#and my internal idk sense of self really doesn't change much but which piece my brain thinks is important does? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pageofheartdj · 11 months

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Wowie, that sounds like quite the self discovery journey, it sucks that so many people struggle so much. I wish you were allowed to just be you without feeling those pressures when you were figuring things out. Hopefully you're doing okay now?

For me and my aroace journey was a ton more simple. I just, never figured out at what age I was supposed to develop a crush or whatever. The only time I ever questioned myself was if someone told me they had a crush on me, and that was more because I felt hurt that people would pretend to be my friend just because they had a crush on me and didn't actually like me. If I told them I didn't like them like that I'd lose my only current friend(s) which always sucked :/

(I had no friends in school really, so that probably impacts me more. I gave up trying to get along with peeps because I just dont understand their social cues or why neurotypical conversations can be boring at times. Why talk about what someone did if you could talk about dinosaurs or how there's enough different types of apples that you could eat a unique one every day for a year and not eat all the types of apples?)

So really I never realized I should have those feelings so I never questioned why I didn't. I did sometimes judge other people for having them because I didn't understand that it wasn't a choice. Sometimes in high school someone would ask me for relationship advice because I gave them a logical answer, and I was really really confused why people would act or do dumb-ish things just because of how someone looked?? Idk tbh

Gender wise my parents gave up caring, and everyone thought I was gay growing up so they thought I was just being gay?? I guess?? My parents were also neglectful though so it was also that they didn't bother explaining gender roles and let me do whatever as long as I was alone.

Similar to being aroace I never realized I was supposed to feel connected to gender. Eventually I came out after puberty and I say I'm trans masc people my gender (or really, lack of gender) doesn't make sense to people. Gender wise I'm not a girl and until puberty when the definition of girl changed for me, I never cared what people called me.

Being (maybe??) autistic probably really feuls this because I struggle picking up and learning social cues, so when people tried to teach me societal things I was too busy doing other things or didn't realize I should be internalizing it. Like i never thought about being in a relationship and even now that i now am an adult technically i still dont care. I like collecting funfacts more than that stuff, so it never registered as a thing to think about lol

Anyways thanks for explaining it from your experiences, it's really interesting learning what it's like for other people!! Have a lovely day!

Thank you! And yeah I am mostly content now. I know who I am and what I need. It's not perfect. We are never done changing and figuring ourself out. I still struggle a bit with society's set that you can be happy only if you have someone, you must be good at socialising otherwise you are a failed human. While every piece in me goes against it. I don't want any relationship, I don't want family, I don't want children. I struggle at making and keeping friends because my brain works in a way that makes it too hard. So it's hard to remember that I am not a failure just because I am not as connected with people and this is not a measure of my worth. I don't own the world to be a factory toy, the same as everyone else.

Ugh yeah this sucks!! I know people can't help their feelings, but still it doesn't feel nice to have these expectations! (also double yes! why should i care what someone did or their little life stories? this is boooring, do people really care about this stuff? i put an effort to care for a friend, but everyone dumps their stories on me! i can be interested talking about specific topics or work. but when its just. life. why is it my business??)

Also 🤝 for giving love advices xD We are not clouded by feelings so we can analyse this stuff from the side while never being in the relationship in the first place xD And it's hard to understand how people can be irrational because of their feelings!(even though it makes sense. it's like how anxiety can make us irrational. but still feels weird cause these are bad things in bad condition. while they have this bad thing in something good xD)

I am sorry your parents were neglectful! But at least you weren't pressured into roles, so at least there is some saving grace?

I thought I might be agender because I never cared about gender. I like being a bit femminine in a light pretty way, but also neutral/male style also worked for me. But then I was told that not caring for your gender is a cis thing?? I don't know, I feel like I am more like gnc in a passive 'I don't actually care and I wish it didn't exist' way xD

I've read somewhere that if you are queer there is a high chance of being ND and vice versa. Maybe it's not true, but it certantly feels that way xD Maybe because of hetero/allo normativeness of the society, that our brain from the start tells us 'we dont get social norms and we wont' XD

Your experience was also interesting to read! I love talking all about it!! Have a nice day too!❤

#aroace #asexuality

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greensaplinggrace · 3 years

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honestly THANK YOU for saying all that abt baghra bc i thought i was going crazy from not liking her??? bc i haven't read the books and only summaries of them on wiki and like. i dunno why ppl like her actually even in the show bc this guy, her son, is like "i wanna make the world better for us grisha" and she's just like "no." even tho he sees that she's MAKING HERSELF SICK from suppressing her powers! she's literally like in bed coughing in the flashback yet seem much healthier at the little palace. also like after everything, after her disapproval, after the fold, after centuries of waiting for the sun summoner.. he never abandons her. he makes sure she's cares for. he doesn't harm her. and i have to wonder if baghra has ever thanks him for that, for just not leaving her alone. like i dunno how im suppose ro believe aleks is a heartless villain when he still cares for his abusive mom like this. like has baghra even told her she loved him (honestly she reminds me of a classic emotionally unavailable asian parent but maybe that's just me). also im wondering if baghra ever told aleks that he had an aunt.. bc like.. now that u bring up her isolating him it's like hmmmm...

not at me being like alina... why do u trust the bitter old woman who literally beats u with a stick and verbally abuses u every chance she gets.. just bc she showed a bad painting... like.. pls use two braincells to see that who u figured out as his mother... is also using his protection..

like baghra could've upped and left with alina. but no. she stayed bc she knew she was safe under aleks's protection.

alsoim just impressed that after his first friend tried to drown him and harvest his bones... he didn't go into hiding???? he still wanted to make a safe heaven for grisha!!! HE STILL WANTED TO PROTECT GRISHA EVEN AFTER HIS GRISHA FRIEND TRIED TO KILL HIM FOR HIS FUCKEN BONES. like... this is the guy im suppose to believe is the villain???

honestly i feel like part of the reason why LB's plotlines seem so bad and disconnected (and sometimes outright racist but that's another rant) and why darkles is disproportionately more violent and villainous in the later books is bc she didn't expect the darkling to be so popular and wanted to stick with her guns of making him the villain. but also wanted the money from aleks's popularity. but like you can't have ur cake and eat it too.

Well thank you for sending this ask! It's very sweet and very passionate. I'm glad you liked my post! I didn't put as much thought into it as some of my others lol. I kind of just talked. But it was nice to be able to finally talk about some of the problems I have with both her character and the fandom/author's perception of her.

HERE is the post this is referring to, in case anyone's wondering.

👀👀 You've hit the nail on the head for so many things, here!

Baghra is extremely emotionally unavailable, basically to the point of neglect. She's also verbally and physically abusive, traits which I doubt were only reserved for her students and not her son. Baghra claims she would do anything to protect him, but I've known a lot of parents who have that mindset and yet still harm their children because they think it's "good for them".

Aleksander stays at Baghra's side for years, and even when they're opposing each other she's never too far away from him. Idk if you've read the books but he does eventually hurt her. And as much as I don't like Baghra, I think his actions were horrid. But I'm also honestly kind of surprised it took him so long lmao.

Yeah I mean, in terms of isolation, let's not forget that she never wanted to introduce him to his father, either. Baghra's sense of eternity clouds a lot of her judgments on relationships, which means she views most people as dust and therefore teaches her son to as well. The problem with that is that he's a growing child, and he needs those social and emotional attachments for healthy development.

I would bet quite a bit of money that Baghra has either never told him she loves him or she has told him so few times it's practically forgettable.

And everything becomes more complicated because so many of Baghra's actions are understandable because of her life and her history, but the impacts they have on the people around her, especially Aleksander, are permanently damaging. And the fact that that's never gone over in critical depth in the books or how it's glossed over in fandom is just very disconcerting. Like, acknowledging Baghra's failings doesn't mean we're excusing Aleksander's actions, it just means we're holding Baghra liable for her own. Which the fandom should be doing, considering she's the epitome of an abusive parental figure.

And Alina trusting Baghra over Aleksander is even more confusing! Especially in the show!! This is the woman who beat her and abused her and tortured her friends when they tiny little children (and who probably still does so now that they're adults). This is the woman who mocks you and harasses you and insults you on a regular basis. Why does Baghra revealing she's Aleksander's mother make Alina change her mind?! Like fuck, I'd just feel bad for Aleksander. No wonder he kept it a secret, I would too! And that painting is enough evidence?! Really?! A random painting shown to you by this abusive mentor that's been making your life hell. That's what you're going to betray your new lover over?

The friends trying to harvest his bones thing is a good point, too. I think Aleksander, especially show Aleksander, is incredibly idealistic. I think he cares too much for others - those he's deemed worth his care (a sentiment given to him by Baghra). Despite everything she's tried to teach him about hiding and abandoning others and never caring and never doing anything to help or reach out or connect with people, Aleksander still continues to do so. It's likely because he never got it from Baghra growing up, and so is desperate for those emotional needs to be fulfilled elsewhere.

His turning point, when Baghra tells him it was understandable that those kids tried to kill him because the world is such a hard place for them - that's crucial. And the reason it's possible as a motivating factor is because of that idealism and that desire to help and that desire to be everything his mother isn't. Baghra tells him this trauma he just experienced was because of the oppression of his people, and instead of following her lead and accepting that, going into hiding and abandoning everybody to their misery, he goes I can do something about that. I can make it so this never happens again. Which is usually how trauma like that combines with one's core personality traits at a young age, especially when there's none of the essential support systems in place to aid in recovery (ie, the role Baghra should have been filling but wasn't, because she decided to exacerbate the problem instead).

And yeah, one of my biggest problems with the ham-fisted "beating you over the head with a sledgehammer of evil deeds" look-how-bad-this-character-is! portrayal of the Darkling in the later books comes from the impression I get that Bardugo doesn't trust her readers. She's so desperate to have us hate this character and think him an irredeemable villain, not trusting any of her readers to engage critically with a morally gray character, that it feels quite a bit like condescending fucking bullshit. Which ew, I know how to engage with literature, thanks.

She really does seem to look down on a large part of her fandom, and imo, the infantilization of the female characters in her books seems to carry over to her impression of most of her female readers as well. Which is why the Darkling's character arc gets fucking destroyed. But he's still a good cash grab, of course, so she'll shake his dead corpse in front of the fandom for money every time she wants something from it.

Also! Another reason I think her plotlines feel disconnected (I'm sorry Bardugo I respect you as a person, but shit-) is because the writing in SaB is just bad. I mean, nevermind the absolutely nauseating implications of the way she portrays the Grisha as a persecuted group who's situation is never actually fully addressed as it should be, considering Grisha rights is what her main villain is fighting for (imo for a series called the Grishaverse, LB seems to be pretty anti Grisha), but her characters and story alone are just wrong for each other. They don't fit together.

And the ending is one of the main pieces of evidence in that regard! You can’t say the ending where Alina isn’t Grisha anymore is her “going back to where she started” when she’s always been Grisha. She just didn’t know she was Grisha because she denied that part of herself that she was born with.

Alina is reluctant to move forward or change, she struggles with adapting, and she’s very set on the things she’s grown attached to throughout her life. She also has some latent prejudices against the Grisha, and so denies the possibility of being Grisha for those reasons as well.

Alina’s lack of powers in the beginning of her life because she willfully doesn’t learn about them to avoid change versus her lack of powers at the end of the book when she’s accepted them and then they’re stripped away from her by outer forces are two entirely separate circumstances. You can’t make a parallel about lost powers and lack of Grisha status bringing her back to the start when she was always Grisha and she always had powers and she simply refused to come to terms with it because of personal reasons.

The first situation is an internal conflict that indicates a story about growth and a journey of self acceptance. Denying herself the opportunity to learn about her heritage and to find acceptance with a group of people like her because she’s tied to the past and because of the way she was raised is the setup for a narrative that tackles unlearning prejudice and learning how to connect with a part of her identity that was denied her and learning how to grow independent and self assured. It’s the setup for a different story entirely. The second situation is an external conflict that centers around the ‘corrupting influence of power’... for some reason.

In a world where Grisha do not have social, political, or economic power and they are hunted, centering your heroine’s journey of self acceptance and growth around an external conflict about... the corrupting influence of power (in a group of people that don’t actually have any power?!) just doesn’t work. It is literally impossible to connect the two stories Bardugo is trying to push in Shadow and Bone without seriously damaging the main character’s developmental arc.

The only way a narrative like this would work, claiming that she has gone back to where she started, is either a) if the Grisha weren’t actually a persecuted group and instead were apart of the upper class, or b) if the one bad connection between the two instances is acknowledged - that Alina denied a part of herself crucial to self acceptance and growing up, and that losing her powers at the end has also denied her. It is a tragedy, not a happy ending.

Alina suffered because she didn’t use her powers. She grew sick. It was bad for her. This was not a resistance to 'the corruption of power and the burden of greed', it was her suffering because she couldn’t fully accept herself.

Framing the ending as a return to the beginning can’t be done if you don’t address how bad the beginning was for your main character. You brought her back to a bad point in her life. You regressed her. This should be a low point in her arc. It should be a problem that’s solved so she can finish developing organically or it should be something that is acknowledged as a tragedy in it’s own right, for the future the world (the writing) denied her.

This is a ramble and it makes no sense and I’m really sorry, but my point is that Bardugo put the wrong characters in the wrong story. The character arc required for organic development doesn’t match the story and intended message at all. The narrative doesn’t fit the cast. She's got two clashing stories attempting to work in tandem and she ends up with both conflicting messages that fans still can’t comprehend in her writing and an ending that doesn’t suit her main character to such an impossible degree that it’s almost laughable.

So yeah, there's a few reasons why I think the story and the plot feels so bad and disconnected. I hope you don't mind me making this answer so long! 😅 I was not expecting to write this much.

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thisstableground · 3 years

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i'm so alone i didn't know who to talk to about it but i keep overthinking that one line in Champagne where Vanessa says “and it's not like Sonny's got role models” and Usnavi repeats “role models?” all confused and idk do you think maybe he doesn't think of himself as a good role model for Sonny? or maybe he didn't realize that fact before? how would he feel about it when he notices that his cousin might only have him to look up to???? idk what do u think

oh man i have overthought this exact same line in the exact same way anon!!! i think it fits - like, i always got the impression that usnavi is genuinely bewildered by the fact that both sonny and vanessa are upset at him for leaving. i don’t think it’s necessarily that he thinks he’s a bad role model. i think he just doesn’t really doesn’t recognise his own importance to everyone around him. that fits with how we see him at the start - he views himself as staying still while everyone moves around him, and even in a sort of meta-sense his role as kind-of narrator (which i’ve talked about before - how everyone elses songs are like internal monologues, but usnavi’s the only one who actually converses with the audience) shows how he kind of feels a little bit separated from everyone else, a little bit isolated, like he’s just watching things happen and commenting on it but not actually a part of it himself. which is clearly not true, when you see how his bodega is like, the hub of activity, it’s where we’re introduced to everyone and it’s sort of the centre of everything, but we don’t always see ourselves the way everyone else does. i think that one little line in carnaval, from some background character being like “yo, here comes usnavi!” says quite a lot, somehow: like, it shows that people like having him around, and to them he is an important part of the community and they value his presence. he just can’t recognise that in himself until the end.

my own personal headcanon on this, of course, is that it’s a lot to do with losing his parents. i think he lost a lot of his sense of self and gained a lot of anxiety around the same time, and forgot how to exist outside of his responsibility to the store and to his parents memory. i don’t think he even really believed he’d ever go to DR until abuela won the lotto, and he wouldn’t have actually booked a ticket without her being the one to push him (because she believes that’s truly what he wants and what would be best for him, and that he needs someone to push him to make changes which is very true - though i also wonder if that’s a little to do with her own regrets or doubts about staying in new york her whole life, following the path her mama set her on, never going back to la vibora, which is a tangent i won’t go into but certainly the concept of trying to separate your own desires from those that you’ve inherited from your parents or your community is clearly a huge, huge theme for abuela, nina and usnavi’s characters especially). but i also think that even his desire to go to DR was based a lot more on thinking about his parents memory and the past and what they might have wanted or where they came from, rather than thinking about what he actually wants for his own future. he says go ahead and make a set of goals, cross them off the list as you pursue them but we know he isn’t actually pursuing them himself yet, he doesn’t know how to. he isn’t very good at wanting anything for himself, and even when he does, he isn’t good at going after it (i mean, the fact that at the start he is incapable of asking vanessa out and sonny has to do it for him shows that pretty well.)

there’s a bit in the show i think immediately before champagne, where sonný’s clearly unhappy about the whole situation and usnavi’s like “??? i’m giving you your freedom, shouldn’t you be happy/isn’t this what you wanted?” (paraphrasing) he’s not saying it sarcastically, or telling sonny like, “tough shit, i’m going anyway”, he seems like he really wasn’t expecting that reaction at all - like, he’s only seen it from the perspective of sonny complaining about the job or slacking off, so surely sonny should be fine with this? and then before he can process that, sonny storms out and vanessa comes in and champagne starts. i always take that as usnavi not getting that sonny’s reaction really isn’t about the job at all, it’s about sonny’s relationship with usnavi. the same as he doesn’t quite get that vanessa isn’t mad because “you get everyone addicted to your coffee then off you go”, she’s upset because she likes him and she’ll miss him. he needs both of those conversations to help him realise his own place in the barrio.

so anyway yeah it makes sense to me he doesn’t necessarily think of himself as doing much to earn the title of role model because he doesn’t feel like he has much influence on his own life so how could he have an impact on someone elses? his parents getting sick, him being left with the store, none of it was his choice or something he actively decided on, so he doesn’t see that he’s done much worth looking up to, because he doesn’t recognise that the role model aspects are a lot more to do with him as a person and his many admirable qualities than to do with the store. he’s sunk so much of his identity into the bodega as his parents store and their memory and his job and, in a lot of ways, his burden that he forgets that he isn’t just a piece of equipment that keeps it going, that he has value outside of it, and that it isn’t really the store or the job or the coffee that people will miss, it isn’t the bodega that sonny needs, it’s usnavi.

#in the heights #character: usnavi #fandom: in the heights #me pulling an endless string of usnavi emotions out of my sleeve like a magician with a bunch of handkerchiefs: oh boy theres so many!!!#i love him so so much

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