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deoffal-mp-adm7000-n-s1-2022 · 2 years

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The 63, Part 6:

51. Onlooker: This piece gets alot more detail in the next caption, but in general this piece is frankly about the Baconian use of the onlooker as a sub subject within post modern art, almost representing a loathing for the audience themselves, something I’m sure me and Bacon would agree on whole heartedly. The thing we agree on being that too many people live their life passively, the watch it walk past them each morning resign their bodies to be idle husks when they retire in their free time, and because they aren’t naturally interesting or insightful to be around, all they can do is use the window and the life of others to fuel their existence, they treat the TV as their cleric and their family as expendable when intervening in their factory lifestyle of finding all that life offers unamusing, unless they tokenise it and treat actual human experience as something to see purely as entertainment and fuel for their idealisms of the world. Being solely an onlooker in life who doesn’t host exciting conservation and an intellect or charm that is worth sharing, makes you a passive part of a regressive and dumber society that can only get dumber the more passively collectivist people become, and I honestly find it gross that we could ever allow this to happen to us. How can we be proud of ourselves when we allow ourselves and our peers to take shortcuts and give up on the harder, truer round to success, and in the process deter people from growing an independent mind and personality, damn the sensibilities of everyone else would support such a lifestyle and their parents for raising such insolent people. We are inventing machines and tools to take shortcuts at all costs, and with god to punish people’s insolence and irresponsibility, they have inadvertently accepted their fate in a aimless and nihilistic society, that would rather debate the medicine of an issue over finding the cure in introspective interrogation in relation to their fear of the world outside of their bubble in the world as it actually is in the noumena. Maybe it’s just because I’m an art student and I actively hate the idea of culture regressing as it counters my very purpose and mission in society, but why in any name of any idol or idea, would people seriously believe that a happy life is one made entirely out of insecure and imitative living? Why not confront the Noumenal knowing full well it will take a piece of, but in exchange you’ll learn so much more about yourself and the reality of the world, and eventually find the darkness and abyss of existence far more awakening and sobering than the screen burn you would get from watching life digitally pass you by?

52. Eavesdropper: This piece is based on the Baconian idea of the voyeur as not just an onlooker but a spectator who can’t help but pervade each intimate detail and conversation they find themselves stumbling across, and social media has certainly made this obsessive behaviour all the more profitable and sardonic with advent of selling data and people needing VPNs just to access their human right to protected privacy (so long as they don’t infringe on the law, but of course, infringing on the law nowadays could mean saying anything considered offensive by the minority of the population, or by the act of making a joke that is utterly subjective, even in your own home, thought crime being the natural progression of aggressive state powers soon enough). The Eavesdropper is the natural progression of the mere onlooker, as they actively soak themselves in gossip, outrage and idle conversation to the point of having no personality themselves, as they live vicariously through the models they follow and the films they aspire to mimic in their own life, it certainly makes for a weaker and more submissive person when their entire life is based on being totally devoted to fashion and the current distractionary talking points.

53. Niccolo: I based this piece on my studies into Machiavelli, and upon reading ‘The Social Contract’ (1762) by Jean Jacques Rousseau years ago, It made me realise just how deeply misunderstood Niccolo actually is, after all he exposed the system to the public long before Orwell did, by writing ‘The Prince’ (1532) as a manual on how to be aware of the power moves at play at all times as made by those looking to control you, and so it is often understood that he is snake like being who wrote all of this treatise on political science so as to expose himself as a master manipulator, when in actuality he never truly belonged among the elite and wrote ‘The Prince’ to prove just how corrupt power can make people, especially the bipolar wannabe Dauphin Cesare Borgia of which the book is based heavily upon. However, I still can’t help but admire his more snakey assumptions, it keeps idiots away from his work and diluting the ideas of his work for their own amusement, it’s the same with Anton Szandor LaVey, yet Anton wrote openly about how he employed scare tactics and overtly shocking ideas in his work to deter idle and slacking viewers from reading and taking his ideas for themselves, it always keeps the simple minded away from complex issues, and in turn, leave the dialog to those who actually make the effort to read the original source material, which says alot about how people still don’t just read iconic works of literature because they want to live in an ignorant society where no one makes the time to read important works. It’s why in Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451′ (1953) he openly talks about how people one day commit mass book burnings and see information and the ability to interpret information and critical media as a weapon against the state. It’s why we see so often the odd conspiracy theorist talking about the state and social media keeping you dumb so they can control you better, the very things that Niccolo talked about just under half a millennium ago, and excuse me for adopting the tin foil hat, but who really would think other wise, people won’t read because they don’t believe it’s worth the time, and yet they’ll waste their brain matter on idle conversation and meaningless materiality, look in the mirror and tell me you aren’t a part of that problem and accepting your sedation, I dare you.

54. Do To: This piece is based on the Baconian idea of the victim of ultra-violence and the object of our voyeuristic entertainment in crucifixion, the original reference once being closer to Ian Curtis of Joy Division fame, but past the initial sketch phase the face became so much more haunted and bloodshot with sadness piped through the tear ducts and their wobbling jowl. This image is supposed to represent the ugliness in victimisation and the pain of the victims under the doer and the provocateur as their torturer, again you can see and debate ideas on sadomasochism as is typical of my work now, but the main idea is that of the human cost between the Baconian idea of the Doer and their aim for power for general authority through violence as their primary resolution, a thing that often underpins every interaction between men and their peers, the assumed role of violence thusly never changing in thousands of years.

55. Focus: This image is another preconscious idea, that of the face out of focus and out of cognitive range. It almost represents the earliest forms of the Mirror stage as Laid out by Lacan, in that when the human mind is finally capable of recognising it’s own face and the faces of others and their connection to themselves introspectively, this relationship with identity and faces generally starts to become all the more important in our social and psychosomatic development from our infantile phase right up until early adulthood. The ability to distinguish various identities and to see the value we base our own identity and artifice on from the appearances and the importance of facial expressions from others, becomes quite the skill when reading social situations and becomes a contemporary tool for navigating homogenised society. Not being able to see the minor nuances and differences between authentic facial characteristics and false ones can lead you into danger, it’s almost our evolutionary camouflage when dealing with contemporary civility, and why it’s now so commonly argued that the most sociopathic and psychopathic people practice facial expressions and acting with their face and tone to lure and trick people. Another theme to discuss I guess, is finding light in the darkness, finding faces in darkness in particular, something my practice has been obsessed with since starting this project and it can be see in all the black background pieces, after all, to see in the dark you have to let your eyes focus on what light there is left to be refracted into your eyes so that you can comprehend your surrounds, another trait of our eye’s evolution. And the ability to focus on dark subjects and still time and time again to be able to pull new faces and ideas out of the darkness is one of my current skills that I want to master, as I’m hoping this project can certainly add in evidencing that development. I guess another idea would be, that if we focus on the dark and ambiguous enough, our sense of logic and cognitive potential will eventually make shapes and assumptions out of things that we were never meant to be reasoned with in the noumenal world and the unknown more generally, it’s why this portrait ended up looking like a self-portrait without me even playing that and honestly that does creep me out sometimes to think that my brain made an automatic self-portrait without much thought.

56. Doer: If the ‘Do To’ is the involuntary masochist, then there always has to be a butcher and sadist generally to do the punishment, it’s a symbiotic relationship as I’ve already explained to death at this point. And this piece is no different, as it was original based on my previous depiction of the Duc from ‘120 days of Sodom’ as made for ‘Beyond Dogma’:

The Duc being a sadist in the most exaggerated and ridiculous sense, even for Sade it would saying alot to make this distinction from the average sadist for sure. This time the mouth is open and ready to commit to the bit and the eventual bite, the idea of the Doer in Baconian terms is about speaking on those who either are consumed by their inner instincts to thrive and push the weak out of the way, those beasts in waiting making their way through life with little care for morals and conventional opinion, law and the status quo generally, the taboo among the few so to speak. But everyone is capable of Jung’s idea of the shadow, that being the darker aspects of our psyche and cognitive potential and even figures like Jordan Peterson now believe that this awareness and control over the shadow is what makes strong and powerful people, but having no control over it makes you as self and socially destructive as you can possibly be, for example it’s the difference between being a Mark Twain or a Charles Bukowski, having a strong mindset and an autonomous attitude to the rest of society can go either way, you either become the rebel without a cause and feed societal nihilism, or you become the in control monster that is the epitome of a strong work ethic and philosophies that represent overcoming your natural and self-cannibalising instincts, but it’s a fine balance and that’s what being human is all about, being able to moderate the very worst potential of others, while at the same time wanting to be the best of ourselves and in control of our emotions without totally supressing or giving into them wholeheartedly. It’s the dichotomy between sadist and masochist becomes such an important dialogue in contemporary sociality and Bacon knew why, because there was always going to be victims and there is always going to be powerful people holding themselves back from lashing out like a bull upon seeing a matador waiting to be gored. But it’s often made clear, that it’s better to be a soldier in the garden, than a gardener at war, and if we were to see the world as a floating abattoir approving of another execution every few minutes and seconds as argued by Blaise Pascal, then you have to choose between the passive victim of the system, or the active aggressor against it no matter the backlash and reclusivity.

57. Ghost: This image is based on Francis Bacon’s idea of fact and truth leaving a ghost, that experience and the presence of an issue leaves a mark, and it often is reflected in art, as art often imitates allegory and metaphorical representations of the truth, in turn making shadows of the actual and the obvious, which is why this piece is one of the most abstract and simple pieces of this entire project. I made this piece simple and almost spectral though because it had to represent the looming presence of what my work represents in contemporary philosophy, art and interpersonal dialogue, it’s a haunting practice that looms like a ghost over people’s optimism and hides behind their avoidance of difficult issues and their frustration with ignorance in the face of the unknown. And though Francis Bacon never outright spoke on post-modernity as his fundamental influence, you can’t help but think he was making work that was figuratively dark and surrealistic enough that it had to consider post-modern methodologies and research topics such as nihilism and the contemporary struggle with identity in a nihilistic society. Which is why Bacon believes truth has a ghost, it isn’t merely an objective idea that makes a truth, but it’s the effect and impact it has on people and their opinions that leaves the vapour of a haunting about them, as if learning about the actual cruelty and depraved potential of humanity and it’s crimes against nature and it’s own kin leaves a feeling of disturbing energy over the atmosphere people discover this truth. And in dealing with the world as it is you can’t help but yourself disturbed by the ghosts of history and the catastrophes awaiting in the future once you leave your sensible and conventional conditioning in the dust behind you.

58. Def: This piece is a running tradition of mine, as for every project I have ever worked on, there has always been one self-portrait, without fail (unless it’s an essay of course, but even then my essays are always self-reflective and that’s only natural for an author of my kind who works so introspectively all the time.). The examples of the MA being these:

Beyond Dogma:

Soma Volume 1:

After these previous cases, looking all glum and out of hand, this last self-portrait is an emblem of my current comforts and ease in spite of all the stresses and challenges I have ahead of me, after all, I finally see my current portfolio as worth sharing and expanding upon. The reason for this new level of confidence is because I have actually been sharing my work a lot more this year and have found the response to be wonderful, people enjoy what I do and don’t fail to let me know in their own ways, thusly it feels really good to find a style that suits my themes and allows me to flourish on social media and my own personal life as the result, I feel less inclined to diversify or be the ultimate illustrator I was so pressured into being during my BA. So my final self-portrait on the MA is a focused and content me looking into the future with a newly attained hope for the future of my career after coming all the way through the hardships of the MA. The addition of hair is only a comment on how I care less about my own self-imposed pressures in life, after all, I don’t allow myself to function and make as much quality work as I do when I live in my insecurities and anxieties all piped up in my head and worry about anything and everything. This in turn becomes my own slight grin after two years of constant effort and continual momentum.

59. The Ladies Fall: This image is based on Hogarth’s ‘The Enraged Musician’ (1741):

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enraged_Musician

This print for some reason caught my attention clearly, just that beggar women singing ‘The Ladies Fall’ in rags to the annoyance of the musician trying to practice reminded me of my own irritations with trying to focus amongst over people and in the public generally, it’s said to be a symptom of dyspraxia, this sensitivity of hearing and impatience with people and their habits. I drew on the women here in Baconian take of my own just to focus on the irritation, that even though I wouldn’t be able to help myself from feeling sorry for her and her baby, I also wouldn’t be able to stop myself from utterly hating her if she disturbing my thinking and ability to calm myself when immensely anxious, it’s often why I am so reclusive on the daily and find immense comfort in solitude and hermitage of course. But I see that as what Hogarth wanted to represent, he wanted to depict and have you sympathise with those struggled the most, without depicting those same people in the most idealistic image, such is the profound work of Hogarth that he always cuts through the hubbub of typical humanitarianist romanticism to make an image worth debating when representing the public and the mindset of the individuals who struggle to deal with them. You can sympathise with both parties here for sure, but where you lean says alot about you and your priorities, and I know I side with the musician everytime, in turn taking the active role of the misanthrope in most situations, and I haven’t found a print that better represents this conflict of social connectivity and the issues of homogenised living any better than Hogarth here. The third option to consider as you do with all Hogarth works, is how do you feel as the onlooker, the audience to this scene of paradoxical concern, of individualism versus the state and the state’s condition versus the state of individualism as trying to survive in the state? Bar all that, I really like this image due to it’s Baconian style and that’s because it was partially based on this painting by Bacon (From the ‘Three figures at the base of a crucifixion’ triptych, 1944) an image of which I even have tattooed onto my left arm I love it that much:

Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bacon-three-studies-for-figures-at-the-base-of-a-crucifixion-n06171

60. Rake: This image is based on Hogarth’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’ (1735) and this print in particular:

Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hogarth-a-rakes-progress-plate-8-t01794

This image of the rake in Bedlam, assigned to a final death that is akin to hell on earth, living as a mad spike among prudish society, yet even though the rake was such a hellfire man in his life, his excesses and dependency on a decadent lifestyle as a devout libertine and swindler finally comes back on him, and I’ve always loved this present because of its finality, way ahead of it’s time and almost embodying the same energy as ‘The Caprices’, it is utterly depressing and introspectively brilliant. You see the rake’s progress is an academic PSA on how a life of excessive pleasure and avoiding problems and difficult decisions in life can ruin a fully sane person, and it’s not an overnight solution or problem, but it does represent those who do look for instant gratification and why they are dangerous in any society. As only those who are willing to make all human relationships and ethics expendable are predicted to live just as the seeds they sowed, their life is forfeit when they play against nature and fight against it’s eventual reclaim on their life. It says alot about how people assume a life of abundance and the internalised temporary immortality that comes with it are the ideal way of living, but even Hogarth saw the crux to this argument long before the aristocracy would ever learn to accept it, and that is that excess always returns to you, so if you live excessively, than you die excessively, and the pain you avoided in life, only comes back harder the longer you attempt to numb and drown it out. It’s why the rake goes from being fitted for suits and living off of the wealth of 10 men’s lifetime earnings, to ripping his own hair out by the strand and needing to be shackled to the floor while he drowns into his own self-harm scars, it’s the same reason why a car travelling at extreme speeds is owed a catastrophic crash, it’s just logical physics acting the way nature intended. And speaking on accelerationism both literarily and philosophically, Nietzsche and philosophers like Nick Land see our current struggles with dealing with a nihilistic futurism to only be such a large issue because we excessively avoid dealing with and confronting our problems (internally and socially) to the point of killing of ourselves with our own decadence, it’s why in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (1872) Nietzsche discusses that the empire run by the ancient Greeks was run into the ground due to them running out of enemies and turning on each other, their decadence and overall hubris in the face of conquering the landscape and living in the privilege of being an unstoppable power, made them their own worst enemy, and so came the great crash that is the downfall of all empires and power structures that lose sight of their original meaning. Having control over your vices and way of life is just as important as treating yourself and finding pleasure in the subtle, self-bought things and the earned things that choose to enjoy too, as in Satanism we have one fundamental law on pleasure ‘Indulgence not compulsion’, compulsion and dependency makes reckless addicts and men-children who can’t face their problems. Our generation now is compelled to dependency on materialistic interests and excessive habitual relationships with porn, drinking, drugs and misinformation, it’s no wonder people aren’t having children or creating life long careers anymore, it’s easier to be excessive and numb, than hardworking and aware, no matter how hard life is I would rather be stone cold sober and see my issues as challenges to overcome, rather than regressing back into the excesses of my past and living like a man-child, something the rake still represents to this day.

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crazgreenenvy · 2 years

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Fat People Exist

The problem with existing on both Twitter and Tumblr is sometimes you see some shit on twitter that you’re like ‘aw hell no Tumblr would throw hands’ but you can’t just like.... call out your tumblr mutuals to come an fix a problem. Case in point the fatphobia vs antifatphobia trending discussion on twitter. Some of the shit being said over there was just horrible - it was conflating eating disorders with LGBTQ rights, LGBTQ rights with fat rights and just making a horrible show of the worst of three sects of ideas.

Something that was said many a time during the whole debate is that being deathly afraid of becoming fat can be a symptom of your eating disorder, but making fat people feel like shit simply for existing as fat people is fatphobia and is just you being a bad person. Your internalized fatphobia, like internalized transphobia, internalized misogyny, etc, are not hurting anyone else but yourself. That’s a psychological issue that you can work out by learning to love yourself and see past what soicety has pushed out for decadeds; however the moment you start using those things to fuck with other peopl- nah fam. That ain’t ok.

Issues like this bother me for a number of reasons. I’ve always been fat, but I didn’t always describe myself as such. I used to have words to dance around the subject like ‘curvy’ and ‘plump’ and ‘big girl’ etc, etc. But recently, when I started my own journey of healing and self love (which make me want to barf to even type let alone say out loud) I realized that most of my issues with skirting around the word ‘fat’ came from the fatphobia of my parents and of society. I hated myself because I felt unworthy to live in a world of ‘nomal’ people when I was ‘not normal’. Seem familiar? Here’s the overlap between LGBTQ issues and fat issues. We face similar stigmas for not ‘blending in with conventional society’. We’re also discriminated against for looking different, whether it is outwardly Queer or outwardly fat, and a lot of times we all just desperately want to pass- at least until we start accepting ourselves.

SO LET’S TALK ABOUT ACCEPTANCE.

What we don’t talk about is how very few people choose to be fat. Like I said, I have ALWAYS been fat. We sidestep the issue when talking about children by saying they’re ‘carrying around their baby fat’ but let’s be real- the baby fat is gone by age 10. After that it’s genetics and lemme tell you! Genetics are a BITCH. They don’t care what society has to say about your body. They are gonna cause you to grown the way they are programmed. So when I hit 10 and was constantly told I’m ‘overweight’ what do you think the solution was? Was it to monitor my food and come up with a plan to limit excess intake and create a healthy weight gain trend (again I was a child so I need to be gaining weight)? Of course not! My parents with all of their fatphobia put me on super restrictive diets to the point of starving me. Should 10 year olds who are ‘overweight’ due to genetics be forced to lose weight? I don’t think so. I think there’s something to be said about healthy eating habits and recognizing the nourishing value of certain foods over others- but that’s not what our society is about. Our society punishes those who fall outside the norm. Bam suddenly I’m on a 20 year journey of self-hatred and restrictive dieting that sees me losing 20lbs in 2 weeks only to gain back 40. Over...and over... and over. And that is the thing fatphobes won’t tell you. It’s not about your health- they don’t care about you living to be 100 or running a marathon- it’s about making you feel bad about shit you don’t control. When the statistics tell you that people who lose weight overwhelmingly gain it back, plus some extra, fatphobes will say ‘they gained it back because they’re lazy’. When modern medicine tells us that people who live their lives dieting and going through weight swings are more prone to heart problems than those who just stay fat and don’t diet, fatphobes will be silent. It’s not about health. It’s about punishment, guilt, and control. And fuck that.

And don’t even get me started on fatphobia in medicine, the interplay between fatness and Blackness, or fatness and Queerness, it’s just a goddamn can or worms. A rabbit hole of absolute shit. Fatphobia is shit. Fatphobes are shit.

I’m fat. Periodt. I’ve always been fat. I’ll always be fat. And I can catch dick and puss whenever I want. Why? Because I am more than a number on a scale, my dudes. And so are you. I can’t talk about eating disorders more than my personal experience with them, but they change how you see yourself, much like depression and anxiety. It’s an issue of mental health- when those issues take root outside the personal and start affecting the interpersonal they become more than just destructive. If you find yourself struggling with internalized fatphobia and unhealthy eating I encourage you to seek help! Because you are worthy of love and acceptance.

I can’t talk much more about interactions with fatphobes because since the day I realized I will NEVER be happy if I cater to a society that doesn’t appreciate me and tries to change me to the detriment of my healthy and my psyche, I make it clear in my very presence that my fatness is my business. Not yours. I take up space (*sometimes apologetically), I eat food that I like. I drink and I party and I live my goddamn life because I am ALIVE and if I was skinny, buff, round or square I will die and be buried one day, so my fat and my body are gonna LIVE goddammit.

Where was I going with this.

If a person says they are a fatphobe (and let’s be honest they won’t, but they’ll give it away somehow even if they don’t just come out and say it Twitter style) make it clear where you stand. That you don’t care what they have to say about you. Maybe you want to be thin and you’ve always been fat- THAT’S OKAY. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to craft your ideal body so long as you do it in a healthy manner. People don’t go chopping their tits off with butcher knives, so don’t start starving yourself to lose 10lbs before a wedding. It’s dangerous and creates bad habits that are very hard to break. Always seek weight loss or gain advice from a medical professional. And make sure they’re not a fatphobe. Anyone who congratulates you when you lose weight- without asking first if that’s what you wanted- is harboring some internal fatphobia. Talk about it. Fat people aren’t going anywhere. We here, y’all. We are the descendants of the peasants who ran from the invaders and learned to get as much nourishment as possible out of one grain of wheat- beware us.

Also, stop buying clothes with the intent to fit into them ‘one day’. That’s just a poor investment. Clothes you can’t wear don’t make you happy. Food you can’t eat won’t make you happy. Games you can’t play won’t make you happy. People who can’t accept you will not make you happy.

Ok I think I’m done.

#fatandhappy #fatphobes #fuck fatphobia #fatphobia in medicine #disordered eating TW #fatness #get over it #don't come for me #also I may be fat but I'll fuckin wreck you dude like don't try to step to me gonna catch these fatass hands #also let dudes be fat #not just for women #fatandfree #twitter discourse #I rant here because if I rant on twitter my colleagues will see

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vaspider · 3 years

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'only tenet of TERFism is transmisogyny' EXCUSE ME NO ITS ALL TRANS PEOPLE. They don't want any trans person to exist. What the hell.

Some people just gotta center their own suffering always, even when they're hurting other people by doing so. I've seen this a lot in younger queer folx of all stripes, this need to be the one that hurts the most, you know?

There's a reason the phrase Oppression Olympics exists, and it's because it's a common behavior or phenomenon in oppressed communities. I see it in the disability community, too.

What I think is important to understand when we talk about how trans people suffer under transphobia is that different groups are targeted differently. I'm not the first person to say this, of course.

Now, like, this is very rough sketchy stuff, and each person's individual experiences will vary, but in my general experience, the rough breakdown of the way in which transphobia lands on trans people kind of breaks down like this:

Binary trans women tend to suffer under a lens of hypervisibility. Everything they do is seen, analyzed, and torn apart. Their struggles are generally the ones centered in the arguments of allies, "allies," and transphobes. Even when trans women are the focus of helpful attention, that hypervisibility can cause exhaustion, because they need to perform perform perform, and be perfect, all the time. It's hard for trans women to just be without feeling like they're on camera, all the time. A lot of the time, they are on camera, because trans women's bodily autonomy and right to privacy are just never respected by transphobes (and often by supposed "allies" who feel free to ask the most invasive questions and get upset when trans women won't answer them), and even if they're not literally on camera, they're supposed to perform as the best examples of transfemininity, because if they don't, then they become the next 'look at this bad trans, all trans are this bad trans' example that TERFs point at and use as a broad brush to paint all trans women. If they're not perfect all the time and have a day where they snap at someone while someone is recording, or make a mistake, or anything, it has a horrible tendency to go viral. You can think of at least three instances right now off the top of your head, right? Right.

Binary trans men tend to suffer from hyperinvisibility. This comes from inside and outside the community -- a lot of trans men talk about being told they can't lead in community because they've 'got male privilege,' that their struggles are discarded, that they're talked over and unable to discuss the things they face, which means they don't get the support they need. Now, there are TERFs and transphobes who absolutely do focus their attention on trans men to the exclusion of or to the deprioritization of the oppression of trans women -- that's where we get Tavistock and Irreversible Damage and Fourth Wave Now and all the other bullshit which focuses on the idea that trans men are "transing the gay away," specifically "transing our butch lesbians" and "stealing butches." But again, generally speaking, trans men face harmful levels of invisibility where trans women face harmful levels of visibility. That's why transmascs in general have issues like lack of understanding even by supposedly trans-competent doctors as to how HRT affects our bodies, why trans men (and transmascs in general) report things like transphobes attacking them with transmisogynistic comments and assuming that every trans person online is a trans woman, etc.

Non-binary (here used as an umbrella term for all identities outside of binary man/woman, to include agender, genderfluid, non-binary, and infinite other identities) AFAB people tend to suffer from a different, very specific form of hypervisibility, unless they start to appear too masculine, and then they slip into hyperinvisibility. This is where we get things like "women and non-binary people" that codes all non-binary people as "AFAB people I can sort of squint and view as women," and people who fall into this category tend to get a lot of attention, a lot of derision from all sides of the spectrum. This is the "blue-haired tenderqueer" sneering that we get from both within and without the queer community, where there's an assumption that these people are just cosplaying an identity, that they're not really trans, etc. Having been in the visibility category and slipped into the invisibility category within the last, oh, year or so, and having two binary trans women in my family to compare notes with, the experiences are unnervingly similar. The difference between the experience that those women have had and the experience that I have had is that according to transphobes, I'm a traitor to my womanhood and performing femininity wrong and taking on a fake identity to escape female oppression because I'm not strong enough to bear up under it, but too cowardly to become a trans man, or... something, whereas they're taking on a fake identity to sneak into women's spaces because they're perverts.

Non-binary (umbrella identity etc) AMAB people tend to suffer from their own very specific form of hyperinvisibility, unless they start to present "too feminine", and then they slip into the hypervisibility which affects binary trans women, but with a little different fuckery in which everyone just assumes they're a trans woman, and therefore they get misgendered by everyone across the spectrum of queer/non-queer/etc. Non-binary AMAB people are generally treated like they don't exist, and when they are spoken about, are often discussed in the context of 'they should just admit they're trans women or gay men,' or if they present 'too feminine,' are subjected to the same sort of horrific attention that trans women get.

Again, a lot of this is very simplistic, and doesn't add in a lot of other complicating factors like race, disability, class, etc. Trans men of color, for example, can run into a different sort of hypervisibility because as they move further through their transition, they begin to be seen in the world as a man of color. It's not really mine to speak on beyond that, but I don't want to neglect saying 'this is really really simplistic and there's more to it than that' over and over.

I really hate breaking it down this simply because it feels like creating another binary (our society does like a binary!) for non-binary people, but like, I can't really talk about my shared experiences with other trans people without putting some framework around it. Someday, I'll be able to do that without categories. Wouldn't that be awesome?

I think we do our entire community a huge disservice when we talk about transphobia as if it's a single snake trying to take bites out of only one part of the community, and not a many-headed hydra, able to attack us from multiple different directions. I also think that focusing on one form of oppression keeps us from forming meaningful solidary and coalitions; the more divided we are, the easier it is for the people who literally want us all to stop existing to pick us off one by one. We see this all across the queer community and it's only ramping up as the attacks on our community escalate from without; people tend to turn on the ones closest to them when they get really scared, and to blame the person standing next to them for the pain they're suffering. It's the "close enough to hit" phenomenon, and it's why we see ridiculous things like "bi women make cis men think that lesbians can be won over," rather than acknowledging that bi women aren't the ones causing that: cis men are the ones causing that. The bi women in that case are close enough to hit. Transmascs are close enough to hit. Trans women are close enough to blame for the problems of transmascs, which makes it possible for TERFs to lure transmascs in and attempt to detransition them, subjecting them to gaslighting and manipulation and then using them as sock puppets.

TERFs do focus a lot on transmisogyny. They focus a lot on transmisandry, too. Debating which one is more prevalent and 'worse' not only misses the point, because transmascs and transfems face very different and totally rotten attention from cis society as a whole, including cis queers. We need to like, not do that anymore: we need to give each other the space to talk about our unique circumstances, but we also need to work harder on looking at each other through a lens of solidarity and trying to see that our struggles are different but not unrelated, and that if we keep downing on each other like this, we're not going to get anywhere except in a much more difficult situation as the people who don't want any of us to exist keep picking us off.

#transmisogyny #transphobia #transmisandry #queer issues #trans issues #long post

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genderqueerpositivity · 3 years

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Tumblr is and always will be the hellsite, but lately the absolute worst discourse takes I've seen have come from Instagram and Twitter.

Mostly this has been a problem within the LGBTQIA+ communities, but it has steadily spread into other communities as well. I really hate how common this has become in the neurodivergent community.

The worst thing about "The Discourse" is how we've normalized treating the personal identities of individual people as a subject up for public debate.

It's like we're no longer the authority on our own selves and our own experiences. Coming out as an LGBTQIA+ person is met first as a challenge from within the community now, just as it always has been from those outside of the community.

I've shared exactly zero pictures of my transition online since starting HRT. I've been very selective about what experiences with hormone therapy--and it's effects on my gender and sexual orientation--that I've chosen to write about.

I'm torn, because I really miss keeping an actual personal blog. I'm also really excited about my transition and I wish that I could share that excitement! I really wish that I were doing more to document my changes from HRT and writing more about these new experiences I'm having at this point in my life. I miss having a spot to post about my day to day thoughts and feelings.

But I don't want to open myself up again to commentary and criticism from those who feel that they are a greater authority on my own transness and queerness than I myself am. I don't want this community to pick apart my lived experiences, searching for some imagined evidence to prove that I've committed a non-existent offense. I'm not interested in the legitimacy of my gender and dysphoria being up for debate.

I'm not interested in being held to the bullshit standards of other people's respectability politics. I'm also not interested in having the language that I use to name myself and my experiences debated or criticized by people who can never live my life for even one day.

My identity and my place in this community aren't negotiable, my pain isn't up for debate, my joy doesn't exist to be stolen.

Something about the internet brings out the worst in people and the LGBT community is not exempt from that.

Too many people in our communities feel like they have to right to decide how other people should identify and feel about their own identities. Too many people feel like they get to decide who belongs in our communities and who doesn't.

I blame the ace discourse for this, especially. When we normalized gatekeeping and identity policing, we fucked up enormously.

We need to make our way back to embracing the reality that each individual is the expert on their own lives, experiences, genders, sexualities. We need to trust that those who choose to be a part of our communities are here because they need to be. We need to realize that there are as many ways of living and being as there are people. And we need to accept that for many people gender identity, romantic attraction, sexual identity are complicated, confusing, fluid, messy, changing, deeply personal, complex, and not easily confined to existing labels.

Until we get to the point of respecting the experiences, autonomy, and agency of every person, all of our pretty words about our communities being safe spaces are just pointless talk.

Liberation won't come through treating each other the same way that cishetronormative society already treats us.

#op #gatekeeping #discourse #intracommunity issues

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astaroth1357 · 3 years

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Unpacking the Angel Event (Through My Own Perspective)

Okay so uh… this was a very uncomfortable seat the Devs have offered us today and like all things that give me moral uncomfiness, I HAVE to analyze it. Blame the ethics classes. A full disclaimer, this is not spoiler-free and is pretty much entirely just me unpacking my own feelings here. What may bother or not bother me could really affect you and there is nothing wrong with that. You are entitled to your own perspective. This is just me trying to walk through all the stuff in this event that just… rubbed me the wrong way. So let's get to it.

The Costumes

So. Let's start at the beginning. Diavolo apparently had the bright idea to put everybody in magical costumes of their angel forms (or something like it in Satan's case). This is… problematic.

The reason the brothers lost their angel forms was because they fell after the Celestial War… who's greatest causality (in their eyes) was their sister, Lilith. So one could imagine that their memories as angels aren't particularly happy ones… By this point in the "continuity" (this is Post-Attic, more on that later), they would have known that Lilith didn't actually die which may soften something like this a little. I dunno, I'm not one of them and trauma is uniquely personal to the individual, but the bigger issue is that Diavolo thought this was a good idea to start with to which I say! - I'm not at all surprised by that. Hear me out.

Diavolo is heavily implied to have had a huge ass crush on Angel Lucifer. He's also uh… probably a little sheltered (as sheltered as the royalty of Hell can be) and probably not used to think of his subjects' feelings on the things he does before he just does them. This is fairly evident in other events where he'll order the brothers to do XYZ task even if they want no part in it. It doesn't surprise me at all that Diavolo would want to see them (Lucifer) as angels again and not take into account how that could affect them. I don't think that'd be malice on his part, just shortsightedness, and he likely would have apologized if any of the brothers expressed an emotional problem with it to him directly.

Do they have problems? Yes. But since the event kind of wipes them of their true selves, that's better discussed elsewhere. Moving on.

The Bangles

Holy fuck, how do we even approach this? So Simeon, in conjunction with Michael (probably, at this point I have to wonder if he's telling the truth about this) gives the brothers jewelry, presumably to wear to the party, that would… I'm not even sure. Curb their impulses? Force them to be mannered? The important thing is he did not tell them about that little detail before they put the bangles on…

This is… also problematic. First, we can try to establish Simeon's intentions versus what actually happened:

The bangles were (likely) intended to be removable. It was the mixing of the magic that locked them in place so we can assume he didn't mean this to be a permanent change.

The magic on the bangles was probably amplified by the angel costumes. What this means is though we can assume that Simeon never intended them to become quite so… different, we'll never know just how much influence he was actually trying to put on them. It could have been anything from suppressing their sins to full blown force you to say please/thank you. We'll just never get to know now…

I won't be the first person to liken this to mind control (nor the last) because… that's kind of how it turned out. Even worse still, it would have been completely involuntary on the brothers' part. Simeon DID NOT tell them what the bangles were going to do. Now, he claims later that he would have eventually, but we don't get to know when that would have been. I presume at some time after the party, because like. These are our boys. They're not going to consent to wearing something like that, they're just not.

This poses all kinds of questions and problems ranging from issues of consent to anatomy and even the worth of good deeds done out of obligation vs. free will and… I mean quite literally when I say Jesus Christ, Simeon, what the hell?!

I could write a completely different post debating whether or not what Simeon did actually had any moral merit but I won't because it'd be very dry and boring. I think the most interesting thing to take away here is that Simeon thought it was okay to do like, at all, and with approval from Michael (maybe) no less… That reflects something on angel society that I doubt will get explored but I need to ponder farther…

This section is all kinds of sticky so we need to move on.

The Development(?)

First off, to new players, don't worry this probably isn't canon (at least to the main story continuity). The Brothers should be back to normal in the new chapters and this won't have a long term effect on anything (aside from maybe a tie in to the next event ala Beach event-> Games). That's how Obey Me has always treated their events it seems and I sure hope they stick to it now. But, these are still the same characters going through a unique situation and that can offer some insight so… Let's discuss.

I mentioned earlier that the brothers had problems with this… Unfortunately, I think we only get to see Lucifer and Satan's thoughts in any detail because everyone else is too far gone by the time we reach them… Lucifer can pretty much be summed up as troubled and unhappy because (you know) not a lot of great memories as an angel. I presume that his wounded pride after the fall may also contribute.

Satan is… more complex. I’m honestly more bothered by his change than anyone else’s because even he expresses how weird this is for him... (We get confirmation that he never in fact had an angel form, btw). Poor baby is going through a full on identity crisis and there’s a certain part of his mind that he’s not even allowed to use right now... Anger. The Avatar of Wrath, born from Wrath, can’t get angry and… Something about that just bothers me at a deeper level, not even I can express properly…

Everyone else is too far gone once we reach them. Their personalities are completely different and they can’t even acknowledge that’s the case. They think that they’ve turned a new leaf but we know that’s not the reality, that leaf was very much turned for them and it doesn’t make anything feel any better…

This may be my own opinion, but part of me thinks that this portion (and only this portion right here) was actually what the Devs were going for. They wanted us to be uncomfortable by all of this for like, story reasons. It’s a narrative trick. Think of the phrase “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” I think they were trying to use the absence of the brothers’ usual flaws and traits as a weird way of celebrating them. Kind of like saying, “We could have given you guys these perfect brothers, but they’re not perfect and we know that’s why you like them. Look at these perfect guys, doesn’t it feel wrong?” The answer is, yes. It does feel wrong. And under other circumstances, it would be affirming like they’d be intending, “I don’t want this emotionally-open non-otaku, give me Levi dammit!” But when you add this intended discomfort with the already sketchy way we got here it just makes it all the worse…

And absolutely NONE of this is helped by...

The… End?

I think the thing I hate about this event the most (actually legitimately hate) is how it ends. In that it doesn’t. It kind of just… abruptly stops right after Lucifer starts coming to himself again. Though I suspect that’s because they’re putting incentive into getting the event cards, this in NO WAY does the narrative any favors.

Most people are not going to get those cards. Even with Lonely Devil as an option, it’s a huge time/resource commitment to get there. Because of that, the majority of people are not going to get to see the aftermath of what happened. We don’t get to see how the brothers feel about what happened. We don’t get to see if they do, in fact, come to and if they have any takeaways from the experience or if they’re utterly disgusted by it. The player character doesn’t even get the option to comfort them after something that was probably terribly traumatic. It. Just. Ends.

What that means is all of that discomfort that we had just lingers… There’s no resolution or pay off. It just… stays… This is the worst possible thing they could have done. If you want your audience to feel uncomfortable, that’s one thing, but unless you’re telling like, a psychological thriller you gotta settle them back down again! Deep moral conflict is not a turn on!!!

Personally, I don’t hate that this thing exists. I don’t. The part of me that majored in Philosophy loves analyzing media like this so I can’t say that I didn’t get anything out of it. I don’t think all media should play it safe, it’s okay to leave the audience with no good answers or a feeling of unease, but you really got to be self-aware of it. The biggest flaw of this event, in my opinion, is that it rarely comes across as self-aware of its own horror. You get a very brief glimpse of it from Solomon when he comments on how creepy things are, but Simeon’s happy. Diavolo’s happy. And though he’s a little uneasy, Luke’s pretty content, too. Add that to the abrupt ending and we never get to know if ANY of them realize how awful of a thing this was to do to the brothers... It makes it all come off as an endorsement of mind controlling your friends into better people and (to me) that feels really, really wrong.

So in conclusion… I dunno. If the next event isn’t something along the lines of “Angelic Demons Part 2: Fixing What We Fucked Up!” then I think they really botched this one guys… I hope somebody was taking notes.

#this is pretty much an essay #fair warning #long post #even for me #obey me angel event #obey me #obey me shall we date #shall-we-date-obey-me

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theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin · 4 years

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Lily Evans and Severus Snape: Headcanons

So, I was asked in the ask about Sirius and Regulus what I thought about Snape and Lily. At this point people are probably going, “Oh that Carnivorous Muffin is just clearly a Snape stan who thinks he could never do anything wrong and anyone who was slightly mean to him is evil.” Shockingly, I’m actually not, I just happen to think sexual harassment and attempted murder are bad and probably worse than JKR intended (I do think she was trying to go the “boys will be boys” route versus “oh my god, they just dumped pigs blood on Carrie at the prom and then threw her at a starving vampire”)

So let’s start on Snape.

First, Snape did live an incredibly shitty life, with circumstances beyond his control, that did lead to many of his poorer choices. In no way am I saying that it was alright for Snape to have grown up in an impoverished, abusive, household and endured years of humiliation and torment at school.

That said, I believe that we all, in some respects, are responsible for our actions and our decisions. Yes, even when we come from non-privileged backgrounds. Life is hard, some people will have it much easier than you, that doesn’t excuse you becoming a domestic terrorist or tormenting and terrifying your students, young children, so much so that an entire generation comes out with a loathing and incompetence in your subject.

I guess let’s start back on his friendship with Lily Evans. We get... a really weird perspective from Snape on that friendship. Time and her tragic death have warped it into this strange worship where I’m not sure the Lily Evans that exists in his mind and memory is the one that really was there. She’s this shining Madonna idol who he failed, actively betrayed, is very very hung up about it years later.

I suspect they weren’t as good of friends as either of them thought they were and it comes down to Snape’s resentment of his own upbringing and muggles. I believe Snape was very racist towards muggles, specifically, due to his father. It was his way of grappling with his home life and only fueled by being in Slytherin. Lily was probably, in his mind, always a golden exception to the rule (Lily is the token, gold standard, muggleborn where she’s pretty, brilliant, charming, etc.) That Severus himself was a halfblood clearly caused him some angst. What I’m getting at is that I believe throughout their entire friendship, especially when they got to Hogwarts, there was an unacknowledged undercurrent of intense racism that eventually boiled up with that one incident in Snape’s fifth year.

Calling her that, while he views it as a slip of the tongue that damned him for all time, I see it more as a Freudian Slip. That sort of thing doesn’t just slip out from nowhere, not at that age when they both knew exactly what that word meant, it simmers beneath the surface, and was ultimately what he thought of her. Later, she became the Madonna figure that he views her as today (ironically perhaps even less of a person than he viewed her as at the time).

That said I think a number of factors played into the young Snape becoming a Death Eater. One, becoming friends with Lucius/that crowd who were all being sucked into Tom’s influence. Two, having his terrible home life and all the implications of Snape resenting his own blood status as well as muggles and muggle borns at large. Three, the loss of friendship with Lily (now there’s nothing to hold him back anymore, he has no reason to preserve muggleborn life). Fourth, Dumbledore’s letting Sirius, James, and Remus entirely off the hook in the werewolf incident.

That last one, especially, I imagine cemented Snape’s utter hatred of ‘the light’ (don’t get me started on the stupidity of light/dark in Harry Potter but I guess I’ll use the term) and those that cater to muggleborns. They’re hypocrites of the highest order, Dumbledore claiming to defend the poor and non-nobility, when he goes and does the exact opposite (James is the next lord Potter, Sirius is still pureblooded even if disowned, Severus Snape is a dirt poor halfblood).

So what I’m saying is I understand why Snape did become a Death Eater, I do not condone this action. Especially as, unlike Regulus, Snape never gets cold feet. He loves being a Death Eater at first, he’s living the dream, getting all the revenge he ever wanted and burning the stupid wizarding world to the ground as he scrambles for ways to climb in Tom Riddle’s graces. We don’t see any hint that he was wavering, thinking of the fact that beloved Lily might die in battle, perhaps at his hand, until the prophecy.

Now, I’m a little kinder than some about the prophecy. We know Snape overhears the first portion of the prophecy in early 1980. He eagerly rushes to the dark lord, regales him with the prophecy in both a) aid to the cause and b) in the hopes of climbing in the ranks and gaining the dark lord’s notice. At this point, Lily Evans is pregnant, perhaps knows the gender, but has not given birth. Months later, when both Neville Longbottom and Harry Potter are born at the end of July, Snape realizes he has signed Lily Evans’ death warrant (because despite Dumbledore talking, I imagine Tom always planned to kill off both children, Pettigrew just happened to make things convenient for Tom to go to the Potters first).

With Lily’s death now so inevitable, and her blood on his own hands, Snape has his existential crisis, goes to Dumbledore who puts the Potters in hiding and becomes a double agent. Snape also pleads for Lily’s life with Tom and he puts in a minimal amount of effort to spare the woman.

Then Lily dies anyway and now Snape lives in the bitter cynicism most commonly seen in characters from Game of Thrones. He’s Dumbledore’s agent and sort of a Dirty Harry character, getting to see all the nasty things that many of the other order members never have to deal with. He’s one of the more intelligent characters in the series, able to see the truth of the world he lives in, but he also doesn’t care enough to actually do anything about it. He’s a bitter, resentful, and angry protector of Harry Potter, choosing to hate a naive child for all the reminders of his own terrible life (both in Lily, for failing and betraying her, and in James his most hated rival and tormentor). He gleefully enables the favoritism of Slytherin (my god how he panders to Draco Malfoy) while tormenting poor Neville into terror (that Neville’s greatest 13 year old fear is Snape is very telling).

Basically by the time we get to him in canon Snape not only isn’t happy but I think he doesn’t want to be happy. He’s accustomed to his bitterness, his cynicism, his quiet rage and moves forward out of both resignation, guilt, and a sense of obligation to a woman’s ghost. The actions he takes in canon aren’t so much for Harry as they are for the memory of Lily Evans.

Even if Snape could be happy at that point, change his life or his purpose, I do not think he would. He’s a man who has given up on life.

Now, onto Lily Evans.

You probably think I’m going to rail on her to for the sheer hypocrisy and nerve of marrying James Potter. I’m actually not. Lily Evans is one of my favorite characters in the Harry Potter series and probably the one I’d label as the most moral (though that’s a very low bar in Harry Potter, the characters are almost all assholes, but even so Lily would still be very high on the list).

You know what, I’m just going to damn myself and sound like a crazy person. Lily Evans always reads to me as a more moral young female Tom Riddle.

What the hell? You undoubtedly ask but I’ll explain.

Lily, while having a far more stable homelife than Tom Riddle, also comes from a muggleborn background. She’s exceptionally brilliant, very good looking, and very charming with a lot of people who would call her friends but no one close. Lily, aside from Snape (and that’s debatable), has no friends.

If Lily had not been a Gryffindor, and were Dumbledore not a raging misogynist, his Tom Riddle bells likely would have been ringing with her.

“But wait, that can’t be right!”

Oh, yes it can. First, as I went into above with Snape and Lily, there was something deeply wrong with that friendship. I believe they both considered themselves best friends, didn’t see many of the warning flags, but ultimately we see the giant fissure when Snape lets loose the m-word. Given all of that, I would not label them having been true friends in the first place. Just the appearance of friends.

Otherwise, while it’s very easily to canonically point out James’ friends it’s incredibly difficult to do so with Lily. First, people hardly remember Lily. We get Dumbledore talking about her like she’s the Virgin Mary, saving her son with the power of her love. We get Snape’s weird Virgin Mary impressions of her. Otherwise, it’s pretty much just Slughorn. Everyone else remembers that she married James and that was great because JAMES WAS SO COOL and that she had very striking eyes and was “nice”. Lily is less than a ghost in Harry Potter canon (sadly Harry never really realizing it).

Also, unlike James who has Sirius, Remus, and Peter to point towards (that are very important characters in canon). Lily has no one. The godmother was Alice Longbottom, a woman many years older than Lily and James who probably liked Lily well enough but I can’t imagine was a close friend. In canon there’s an offhand mention of two girls named Mary and Marlene but we don’t see much of them/Severus was always cited as Lily’s closest friend. As for Lily’s sister, well we know they’re estranged. I think it’s very telling that Lily writes a letter to Sirius, James’ best friend and certainly not hers, telling him that James is pouting over his invisibilty cloak. It’s because there was no one else to write.

So Lily Evans is a brilliant girl, who everyone likes and is very charming, but has no friends and led a very lonely and short life.

Here’s where my slack towards Lily comes in.

When she dumps Snape I completely understand why she did so. Snape dropping that word wasn’t simply a mistake, a moment of infinite regret, but something that revealed what he truly thought of her and where she came from. Lily was absolutely right in walking away.

However, without Snape, her closest friend is suddenly gone and the world is cold. As graduation approaches I imagine Lily’s career options become clearer and clearer. While very talented and smart, Lily is a muggleborn, what job she does manage to get (thanks to the sheer nepotism of the wizarding world/lack of jobs) will likely be through Slughorn if she manages to get a job at all. The world is cold and it is cruel and no one seems to even notice.

Cue James Potter. I do believe, probably until seventh year, Lily loathed James, not simply because of the horrifying things he did to Severus (and I’m sure she knew very little of it, Snape hiding most of it from her out of pride and shame), but because he’s just a giant dick. He’d make flirting with her a kind of game and joke to be shared with Sirius, something to hold over Snape’s head, like she’s a prize to be one.

However, by seventh year the werewolf incident has happened, Snape’s retreated further and further into Death Eater recruit land and she’s cut him off, and for all my “James is a dick” I do imagine he calmed down a little. Now that Snape is no longer friends with Lily/after the whole almost murder incident I imagine they didn’t bully him nearly as much as they used to. Though yes, they probably still bullied him, but Lily probably doesn’t know that now that she’s lost contact with Snape.

James is charming and very good looking. He seems a bit more mature than he used to be. Lily is desperately lonely, living in a world that rejects everything she is, and James seems like one of the few who does support her (that James is more of a ‘pretty fly for a white guy’ kind of support for muggleborns doesn’t hit until later). So Lily is charmed and makes the largest mistake of her life, she and James start dating.

Now, given their extreme youth as well as Lily’s pedigree (say what you like, I don’t think Mr. and Mrs. Potter were thrilled that their son was dating a muggleborn) I imagine the wedding was a shot gun wedding and Lily got unintentionally pregnant. Yes, go ahead and throw fruit at me or call foul, I just can’t imagine they’d want a child that young while in the middle of a war while they’re part of an active resistance movement and only just out of Hogwarts.

Then things start snowballing downhill. Lily and James have just joined the resistance movement, Lily’s son is prophesied to defeat Voldemort, they strongly suspect one of James’ close friends is a spy, and they’re forced into hiding.

In hiding is where I imagine stress runs high and their marriage begins to fall apart. We know from Lily’s letter that James was routinely leaving hiding, using the cloak, so he could meet up with Sirius and Peter (I imagine Lupin’s on the out as they suspected he was the spy). While James might not realize what a big deal that was, I imagine Lily always did, and she begins to realize just what she’s gotten herself into but there’s no way out while in hiding.

Now we go really off the rails into headcanon territory in: what the hell is up with Harry Potter?

In my stories, I often choose the unwitting god route. Harry can’t die because he is a god, he becomes the master of death and always was the master of death. This is an answer, but it’s one that makes canon Harry a god and... I would not want canon Harry as a god. JKR and Dumbledore push the “Lily loved her child so much that it deflected death... multiple times” but this always felt... unsatisfying. Many parents love their children (fathers too, JKR, let’s not make this weird Virgin Mary thing) and yet Harry Potter alone in the history of mankind survives multiple times.

Most likely, Lily pulled off some insane bullshit with absolutely no resources and minimal education AND EVERYONE IGNORES IT. We do know that Lily crafted the blood wards, wards stronger than anything Dumbledore himself can come up with/than Voldemort can break. Ones that protect Harry not only at home but away from it as it melts Voldemort for simply touching his skin. Lily pulled off the impossible in only a few months and did it right under everyone’s nose.

This makes her easily one of the most intelligent characters in Harry Potter. Probably beating out Dumbledore and maybe tying with Tom Riddle. And Dumbledore tells us, “Your Virgin Mary mother loved you so much, Harry, that it courses through your veins and lights those that would want to harm you on fire.”

So, that’s Lily for you.

Now, that said, I’m probably a bit biased and clearly very lenient with her marrying James. To be honest it took me years to figure out why the hell Lily would ever marry James after what happened with Severus and was always one of those weird canon things I never quite understood. He’s that good looking and charming, I guess, was my response.

The answer I now land on with some confidence was that the world is that cruel and bleak and Lily was utterly alone for two years.

By the way, a side note/plug, of all my stories while head canons do pop up here and there I think “October” is one where they tend to crop up more. It’s a vast AU of canon, but it gives an idea of what I think x character would do in y situation.

#headcanons #harry potter #lily evans #severus snape #october

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smolstarthief · 3 years

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Persona 5/Persona 5 Strikers: Pro-Police or Anti-Police?

Hoo boy... So this honestly has been a LONG time coming on my end because I have seen so much of that debate on social media (Twitter namely) and I can see the points of BOTH sides but there have been moments where it just got out of hand... Especially whenever people tried to put in a more grey/nuanced take only to be slammed and taken out of context. Even repeatedly mentioning the interrogation at the beginning of P5 which, I will admit has gotten tiresome. At least for me, I do still feel for Joker and I wished the game acknowledged his trauma more but there's a thing called, "beating a dead horse" and this is one along with "Haru says ACAB" in Strikers (which was done THREE TIMES in the same arc and it got annoying fast, like shut up already! We get it!). So, let's dive in a little bit:

MAJOR SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT!!!

Persona 5/Persona 5 Royal

Now let me just say I know! Police in Japan are just as bad if not worse than the West and I STILL hate the idea of Makoto wanting to become a cop for such naive reasons (especially with what happened to Sae, her own sister!)... But there are at least some of form of nuances sometimes and by that I mean, I can see what they were trying to do? I do agree that P5/P5S backpedaled SEVERELY by deciding to sweep issues under the rug after addressing them and not continuing from such. In fact I feel like it could have been a hell of a lot better. But P5 did something different compared to previous games and addresses the issues DIRECTLY right at the beginning of said game! It was tense and horrifying, but needed. Of course... They then sweep it under the rug and act like nothing traumatic happened to our protag which is NOT a good look at all and I'm still pissed off about it. In the main game's case, it's portrayed as more black and white with only a SMALL amount of nuance like that cop that was trying to help Futaba when she went out by herself and got lost (which people ignore entirely by the way). So I CAN see where people got the "anti-police" message from... But that's only the tip of the iceberg as it's ACTUALLY more about Systematic Corruption, not exactly or JUST police corruption. Namely in politics with Shido and the Conspiracy (which is apparently still somewhat around in Strikers until Owada's downfall) controlling everything all the way to law enforcement. The force had been basically under his payroll (including the corrupt SIU Director before his death) whether by force or not (mostly not in this case though). Now honestly, the police depicted there are undoubtedly rotten to the core save for a VERY SMALL handful (the cop that was trying to help Futaba which, again, gets ignored by several). Look at the interrogators who ruthlessly beat and drug a minor without any second thought or remorse for example. But again, the black and white narrative the game kept unwittingly doing ended up being to its detriment in a way. I'm not defending those assholes AT ALL! They deserved every punishment given to them! But for a game that goes on about grey morality... It doesn't quite deliver on that. Still though, it does emphasize that it's more of the fault of the whole corrupt system, not just one part of it. There needs to be change and reform which is what our MCs were trying to do in a way (more like inspiring change but still). In the end, it's all about the following:

Corruption and abuse of power.

Again the police depicted in this game were incompetent at best, corrupt at worse with very few silver linings. But it's not just them but rather the one person responsible for the whole mess. Who had them under his payroll? Who controlled them and by extension all of Tokyo? Who was willing to dispose of anyone who "outlives their usefulness" or is perceived as a threat to what he wants (including his own family)?

SHIDO AND BY EXTENSION THE CONSPIRACY

Bottom line: They are definitely a problem but it's not just them.

"But, Joker and his trauma?"

I definitely understand that and still do. I fully believe he has and still has trauma with the police. Easy! But... I do feel like people go too far with it sometimes. It's hard to explain but there have been moments where people either use it as a justification/argument against someone trying to provide a more nuanced view of things or... Dare I say, depict him like a "uwu soft traumatized boi." Like I said, it's hard to explain on my end so feel free to ignore it. Everyone deals with trauma differently so there is STRONG chance that I'm overanalyzing it. I just remember moments where I just feel a little, I guess annoyed? I'm not sure exactly but final thing: I understand what he went through and I can't imagine how long it would take to recover but I hope he DOES overcome it.

"Sae? Akechi?"

Yep, even though their jobs are different, they are by and large members of law enforcement no matter how you spin it. Both were broken in a way. Akechi is pretty easy to explain with how Shido negatively impacted his life but not much about Sae, who dealt with sexism/misogyny at her workplace along with the trauma of her father's (also a cop) death. She no doubt had some idealism only to be hit with the fact that she's gonna have to use underhanded/downright illegal tactics to get by and even rise up the ranks. She, therefore ended up (well, nearly) corrupted herself before coming to her senses. That's honestly one of the BIGGEST REASONS why I felt like Makoto joining the force to become a police commissioner isn't a good, even a downright naïve, idea. I honestly would have been somewhat fine with it if it weren't for that fact among other things. Regardless of her willpower, it will go south fast.

Now... Onto Strikers!

Persona 5 Strikers

Since the game came out and I started playing it, I still feel like the system is still beyond saving, especially when attempting to do it from the inside. But I don't mind the added nuances that P5 didn't do much of. It's still continuing the critiques, just shows more of what does happen within said system and even has an ACTUAL officer (Zenkichi) say, "Yeah, my job sucks, everyone's corrupt, there are much better ways to do things and make a change but not this. I'm only staying because I have a daughter to take care of and it's all I know. I'm no different from them." Was it all handled well? I wouldn't say "yes" (Joker's trauma is BARELY addressed at all of course) but a little better than what P5's narrative did which only addressed the issues but not exactly follow up on them. Now to be fair... In the system, regardless of where you live, any one within it who remotely tries to do something or speak against it either lose their jobs or even go "missing" irl. Those have happened and it's more proof that yeah, it's rotten to the core. There's no denying it but regardless, that's NOT what the game is about at all. At least that's what I feel about it as it's only PART of the narrative. I think Zenkichi puts it best here:

Speaking of Zenkichi... Oh boy... Now I definitely understand some of the criticisms with him but honestly, he was the best written (PT) character I've ever encountered! He was honestly the perfect representation of those that genuinely want to help and do good, only to be held back by an extremely harsh reality. It was already hinted at with Sae but here? It 100 percent confirms just how harsh and even cutthroat it can be if it could break someone's idealism so badly. Even Kaburagi of all people thinks the same thing Zenkichi said:

Then there's his past and it's a tragic one! But let's look more at the decisions he ended up making:

While it was no doubt done to protect his daughter, he ended making a selfish decision along with a selfless one (which was brilliant!) with not only allowing the cover up of his wife's death and denying justice for her, but also ruining an innocent person and their family's lives.

It's horrible, but also... There's a grey area/nuance as with the rest of his character. It was both understandable, but also wrong as he, as Akane's Shadow puts it:

He sacrificed his values, his morals, all for the sake of having a peace of mind. Speaking of Akane, she's also an interesting case in a way that she more or less perfectly represents the more "black and white" views on justice in general. Namely the more toxic/biased kind. Her reasons are also understandable but she was also acting selfishly by only focusing on how SHE was effected by Aoi's death and not even considering those that were also grieving her death and/or that people grieve/handle grief differently than her. But back on topic.

Her own views and beliefs that law enforcement basically SHOULD be dismantled (mostly out of said childish bias and black & white views) and it's framed as WRONG and it's very much correct on that. Chaos and order are two sides of the same coin, one can't exist without the other. When I say ACAB, I'm calling for reform, defund, have the corrupt held accountable for EVERYTHING and even face jail time for their crimes! Defund the police, have the ones that arrest, harm, and even murder out of bias (race, gender, etc.), lose their badges/jobs and locked up, make improvements! It's saying that there IS still corruption out there and there's no denying it. But fully eliminating the law in general will just lead to more problems. Now granted, she's young and clearly doesn't fully understand why those views are ultimately wrong but still... It was a very interesting subject to tackle and I feel like they handled it well.

Now back to Zenkichi, he was at first in denial about his decisions ultimately being the wrong ones too and even tries to justify it. Of course, his Shadow said otherwise and that was when he finally admitted that he really did act no different from the criminals he despised. But it also doesn't mean he can't redeem himself and that's what ultimately leads to his new resolve:

That right there along with everything else! There's the nuance! And ultimately despite some hiccups, Strikers handled the grey morality and nuance beautifully! Especially regarding law enforcement! Dare I say, even better than the base game! It continues the critiques with no problem but also showing different sides and areas of it! There is good and evil, but what about in-between? What about the more greyer area? It still says that there IS corruption, sometimes even beyond saving but... Sometimes a small silver lining is hidden somewhere.

Now, the ultimate question:

Is P5 & P5S (namely the latter) Pro-Police or Anti-Police?

Personally, my answer is this: Neither.

Why? What theme do they both have in common?

JUSTICE

Someone puts it best on Twitter that the games are more pro-justice and I fully agree!

P5/P5S gives the idea about following your OWN justice, your OWN moral code and rules, paving your OWN path and not let others dictate it! That's what the MCs ultimately start to learn in both games. Therefore it's pro-justice. Again, do I agree that the system is beyond saving? Yeah. Do I at least acknowledge and understand what the narratives are trying to say and nuances regardless even if I don't agree with some writing decisions (ex: Makoto wanting to become a commissioner despite everything)? Also yes. But at the same time, don't judge a book by its cover for other people (not just law enforcement and politics mind you). Especially some that genuinely DO want to help at best. That there is nuance and greyness, just have to look closely. Some of the MCs are still TERRIBLY written and executed (even annoying) but the message was still somewhat there.

Final Thoughts

Now I fully understand how you all feel of course! I still believe in ACAB and even I agree that maybe I'm one to talk and have a lot more to learn about the world... This is just my own attempt at putting my own two cents in. If you disagree, that's fine! This is just what I've felt should be at least talked about more often. And I tried to phrase it as best as I can without coming off as insensitive or ignorant and if I did, I sincerely apologize for that! I'm not trying to say, come off as a "bootlicker" or any of the sort. I'm just trying show discuss more of the grey areas and nuances that are, more often than not, constantly overlooked. How one interprets both games is ultimately up to them. You, the player. And this is my own interpretation. Simple as that. I hope you all have a good day/afternoon/evening!

#starchild rambles #analysis #persona 5 #persona 5 royal #persona 5 strikers #p5 #p5r #p5s #p5s spoilers #p5r spoilers #p5 spoilers #long post

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tamhrayis · 3 years

Text

I brought a theory from Reddit.

Disclaimer:

I am here to not disrespect the author by any means. I simply have questions as a person who is reading it and pointed out which parts are confusing. It’s up to you to believe this theory or not.

What’s more, reborn Ymir will be in the same position as 2000 years ago – the Founding Titan's shifter. BUT, this time she's free. Therefore, once she pops out and gets her abilities back, she can do whatever she wants with them. She no longer needs to be commanded by royals, which gives her the ideal opportunity to conclude everything. [How does Eren know that an infant can assist him in such an endeavour?]

Well...Ymir was definitely not free, but Ymir wasn’t born with her abilities. She got them because of hallucigenia attached to her back when she fell into that water in the tree. She wasn’t born special.

Another point. How Ymir being born with titan powers will stop the cycle of hatred?

Zeke’s death was a necessary distraction, deliberately included by Isayama to divert our attention. It tricked us into thinking that the baby inheriting Zeke’s titan is relevant as it would help Eren resume the Rumbling. But that’s not the case. The child will indeed inherit the Beast but what’s important here is the baby inheriting the Founder (what Isayama tried to hide behind Zeke’s death). Also, his death served the purpose of stopping the Rumbling as it is not needed anymore. Most of the world's population is already massacred. [What was the point of Zeke dying? Will the baby inherit the Beast Titan?]

Hm...Yeah, Zeke’s death indeed helped to stop the rumbling, because Eren could reach the Paths because of him and killing him stopped the whole process, but why would Isayama make such a distraction at the last third chapter of the whole manga? Shouldn’t he kill Zeke before, so Eren and Historia’s plan would work and it had more screen time?

“In a vision, Eren saw that Ymir will be reborn after his death. He told Historia that he has to figure out which random child will inherit the Founder”. [“What would you think… about me having a child?”]

Which vision? Ch.1 or after kissing Historia’s hand? Ch.1 vision was Eren and Mikasa’s shared dream and we still don’t know what exactly Eren saw while kissing Historia’s hand.

Of course it’s safe to say that it was his future memories, but it yet has to be revealed.

Random child. How Eren can predict that the baby will be Historia’s? Does he know how many pregnant women are there on Paradise? Okay, let’s say that it’s FT and Paths magic, but can he control which child will be born with Founder’s powers?

It would also explain why Historia didn't appear in Ch. 138 – if Isayama showed the baby coming out seconds after Mikasa decapitated Eren then it would’ve been obvious what’s going on.[“What would you think… about me having a child?”]

Chapters are 45 pages long. Why Isayama didn’t cut out some panels and didn’t put it here? Why not to show it right after the kiss page? Distraction?

Moreover, Ymir is smiling at Eren and Mikasa not simply because she saw affection. Yes, she does care about bonds but another thing could be that Eren's plan downed on her – she connected the dots and figured out that it's now her turn to contribute and complete the mission Eren wordlessly gave her. I believe next chapter will start with her disappearing from inside the Founder's mouth and switch to her being born. [“What would you think… about me having a child?”]

Okay! I agree with the part that Ymir smiled at Mikasa and Eren because of the affection they showed to each other and the part that she will contribute to the “mission”.

They showed affection to each other. Why would Eren show affection to Mikasa if he is having a child with the woman he loves?

What about the hallucigenia? Will it still stay there or disappear with her?

Immediately after she cries for the first time, all Eldians will perhaps be summoned in Paths, where Eren will be waiting. To their surprise, he will announce the end of the Titan Age. Then, Ymir will make the command and Paths will begin collapsing. Eren will hold her in his arms as all traces of titans disappear. "You're free." will collectively be directed to Ymir and all of her Subjects. [What will happen after she is reborn?]

Hold on. Can the power of Founder be shared between two people? Is it like One for All? If Ymir was born with FT, doesn’t that mean that Eren no longer has FT, AT and WHT? How Ymir can summon them? She is an infant. She doesn’t have a proper consciousness to purposely summon everyone into Paths. Where AT and WHT will go? To random Eldian children or Ymir?

It has always been suspicious as to why Eren teased Zeke about them not reaching "the part where he eats their old man". It's strange that Grisha gave Eren the power of the titans when beforehand he begged Zeke to stop him. The only logical thing would be that Eren showed him what I described above: the resolution. [What did Eren show Grisha?]

Wait. Why would Grisha be this heartbroken and scared if Eren showed him the resolution? He doesn’t look like crying from happiness. Sure, he was crying because he killed children and others, but why would he look at Zeke like that? He was in literal pain.

What used to be nonsensical before is now super logical. Grisha and Kruger were not helping the Alliance because Armin’s TnJ (talk no jutsu) worked. They aided them because beforehand Eren revealed the truth of what is to come and that they will NEED to kill him in order for Historia’s baby to inherit the Founder. Basically, they didn't feel sympathy for Marley all of a sudden – instead, they were helping Eren in liberating Eldians from titans. [Why did Grisha and Kruger help the Alliance? Why did Ymir revive them if they were going to go against Eren?]

Well...Besides Grisha and Kruger, Marcel, Ymir, Mr. Xavier, Porco and Bertholdt were there. Did they want to help Eren too?

As it has been confirmed by Isayama's notes on Ch. 138, it’s not an AU. So we should probably forget about time loops. It's a dream. Eren entered it (through Paths, duh) as he wanted to convince Mikasa to behead him as fast as possible as they have no time left. Him joining her is why Aaron Yogurt dream Eren got shifter marks on his face and why in Ch. 1, he saw this particular moment. [What’s up with Mikasa’s hallucinations?]

Oh! “A long dream” topic again. I went to the link author put and this is what I see (see below).

Okay, let’s say that he entered it via Paths, but why not to straightforwardly say that? Why to create a dream where they live happily? Why to show this hug, “I want to live with you for the rest of my 4 years”?

I don’t really like the time loop concept myself, because I don’t like time travel stuff, but why then he saw the exact same dream in ch.1? Something is not clicking.

The former will likely return to being humans. There’s no reason for them to disappear as they’re material beings that exist in the physical world – what will be removed is just titanization. Plus, with this, Eren will keep his promise of his friends living long lives. Though, this is something I cannot predict properly and just speculation. The latter will be free from the Curse of Ymir (good luck, Reiner, no dying for you). [What will happen to the titanized Eldians and titan shifters?]

Fully agree! No debate.

There's no question really. I feel like it should be self-explanatory after everything discussed so far. The farmer being Ymir's father would be a more shocking twist than Eren being the dad. [Is it sure that Eren is the father?]

Why wouldn’t Isayama add a plot twist into his story? It’s not hard to do. But Isayama’s plot twists work because he visually foreshadows it or uses characters’ dialogues. He already has showed us farmer. Why he is here? For cover up? Why would Isayama put these words if farmer is unnecessary? Why not to add more information?

To stop the cycle of violence and hate once and for all. If Eren removed titan powers without the Rumbling, most people (especially Marleyans) would’ve still despised Eldians and they would've just been defenseless. So Eren wanted to prevent that. [Why did the Rumbling have to occur?]

I agree with this. Rumbling was a cause for people to work and stop fighting each other as I said here. Rumbling plan was very risky, but it was unavoidable, because Marley is way more advanced and Paradise would terribly lose. Good point!

But why would Historia, who has decided to live for herself agree with Eren’s plan? How would she benefit from it? Okay, she and Historia are in love, but why would she want the person she loves to become a mass murderer? Why she couldn’t stop him? Why she was crying when he told his plan? She is a royal blood after all too! They could come up with another plan which wouldn’t involving Zeke.

I assume it would just die/disappear/go back to the tree it emerged from. [What about hallucigenia?]

Where’s that tree? How it will get there?

In conclusion, the theory isn’t bad, but it would work if Historia and Eren had more set up, the importance of Zeke would be explored a little more here and ch.138 didn’t have clear symbolism between Eren and Mikasa. There’re some holes, but the author gave some good points, which is truly appreciated!

#it’s theory time #attack on titan #shingeki no kyoujin #eren jaeger #mikasa ackerman #eremika #zeke jaeger #snk 138 #snk spoilers

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maries-gallery · 3 years

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Hi hun! Could I ask for an ikevamp match up please?

My pronouns are she/her, hetero.

Personality:

I'm an infp and a pisces. I'm very dreamy and artistic - love crocheting, reading, writing poems and stories as well as doing arts and crafts in my spare time. I also LOVE going on walks and exploring places - my curiosity knows no bounds. I'm a responsible, efficient and reliable person though I can also be very childish once I feel comfortable around someone. That being said, I am a perfectionist and have depression and anxiety as a result of growing up with a gaslighting alcoholic parent so I'm absolutely terrified of being imperfect and people judging hating me for it. I think my most distinctive feature is that I'm very nurturing and love taking care of others. Also, I have absolutely no impulse control when it comes to spending money - I see something I want, I'm having it no questions asked.

My likes:

Waa I kinda said it already didn't I 😅😂 walks, exploring, shopping (not clothes though; give me a book/stationary store or tiger or a quaint little shop or crystal shop etc. and I will not leave for half the day), writing, arts and crafts, reading. I also LOVE discussing things with people, especially philosophy stuff. I actually study neuroscience at university atm so I also absolutely love science especially biology - I love theorizing and being able to bounce ideas around with another person.

And yes, I am a thirsty, kinky mofo - I'd be grateful for sfw and nsfw.

Thank you! Hope you have a wonderful day 💕

So I really hesitated between Leonardo and Arthur, but I finally decided to match you up with Arthur.

General SFW :

- Arthur would probably find you endearing right from the start. He’d probably tease you for being innocent (his words, not mine). However he wouldn’t be able to push his worries away concerning your safety, considering the fact you just jumped in a house full of vampires... But unlike in the game I don’t see him actually trying to push you away or scare you, he’d tease you a lot, of course (come on, this is Arthur) but he already has a soft spot for you and doing anything which could scare you would be a no.

- Instead he’d probably hang around you and try to spend time with you to make sure nothing came your way. Although he wouldn’t admit that and would cover it up by teasing you some more and playing around, being his usual flirt.

- But the more he’d get to know you the more his affection and interest for you would grow. There is so much more to you than just an artistic and cute girl. You are in fact, a true whirlwind ! Both responsible, smart and adventurous, both nurturing and hardworking... And what’s more, you like to read and write ! Then he also finds your curiosity really attractive, he is himself very curious and adventurous.

- You two would spend hours debating about whatever subject came to mind, Leonardo sometimes barging in and joining the conversation. Although in these moments Arthur would probably feel insecure as Leonardo, having lived longer than him would probably be more knowledgeable on certain subjects. You’d probably have to reassure him afterwards and wipe this cute pout off of his lips.

- He’d love listening to you as you talk about your new work in progress or the latest book you read, or pretty much anything you had going on. And I can imagine the two of you spending late nights cuddling in his bed and one of you reading aloud to the other as you both wait for sleep to take you down.

- He’d love to go shopping with you during one of your many outings. You two would have so much fun going from one shop to the other and looking at all the different articles and trinkets.

- Considering his own experience with crippling depression and healthcare he’d be the best at comforting and supporting you on hard days, weeks or however long it lasted. He wouldn’t leave your side, ready to listen, cuddle or do whatever you want. He’d make it a point for you that perfection is boring and unachievable anyways. That he loves you because you are human, and thus have flaws. And that it is normal. He’d make a list of his own flaws in a humorous way for you both to laugh about it and for you to know that it is okay to be imperfect.

- However keep in mind that he two has some issues and as mentioned previously he can get really insecure too. I see him being a bit distant on some days but he’ll always come back into your arms in the end and talk about whatever has been bothering him. You’d both be very considerate and supportive of each other, sticking together through thick and thin. Arthur is also quite lonely and having been a war doctor he has seen his fair share of horrible things. But when with you he can forget these memories and enjoy the beauty the world has to offer.

- You’d be one of the few people to whom he opens up. You, lucky girl.

Scenario :

You sat in Arthur’s room, the two of you writing on his desk. Your eyes scanned over his concentrated features. A light frown adorning his brows, lips pressed together and glasses perched on his well sculpted nose.

Your attention then fleeted to the lines written in your notebook, scrutinising every word, conflict rising in your chest. You picked up your pen, ready to make some modifications to your writing. Just like you had done a few seconds before, three times.

However the dark haired male beside you had other plans as he stretched and groaned, sending you a playful grin.

“Are we done, Luv ?” He voiced, leaning in to take a peek at your work. This didn’t go well with you as you impulsively hid the paper.

Arthur’s eyes widened, grin fading at the sight of your conflicted expression. He immediately knew what was going on. He could read you like an open book after all.

A flicker of sadness passed through those blue eyes and his heart clenched in his chest. He let out a sigh, looking intently at you, any trace of his usual playfulness gone.

“Luv, I don’t know what you wrote, okay ? But what I know is that you put all your heart into these lines and already edited them four times in the last five minutes.” He held your gaze, aching at the thought of what may be going on inside your head.

Your lips quivered, “But... You’re such an amazing writer... When all I can come up with are some flawed stories and flawed lines and-” Your voice trembled by now, tears on the brink of falling.

“It doesn’t have to be perfect on the first try. Nor can it be perfect, for perfection doesn’t exist. It is not human.” He explained, voice soft and tender as he leaned into you. “And I can assure you that my writing is far from perfect, Luv. But this is also what makes it so unique and authentic.” He grabbed his papers, placing them in front of you and reading over the lines he had written.

“Look. There, this is one imperfect line, don’t you think ?”

You read over his shoulder.

‘The walkers walked along the streets.’

You couldn’t repress a small chuckle, a hand covering your lips to stifle your amusement. Arthur only sent you a joyful smile, warmth flooding his system at the sight of your smile.

“See ? No one is perfect. And we all make mistakes.” He reassured, eyes swarming with his love for you. He gently took your hands in his own, cradling them glass.

“And remember, I fell in love with you. The whole you. Your qualities and your flaws which all make you the wholesome person you are.” With these words his soft kiss pressed against your brow, the intensity and honesty of his words pouring into your cracks like sweet honey to fix your insecurities.

Song :

Be my Baby, The Ronettes

NSFW :

- It is no secret that Arthur is good with his mouth, in more ways than one. Would it be to dirty talk the soul out of you or to eat you out, he is skilled both ways.

- Speaking of eating you out, his favourite place on earth is probably between your legs. He could spend hours there, teasing you, enjoying and rejoicing in the way your body quivers and shivers in his hold, how your head rolls back and eyes close with his ministrations, with every lick of his tongue on your sensitive bud.

- He is also very skilled with his fingers and loves fingering you.

- Arthur is also a huge tease. And I can’t stress this enough, he will come up to you in the middle of the hallway as you’re dusting the shelves to whisper the dirtiest of things in your ear. He just loves how a deep blush creeps onto your cheeks and how flustered you become.

- I can see him being into role play too, you as his assistant and him as the detective.

- Wear a maid outfit to clean his room ? The guy is dead and crumbling at your feet.

- Arthur can both be passionate and serious or playful and a tease. Depends on the mood and circumstances.

- Not very surprising but he has a very high sex drive and can’t get enough of you. If he could, he’d spend his life with you in his bed, under the covers. He is also very energetic and has stamina.

- He is a switch, can both be a dominant tease and a lovesick puppy eager to please you.

There, I hope you enjoyed it ! I had lots of fun doing it and may have gotten a bit carried away...

This is my first match up ever so I am really sorry if it is a bit clumsy. You really seem like a sweetheart and I truly hope this gave you some serotonin !

#ikemen vampire #ikevamp #ikevamp arthur #matchups #ikevamp match

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xz1005fanblog · 3 years

Text

2021-02-27 Some things I want to say

WARNING LONG POST

Context first, translation of his post above will follow:

Disclaimer: I have no interest in other artists other than Xiao Zhan, and I am merely explaining the situation of the fandom in China that led us to the fiasco in March 2020. I do not care for bjyx, I ship WangXian but I do not ship real people as a basic principle.

My opinion as an international fan of Xiao Zhan and as an AO3 user (yes, I am not Chinese nor do I live in China, I just happen to be able to read Chinese) is that C-entertainment industry is TOXIC and celebrities are not free targets for you to cyberbully. They are human just like you and me.

Everyone needs to learn a bit more about compassion.

I am sure all of you read about the cyberbullying Xiao Zhan went through last year. There were multiple factors that started all of this, most of which XZ doesn’t talk about in this letter because of how sensitive the topic is in China. I’ve never explained entirely what happened because I personally thought that this is not something overseas fans should worry too much about. Especially since most of you don’t have a wb or db account, there’s nothing you can do about it anyway. But since Xiao Zhan himself decided to post a letter to respond to this subject, I’ll put in my 2 cents just that so everyone is on the same page.

Basically, after The Untamed aired in China, the show fandom split into 3 groups. XZ fans, WYB fans, and CP fans (or bjyx, whatever you wish to call it, those who love shipping these two real people together - not just the characters in the drama). Of course there are still people who would watch the show without becoming a fan of the actors.

At the beginning, most people thought they were good friends with each other, with all the short BTS clips from The Untamed. However, fans slowly discovered that it wasn’t the case. Some unofficial BTS clips emerged where WYB said XZ was shooting multiple dramas at the same time = 轧戏 (which is very frowned upon and a disrespectful thing to say to an actor), whereas in reality, XZ only asked for a couple of days days off during the shooting for The Untamed because his scenes in Joy of Life had to be redone and he was bound by contract. On the contrary, WYB had to ask for most weekends off because he was participating in Produce 101 at the time. Other clips shows them fighting about somethings WYB said about WWX, which made XZ mad. So this broke a lot of CP fans’ image of their relationship, and they either stopped shipping/became XZ or WYB fans only. This angered WYB’s fans, of course, which made them blame XZ for the entire fiasco.

Other incidents continued to happen after the show which increased the friction between these 3 fan groups. XZ fans and WYB fans would fight about various voting charts, and fight with CP fans because they don’t like seeing the two actors together. In the meantime, CP fans continuously feminize and weaken XZ in order to ship the 2 actors together (it’s rather an unhealthy trend in China, I’ve been in multiple other western fandoms before - not real person shipping - but we rarely glorify weakening/feminizing the bottom of a ship, because of the underlying prejudice against real homosexuals, who are not synonymous to transgenders).

Some incidents added oil to the fire afterwards. It’ll take me too long to explain everything, so I’ll just put here the main ones to explain why there’s so much bad blood between these 3 groups of fans.

On XZ’s birthday, some CP fans found XZ’s parents’ apartment building and yelled BJYX is real. This angered a lot of XZ fans, because of how disrespectful it was towards the old couple and the clear breach of privacy. WYB fans and some CP fans were also angry that XZ didn’t reply immediately to the birthday wish on wb that WYB sent at midnight (??? XZ was busy shooting a drama, can you blame him for not being on wb at midnight? Give the guy a break.)

In November 2019, WYB filed a lawsuit against some of XZ’s fans (instead against of his own haters!) for dissing him (although I’ve never seen any proof, and a few of those fans remain active on wb now, one of whom has even defended WYB's portrayal of LWJ before...). This angered a lot of XZ fans and CP fans who didn’t understand how he could have done this to his “friend”, and further proved that their relationship wasn’t that fantastic to begin with. WYB fans felt justified in hating XZ and all XZ fans as a result, and openly bullied XZ fans on the grounds of the Nanking CQL Concert.

In January, The Untamed was named to Beijing Journal Drama award. CP fans and WYB fans were unhappy that XZ was named to the Best Male Lead category and WYB was named to the Best Male 2nd Lead. They attacked the award committee wb by spam commenting all their wb posts and the entire drama was pulled from the nomination afterward. XZ fans were especially angry that they started all this only for the nomination to be pulled out - because the only possibility was one Male Lead per drama, and anyone would agree that if chosen between WWX and LWJ, the character with the most scenes and importance in the story is WWX.

Yadda yadda yadda, fast forward to February 2020, it started with a fanfiction written by a CP fan that depicted XZ as a prostitute transgender woman and WYB as a highschool kid (UNDERAGE) = AKA very sensitive material in China. It was posted on AO3, but the author posted the link of said fic on wb and a lot of CP fans broadcasted it around, so much that XZ fans became aware of it. Due to how sensitive the material is and how badly it would taint XZ’s image for his future roles, some XZ fans started reporting the wb post that contained the link (NOT AO3) and the author’s wb page. This is common practice in fandom on wb, usually done to get the wb posts taken down. This caused panic in the CP fans crowd because they thought XZ fans were reporting AO3 and that they were gonna lose the website (which is impossible, because AO3′s servers are in Sweden and not subject to Chinese laws anyway).

Because of how sensitive AO3 was in China and how haters tried to pull in antigovernmental into their crowds, the subject quickly became too dangerous for XZ fans to get involved in. Official fan groups in China unanimously decided to ask all fans to stop participating in the online debate and stay within the fan group circle only.

Someone on AO3 made a commentary about this incident that you can find here. She dug up a lot of info on the companies feeding money to the trolls online, but as I am an overseas fan and cannot really verify her info, I will not comment on those statements.

Sometime in the middle of this fiasco, someone started spreading the notion that XZ fans hated fanfiction and were trying to report anything that goes against their image of their idol... And subsequently people who were not CP fans or XZ fans became aware of this problem when they couldn’t access AO3 suddenly because too much curious fans where trying to access it and they crashed the servers. However later on, people could access the website without any problems. I am not personally in China right now so I can’t verify these claims of the website being walled or not for real, but I know from various reliable sources that on March 1st it was only an overload of the server, and people could still access afterwards.

With this however, haters (which include previous CP fans, WYB fans, and other idol’s fans) attacked XZ for not telling his fans to stop reporting, for not saying anything. They attacked XZ’s endorsements and spammed hate speech on the products he was promoting. They would rate 1 star in all his dramas and songs on db, and then buy accounts to further rate 1 stars (yes that thing exists in China, everything can be bought in China, don’t ask me why.) The reason why I believe that all this wasn’t coincidental, is that barely the day after the fiasco started, someone posted on db the exact list of all his sponsorships, detailing exactly who to call to protest, what words to spam in the comment sections of various official brands’ wb accounts. This entire thing was too well planned to be just a normal fandom fight.

Whether it was other actors’ fans who organized this to cut down competition, we will probably never know for sure. The following year was laden with fake rumors, hate speech blasting from multiple directions. They attacked his personality, saying that his polite manners are just for show (when the reality is that he has always been a gentleman even when he wasn’t popular). They attacked XZ for faking donations to Wuhan, forcing him to show his donation certificate to prove himself. One of his friends couldn’t stand the cyberbullying anymore and revealed publicly that his grandfather recently passed away (the date on this drawing is 2020.03.03, he couldn’t post this last year).

His friend defending him from the cyberbullies, saying that he had plenty of reasons to stay silent. That his grandfather passed away recently and his family has been planning his funeral.

(Sources also said that his mother was hospitalized a few days afterwards. And that haters went to his mother’s hospital to harass her and her nurses)

Haters saying that XZ is using his grandfather’s death to excuse himself (??? is he not allowed to grieve like a normal person???)

Haters wishing that XZ becomes depressed from the cyberbullying and kills himself, wishing that he was dead, wishing that his fans were dead too. Photoshopping his picture into a funeral portrait to curse him

Haters admitting they are cyberbullying XZ, but rejoicing in the fact that they are so many so XZ can’t sue all of them. They have also reported his upcoming dramas for various reasons just so they cannot be aired.

The airplane incident I’ve already talked about here.

A picture antis made to diss on XZ fans: AO3 can be still accessed even if it’s walled, Lofter can be still access even if it’s taken down from the app store. Your gege’s picture are still accessible even if he died.

I’ve only posted here the tamest screenshots, there are far worst ones that I won’t be posting because the amount of vitriol give me nausea just looking at them.

In all this fiasco, antis gave him the tag of “idol who didn’t manage his fans well”. But Xiao Zhan never thought fans needed to be trained, he thought of them like normal people, and their love, something to be treasured and not used. But some people in China still blamed his fans for starting all this mess, and partly him and his studio for not being able to stop it.

Below is the translation for XZ’s letter, posted on the wb post above

Some Things I Want To Say

Today, I have something to say to everyone. I’ve thought of a lot of ways to do this, but in the end, I chose the simplest way to tell everyone about all my feelings and thoughts in the past year. These opinions, maybe they won’t be able to represent anything, nor won’t they be able to change anything, but I still wish to say this today.

On this day last year, the incident happened very quickly, as if a bomb exploded on my face - endless phone calls, never ending message notifications, everyone’s opinions and questions came in like a tsunami. I wanted to say something back then, but I didn’t know what exactly. I was apprehensive of making a statement, afraid that one wrong word, or one wrong sentence would be taken the wrong way and end up adding oil to the fire. This is why at that time, I chose not to say anything.

I never thought that the online fighting would grow bigger and bigger like an avalanche, getting larger crowds involved, and gradually leaving one person’s control. Even though afterwards I made repeated statements to make amends, it could not develop as I wished it to anymore.

This life filled with broken protests and tumultuous noise continued to this day. And I felt I was going through a very dark and never ending tunnel. Unrest, ruminations, turmoil... I have also asked myself what did I do wrong exactly, why did everything after that day became as if it were an uncontrollable vessel.

I spent a lot of time to digest, and then spent a lot of time to understand, understand everyone’s words and actions. Slowly, I started to understand what everyone was criticizing about me personally. The moment that I chose not to say anything, I lost that window of opportunity to reason with everyone. So I was wrong, from the very beginning.

At that time, I wasn’t yet able to clearly understand the entire incident, to understand everyone’s feelings, nor did I know what kind of responsibility I had to carry as a public figure. Thus, I missed that opportunity to communicate with everyone, and wasn’t able to withstand the responsibility of letting these antagonizing feelings grow. Now, I can clearly recognize that throughout this year, this criticism that everyone had against me of “Idol Who Lost Its Voice”, was correct. During this year I reflected upon this repeatedly, as a public figure, I have to not only improve myself within the boundaries of my profession, but also have to carry the social responsibility that comes with my influence. To influence those who like me, who follow me, towards the right worldviews within my capacity. Even though my studio and I have already expressed some opinions through wb and interviews, but scars that this incident that brought such antagonistic emotions between different circles are still difficult to heal.

No matter how late, my own problem has to be corrected. I would like to express my first comment: Xiao Zhan, would like to apologize for “losing voice” towards those who have been affected by this incident. This is my first responsibility towards the public, face the problem and admit my faults.

Also, I would like to use this opportunity to speak with my fans. This is my second responsibility. In one of my interviews last year, I have said, I do not really agree with “managing” my fans (some celebs in China have hired people to manage fan groups in order for them to behave in certain ways for their purposes. Antis tried to spread the false rumor that XZ also had those people and that they directed their fans to start this mess), because everyone is an individual. No matter my studio nor myself, we do not have the authority to “manage” them like some would manage workers in a company. Afterwards, I reflected many times, maybe I cannot use the word “manage” to define my relationship with my fans, but I do have the responsibility to “correctly influence, and actively advocate”. So today, I would like to tell my fans, everyone has the right to like or hate something, and it should be respected and allowed within their own space. Of course this right should be reasonable, should not hurt anyone else, and remain within the boundaries of the correct values and norms. I hope my fans and friends can understand that no matter which profession, no matter what age, one’s own preferences or actions should not cross the line for one’s professional ethics or disrespect basic principles.

(Here he is referring to reports of teachers using his name in class or asking children to say his name to cheer for him. This is a problem that occurred also with other celebrities in China, and for which he has already expressed himself previously.)

No matter online or in real life, everyone should be responsible for their own words. I also hope that we are not represented tags like “xx’s fans”, that we do not set this as the basis of where we stand on a topic nor do we let this determine what’s right or wrong. Everyone have their own hobbies and interest, respect everyone’s choice and freedom of speech. No matter whether they like me or hate me is their own right. Passion, this should be a source of strength to everyone, I do not wish for it to consume or hurt anyone. Perhaps I cannot change this kind of environment, but at least for you and me, today is a new start point.

At last, I would like to talk a bit about myself. Ever since I came into this field, until today, I have always been defined by some tags. But the reason why I originally stepped into this circle was my passion for performance and music. And this is why, I will keep working on becoming a better actor and singer. The sudden criticism of “having lost voice” made me realize that, other than what I have always focused on professionally, I have to also be able to carry the responsibility of a public figure and an idol. I was born in a normal family in Chong Qing, and have lived a normal life, like many other people, for more than twenty years. Today I will also use this opportunity to apologize for the words I have said before as a normal person (I’ve already talked about it here), for the people I have inadvertently hurt. As I work hard on studying to become a better person, I will try to become a better “public figure”, so that these two Xiao Zhan can blend in together, for a better self.

This past year, no matter big or small, I have to be responsible for the incidents that happened because of me. I can demand this for myself, but I have no right to force it on other people, so I can only hope that those who really like me can really listen to me: please be a bit more reasonable for things outside of personal preferences. Live a healthy life, put more time and energy onto one’s real life, and less on the senseless fighting behind fake IDs and unreliable online world. Only to become a better self.

(Here he’s referring to an online fight that an anti called 晨小晨 started. I’ve already explained a bit here. #微博管理员回应晨小晨事件# )

Sorry for any grammar errors, this post was really long to make and I didn’t proofread. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to translate the entire thing for overseas fans since you don’t understand the entire context, and because I wanted my wb records collection tag to be complete, I felt I had to... and I got carried away trying to explain everything. Tried to summarize it as much as I could.

As a fan of Xiao Zhan and also an AO3 user, I would still like to apologize for how this bullshi*t ended up disrupting respectful and peaceful users of AO3. The Untamed tag did not contain hate fics before all of this happened, it is unfortunate that a place where there used to be only love, ended up being tainted by antis and haters.

To the anonymous person who asked me a few months ago if I supported bjyx, this is my answer: You have the right to like whatever you want within your own corner, as long as it doesn’t bother anyone else and isn’t against basic principles. I ship WangXian as characters from a novel, but I have never liked RPS as a principle.

#肖战 #肖战xiaozhan #xiao zhan #xiaozhan #zhan xiao #sean xiao #wb records collection #bjyx #i hate fandom fighting #in the end he chose to say sorry #for the innocent people dragged into this #and for the innocent fans #he chose to carry all the blame #even when none of it was his fault

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desidarling123 · 3 years

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FATWS Episode 4: A Definitive* Rank Ordering of Most Interesting Character Arcs, from Yours Truly

(*And by definitive I mean completely subjective, but yanno.)

IF YOU HAVEN'T FIGURED IT OUT BY NOW: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR FATWS. SCROLL AWAY NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT EM.

Now let's get into it:

1. John Walker

Let me start by saying -- the near-universal John Walker hate from fandom has always been largely undeserved, and that's a hill I'll die on. It comes out of, I think, a visceral sort of need to slot him into an easily understood black-or-white binary when, truthfully, he is neither, and I think this episode was the BEST example of that. The sheer range he exhibits in such a short time -- a handful of character moments and action sequences in the larger fifty minute episode -- serve to humanize him in a way that's messy and intense and very, very real.

Because MAN. Whether you were already sympathetic to John's plight or not, the death of his partner, Lemar Hoskins, is viscerally disturbing. There's no other way to put it. FATWS has not shied away from some pretty crazy onscreen kills, but this one was arguably the worst in how brutally mundane it was. Lemar was in the wrong place at the wrong time -- a man fighting amongst a whole room of super soldiers. He never stood a chance -- and yet, he still jumped in harm's way to save his best friend, a man in whom he saw indisputable goodness, even when the man could not see it himself. There's an obvious Steve/Bucky parallel here, but with a much darker and more realistic twist -- not all of us, after all, can be lucky enough to receive super strength that could save our lives. Lemar was always a regular mortal -- and for that transgression, he pays the ultimate price.

And then. What happens after. Oh. My. God. I felt Walker's rage and hopelessness through the screen. The death of that Flag Smasher -- at the hands of Captain America, no less, a man he'd admitted to admiring as a child not ten minutes earlier -- was brilliantly executed.

With the final shot of the townspeople recording the brutal murder it becomes overwhelmingly clear -- we are witnessing the tragic fall of a man who was, for all his previous missteps, trying to be a hero. But John's moral compass just died a meaningless, horrible death -- and without him by his side, Walker has become a man unhinged.

2. Bucky Barnes and Ayo

I debated putting this one at number two because I'd argue there were some weird elements to the writing choices made (more on that in a sec), but, nevertheless. Bucky and Ayo get slot #2.

That flashback to Wakanda got me excited, but I didn't expect my heart to get shattered almost right away. Oh. My. God. His interactions with Ayo BROKE ME. There's so much nuance in a scene that’s incredibly well-acted by both Sebastian and Florence — you see both of them in a moment that is incredibly pivotal for the former’s character, and we see the latter reacting with sympathy, strength, and enormous grace. I had expected a scene like this to be with Shuri (given that we last saw her with Bucky in the post credits of Black Panther) but, given the context of what was being performed (a final test of the trigger words) having Ayo there made a lot of sense. She could take him down if need be — but as the scene so wonderfully shows, thankfully, she doesn’t have to. Instead, she’s there to let him know that for the first time in almost a century, he’s free again.

Now, let’s get into some of the unevenness. I had hoped, at the end of the last episode, that Bucky had at least informed the Dora Milaje of his liaison with Zemo — that, perhaps, it had been Bucky’s intent to hand him over all along. Alas, that was not the case — Bucky, it seems, had broken Zemo out with little thought to — or perhaps simply silent acceptance of — the consequences that would come with it.

This is the part, again, where the writing felt a bit weak. We know from the opening shots of the episode that Bucky cares enormously for Ayo — they’re not simply soldiers in arms, but they’ve shared a moment of immense vulnerability together. We ALSO know that he cares enormously for T’Challa, for Shuri, and for Wakanda as a country (see Infinity War, where he says “I love this place” in reference to his new home).

So that begs the question — why? Why did he betray them in that way, besides sheer desperation for a lead? And it’s not one, I’d argue, that we are given a satisfying answer to. Bucky has been reckless to an alarming degree in the last few episodes, but not informing Wakanda of his intention to liaise with the man who killed their king feels like a MAJOR tactical oversight. Is he willing to burn everything down to win this battle against the Flag Smashers? Are these his self destructive tendencies kicking in? OR, is he just truly so blinded by his emotions surrounding his past that he’s willing to throw away what could very well be his future? Only time will tell. But I hope he’ll do right by Ayo and Wakanda, as he clearly has a LOT to make up for.

3. Baron Helmut Zemo

God. I love Zemo’s psychotic, problematic ass. Say what you want, but the man is the most efficient of them all and he isn't a super soldier or an Avenger. Over and over, he shows that he's truly smarter than them and always has been.

He doesn't get personal. He doesn’t get distracted. He knows exactly what his goal is, and he executes on it. Mans didn’t hesitate to unload several bullets into Karli, and as soon as he figured out what the vials were, he destroyed all except one. Like I said, the most efficient person on the team. Has arguably done more to forward the cause against the Flag Smashers/continued existence of super soldiers than anyone else and it’s only been a few days. Between that, his god-awful dancing skills and him shooting the eugenicist scientist without so much as a blink of an eye, I think he's a man after my own heart. I’m almost sad to see him get what’s coming for him come next episode. (Because y’all, he did still kill King T’Chaka, and there’s no way the Dora leave here without taking him out on a silver platter and an apple stuffed in his mouth). But again, let’s see how that pans out.

4. Sam Wilson

WHAT are the writers doing to Sam, I swear to God? We didn't get too much introspection into where his head's at during this episode, and when we did the treatment felt uneven at best. I think, in trying to have him create a rapport with Karli, the writers have created some areas of commonality that didn’t always translate as they’d like. It was also weird to see Sam swinging from the well-earned cynicism of the previous two episodes to the sort of wide-eyed optimism Steve used to portray. Perhaps that was simply to try and show Karli an alternative, but as the episode showed, she clearly wasn't buying (though, in Sam’s defense, he came pretty close).

Something about Sam’s characterization in this episode didn’t really do it for me — I would argue episode one and two were both stronger in that regard. Nevertheless, I’m hopeful that they’ll correct it in the next one.

5. Karli Morgenthau

Her treatment is arguably the worst of them all. She is young, yeah, but she oscillates at an alarming rate between spouting class discourse that, by this episode, feels largely derivative (like someone scrolled on Twitter and put a bunch of keywords together in hopes of evoking an emotional audience response) and homicidal tendencies that show a brutal yet fundamentally messy underpinning. Unlike Zemo, she is still too easily confounded, and that will come to bite her in the ass sooner rather than later. (See: The Power Broker)

Perhaps I'm meant to be rooting for her on some degree but I really can't -- she's cruel and sloppy, which I cannot forgive.

Oh, and she killed Lemar Hoskins and threatened Sarah Wilson. Yikes.

Overall Episode Takeaway: A lot of shocking moments and great acting beats for everyone involved (arguably some of the best of the series thus far), but the weakness of the writing does crop up in parts. Whether they'll be corrected for going forward is to be determined...

UP NEXT: Meta pieces for Sam, Bucky, John, and Zemo all in the works!

#fatws #tfatws #sam wilson #bucky barnes #john walker #fatws spoilers #tfatws spoilers #tfatws meta #karli morgenthau

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david-talks-sw · 3 years

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About the supposed “dig at Rey” in the Mandalorian finale.

So a lot of people have taken to YouTube and social media, saying that Luke’s line about “talent without training (being) nothing” is a dig at Rey “bEcAuSe ShE’s A mArY sUe who’s good at everything and never trained!!”

No.

Quick recap: The Mandalorian is created by Jon Favreau, and he develops it with Dave Filoni (who created The Clone Wars with George Lucas, invented Ahsoka Tano, and created Star Wars: Rebels), among others.

As far as Dave is concerned, Rey is no different than Ahsoka, she’s not “OP”, she’s not a “Mary Sue”. He’s all for strong, independent, female characters.

He talked about this at the National Center for Women & Information Technology, you can find his full speech here. If you want to see the extracts specifically about Rey and female character in Star Wars, you can find it here (though I’d advise just ignoring the intentionally-triggering title and seeing the video for what it is).

All the backlash he saw about Rey? He saw it for Ahsoka too.

“Oh, she’s fighting Grievous and she’s only, like 13?! That’s so OP!”

“She feels like a Mary Sue written for a prequel based fan fiction.”

“Oh, she disobeyed an order from Yularen on Ryloth?! She’s so snippy!”

“Ugh, I hate her and her stupid voice!”

“She’s always pointing out stuff other characters have missed, like she’s so perfect! She's a Mary Sue with an annoying voice and personality.”

And honestly? I remember that period. People hated Ashley Eckstein and Ahsoka, just like they hated Hayden Christensen, and most Prequel-related content.

So no, that line is not a dig at Rey. If you expect that to ever come from Dave, big chance you’ll be disappointed. He is all for Rey, as a character (as am I, tbh). There may be issues with how she’s written, but none of it is related to her being too strong, or her being good at everything. Guess what? Captain America and Goku are good at everything too.

What The Mandalorian tackles, with that line, is a debate with bigger implications than just Grogu.

We get two sides of the same debate, from both Ahsoka, and Luke.

“I cannot train him. His attachment to you makes him vulnerable to his fears. His anger. I’ve seen what such feelings can do to a fully trained Jedi Knight. To the best of us. I will not start this child down that path. Better to let his abilities fade.”

“He is strong with the Force, but talent without training is nothing. I will give my life to protect the Child… but he will not be safe until he masters his abilities.“

The subject they really subliminally tackle is:

Should Anakin Skywalker have been trained to be a Jedi?

On the one hand:

Anakin has the potential of being the most powerful Force-user in galactic history, as the Jedi know it. It’s just a matter of time before he accidentally Force chokes someone in a fit of anger, or when submitted to extreme stress. He needs to be trained to hone his skills so he’s not a danger to himself and others.

Jedi Training would also help him get over the trauma of growing up as a slave on Tatooine, as it is aimed at keeping your emotions under control, whereas Anakin isn’t even acknowledging their existence (he pretends he’s not afraid in front of the Jedi Council, and seems to be the only person in the room to think that he should hide his fears). His hidden fears, his anger… Jedi Training would teach him to confront them.

Also, there’s a big chance the Sith are back! If they let this kid just go out into the wild, who knows, maybe the Sith Lords pick him up and make him one of their own. Better to keep the boy close.

Anakin is a good boy, raised by a loving mother, with a kind heart. If anything, he’s got the drive to do good as strong as that of any Jedi’s. Him being down-to-earth more than your average Jedi can potentially make him the best out of all of them. He could bridge the distance between the Jedi and the Senate, he could lead the Jedi into a new age. If anyone could be the next, better and improved Yoda, it’s Anakin Skywalker.

On the other hand:

Jedi training is for Jedi only. AKA, it’s perfect if you’re raised in the temple at a very young age to be a diplomat/wizard who upholds the values of the Republic, in control of your emotions and in Balance with the Force. But if you’re not? Then the strict rules of the Jedi Order will basically seem like an insurmountable (bordering on unreasonable) obstacle.

Any normal person will see these rules as attempting to turn you into a sociopath. Because if you’re a normal person, they might. For all intents and purposes, Anakin is a super-powerful normal person. If they take Anakin in, 10 years old, with the attachments he’s formed (his mother), the emotions he represses, the trauma from his upbringing - all of which, in a normal person, are totally fine and common - and try to force him in a mold he just won’t fit in, that’s just a recipe for disaster.

Of all people, Qui-Gon Jinn - Mister “I’m always right because I follow the Will of the Force and you don’t” - who is not the most forthcoming of people, as opposed to Obi-Wan, is insisting that he should train the boy. You give a chaotic Master a chaotic Padawan? That’s adding extra ingredients to the recipe for disaster.

The BEST thing to do would be Qui-Gon leaving the Order with Anakin, and raising Anakin as his surrogate son, teaching him his values, rather than training him as a Padawan and teaching him the values of the Jedi (which he’s too old for and which essentially make the Jedi the Senate’s lapdogs). But Qui-Gon’s insisting that he train him as a Jedi.

Anakin’s mind is too fragile as it is. If they add the stress of being a Jedi to that too, there’s a big chance he won’t be able to take it, and bring about the destruction of everything they are, stand for and care about.

And, to be honest? Both points are fair.

Because Anakin was both…

… the best of them…

… and their destructor.

But then, should Grogu be trained?

In my (and Luke’s) opinion? Yes.

Ahsoka’s logic makes sense… but it only applies to how things were before, back when the Jedi served the Republic as Force-sensitive diplomats/ambassadors, making decisions that impacted whole planets and their billions of inhabitants, keeping the peace through mediation, and occasionally investigating a crime.

But in Grogu’s case… things are a bit different.

The Republic is gone.

The Jedi’s mission of upholding its values seems to be gone with it.

So literally any surviving Jedi, has a new mission: just help people.

Be it Ezra & Kanan helping the Rebellion during the Dark Times.

Or Cal Kestis, saving the Force-sensitive children.

Or Ahsoka, helping the village of Calodan, after the fall of the Empire.

Or Luke, literally being a space-vagabond/Jedi archeologist for 10 years and helping out wherever and whoever he can.

The Jedi no longer have to deal with planet-sized problems, or mediations, or investigations, because the New Republic hasn’t included them in its government, seeing as they have their rangers, now.

So now, the pressure of “upholding the Republic’s values” and “going on missions which impact billions of lives” is gone.

Now, the Jedi operate at a smaller scale and just help people out. As they did, before they became Republic officials.

Sure, they still keep their emotions in control, but that’s simply for the sake of living a healthy life, rather than for the sake of objectiveness and diplomacy.

In these circumstances? It’s totally fine for Grogu to be trained, as he should be.

The line was about the fact that training Grogu to hone his skills is fine, and should be done, before he becomes a danger to everyone around him.

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urmomsstuntdouble · 3 years

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Can you do one for america

Since I received this about an hour or two after posting my lithuania analysis, I assume you’re asking for an america character analysis. I was debating whether or not to go through with writing this or not for a while, but i’ve decided that I’ll try. I hope you enjoy it!

Idealism

The first thing that sticks out to me when thinking about america is that he’s super idealistic, and I think this has its roots in his birth. Everything in his life has been about hope and being better than others, even down to the decision to colonise north america. England needs to be the most powerful country in europe. Better set up a colony in america so that it can save us. It’s that sort of logic that i think gives america the idea that he needs to be perfect, or that he can be the ideal person. And though a lot of what we consider to be the “american” identity (intense patriotism, nativism, idealism, etc) took recognizable shape in the 19th century, i think this way of thinking was nothing new to alfred. He’d been raised on it, with the desire to please arthur sort of in his blood? Anyway i feel like the idea that the colonies would be so so prosperous really put the idea into america’s head early on that he was perfect and that he was destined to be such a great person, even if that wasn't true. I often see his daddy issues presented as solely abandonment issues, but my interpretation of america is more of a combination of abandonment issues and the pressure, some of it self inflicted, to be a perfect country. Basically, his idealism is deeply rooted in unhealthy places.

Also, a religion headcanon i have is that while he was more raised to be a puritan, freddie prefers quakerism. Though he’s not the most compatible with quakerism, as it rejects violence and quakers often refer to themselves as the society of friends, and are very welcoming, i think it gives him some hope. One of freddie’s biggest problems is that he wants people to be better than they are, and quakerism helps a little with that, because it’s a way that he can help himself become better than he currently is. I feel like he’s been a quaker for a very long time, so he’s not a very good quaker, but this is still something that’s very important to him.

Hero complex and other mental bullshit

America having a hero complex and also being physically 19 is something i think really highly of. First of all, it very much fits with the mythology of america being a sort of world savior. Secondly, a lot of american media focuses on heroism, whether its on the behalf of average people, like the hunger games, or on the behalf of superheroes, like the mcu- especially over the past 20 years. Though i think it’s a good thing to promote heroism, the hero-martyr complex that gen z has is. Oof. And i think alfred fits very well into that toxic sort of “heroism” that most gen z kids have. He thinks he’s somehow able to fix everything wrong with the world, just because he really wants to. Though that desire is genuine, it’s not always something that’s his place to fix or something that even needed fixing. There’s also a selfish component to that- He needs to prove himself, and heroism is the only way he thinks he can do that. It’s why he works out constantly and cares so much, on a personal rather than country-avatar-thing level, about being #1 at everything. He has to be better than everyone else because he has to be the perfect hero.

I also think it’s interesting how america seems to have more pronounced daddy issues than canada, and i think this is something that harkens back to the 13 colonies (side note i hate the term ‘colonial times’ when referring to the time before the revolutionary war or canadian independence. These are settler states, its always colonial times.) and american independence. Canada sort of only exists because of british loyalists, as they made up the majority of the population around the turn of the 19th century. They saw themselves as being The Better Colonists. Real daddy’s boy types, and I think this is something that contributes to the hero complex. Because matthew refused to rebel so openly, that made arthur favor him as a son, so alfred felt the need to be even better than matthew- even though, of course, alfred was a bit more favored.

Fighting Style

Freddie is very good at violence, but not in the same way that a lot of other nations are. Where they tend to be more well trained in specific styles of fighting, freddie just sort of has all of them? His mind is very crowded, i think. Also, the way that he would have learned to fight is different from the other super powerful countries by virtue of his youth, and by virtue of the different regional fighting styles in america. One that’s haunted me is a trend in the ability to rip off ears and noses- Particularly by white gangs in the antebellum south, this was seen as being like. A real badass. I think alfred was something of a feral child. If you know the saying “it takes a village to raise a child,” i think it really did with him. He had so many parents, just like a lot of the western hemisphere countries. But anyway because of all his many many parents, there was never any strong parental force in his life, so it’s more like he didn’t have any at all, and because of that, alfred was a very strange child. And because violence is so ingrained in american society, alfred is very good at fighting, both in order to be fun and flashy and for his own self defense. Though he doesn't really like to fight unless he feels like he has to (and other people are very good at convincing him that he does have to)

Sports

Though america is definitely super athletic and could probably naturally be good at most sports, i think there’s a few that he’d more gravitate towards. Those are basketball, track and field, and olympic lifting. I would include american football but it’s a stupid sport that doesn’t make any sense, so it will not be included for spite reasons. In basketball I think he’s sort of an every-man. I think he’s around six feet tall, so he really could play any position on offense, and as for defense, I think he’d play his best defense against the point guard, bc i feel like Alfred is really fast and good at getting up in your face. He’d have a ton of steals whenever defending against the point guard. I think he’d be a good center on offense, because he’s a bit aggressive and that would be useful for getting rebounds and put-backs, though i wouldn’t discount point-guard freddie, because he does like to be very inspiring. He’s pretty energetic as well, and a point guard can really carry the entire team in terms of energy and spirit. As for track and field, he’d also be an every man- I feel like he’d gravitate more towards sprinting events by personality, but his coach would stick him in wherever. Where olympic lifts are concerned, he’s absolutely a snatch specialist.

Empire and contradictions

America is an empire. No way of getting around that. I think imperialism in hetalia is an interesting subject, especially where america is concerned. @mysticalmusicwhispers did a good job running that down here, but basically my thoughts on the matter are that alfred doesn't really like being an empire. There’s many angles to that. It’s lonely at the top, for one. There’s no one who relates to being a 21st century empire in quite the same way as him. Then you have the fact that a lot of people living in america have suffered under imperialism as well. Because of that, there’s a lot of self hatred and anxiety and a not knowing if he can fully trust himself. Theres also the obsession that many americans have with people from other cultures being able to assimilate to american wasp culture. Because of all the people who live in the states who are very much not wasps and who can never be, it’s really hard on alfred, though he refuses to admit that things are anything but fine.

Extras/Fun stuff

A book that reminds me of him is The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It’s a collection of short stories about O’Brien’s time serving in the military during the Vietnam War. It’s a very haunting book and I think about it at least once a week, but it is very violent and there’s a lot of fucked up stuff in it.

giveme chubby alfred or give me death

i feel like this shouldn’t have to be said, but sometimes there’s people who depict him as being pro-trump or pro-right wing bullshit, which. absolutely not. just because of all the political turmoil that exists within alfred, and because of all the pain he goes through because of all the hate that exists within his borders- hate that the entire world is forced to pay attention to. even though he might not have all the best sympathies or motivations, he’s just so tired of all the pain he personally goes through because of domestic political unrest, and would like it to end in the way that’s the least painful for him as a person.

Bi king of my heart

not a natural blond

I hc him as being mixed, though i’m not sure what exactly he’d look like? But i do enjoy alfred but not white, as poc are the driving force behind a lot of american life, right down to the languages we speak. Like. something like half the states names are the words of their indigenous peoples, and even more toponyms are indigenous across the country. Then of course i feel he’s very protective of aave and will always pronounce words in Not English correctly. (if u want to hear more about my language thoughts they’re linked below. Not gonna rehash it here cause those posts are Long™)

My playlist for him!

Other analyses (age, linguistics)

writing requests

#@ mystic how does it feel to be tagged in two of my writing request posts #im sorry i love your writing sm #anyway thanks for the ask anon! im not quite so angsty about america right now so this probably #is not as good as it could've been were i in my feelings about him #anywhomst! hope u enjoy this #hetalia #hws #hws america #tw violence #tw imperialism #?#sort of #i dont go into detail about the imperialism but its metnioned #ask #anon #writing requests #character analysis #ceros posting

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silverandarsenic-hcs · 3 years

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Ghost Slander

I know I’ve done this before sorta but this is the Finial List of all the shit that’s really just bad about them. the first half of each is serious bad stuff and the second half is just silly annoying shit they do. I am not apologizing for this so that’s that on that. I also still love them anyways.

Papa I: too old to do anything. he may be strong and smart, but he’s old, and tired, and gets grumpy when he’s tired. and when he’s grumpy hes a fucking asshole. he really doesn’t want to do anything, like go out for a fun day in the city, or try new things. can’t teach an old dog ne w tricks, and he doesn’t even try tricks he’s known about for forty years. He can be boring, and he can be punchy and shitty when he’s annoying (I don’t mean like punchy as in hitting, just you know when you were grumpy as a kid and you get really irritated and annoyed and kind of just wanna have a hissy fit and cant control it???? that.)

Papa II: Super emotionally unavailable and it just becomes taxing to try and get him to open up unless he’s ready and willing - which, spoiler alert, will never happen. He really does have a shitty temper and when he gets angry he sees red. Refuses to delegate tasks to other people around him because he thinks no one else can do it right. When he does, no matter what they do it’s never good enough and he makes all his interns cry and/or quit. for fun: he gets the “man flu” in which he will not take medication or go to the doctor until he literally has muscle dystrophy. thinks Advil or Tylenol is some hippy bullshit brainwashing pill invented by liberals that are trying to trick him into being happy. conspiracy theories. thinks aliens built the pyramids. watches ancient aliens in his spare time and never shuts up about it. Unable to use technology, and falls asleep in “special chair” at home.

Papa III: cant take no for an answer. he doesn't understand when someone refuses his advances because all of the girls in the clergy falling all over him his whole life has made his head a little too big. if you want major fucking ego, he’s the brother for you. if you don’t want flowers, and you don’t want random extravagant things, he’s not the brother for you, because if you tell him you don’t like the things he’ll assume you hate him and decide that you shouldn’t be together anymore. sure, it comes from a place of caring and wanting to spoil his s/o, but fuck, bro, tone it down. He’ll also talk at you for hours even if you’re not listening just because he loves the sound of his own voice. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to do something else, or are tired, or you just don’t care, he’ll stop talking when he’s ready and only then. For fun: at a kids soccer game he would be That Dad that screams at the other kids like hes the assistant coach and probably be drunk and fist fight the other drunk dads in their lawn chairs. makes his s/o wax his back before they go to the beach or anywhere he has to be shirtless. its gross and hairy and he wouldn't care if his s/o didn’t bully his persian-rug body into it so hard one time he canceled a vacation.

Copia: He has no back bone. He’ll work until people give him what wants but he’ll never come right out and say it, in any kind of relationship or work. You’ll constantly be guessing whether or not what he said has a second meaning and if it’s really want he wants or he’s been waiting for you to figure it out the whole time. It’s fucking annoying. He’ll never be the one to put his foot down, or silence a room, or command attention like the other papa’s have, he just doesn’t have it in him. For fun: Calls his stomach his “spare tire” like what the fuck who says that?? Talks to everyone, you literally have to drag him away from talking to strangers. The person next to him at the cafe has their headphones in and he’s just chatting away. Small talk but just gets worse, and he subjects everyone to it. rides one of those bikes where you're basically lying down and doesn't shut the fuck up about how low impact it is on your back and knees. thinks the government is out to get him and everyone else but doesn't put two and two together and still has a google home thing or an alexa, buys that facebook skype camera thing for your tv that literally follows you when he walks. he just thinks their neat.

Dewdrop: Has a hot temper and genuinely gets mean when he lashes out. He doesn’t care that everyone has to chase after him all the time and has no remorse for what they have to do for him or what he ruins for them. He’s gonna do whatever he want’s whenever he wants and no one can tell him otherwise - everyone thinks this is so fun and quirky and great until it’s been a few months and they’re wondering why Dew hasn’t calmed down even a little. He’s too self obsessed to even care what other people want for him. A total mess wherever he goes, eats all the soap and candles and doesn’t replace them.

Swiss: saying someone is too good at everything doesn't sound like an insult, but it does when they brag about it. Swiss has always been the multi ghoul, meaning hes always been pretty good at everything, but never specialized in something. so rather than do more to hide the fact he’s a jack of all trades but master of none, he just brags about every tiny little thing he does. hes like 6′ but his ego is like 8′4″. Insanely jealous in relationships which can cause problems. he’s a liar. there. i said it. unless he’s your s/o, if his mouth is moving, it’s probably a lie. whether hes bigging up his own adventures, or trying to cover his tracks about where he was and who he was with, its probably all bullshit. the only reason he doesn’t lie to his partners is because he HATES being lied to in return and if he has feelings for you its a little harder to just shut you out once you realize he’s full of it. He mostly lies for fun, and partly just to see what people will really believe, so it get’s wilder and wilder every time. Refuses to do anything that’s boring to him like clean or do laundry, but he hates disgusting messes so he’ll just pay someone else to do it.

Mountain: Disgustingly messy. When I walk into a room i leave a hurricane of my shit everywhere, but if you took an actual hurricane and put it in his bedroom, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. No one in the whole church will go near his room, partly for the smell, partly for the fact of that there is no where to stand that isn’t a foot high with garbage and dirty clothes. If he cleaned his room i think a new disease would be unlocked. Super stubborn, and inpatient. He’s pretty chill, but refuses to wait for anything without getting super annoyed, and it’s impossible to change his mind about literally anything once it’s made up. Trying to debate him about anything is a fucking nightmare.

Aether: when you’ve been together for a while, and you’re comfortable with each other, things can get boring. he’ll stop taking you on dates every week, and stop thanking you profusely for everything you do, and stop treating you like a queen. things will get stale quickly, so unless you’re into routine, steer fucking clear or you're doomed. when he’s in a shitty mood, he will say literally anything to you to get you away from him. he just wants to be left alone and if you wont let that happen he’ll break up with you, tell you to fuck off, tell you to get away from him, tell you to go fuck yourself, whatever it takes. he doesn’t mean it, and even if he knows that deep down, you’re still causing the problem by existing, in his mind. refuses to accept that there may be a different way to do things. it’s Aether’s way or the highway and that's it. he thinks that if somethings easier, or faster than the way he does it, then it’s not being done right, and it’s fucking annoying how he wastes so much time doing stupid simple tasks because its the way he was taught and its the way he’ll do them until he dies

Rain: A baby. An actual baby. Needy and clingy and even a little bit pathetic sometimes. Here and there it can be cute and you might feel the need to nurture him, but honestly most people can’t handle it all the time but for Aether. He constantly needs attention in the exact way he wants and if he doesn’t get it he’ll whine and cry and try and make you feel like shit. Maybe it’s manipulation, maybe it’s not. Who knows. But you have to make sure he eats properly, make sure he gets dressed properly, make sure he sleeps, pretty much be a parent to him half the time. The amount of emotional labor is borderline slavery. His attitude is insane, and he’s sassy and bossy all the time as if he’s actually in control, and if you tell him otherwise he’ll scream (at the top of his lungs). Uses baby talk at an inappropriate timing and makes people uncomfortable sometimes.

Cumulus: Collects tiny little themed knick knacks that are literally everywhere and take up all the space in her and Cirrus’ little sapphic cottage. Nosey and wants to know everyone’s business all the time. The only person she tells is Cirrus but she won’t rest unless she knows every detail about a persons life and drama.

Cirrus: Leaves all the lights on wherever she goes. Leaves all the cupboards open. All the lights are on so much that it lights up the whole house all night, and people call them to tell them to either close their blinds or turn the fucking lights off.

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tidesreach · 4 years

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So, I've been musing a lot on whether Xue Yang thinks he is deserving of love or not, because I have seen varying opinions on the subject. I think this is actually a debatable point. I have my own musings, but you could definitely argue either way. You could definitely argue, for instance, that Xue Yang doesn't think he's undeserving of anything because he doesn't particularly think of things in terms of deserving. If everybody got what they deserved he wouldn't have been abused as a child. Or, alternatively, Chang Cian would have faced repercussions for his actions. Xue Yang learnt very early on that what people deserve doesn't actually mean shit in this world. You have to take it for yourself. So, that's a point.

But, having said that, you could also definitely argue that Xue Yang doesn't think himself deserving of love. Personally, I don't think he does think himself deserving of love. For many trauma-related reasons. But I don't think that necessarily bothers him. Or he's convinced himself it doesn't bother him. At least until Xiao Xingchen. Love is not something Xue Yang thinks he needs. It's not even something he understands. It's not something he has — and I can't stress this enough — ever had. You can't miss something you've never had. So being deserving of it is utterly irrelevant to him in the grand scheme of things.

Xue Yang has figured out how to reach his own goals and also get attention and acknowledgement in other ways (murder! demonic cultivation!) and he's perfectly fine with that, thanks very much. He's not fussy about how he meets his goals as long as he meets them. He's not fussy about the kind of attention he gets as long as it's attention. Not to expose my bandom roots, but he's very "I don't care what you think as long as it's about me" (Fall Out Boy, 2009). He's never tried to be deserving of love because he doesn't need it. Or, at least, he thinks he doesn't. Xue Yang's whole thing, really, is that he has literally nothing to draw from where love is concerned. It's a completely foreign concept to him. He doesn't know how to be someone deserving of love, he has no blueprints for that, but he does know how to make himself deserving of hate. And that, well, that's just as good. Better, even. If he can be notorious, he can't be forgotten. Which, I think, is a very real fear of his. He wants to be remembered. He wants to be acknowledged. He wants people to know he exists, that he existed. Which makes sense, considering he spent so much of his life being treated as worthless. Being loved is not important. Being acknowledged is.

I think another layer to this is that Xue Yang doesn't believe his actions to be wrong. Or more, he doesn't see things as morally right or wrong. So you could argue that he doesn't think himself undeserving of love because well, actually, he's not wrong. But also, Xue Yang is not stupid. He knows how the rest of the world sees him. He thrives on it, in fact. He knows his actions aren't deemed Right and Acceptable despite what he personally believes. The rest of the world sees him as a monster. If you spend long enough being told that you are a monster, that you aren't worthy of love, you start to believe it. You start to feed into it. You start to believe that maybe you don't deserve anything good. So you act out, because if you don't deserve good things, if they’re unattainable, why bother trying to be good?

Xiao Xingchen solidifies this feeling for Xue Yang, I think. Because regardless of whether Xue Yang previously thought he deserved it or not, or whether he even gave a fuck either way, he knows that Xiao Xingchen would never deem him worthy of love if he knew who Xue Yang really was, and that, for reasons Xue Yang can't understand, bothers him. This is a predicament that Xue Yang has never had to deal with before, he has never cared about what people think about him; hate and fear are better than indifference. But then Yi City happens, Xiao Xingchen happens. And all of a sudden, Xue Yang cares. Xiao Xingchen's kindness really drills it home for Xue Yang that he Does Not Deserve Good Things. It's apparent from the moment he wakes up and realises that Xiao Xingchen is helping him, showing him care and concern. That kindness is a foreign concept. You can literally see that play out on Xue Yang's face. He has never had this before. No one has ever deemed him worthy of this. It visibly affects him. For a moment, he's so lost in it that all he can do is smile, softly, so softly that it's disorienting because we have never seen him look like that before. Because, I repeat, he has never had this before.

After that, I think he craves it. He drinks it in, all of this kindness that Xiao Xingchen is offering. He has no idea what to do with it, because it's not meant for him, but he craves it. He also knows that who he is and what he's done would make him undeserving of that love in Xiao Xingchen's eyes (metaphorically, obviously). I think a lot about how disorienting and unfamiliar this must feel to Xue Yang. How little he was prepared for this. How this is something he has never experienced before. So much so that he actively works incredibly hard to be someone (for years, after he stops manipulating Xiao Xingchen into killing people) deserving of Xiao Xingchen's love, and that, paradoxically, he actively works to eliminate any threat (Song Lan) to the life he has built with Xiao Xingchen, because he is terrified of losing him. He knows that some of his methods would deem him unworthy of Xiao Xingchen's love, but as long as Xiao Xingchen doesn't know, then there's no harm, right? Xue Yang will do anything to keep his secret (even if he doesn't acknowledge that that's what he's doing, or more, why he’s doing it). Not because he has some Long Con Revenge against Xiao Xingchen planned, but because he, in his own way, loves him, and loves the life they have built. I feel like, in Xue Yang's head, he's always telling himself that it's all just a long con, that "one day, I'll tell him one day, it'll be brilliant!" and keeps telling himself that for years. That's how he justifies their life together. Because if he keeps telling himself that, then he won't have to look too closely at all of the reasons why he hasn't told Xiao Xingchen yet. Why he hasn't yet had that dramatic reveal that he has planned. Why he really wants to stay in Yi City (spoiler: it's love).

In the beginning, Xue Yang tries very hard to bring Xiao Xingchen down to his level. His immediate reaction to Xiao Xingchen's kindness, after the initial unexpected softness, is to exploit it. For a number of complex reasons, but one of them, I would wager, is definitely "if I make him do all of these things he deems Terrible then really he is no better than me, we are on an even footing, and I am therefore more deserving of this kindness". He's looking for ways to justify accepting Xiao Xingchen's kindness, and exploiting it is, obviously, his first port of call, because he doesn't know what else to do with it. He doesn't know how else to be deserving of it. I think that becomes apparent when he lashes out later, during that final confrontation, when he says to Xiao Xingchen "Can you really be disgusted by me?" and then proceeds to tell him about the people he had him kill. He bitterly lays it all out, in a way that I think, at this point, he never actually wanted to do, because he realised that if he did it would hurt Xiao Xingchen, it would make him undeserving of his love. But he does it because it doesn't matter anymore, Xiao Xingchen has already realised Xue Yang's worst fear, has already attacked him without hearing him out, has already called Xue Yang disgusting, has already deemed him unworthy. Xue Yang could have argued that he had stopped all of that — all of the killing, the trying to corrupt Xiao Xingchen — years ago. He didn't even need to bring it up in the first place, he could have left it all buried. But, tragically, Xue Yang didn't ever fully realise (or didn't want to admit) why he stopped the killing. I think part of him knew, part of him knew that it was Xiao Xingchen's love and kindness and approval that he wanted to be worthy of. Part of him knew that this wasn't about revenge anymore. Part of him knew that he wanted to keep this life they had built. Part of him knew that he stopped the killing because Xiao Xingchen wouldn't like it. But Xiao Xingchen's refusal to give him a chance to explain, that straight shot to you're disgusting, to deeming Xue Yang unworthy of any empathy or love, that flipped the switch for Xue Yang. That's what ruined it. Because it realised all of Xue Yang's worst fears that he had tried so hard to combat. So he threw it in Xiao Xingchen's face, that Xiao Xingchen had killed innocent people, out of cruelty and spite, yes, but also as a last ditch attempt to prove that Xiao Xingchen wasn't any better that him, that Xue Yang wasn't unworthy because Xiao Xingchen was also a killer.

The tragedy of Xue Yang is that, really, he is still that terrified child, craving acknowledgement and just... a show of kindness and empathy. The tragedy of Xue Yang is that he worked so hard to forge this life, a life where he is loved, where he can be deserving of it, that when it all comes crumbling down and he is ultimately rejected, the only way he knows how to deal with that is through lashing out.

He didn't let himself realise, until after Xiao Xingchen was dead, that the reason he so desperately needed him was because Xiao Xingchen made him feel loved. I think love was such a foreign concept to him, something that he never really believed in or believed he could ever deserve, that he couldn't understand that it was the whole reason he wanted to stay in Yi City and build a life. I don't think he even let himself acknowledge that until the very end, when he was clinging to that candy. He was so focused on getting Xiao Xingchen back in whatever form he could that he never really stopped — for several years — to ask himself why. He was adamant that the dead are better, more obedient. But he never considered that he would likely hate Xiao Xingchen that way. This is not his Daozhang. It wasn't obedience he wanted, it was love. But all Xue Yang knew was he couldn't live without him. In the end, he didn't have to any longer.

#so uh #happy halloween #xuexiao #xue yang #xiao xingchen

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