#and if he is i would hate if ppl like. further pressured him to post ya know

[single-malt-scotch]

in the last year of hermitcraft watching i feel like theres been a very nice understanding between all of them that breaks are important. time off is important. and i think thats why now coming down from hearing about bdubs' v likely not releasing any video for LL2 is important.

you gotta take that step back and realize this really isnt any different reasoning than anyone else whos taken some kind of break- bc i think we know that breaks dont just mean constant offline time-- people have appeared in others' videos in periods where they release no videos. bc its a game they enjoy playing and hanging out with friends in.

even considering other circumstances up to now- bdubs going on vacation, and not uploading until recently, even further back being sick for like a whole month- whatever it is. now just happens to be the time he decided to take a step back from the typical. i cant even imagine the constant energy put out for these videos-- and when i look back at DL i could very much see how much work bdubs was putting into all that. it was fun but it was really acted up. (that is to say- is worked very hard to playing out a character when playing)

and hes great at it- but i cant not feel for someone who just want to step back and play with friends with little regard to recording on screen. my little expiriences with youtube and twitch prove enough to me how hard it can be at any scale when you really try and think about that stuff every single time and its the number one reason why i stepped back from my own stuff- i wasnt doing anything with my friends outside of it, and i was missing the casualness of just hanging with them offline! its so important to do that.

#he seemed to imply he was recording but? just not going into it w intent to release it #and if he is i would hate if ppl like. further pressured him to post ya know #also. if anything it makes me very happy to hear he is thinking about kind of thing... #like its very important to step back in this kind of job. its easy to feel like everything has to be for the public #you have got to make time to just not do that

[flwrpersona]

I am once again thinking about Shu’s social link in P4, and about how so many let’s players seem bored/annoyed/indifferent about Shu. Some never continue his link, prioritizing others. He comes off moody in your first interaction with him (you can even call him a prick, right to his face!) His initial behavior seems to turn a lot of ppl off from trying his link any further. Which is a damn shame. Shu’s social link is underrated as hell, since he’s low key a very important social link.

You learn through it that Shu is facing immense pressure from his mother to have the best grades. He himself puts value on the grades he gets. Shu knows that studies are his strong suit, so that’s why he accepts that schooling will be his path for the future. He’s so young, yet college is brought up at one point. He’s at the top of his class, but still hires you to tutor him. And even if you’re there to help him study, he starts hinting that he enjoys your company, despite how anti-social and pessimistic he seems initially.

Achievement in school is tied into how successful his future will be, how successful of a person he currently is, and even his own mother’s love for him. But when he starts to feel like he’s falling behind in school he cheats. To such a young kid, everything is on the line if he’s not the best of the best. And that’s damn heartbreaking. Most of his inadequate feelings probably started with that new transfer student he tells you about. The kid’s previous school was ahead, so he’s smarter than everyone (which was Shu’s thing in school.) And the new kid is apparently also good at sports and talking with everyone.... (He seems to have it all.) Shu is dejected and heartbroken by the entire situation.

Because of Yu Shu has support through it all. Instead of feeling scared and alone, he has a shoulder to lean on. He can vent his feelings and get advice of what he should do. If you didn’t have an impromptu birthday party for him he’d never open up to you about his feelings. You’d never have the chance to help him. And I’d bet that if you don’t do his social link he’d not have the confidence to talk to his mother about the cheating situation. And after the whole experience he realizes that his studies aren’t the most important thing. He and him mother come to an understanding, and she affirms that she’ll always love him. He says that he‘ll join a sports club, has always wanted to try it (but put all his effort on his studies before.) Lastly he stops hiring you to tutor him. Which is a happy ending to the social link.

But what if you ignore Shu? Unknowingly leaving Shu to deal with the heavy pressures of school life alone. (There’s a chance his mother would have noticed and maybe they’d still have a conversation, but would it be too late? Would Shu isolate himself from everyone completely? Convince himself that his grades will determine is future, that he has to be the best of the best to be successful, to be loved, to do the things society expects of him?) Would Shu learn to hate the world around him? To hate that transfer student, who seems to naturally be smarter and better that Shu in so many ways. He was on a path of becoming cynical at life. I know that it’s kind of an extreme, depressing what if situation but....

Ya’ll this is just a precursor of Adachi. Adachi says that his parents only ever wanted him to study. He was the “best of the best”, smarter than most others around him. He wasn’t allowed to be with friends or have hobbies, he studied. He couldn’t pursue frivolous hobbies/interests (*cough* magic), he studied. So much of the stuff Shu talks about, even his standoffish behavior towards you, is reflected in what we know about Adachi’s past. It’s crazy to me to think about how many ppl seem disinterested in his social link and just decide to ignore it. Feeling alone while growing up is a driving factor of how Adachi turned out the way he did. So everyone that ignored Shu just created another Adachi in the world, congrats.

I did not expect this post to get very long, so while I could probably go off about this topic more specifically, I’ll wrap it up. Shu is an important social link bc it helps you understand Adachi a good bit. And I do wanna leave this post off with how oddly similar Adachi’s Beta Design looks to Shu’s design. Intentional? I think they both have socially awkward boy genius vibes to them, at least.

#persona 4 #p4 #Tohru Adachi #Shu nakajima #social link #meta #analysis #mine #it’s me Of Course I tie it back to Adachi #Shu’s situation with the transfer student is so similar to Adachi and Yu...like Yu is perfect who took Adachi’s place w/ the Dojima’s #plus Yu is super good with school and sports and a social life that Adachi was never allowed growing up

[jyndor]

paul krugman and the art of doubling down on shitty takes

so on september 11th, famed nyt editorial writer, keynesian economist and fave of your racist liberal uncle, paul krugman, wrote one of the shittiest takes I have ever seen on twitter, which is SAYING SOMETHING.

krugman famously tweeted this:

and got a million virtual shoes thrown at him for being so ignorant, because anti-muslim hate crimes did actually escalate after 9/11, and the bush administration eagerly fanned the flames of islamophobia in order to make their illegal wars in afghanistan and iraq popular with the public. muslims, sikhs, indians, literally anyone vaguely brown, and lots of black ppl too, were terrorized by their neighbors, (former) friends, classmates, coworkers, etc. and anyone with a muslim friend knows this happened because they've told us about it. and these attacks were reported on. they were, I remember reading about them when I was a kid.

(paul krugman works for the new york fucking times, and while I think the nyt is warmongering centrist garbage, they do actually report on things that happen in the world. he writes editorials for them, surely he reads the damn paper once in a while).

so today, I log on to twitter and see he has decided not to apologize, but rather do the ol' double down, which always works out well.

here are some highlights:

okay so first thing's first, no apology (obviously) since this is a double down. but we got a chart, and liberals do love a good chart when they are being racist and ahistorical.

he admits that the chart is actually inaccurate because it excludes all the other victims of anti-muslim hate crimes who weren't actually muslim (read: the innocents). okay. so already he is losing credibility because he is using an inaccurate chart as the basis of his double down, and really, we love to see it.

after this there's some shit about how he didn't say there wasn't an outbreak of white americans attacking muslims and people mistaken for muslims, but rather that it could have been worse. lol well anything can be worse than it was, as 2020 has taught us. it’s a pedantic mess and I didn’t feel like that was the meat of the double down.

so first off, the iraq war was definitely started for many reasons, but islamophobia was part of it. the bush administration wanted to invade iraq and depose saddam hussein, and steal iraq’s oil for multinational oil companies lbr, and so they exploited americans’ fears about muslims by propagandizing about how it was important for us to attack them over there before they attacked us over here with their weapons of mass destruction, and of course they would attack us over here if given the chance. why? because they hate our way of life here, our freedom. those things were LITERALLY said by bush people and also by their stans at fox news and the wsj, and yes, in the editorial pages at the nyt.

so to someone like paul krugman, who knows lots of conservatives who don’t seem racist, or are educated and distinguished and just... like war? idk but to him, he sees people like them and says, well... they’re not like uneducated filthy poors in west virginia, not that kind of racist.

but what he doesn’t get, or he is being deliberately obtuse about, is that in order for the bush people to dehumanize muslims the way they did, they had to personally place less value on the lives of iraqis than on the value of that sweet crude oil. they were willing to go to war, sacrifice hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process (as well as thousands of american soldiers, but this isn’t about them) because they didn’t see them as anything but collateral damage. and that is fucking racist.

and while I have no interest in playing the “which racist is worse” game, when the west virginia uneducated racist endangers those around them, the politician rich harvard educated racist writes policy and lies us into illegal wars that endanger millions. both are bad, both are racist.

and by the way, him “sticking his neck out” to speak up against going to iraq was brave and necessary, especially because the nyt was pushing the invasion. but when you put it like that... you just sound like a tool. like it was a burden to call out the liars and imperialists. bitch, you’re paul krugman, a nobel laureate and renowned economist. I do not want to discount the IMMENSE pressure and blacklisting that opponents of the bush administration experienced, because showing any opposition to the wars at the time was risky. but idk the way he put that just irked me, especially since he didn’t even lose his job like many in the media did when they spoke up.

usually what liberals do when they fuck up publically is a fake ass apology and a few hail marys, and I assumed he would be on twitter begging for forgiveness on this one since his garbage take went so viral and pissed off so many people. and of course was wrong.

but then he does this:

yeah. your eyes are not deceiving you. that chart is measuring anti-black, anti-lgbtq and anti-”islamic” (lmao who says that bro just say anti-muslim or islamophobic) hate crimes. shut up leftist twitter, black people have it worse than muslims according to my inaccurate chart. so stop attacking me, a rich white man who doesn’t really care about anything other than my reputation.

there is a lot to unpack here, namely that paul krugman is using faux concern for black people as a way to deflect from his shitty ahistorical take about how much restraint white americans showed after 9/11 towards muslims. maybe krugman doesn’t know any black muslims, but they exist. also oppression olympics is stupid even when used by well meaning essentialists, let alone by milquetoast academics.

not to mention that he has already discounted his own shitty chart by saying it doesn’t show the full picture of what happened in these anti-muslim attacks. but even if we take this chart seriously, it actually does not really support his point. look at how many more hate crimes there were against muslims in 2001 than there were in 2000. there are significantly more black people than muslims in the united states. I am not good at math, and surely I am no nobel laureate, but it seems to me that hate crimes against black people increased a little, and hate crimes against muslims increased a lot. and this chart only takes into account three years, and only two of which are post-9/11. so... idk man maybe we should look at what happened in, say, 2003? 2004? how about all of the 2000s?

(source: https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-09-12/data-hate-crimes-against-muslims-increased-after-911)

oh, that is actually pretty consistently bad! yes, there was one spike in 2001/2002, but it isn’t like we went back down to pre-9/11 numbers afterwards. and I am not sure if this information includes non-muslims targeted for “looking muslim” but I would say it is unlikely, since the data seem pretty similar to krugman’s olympic shit.

I am not writing this because paul krugman is particularly shit-for-brains, or because I hate him more than like... idk any other moron on twitter. there were plenty of anti-muslim takes on twitter friday like there are every 9/11, and every day. but krugman is actually someone liberals respect. he is, after all, a nobel laureate and a keynesian economist, and fairly mild mannered. when people in the media like krugman write these ahistorical shitty takes they are, as chomsky wrote, MANUFACTURING CONSENT. it is a deliberate tactic, and it works. and if you want to learn more about this theory, check out this short clip by al jazeera narrated by amy goodman (of democracy now). the media manufactured american consent when they pushed the wars. they continue to do so when they try to rewrite george bush’s history by making trump seem uniquely terrible to muslims.

elites in the press and in government have been trying to whitewash and rehabilitate george bush’s reputation for YEARS, and they are succeeding. and why would they want to do that? well, there are a lot of reasons. one, a lot of people in washington are complicit in bush’s crimes. two, democrats think they need to appeal to moderate republicans (lol) in order to win elections, and I guess they think there are moderate republicans left (lol!), and that those moderate republicans like george bush (LOLLL). three, they want to make trump look uniquely terrible. if they do that, then no one but trump needs to be held to account for his government’s failings. but these are just my speculation.

do not let them rehabilitate george bush any further than they have. it is a fucking shame he will never be held to account for war crimes, but an extra slap in the face to all of his victims when we act like he didn’t do things he did. like stoke anti-muslim hate. he invaded muslim countries with a smile on his face, and that is pretty fucking hateful.

paul krugman doubled down and tried to use Black Lives Matter like a human fucking shield. seems a bit racist imo.

#paul krugman #islamophobia #racism #war #imperialism #anti-blackness #fuck this guy i stg

[anxietysroomsupport]

Ugh ok it’s late and I might regret writing this to someone in the morning but I’m genuinely upset now bc my brother just went on a tangent abt how shipping irl ppl is awful and disgusting but crankiplier (markiplier and crankgameplays) is right next tss for me rn and I almost told him yesterday and I’m really upset that he thinks something I enjoy is revolting. Is it actually that bad like should I actually stop? I don’t post anything abt it so I thought it would be fine and I know it’s not real and not gonna happen so it should be fine right? But then why does everything think it’s so awful. I know the real people don’t care for it but they don’t hate when people do it for funsies right? I just feel so bad now like am I actually a bad person? I always seem to have problematic ships and so I have no one to talk to about it but myself which is already kinda hard, but to think that I’m hated by ppl bc I think certain people can be cute together. Can you help me understand please, like should I stop? -🧸

Hi 🧸 Anon,

This is a very grey-zone question so I think it would help to go over a general range of all the kinds of IRL shipping that take place and talk about each one.

It’s also a hotly debated topic and you can find people for and against it all over the internet, so you might want to read through more opinions as well.

First off, the umbrella opinion seems to be that shipping real people together is not cool, because it can make those people very uncomfortable.  Celebrities are already a lot more exposed than most people and their fans opinions can have a big sway on what content they produce and what directions their work takes.  So, learning that huge numbers of their fans think they should be dating someone or other can be stressful, not matter how they actually feel about that person.  

Some celebs take this information in different ways.  Thomas Sanders and Jon Cozart apparently thought it was funny and leaned into their ship by making a video about their compatibility.  But I recall a talented Loki cosplayer a while back who was very offended that fans were shipping him with another cosplayer and hated all the comments he got about it.

(There is also the side factor of people we see in media or online not necessarily showing their true personality, but actually a persona they create for their content.  Deep analysis of those personas as if they were the real person can sometimes make those celebs feel incorrectly portrayed or misunderstood.  For example, this is tied to why fanders, and Thomas himself, have made a point to clearly distinguish between the real Thomas and Character Thomas.)

So, what form does the shipping take anyway?  If it’s just thoughts in your head - a headcanon - no harm no foul.  It sounds like you’re in this category.  The celebs can’t read your mind, there’s virtually no way anyone will ever become aware that this ship is taking place in your head.  Your thoughts are your own and you shouldn’t feel bad for having them.  This is like Level 1.  But what if it went further?

Level 2 - innocent posts / chatter

From your example, Mark and Ethan do appear to have a very close friendship in their videos together.  So it’s not a big jump to see a new video and comment on their friendship or closeness, and maybe you tag it “crankiplier”.  Ships can be platonic, too, of course.  Pretty innocent, just recognizing things they’ve actually done together, thinking it’s sweet, and chatting with other fans about it.  It might not be the intended focus of the video, but their personalities and friendly chemistry is part of why they’re great to watch together.

Level 3 - fan-edits / art / fiction / and statements

This level is the ultimate grey-zone because of the broad sweeping range of content it encompasses.  Redraws of scenes people have actually been in, edits or video compilations of people’s interactions are pretty safe.  But art and fiction that are creating entirely new events get iffy.  Those celebs didn’t really do those things.  Now the fan is developing the relationship beyond what is really there, and should be reasonably cautious.  

Special attention to the word “statements” - When fans say things in the comments section or directly at celebs like, “you two should ---” or, “when are you two gonna ---?”, it’s creating a clear potential for that person to feel pressured and uncomfortable. 

Level 4 - NSFW / 

NSFW suggestions, writing, and art are very questionable!  People doing this should be prepared to highly curate who has access to their work, because hate will come out of the woodwork.  And if the celebs in question found it, there’s a high chance they would be disturbed and offended, and it may cause them to speak out against it and the poster.

Level 5 - Toxic.

All the levels before now are still grey, albeit some more than others.  But this level (that I just made up) represents the denial of facts.  While shipping can often build off of what was already there, a toxic level of shipping denies all contradicting information and tries to force its own narrative.  Think of celebrities who are actually in relationships already, but the ship is for a different pairing.  Toxic shippers will hate the real relationship, sometimes even send hate to that S.O. and promote the failure of the person’s real life relationships in favor of the ship.  That’s just wrong and it’s veering right into harassment.  

(And coming back to the point about personas, a person might have a relationship that their fans don’t know about, because they keep their private life separate from the persona they present.  Fans can’t know everything about a person, and therefore might cross the line without realizing it.  The only way to prevent that is by not being so aggressive about a ship in the first place.)

Shipping IRL can stir up a lot of strife in a fandom, because everyone has different boundaries and because it has a high potential for going too far -because it has gone too far, too many times, and people, fans and celebs alike, remember dealing with the fallout of those events and how weird it made things for everyone.  Some creators even leaving their work behind to get away from it.  When a particular celeb has stated they are already in a monogamous relationship with someone else, or they don’t like being shipped in general, their decisions should be respected.  Aggressive, pushy obsessions of IRL ships like in Level 5 should be avoided altogether just to be safe.  The celeb’s life is not ours to control.

All that said, freedom of speech means you can say whatever you like, and if that means promoting an IRL ship in various forms, then you could do that.  But other people can also tell you they don’t like it, or hate it even. 

There will always be people who hate you, or hate groups you’re in, for all kinds of random reasons.  People are just too diverse for it to be any other way.  So long as you aren’t hurting anyone (e.g. actively and thoughtfully examining your actions to prevent hurting people) then you do you, friend.

-Miss Fay

#🧸 #🧸 anon #shipping #irl shipping #long post

[hakuteeth]

hey, may i ask you something please? you don't have to answer if you don't want to, but how did you stop being a larrie? I don't mean how did you stop believing, I mean how did you make the transition from larrie to only harry and were okay? How did you find these friends, like you seems to be all so close and have so much fun, did they leave with you? or are they new friends? I'm a larrie, but I don't believe in larry for some time and I want to be harrie and have fun but I don't know how 1/2

to leave, all my friends except like louis and still believe in babygate, and I feel like I'm being "forced" into liking him and believing in babygate by peer pressure. I still like my friends but I'm sure I would lose everyone if I left. How did you find new friends, did you just say, I'm not larrie anymore and you just started interacting? Or did they reach out to you? I just don't know what to do. I don't want to be larrie but I don't want to alone either. thank you, sorry for the rant. 2/2

Hi! Sorry I woke up a bit ago but I wasn’t sure about responding to this mostly because it’s like very old drama ya know I left the larrie fandom about the middle of 2016 but months before that I felt very isolated because I started to feel more into a harry stan and I definitely stopped believing in larry. It was definitely a combination of things. Every time louis posted a picture on instagram I would legit have a panic attack. I felt like I was lying to my friends. It was just bad for my mental health and you know I got tired. It was exhausting.

My story isn’t like everyone’s it’s pretty weird actually. A good mutual of mine, a friend, had screenshotted our conversations about louis where I said that if ppl said he was homophobic we couldn’t blame them cause of the bs tweets they basically took that to mean that I was calling louis homophobic and then they proceeded to send them to every louis mutual I had which is all of them because I was a huge louis stan, well Zourry stan I should say. They shared it in a groupchat they had with people I didn’t know and ppl I did (I should say that we are the same age so we were both 19 / 20). Also during this I should say that I stopped identifying as ace and started to have the opinion that cishet aces shouldn’t be part of the community, this infuriated them. 

So long story short, For a couple days I said a bunch of vague posts about me from ppl who were still my mutuals and eventually I had to unfollow them I didnt hate louis at that point I was just... really freaking sad, paranoid, and anxious. I had 1 or 2 mutuals outside of the 1d fandom who reached out and really helped me thru that situation. Also I had maybe 3 mutuals who were following the whole situation and sent me really nice and supportive messages it was hard BUT I got through it. The friendships I kept were further strengthened and when harry started his solo career we all kinda found this common bond between us again. 

I also made a bunch of new friends and mutuals since the time I left. People who make staying on this website worth it ya know and Harry definitely helped. I didn’t leave the larrie fandom for him but finding friends who shared the same interests and being able to stan a person who didn’t give me constant anxiety felt so freeing and refreshing. Knowing tht I have mutuals who aren’t gonna talk about me behind my back helped as well.

Making the transition is hard. People do get backlash depending on how big they are in the fandom BUT I will say if you aren’t having fun anymore sometimes You do have to take that time for yourself. You get to cultivate your own experience. I’ve been called a lot of nasty names One of my ex mutuals said that I should go and eat glass BUT I would 100% do it all over again. I’m immensely happy compared to 2 years ago (real life aside lol) and maybe I wished people hadn’t been hurt by how I left but yeah. I’m just..... Happy. I’m not anxious over it anymore. 

I think if anything this is ultimately ur decision but .... make the leap. You’re going to find new friends. Some mutuals may surprise you and leave with you. You never know. I wish you all the best okay and if you need to talk further I am always here.

#apologies to mobile users #this got too long I'm sorry #the answer machine #Anonymous

[itsgideon-garth]

[ GIDEON GARTH (DAVINA CLAIRE’S FATHER)] WHO IS THE SPITTING IMAGE OF [ VIGGO MORTENSEN ] SEEMS TO HAVE GRACED NEW ORLEANS WITH THEIR PRESENCE. THEY ARE A [ 41/61 ] YEAR OLD [WITCH ]. IT IS KNOWN THAT THEY ARE [ BRAVE & RESOURCEFUL ] BUT ARE ALSO [ CLOSED OFF & SELF-SACRIFICING ]. WORD AROUND TOWN IS THAT THEY [ ARE NOT ] WORKING WITH THE CULT.

⚜ So I haven’t 100% fully fleshed out all parts & the many experiences Gideon has encountered along his story to make him the man he is today, but hey, that’s the beauty of plotting right? To make me delve further into my character and make up past experiences/stories and connections as I go along rping & plotting with all of you lovelies <3 So if anyone would like to plot a connection or anything at all, with Gideon, please feel free to fill up the heart on this post with some red XD ;)  ⚜

So Gideon comes form a very old & powerful family line of witches and his family also happens to be one of the oldest witch families to have settled in NOLA eversince it was founded.

His large family is very into their ancestral magic and they are quite uppity and proud folks. Some of them throughout the past century till now, were also said to be quite hedonistic and irresponsible when it came to using their magic esp on the vampires, the no.1 species whom they hated. And there were also rumors that a couple of the Garth family of witches, had dabbled quite deeply into dark magic, but till now, those were just rumors. 

However even from a young age of 7, gideon was a sharp, pretty perceptive and wise boy who didn’t hesitate from speaking his mind even in front of the elders and stating his pov/opinions of things. he disliked most of the principles, type of values and beliefs his large family and even his coven stood for & even disliked teh fact that they were all rooted in ancestral magic. The only thing he did like was the ability and powers of magic, the supernatural heritage of the city he grew up in and the ever-expanding knowledge about the supernatural world and the different types of supernatural species. So he studied hard, researched, and explored as much as he could about the supernatural species from his friends/ppl in the town & from the historical records from NOLA and even more so, the different forms and types of magic that were in existence. He thus also chose to invest &  practiced other types & forms of magic, apart from his family ancestral ones, due to his growing curiosity and interest. So all in all, you could say that he was considered “the black sheep” of the family, since he was sorta of the rebel against them and so vry different from most of his family members, as he was v responsible in using his magic, had a pure heart full of good intentions and nothing else, very upright and steadfast in his good moral values and principles and in summary, v straight and not crooked like most of his family members were, in which he had also labelled them as ‘hypocrites.’

When he blossomed into a teenager, his powers manifested even more and his magical abilities also began to increase tremendously. Eventually, his inexplicable surge of power and energy had not gone unnoticed by the people in his coven and family (his family belonged to a large coven consisting of 3 families) and tehy all started considering him as a possible candidate to be the next leader of their coven. His family members then began to coach & pressuring him into becoming the perfect coven leader as they saw it as another golden accomplishment for their family’s name and were proud of the fact that their family line were able to churn out leaders at almost every other generation. Gideon initially showed he was okay with it bcos he secretly wanted to learn from them how to advance, control and harness his burgeoning magical powers even further, but once he had learned as much as he could from them, he began to boldly show his dislike for his family’s kind of magical practices and also boldly show that he had no intention nor did he ever want to become his coven’s leader as he was against a lot of things that they believed to be right and condoned half the stuff they did which was based on their manipulative and slightly crooked beliefs.  One of which was the Harvest Ritual they believed in, and in which Gidoen was highkey skeptical & critical of when he first heard about it and in the end, he grew to hate it once he saw between the lines of matter. All the things which the coven and his family had done were mostly based on their ancestral magic beliefs and ancestral magic was the kind of magic which Gideon believed to be the key root problem to everything as well as anything negative that his families and the other witches of his coven did. When he was 17/18, he found out that he had natural affinity for nature and connection with the vast multitude of different species of plants, which then fueled his curiosity to research and learn more about this area of magic. He then gradually started to study herbalism as well as a few other areas linked to magical healing, as he felt that it would be a great way to help people with his powerful magical abilities and anyway, gideon’s objective all this while from childhood till now was to use his magic for good, to aid others and to keep the Balance in a purely righteous and morally upright way. 

He finally had enough of his family and coven by the age of 22 & was so sicken of them to this point, that he ran away from NOLA without a word to anyone so nobody would be able to track him down ever and covered himself with an extraordinarily powerful charm he had secretly created on his own for a few years already, that shielded him from being able to be tracked by blood magic or any other magical means of locating him. He has then never once returned back to NOLA till now.

About a year before he left however, he entered into a relationship with a St.Claire witch (davina’s mom), and while he was initially reall in love with her at first, but after 8 months into the relationship, he finally saw all of her true colors, and a lot of them(or half of them) were negative and clashed with his own moral beliefs and principles. ( im willing & open to discuss further about this part of her character & personality with any mun who wants to play davina’s mom as i don’t wanna limit or god-mod anybody’c character, so this is just ny own personal hc for now since we don’t have Madam St.Claire in the rp rn XD) Their relationship deteriorated after that, as he couldn’t convince her to widen her mind and see between the lines of the many negative parts of their ancestral magic and they also had many terrible arguments for the next 2 months. Finally and sadly realizing that the two of them were not suited for each other and they might possibly forever be clashing with each other, he decided that the healthiest, best & only course of action was for them to end their relationship and thus he determinedly broke up with her. He left town 2 months after their breakup and ofc didnt inform her about his leaving. So if davina’s mom were to come in, im leaving it open to the mun to decide if she had already knew she was pregnant just before he left or only found out about it afterwards, but either way, she really didn’t have a chance to tell Gidoen that she was pregnant with his child.   

He then travelled far and wide all around different states and eventually also different countries and parts of the world. And among his journey, he learnt hundreds of things, gained and widened his knowledge immensely, met all types of people, personalities, and species and had many impactful experiences which changed and molded him into the man and person he is today. It was during his travels that he further practiced and improve on his healing magic as well as herbal & traditional medicine which were pretty effective most of the time  whenever he aided in helping to heal people, as he had infused & blended them with magical properties. So he quietly become pretty known among many people as a good & effective healer and he always tried his upmost best to use his magical abilities to  help and save people who were being attacked by any supernatural beings with evil/bad intentions. The “part-time hired fighter” part of his occupation is indirectly more of a bodyguard/protector type of thing , where he selectively( & once in a while) allowed himself to be hired by any family or person,  needing some protection for a while against someone who had malicious intentions of harming them. And after 40 years of his nomadic travelling (as he nvr settled down longer than a few years at a place), he has finally returned to NOLA due to the disturbing news he had heard Inadu, her cult and all the problems that were happening as result of them , and he wanted to come here to aid the good side as much as he could.

His personality rn, is of a more discreet and quiet man, gentle with some people, v patient, compassionate, likes to keep to himself as often as possible whenever he is not helping people, subtly wary, sometimes a bit dry and pretty shrewd & likes to silently & secretly observe people by himself on the inside. He is also very firm on his morality & always wants to do the upright thing as often as possible, though throughout his many years of experiences, he had also come to the realization, that there were a few instances, where things had to be handled in a more grey manner rather then black and white for the best outcome. So it is only in those few particular times, he had to grimly blur the lines a tiny little bit and view things in shades of grey.                                                                                                                            

#pregnancy tw #bio #macabre:intro

[jagaimogoshujinsama]

rambling about shin men and hyu/kan. its long and self indulgent but if ur curious where my brains been at recently here it is

ive been in an out of a couple fandom interests recently, im still following new shin chan episodes closely (and i’ll get back to subbing some eps probably, at some point)...

anyway the past couple weeks i got, weirdly, super into hyu and kan as a ship. even though theres not a TON of content to work off, and also theyre ostensibly a het ship which can turn me off (and did at first, when i first realized kan is a ~secret girl~, in fact i have my reaction in writing

but then i gave shin men more of a chance and rly grew to appreciate all of the characters and.. the thing as a concept, and BOY!! i love kan a lot, like a heck of a lot. and since shes a girl who deliberately takes on a lot of masculine attributes its very easy to read her as genderqueer or transmasculine or even a trans dude straight up - though as a demi...gender?? person myself i like reading her as Soft Transmasc, because projecting onto cute little cartoon ppl is my favorite thing to do

so one of my main questions when i encountered this series was: who came up with this and why? what IS shin-men? this post will be me trying to explain it to myself:

shin-men was a concurrently-running anime AND manga series created in 2010 to celebrate the 20th year anniversary of shin-chan. the anime is obviously more well known, but the manga chapters tell the stories quite a bit differently and provide some more backstory - i own the first two volumes with the third on the way. the anime is awesome because it was seemingly spearheaded by Masaaki Yuasa (the kaiba dude), and as soon as I saw the first episode i assumed Shin-Men was his brainchild from start to finish. i’m not sure EXACTLY how much was his creation, conceptually speaking, but it is true that he finalized designs and a lot of basic concepts for the characters.  (parabon is straight up hyo hyo!)

(from masaaki yuasa’s super huge sketchbook, which runs in the 40-50 dollar range. let me know if you find it cheaper anywhere ill accept a used copy with heavy spaghetti stains)

yuasa boarded the first five episodes of shin-men, and a subsequent 8 episodes were released with different boarders (primarily yuji mutou, who’s been a heavy hitter on shin-chan since 1998). yuasa’s 5 episodes are beautiful - i mean look at this

yuasa always brings an otherworldly, dreamlike quality to whatever story he’s telling. on shin chan he generally seemed to prefer fun AUs and outlandish stories about buriburi zaemon that would allow him to invent colorful new settings and costumes.

that’s what’s so refreshing about shin-men - it’s the first time the show completely abandons its core cast of characters and focuses on NEW ones, in a universe with different rules. except, just kidding, because shinnosuke is still the main character, he’s just red now and called gou. so even while shin-men is TECHNICALLY breaking the fundamental rule of shin-chan - that shin is the main character who is in every single episode no matter what - it’s still abiding by it, and it still feels like shin-chan. that’s not criticism, though - i like the various alt-universe appearances of shin-chan characters in the shin-men universe. my favorite is matsuzaka, who is called “matsuzakaroni”, is STILL a kindergarten teacher even in this very alien universe (and despite the fact that she, i think, hates it?), and most uncannily of all, gets hit on by gou?? also gou is an adult i think, in this universe’s rules, he’s just really short like all of the other shin-men who are also adults?? i mean, i THINK? why does nobody in universe ever seem to mention how tiny these apparent grown-ups ar

anyway i’m not an expert on shin-men. despite my efforts i don’t really understand exactly where it came from or where gou’s ears are

i hope some day someone will create really good english subs of it, though i realize that’ll be a serious effort since yuasa’s episodes ABOUND with onscreen text - fuck, just imagine editing the moving gossip clouds on botswanawana to have english text. how would you even do that.

but i do wanna talk about kan a little and why shes cool thats the topic of this post

kan akaluislar (thats her last name..) is one of the 5 shin-men, superheroes with elemental powers who all look like a 5 year old named shinnosuke nohara from another universe, but don’t think too much about that. kan’s the only one who doesn’t actually have a superpower - she’s the Iron Man of the group, like, literally she’s tony stark, she’s the super wealthy and successful president of a major automobile company and rules the school in her home country, Detahoit. (which is maybe a pun on detroit? i’m not sure what’s up with that name)

anyway in addition to being iron man she’s also Transformers and Fullmetal Alchemist, she’s all three of those guys. she turns into a car a lot and transports her teammates everywhere. she also OWNS a car and drives it around when she’s not being a secret car superhero. is that bitterly tragic, or does kan secretly PREFER to be the car? is that her darkest fantasy? to be a full time car instead of a car-driving ceo? that is my headcanon

kan guards the fact that she’s female from the group, convinced they’d treat her differently. specifically, she’s convinced gou and nyoki would hit on her (confirmed), sui would bitch her out for not having a proper skin care regimen (that’s sui’s big thing, by the way, is that he’s a bitchy youtube beauty vlogger), and - worst of all - hyu would kick her out, since girls can’t fight.

...which seems like a pessimistic view of hyu. hyu is the wind elemental in the group - he’s buff and a little dopey but kind hearted and sweet, the noble hero type. also a bit of a spoiled prince.

each member of shin-men gets a yuasa episode dedicated to them, and hyu’s episode - his main arc, really - centers on his love for kan, which he keeps secret, despite the powerful curiosity of his country’s gossipy citizens.

what interests me is the disparate ways the anime and manga handle this plot thread. the anime treats hyu’s crush very earnestly, maintaining an undercurrent of quiet affection from him that appears in the majority of its episodes. the manga, however, emphasizes kan’s disinterest in romantic advances from both gou AND hyu, then practically drops the topic of hyu’s crush. it doesn’t exactly defy or contradict the relationship they have in the anime, however -- but it makes me sad, because hyu’s crush on kan is extremely cute and endearing. (as a sidenote, gou’s thing for kan is also pretty  cute, but it only exists in the manga, and, well - it’s not really a /romantic/ crush.

the shin-men manga makes a lot of different choices to the anime, and since the two were released concurrently i have no idea which “version” of any one story was the “original” - and in some cases i’m sure there isn’t an “original” version of a story, just two different ones. sometimes i really prefer the anime’s decisions (not drawing eyelashes on kan) and other times i’m... not sure what to think (the manga chapter with pimawari does NOT focus on kan, so did the anime decide to highlight kan’s relationship with pimawari because... kan’s a girl?? did they really do that? am i over thinking this?)

the manga does a GREAT job of fleshing out kan, though, even though it does so by torturing her, endlessly. she gets trapped inside of a washing machine. then has to use up all her fuel exploding out of the washing machine. the good news is, kan can repair washing machines, we learn this in episode 5 of the anime.

but be it manga OR anime, kan and hyu frequently wind up as partners who work well together, and its understandable. kan and hyu have private lives that mirror each other, both of them being high-profile and wealthy, pressured (kan by her conniving older sisters, hyu by his palace’s grand chamberlain) to settle down when neither of them is particularly interested, both preferring the life of a superhero. their private lives seem lonely and neither of them has any friends outside of shin-men. but within shin-men they team up frequently, and (being natural leaders) the two of them tend to take charge and stand out as The Responsible Ones.

(pointing = leadership)

this is what sells me on them as a couple - that they have this core of collaboration and mutual care in their superhero lives, which could build into a supportive friendship in their personal lives.

i very much love that hyu has a crush on kan despite thinking kan is a guy. that angle never comes up in the anime, though its lightly touched in the manga - and yuasa explicitly addresses it in his earliest notes. to quote,

“kan (iron shinnosuke) is the only girl within shin-men. since only men can be shin-men, she wears an iron suit to conceal the fact that she's female from everyone. and since she doesn't have a superpower, she relies on the power of her suit. hyu (wind shinnosuke) secretly likes kan but keeps thinking things like "could it be that i actually swing that way.." (lol). eventually, he's the only one who knows about her true self, but hides it from everyone so it won't be known.”

so, kan’s expectation of how hyu would react, having a sexist freakout and banning her from battle? apparently not representative of reality. which is good news because, even if kan doesnt want a love connection, she DESPERATELY needs a friend whom she doesnt feel the need to hide her private life from.

and at th end of the day thats what makes me happy: the idea that hyu can be this friend to kan, and they just chill out together, smoke a bong, get their truant son gou to cook them some curry, consolidate oil and wind technology to make both of their countries more sustainable and energy efficient, kiss etc.

im so curious if vol3 of the manga will give me any further insight.. i doubt it but im excited anyway