#has anyone already noticed this? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

Visit Blog

Explore Tumblr blogs with no restrictions, modern design and the best experience.

Fun Fact

130K people were victims of a chain letter scam that affected Tumblr in May 2011.

#has anyone already noticed this?

kickbutts-singsongs · 3 months

Text

Okay I’m not really a part of this fandom but I’ve been following along cuz it looks kinda cool

So I do wanna say that I noticed smth in the last episode of Hazbin Hotel involving Alastor?

Like it’s canonical that he’s never not smiling right? But I was watching his fight with Adam again and I saw this:

His shadowwwww was FROWNINGGGGG

But then it corrects itself like half a second later!!

It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment:

#is this anything?#has anyone already noticed this?#might delete later #hazbin hotel #hazbin alastor #alastor #vivziepop #1k #2k #3k #5k #10k #< holy crap?#i don’t even go here guys

12K notes · View notes

talaricula · 5 months

Text

Things I've seen tumblr memeing about James Somerton doing à la "How did no one see how bigoted he was!" as if those things haven't been a significant part of tumblr culture for over a decade :

Presenting untrue and bordering on conspiratorial versions of (queer or otherwise marginalised) history without any sources

Completely disregarding and disrespecting any expertise on socio-cultural topics/humanities and distrusting academics and historians (incl. acting as if no academics or historians could be queer or marginalised)

Downplaying the role misogyny played in the historical oppression of queer women and concluding that queer men must have been more oppressed than queer women

Bi women are, at best, not as queer as "real" queer ppl, and at worst, simply equivalent to straight women

Despite nominal trans inclusivity, transmasculine ppl are functionally women when convenient (combined with the above, bi transmascs are functionally straight women)

Despite nominal trans inclusivity (bis), shamelessly attacking, threatening and actively endangering any trans woman who questions them or smth they find important (often by unfairly presenting her as violent or as a threat)

Having absolutely fucking wild and reductive takes about ace ppl, the oppression they face and their place in the queer community

Stating that marriage equality is an assimilationist fight while completely ignoring its direct roots in the horrifying consequences of the AIDS crisis for partners of ppl who died of AIDS

Praising western media creators from the past for queer coding even under censure and in the same breath condemning current non western media creators for being homophobic bc their representation isn't explicit enough

Blaming China for all existing homophobic censoring in western media

Assuming all queer media would be better told by western creators and by western standards

Only out queer ppl get to tell queer stories

Heavily criticising almost all queer media created by women or ppl they see as such (see above points about trans ppl) or involving/starring a significant amount of women for any perceived or real amount of "problematicness", but fawning over and praising and negating criticism of queer media created by and starring mostly or even functionally exclusively men (even when it could be argued that, you know, not involving/seriously sidelining women is a pretty clear example of misogyny which should probably be considered "problematic")

And I'm probably forgetting stuff or there's stuff I have internalised myself and don't recognise as an issue

Like idk but I feel like the takeaway from Hbomberguy and Toddintheshadow's videos should maybe be "be aware of such patterns in your communities bc they definitely exist" and not "this guy is uniquely awful" and I feel like a lot of the discussion I've seen surrounding this has been severely failing at that. Most ppl who've spent any significant amount of time on tumblr prob either have internalised at least one of those thought patterns, have had to de-internalise them, or have had to be extremely vigilant to not internalise them (which is done by, you know, seeking out other sources, which also seemed like an important takeaway from the videos)

#Also I'm saying this as someone who actually watched quite a few of Somerton's videos #And noticed those patterns and stopped watching bc I recognised them from here #and had already learned to unlearn them after being so exposed to them here #And tbh I think anyone who hasn't had the luck or made the conscious choice to seek out ppl who pushed against those narratives #Would absolutely have fallen for this man's bullshit. Like let's not kid ourselves we see takes like this every day on this hellsite #2014 me would have. For sure.#This is next to the plagiarism issue which as Harris points out is an Internet wide issue and this includes tumblr #James Somerton #hbomberguy #todd in the shadows #This brought to you by a conversation with my wife yesterday #So many ppl on here don't deserve to meme or be this self absolvingly critical of this man #The call is coming from inside the house #The man has a tumblr it would legit not surprise me if some of the things he supposedly made up himself he did actually get from somewhere #And that somewhere was a tumblr post

16K notes · View notes

visenyaism · 5 months

Text

astarion baldursgate being a nepo baby corrupt magistrate before his death is a deliberate narrative choice meant to highlight that in the tradition of The Vampire being an incredibly transparent metaphor for class dynamics of feudalism (evil lord living in a palace demanding the blood of the peasantry,) the category of the Vampire Spawn exists as a clear analogue to the bourgeoisie and their role in perpetuating the power of the aristocracy. in the rest of this deranged fucking text post i will

#if you are a corrupt DA you are already a vampire spawn. to capital #bg3 #hey has anyone noticed that the mindflayers live in a stateless classless soci-i am forcibly shoved into a chasm

884 notes · View notes

natelia-aldelliz · 1 year

Text

Soap & Gaz : =(

Ghost : What's going on with you two?

Gaz : Old people flirting =( it's like my divorced dad flirting with his new girlfriend in front of me all over again

Ghost : What happened?

Gaz : Well he and my mom got a divorce, which was for the best honestly, and then he got himself a girlfriend that was closer in age to me than him and -

Ghost : I don't give a shit about your parents Garrick, what happened right now.

Gaz : Oh =(

Soap : Nikolai was teaching us insults in russian, and Price told him he had a dirty mouth and Nik just smiled at him, y'know, like a smirk, and Price smiled back, ewwww

Ghost : Wait, you think Price flirting with his... friend is gross because they're old? You do know I'm not that much younger than Price, right?

Soap : Yeah, but you're not flirting with anyone, so it's okay =)

Ghost :

Gaz :

Soap : =) ?

Gaz : I can't believe you just said that. With your full chest too...

#cod mw2 #john soap mactavish #kyle gaz garrick #simon ghost riley #captain john price #i just found out that price's name is jonathan?? i thought it was a joke not canon lmao #cod nikolai #ghostsoap #soapghost #does pricexnikolai have a name?#based on a thirty seconds search through tumblr it appears to be nikprice #and i was so happy that for once i shipped a main ship and not a rare ship lmao rip me #the dilfs got me #anyway i was realising that price is also fucking massive like next to ghost it doesn't show or even gaz who's pretty tall as well #but next to other people wow he's tall #soap isn't as tall but what he doesn't have in height he has in shoulders so it's not that obvious that he's smol #anyway #soap instantly notices people flirting with other people like he'd met ale and rudy for five minutes and already knew #that doesn't apply to himself tho because he doesn't think anyone could love him and thinks they just want sex #and he ignores it coming from ghost because he couldn't deal with just sex from him so he'd rather not see anything at all =)#and gaz is tired of him and ghost thinks soap knows and is rejecting him and gaz is tired of him too #and now he's also tired of price because how dare he flirt in front of his salad like that

2K notes · View notes

amaranthsynthesis · 6 months

Text

looking at timelines and thinking about the CONSTANT near misses where Durge and Karlach almost met while involved with/working for Gortash. the overlap is there!! but Karlach doesn't recognize Durge when they meet in game, so they must not have ever met

Karlach was Gortash's bodyguard, it would have made sense for him to bring her to meetings with a Bhaalspawn--when would he be in more danger than that? That he didn't means that either he trusted Durge not to kill him, or worried instead that Durge would kill Karlach if they met. Which, yeah, if her temperament pre-Avernus is anything like in-game then that meeting would have extraordinarily poorly! Faced with a very real threat she would have stood her ground to protect her boss and friend, still, and there is no way Durge could let that slide--there is no way she could have won that fight. Gortash liked her too much, or did not want to replace her yet, or had already put the wheels in motion on the infernal engines front and knew she would make an excellent candidate for a test, when the time came. Cuz he sold her anyway, didn't he?

so I'm emo about that but ALSO the slapstick hijink potential of Gortash running interference so that neither of them ever encounter one another is UNPARALLELED.

#Karlach badgering Gortash constantly about who he's secretly banging bc boy they sure are bitey aren't they #and how come she never gets to meet them anyway she can keep a secret! she can be discreet! is it someone's wife? is it someone's HUSBAND?#meanwhile Ballard doesn't believe in doors or office hours so he's already arriving at unconventional hours by unconventional means #it's a game to sneak in without anyone seeing him and seeing how long he can lurk before Gortash notices he's there #and he knows everyone Gortash has in his household and immediate employ it would be stupid not to #so he recognizes this great tiefling lady and also that Gortash is ALWAYS sending her on a coffee break or an errand whenever he arrives #but there's no reason to think any more of it so he. doesn't.#bg3 #karlach #enver gortash #bg3 spoilers #I'm putting this in the tag but y'all better behave

244 notes · View notes

petite-phthora · 8 months

Text

This yours?

[DP x DC fic]

[Love at first... murder? - part 12]

<< Prev | Next >>

Part 1

Ao3

---

Somewhere else, in a seemingly abandoned building on the outskirts of the city, a figure shrouded in darkness and wearing a dark cloak plots.

In front of them is a whiteboard. It’s covered in pictures, sticky notes, and illegible texts. Some of the notes thrown about that are legible are ‘fight…’, ‘draw blood.’, and ‘DEATH!!!’.

There’s a crude stick figure drawn in the corner of the board, it’s impaled. Other small doodles can also be found all around the board.

Most of the information and pictures are connected by red strings, like you see in movies.

In the middle is a picture of 2 people sitting on a motorcycle, the arms of the person sitting in the back are around the waist of the person sitting in the front. The picture has some arrows pointing towards it and the people in the picture are very obviously circled.

Though the face of the person driving the motorcycle is obscured by their helmet, the other person seems to be heavily blushing and grinning broadly.

“Yes… yes! That’s it! I know what to do…” They seem to be speaking to themselves.

Quickly, the person scribbles down a barely legible ‘sacrifice!!‘.

They start cackling.

“Mwuahaha!”

It’s an evil laugh they’ve been working on for quite a while now, and they’re pretty proud of it.

However, the effect is slightly ruined when a fly enters their mouth, cutting off their cackling with choking as they gasp for air, grasping at their throat.

A few good thumps against their chest, with some coughing out their lungs, helps them dislodge the fly from their throat and they spit it out on the ground. They take a few deep breaths before straightening up again.

“Curse you” the person exclaims, angrily waving their fist at the fly as it flies away.

---

Bruce’s face gives off nothing as he stares at the streets down below. He’s dressed as Batman, crouched at the edge of a building with Damian by his side as Robin. Spoiler, Black Bat, Nightwing, and Red Robin are further back on the rooftop.

They watch in silence as another group of the Joker’s goons passes by. They’ve been all over the city, wandering around, not doing anything obviously illegal.

They don’t stay in one place and they don’t seem to have much of a purpose. No attacks… No stealing… No smuggling or transport of goods… No, instead they’re inspecting every single inch of the city.

They don’t seem to have any weapons on them. All they’re carrying on them are some flashlights. While most don’t give anything away with their body language or expressions, some seem to give off a bit of anxious energy.

Spoiler claimed she even saw some of them climb down into the sewers earlier and then climbing out again sometime later somewhere else, but this time ‘dejected and stinky’.

One thing seems clear to the Bats.

They’re searching for something… or someone.

“This basically confirms that not even the Joker’s henchmen know where he is. He’s missing.”

“I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing”

“Good… thing?”

“It’s… something. That’s for sure.”

“We don’t know if he’s really missing. For all we know it could be a trap. What if the Joker is hiding, pretending to be missing to have us bring our guard down? Besides, how could he be missing? He’s the Joker. No one’s just gonna kidnap him”

“For all we know he could be lying dead in a ditch somewhere”

“I highly doubt that”

“Everyone, focus” Bruce speaks up, having them draw their attention to him.

“It’s unclear whether the Joker is simply hiding away or missing. Instead of focusing on the why, we need to focus on the where. Missing or not, we need to find him and get him back to Arkham. Oracle, have you managed to find out anything from the footage yet?”

“Nope, still nothing. All the files from the moment he enters Crime Alley are wiped and any attempt at recovering them only brings back corrupted files.”

“We need Red Hood. Where is he?” Bruce asks.

“He still has his phone on silent and he has removed the trackers and cams. We haven’t placed any new ones on him yet”

“Let’s visit him on his turf then. And keep an eye out for anything suspicious in the meantime. Oracle, try recovering the missing files. If that doesn’t work, go back to the breakout footage. Perhaps he left some kind of clues about his plans or whereabouts behind there.” Bruce states.

“Roger that.”

---

Red Hood has his arms by his sides as he gazes down upon the street below from the rooftop of a random apartment building in Crime Alley.

He’s lucky to have avoided the Bats so far. But he doubts his luck will last for long.

Red Hood stiffens as he suddenly feels something clamp down on his arm. As a reflex, his other hand has already drawn his gun.

He slowly raises the arm he felt something clamp down on and looks at it, only to make eye contact with a girl with black hair and blue eyes who has sunk her teeth into his arm and is now hanging off of it.

The teeth are sharp, as the girl seems to have some small fangs. They’ve gone through his jacket and sunken into his skin.

It doesn’t really hurt all that badly though, probably hasn’t even drawn much blood, and that’s one of the only reasons Jason hasn’t flung the kid off of him yet. Another reason is the fact that it’s a kid.

They both stare at each other for several seconds.

As Jason takes her appearance in, he notices that she seems rather familiar. In fact, she looks like a more feminine version of Danny, or if Danny had a twin.

The person hanging off of his arm looks younger than Danny though, probably a teenager around 13 or 14, if he had to make a guess.

Slowly, he puts his gun away and takes out his phone with his other hand, watching the random girl’s eyes follow his movements. He raises it level with her face and snaps a picture, quickly sending it to Danny and ignoring the girl’s curious gaze while she’s still hanging onto his arm by her fucking teeth.

---

Meanwhile, Danny checks his phone to see Red Hood sent him a message. He opens it and is greeted by a picture of Ellie in human form biting down on Red Hood’s arm with the caption ‘this yours???’

---

Taglist:

@i-always-say-yea @uraniumwizard @why-must-i-be-like-this @griffinthing

#dp x dc #dp x dc fic #dpxdc #dcxdp #dc x dp #dp x dc crossover #dead on main #dead on main ship #Im wondering how easy/hard it is to guess who the person is #and also yes its supposed to have stereotypically comedic 'evil'/'villain' vibes #the person did that on purpose because they are dramatic and have style #also i aged ellie down a little from how old she *should* be cause i felt like it fit better #If you need a reason maybe she like ages a little bit slower due to being a clone or something idk #oh and i have a question for you all #should i make a masterpost??#i have like the very first chapter pinned but i feel like a masterpost might be better #especially cause like i already have 12 chapters and the story is only getting longer #damn this story has gone further than expected from a oneshot lol #it all started with me just tinking it'd be funny if like #a character was basically in shock but was still like nah I cant just kiss someone without consent lol #also I said id post like 5-6 chapters and this is still only like 6k :( i really need to write more ;-;#and also if y'all haven't noticed already #all I know of dc is through fanfics and fandom posts #though I really want to start reading the comics #i just haven't really had the time nor do I really know what's good and where to start #so like if anyone has any recommendations for dc/batfam comics they are more than welcome!! ^-^

211 notes · View notes

shifty-shark · 1 month

Text

So I’ve noticed that everyone in spop seems to be only roughly a head shorter than She-ra, and She-ra is around 8’-8’2 right? So is everyone else in the 5’9-7’ range height wise?

Also I read somewhere that Catra is 5’4 and I don’t believe that for a second considering how tall She-ra is compared to her in the show.

Examples

#has anyone else noticed this #maybe this has already been addressed and I’m just late #let me know if that’s the case #she ra #she ra and the princesses of power

64 notes · View notes

ctrl-alt-cel · 1 year

Text

when i was 13 i wrote an essay explaining the rationale of puppyshipping to some guy in a skype chatroom. found the essay again. wanted to rewrite it. without further ado:

HERE’S HOW PUPPYSHIPPING CAN STILL WIN: THE SEQUEL: 2 PUPPY 2 SHIPPING (4.3k words)

⠀

kaiba and jounouchi’s relationship stands at an awkwardly undefinable place in canon: they're not on good terms, but they're not enemies either. they know each other too well to be called passing acquaintances, but kaiba hardly acknowledges jounouchi as a duelist, let alone a potential rival. at best? they're mutual nuisances.

or, that's how jounouchi and kaiba choose to define it. both of them would love if their dynamic were that simple, nothing more than a back-and-forth of petty insults—but that’s not the truth. and they'll dance around the truth for five whole seasons, purposefully downplaying why they’re so obsessed with provoking each other whenever they’re in the same place.

they're foils.

—but the term "foils" is so dulled within fandom lexicon now that it can mean literally anything from two guys who just disagree with each other sometimes, so i'll sharpen this further. jounouchi and kaiba see their counterpart less as an individual person but more a representation of who they could have become if they had respectively, in their eyes, never learned the lessons they needed to. they project their own ideals onto the other and come away thinking they already know how the other operates, and the fun thing is, even when working from conjecture, their assumptions of one another happen to hit far closer to home than they have any right to.

so really, they can't leave each other alone because they can't stop seeing their failures reflected back at them. the other is a defective version of themselves that they need to correct because they can't stand constantly acknowledging who they used to be, so they try to bend the other to be more like their own image—an "i can fix him (by dragging him down to my level)".

⠀

jounouchi and kaiba’s parallels run down to their origins, both set up against abysmal family situations they have no choice but to make the best of. seto and mokuba are orphaned at a young age until seto gets them adopted, while katsuya is separated from his sister and stuck with a deadbeat father who can't carry his own weight. trapped in an environment where nobody expects anything worthwhile from him, katsuya joins a gang and lives out a self-admittedly miserable existence before befriending yugi, while seto is in a battlefield of his own, faced with protecting mokuba while enduring against the nightmare that is gozaburo kaiba’s parenting.

what they do to survive those conditions determines the outlooks they carry for the rest of their lives: jounouchi learns that losing is inescapable and the best you can do is learn how to cope with it, whereas kaiba learns that losing is something you must protect yourself from because there's only so much you can afford to lose.

jounouchi is positioned as the underdog, fighting tooth-and-nail for every victory he can manage, while kaiba has power in excess and holds to the belief that it’s all he really needs. one would argue that they have the perspective the other lacks—they argue that they have the perspective the other lacks. but in my opinion? it doesn't actually matter. what interests me is how they treat each other as a result.

⠀

side: seto kaiba

kaiba degrades jounouchi a lot. like, to an uncomfortable extent. you know that one post that’s like “why does bullying exist? why are you mad that i’m ugly?” why is kaiba so mad over the fact that jounouchi loses so much?

it’s projection. he’s just holding jounouchi to the same standard he holds himself to. you need to be powerful if you want to play the same games as kaiba, and seeing jounouchi so openly lean on his friends, ask for help, and have the audacity to lose sets kaiba off because he’s not playing the way he’s supposed to. kaiba rubs jounouchi's losses in his face because he believes that's what loss is supposed to look like, and that it’s jounouchi’s fault for not understanding that yet. kaiba is trying to teach him. to kaiba, this degradation might as well be an act of generosity.

while kaiba stayed true to his own ambitions, seizing kaibacorp from gozaburo and turning it into a children's entertainment company, he beat gozaburo at his own game not by inventing new rules but by playing it better than his adoptive father ever could. and as impressive as that is, it’s not sustainable. gozaburo kills himself when faced with his own defeat, and kaiba internalizes this lesson: that all losses are final, and it’s better to die than adapt to the consequences of a defeat. gozaburo’s death was a suicide, but in the context of their game, kaiba might as well have killed him regardless.

he mirrors this when he threatens to kill himself in duelist kingdom, his heightened emotions catastrophizing losing the duel to immediately equal failing mokuba and coming to the conclusion that if he loses mokuba he’d rather be dead. being someone so fervently self-reliant, any alternate solution, a possibility that he can lose here and still find a different way to rescue mokuba never crosses his mind. and, look, this isn’t his fault. this is the only way of living he’s ever been taught. he’s never learned how to cope in the event of failure because he’s never had the luxury to fail to begin with.

he's burned and rebuilt himself over and over again to survive in the world he operates in, and that’s why jounouchi pisses kaiba off so personally. jounouchi loses so much and so messily, and kaiba tries to show him that if he doesn’t start reinventing himself from the broken pieces of his defeats until all that’s left of him are jagged edges the same way he has, he’s never going to win. but jounouchi…does win. and keeps winning. and even when he does lose, it’s as if he creates new victories for himself, like there’s still value to playing a game with someone when you don’t win it—power of friendship bullshit and whatever. jounouchi is still here, a competitor that kaiba can no longer write off as much as he desperately wants to. (and, yeah, it is pretty ironic how jounouchi will jump through a million hoops to get kaiba to look at him, but he doesn't realize that he doesn't need to do anything to keep kaiba’s attention, only continue being himself.)

jounouchi refuses to compromise who he is and still manages to get far when in kaiba’s mind, that shouldn’t be possible; he’s supposed to be punished the way kaiba was. jounouchi is proof that you can take a devastating blow and move on from it, that even when you do fuck up spectacularly, there’s still something worthwhile in starting again tomorrow.

so kaiba constantly needs to prove that he’s better than jounouchi, that jounouchi isn’t even worth his time in order to justify his worldview. because if kaiba isn’t right, then he'll have no choice but to confront the fact that the war is over. that his circumstances aren’t instant life or death anymore and that even though he’s freed himself from gozaburo’s influence, there’s still further growth as a person he could stand to undergo, now divorced from the harsh conditions of his upbringing. jounouchi is a testament to how it’s possible to make peace and move on from the past without constantly bleeding for closure, that maybe, kaiba’s headlong quest to get the last word on his rivalry with yami yugi may not actually be as fulfilling as he thinks.

but admitting that you might need to change the way you live feels like a defeat in and of itself—it’s infuriating to hear that after everything you’ve had to learn, the way you live now isn’t good enough. that surviving insurmountable trauma doesn’t inherently make you better or more worthy than other people—it just traumatizes you, and is something you must heal from. so, instead of reflecting on these revelations, it’s so much easier for kaiba to tell himself that jounouchi is only ever graceful when he’s dead.

⠀

side: katsuya jounouchi

jounouchi is very stuck on this idea that he needs to be useful. his dad is an alcoholic with a gambling addiction and he believes it's not only his duty to pay his father's debts, but to be the household's sole source of income. his sister needs eye surgery and he believes it's his responsibility as an older brother not only to pay for it, but to act as her primary emotional support to get the surgery and throughout her recovery process. haga throws yugi's exodia into the ocean and jounouchi blames himself for not stopping it. jounouchi gets mind-controlled by malik and blames himself for causing his friends anguish from it. mai literally gets jounounchi’s soul stolen and he apologizes to her for messing up and making her sad. it's habitual, jounouchi doesn't know how to stop taking on the burdens of other people.

if you live with the mentality that you’re inevitably going to fail for long enough, you’ll come away with the belief that caring about your own wellbeing isn’t worth the effort. it depends on how pessimistic you want to read it, if it’s just his love language or jounouchi compensating for the damning act of being himself, but jounouchi quantifies his worth by how much he provides for other people. he’s always jumping in the line of fire for the sake of others because if you constantly undervalue your own wellbeing, you always have less to lose. as the underdog, he may not be as overtly powerful as kaiba or yugi, but he can still give himself away, and he’s convinced himself that it’s what he’s supposed to do. jounouchi is still new to this whole friendship thing. after a lifetime of supporting himself by himself, he doesn't know when he's allowed to ask for help yet—he’s supposed to be the help, dammit.

a key distinction between jounouchi and kaiba’s upbringings is that while kaiba’s biological parents died in an accident, jounouchi’s parents are still alive and they choose not to be responsible for him. jounouchi is conditioned to fend for himself by himself because having a parental figure actually present in his life isn’t a luxury he gets to have. to jounouchi, there has to be a reason why his mother only takes shizuka and never goes back for him in the six years he’s left with his father, and he rationalizes this with his notions of masculinity: he’s a strong man who can handle it. jounouchi is not delicate, he can endure it. men are responsible for their own circumstances. kaiba is hyperindependent out of a mixture of spite, paranoia, and self-defense. jounouchi is hyperindependent because he believes he deserves it. it’s the reason why he believes he’ll finally have a good relationship with his father if he just wins enough money to pay off his gambling debts—jounouchi can fix everything if only he were man enough to, and he can get people to stay if he demonstrates himself useful enough.

so death doesn’t carry nearly as much weight to jounouchi as it does to kaiba. in kaiba’s eyes, death is the punishment for failure, but to jounouchi, death is just the natural consequence for the kind of life he leads. he can't stop himself from fighting for the people he loves until he’s spent everything and forced to stop (read: dies), so during the several times jounouchi is confronted with his own death, he meets it with a solemn acceptance. like, yeah, it sucks, but he doesn’t regret the actions he took to end up here—he’d do it all over again, frankly. it’s better to die than not give everything he can, and at least he was able to give his life in service to someone else. it’s not necessarily good to die, but it doesn’t matter as much if he does.

so where kaiba is afraid of losing, jounouchi is afraid of outliving his usefulness (and being abandoned as a result), and kaiba disrupts jounouchi’s worldview specifically because he puts his ideology on the defensive. to jounouchi, kaiba’s presence never demands a question of “what can you do for me?” (nothing, kaiba doesn’t want jounouchi to do anything for him, and frankly, he’d be insulted if jounouchi even tried) but “what makes you worthy of standing on the same level as me?”, and jounouchi can’t sacrificial lamb get set on fire die a billion times into getting kaiba into seeing it his way (rather, that would only prove him right: kaiba would love nothing more than for jounouchi to lose the ability to fight and finally align with his preconceived notions of how the world works), and he can’t argue that his value is in how much he provides for others because that’s a non-answer. kaiba doesn’t care.

kaiba’s presence forces jounouchi into a position of self-reflection: jounouchi works so hard to preserve the friendships he’s created, but who is he—what does he value about himself in the absence of it? jounouchi needs to acknowledge something inherently valuable about himself if he wants to counter kaiba in any meaningful way, and it’s not like he doesn’t have valuable qualities either: he’s tenacious, he’s resourceful, he’s a quick learner—it takes intelligence to rank as high as he does in tournaments, but he undervalues all of it. these traits are all to be expected, they don’t actually count as extraordinary when it’s him. they’re only remarkable when they’re being applied to something greater. jounouchi believes he has the potential to become strong (and valuable by extension), only with the stipulation that he’s never actually there yet. he focuses too much on his inadequacies, constantly pontificating on how he needs to become a “true duelist”, but by the way he speaks about the title, the only way to be a true duelist is be named yugi muto, i guess.

so it’s very jounouchi-esque for him to miss this point with near deliberate precision and try to make himself useful to kaiba anyway. while kaiba is bent on seeing jounouchi fail to prove that his cynicism is superior to jounouchi’s altruism, the inverse is that jounouchi sees his old self in kaiba and he’s dying to teach kaiba a lesson. during battle for bronze, jounouchi states that they used to be the same, people who only relied on themselves and thought they’d be fine living like that. the argument jounouchi makes is that living that way is fucking miserable. he calls kaiba out: you’re supposed to be having fun. why are you playing duel monsters if you’re not having fun? he’s trying to show kaiba that he can be useful and teach kaiba things if kaiba would just let him, but for reasons mentioned in both of their sections, kaiba isn’t interested in being taught anything.

while less malicious in display, it's important to note that jounouchi’s method of trying to teach kaiba doesn't make him the better person here. jounouchi isn’t coming from a place of understanding when he lectures kaiba, he’s coming from a place of misdirected self-flagellation. and from kaiba's perspective, jounouchi is just dispensing unwarranted advice for the sake of his own ego. the most egregious example is when jounouchi picks a fight with kaiba in duelist kingdom, demanding they duel when kaiba is clearly not in the mood, busy with more pressing matters like, i don’t know, trying to rescue his abducted brother? so, okay, maybe a little bit inconsiderate on jounouchi’s part.

they're two ideological extremes: kaiba lashes out at the world while jounouchi gives himself to it, and jounouchi will keep barging in on kaiba with his life lessons because it’s the only way he wants to engage with kaiba’s arguments otherwise. jounouchi interprets kaiba’s rejection of his ideals as the equivalent of the stubbornness jounouchi had before befriending yugi, and he uses it as a reason to keep pushing, not understanding that while he may have found the most honorable path for himself, you can imagine how constantly burning yourself for others isn’t very…appealing. or sustainable. and that maybe it’s something you need to work on, actually.

⠀

conclusion: how i WIN

what’s fun about jounouchi and kaiba is how wrong they are. they genuinely can't live the way the other demands them to, their respective environments won’t allow it. if jounouchi chased victory with the same cutthroat relentlessness as kaiba, he probably never would have left his gang. or, at least, he’d lose the selfless devotion and consideration he has for others, traits that helped him build his support system, and he never would have found the friendships he values in his life—his willingness to change and start again was how he was able to befriend yugi to begin with. (and if you wanted to get really extreme with hypotheticals, his self-destructive tendencies could have grown so severe in the absence of a support system that he probably would wind up getting himself killed somewhere. lol.) inversely, if kaiba granted himself the freedom to worry less about the outcome as long as he enjoyed himself, he’d put mokuba’s safety at constant risk. kaiba’s guarded nature isn’t without reason, there are powerful corporate executives who would love to see him fail, and there are very real consequences if kaiba slips up for even a second and gives his opposition any leeway. the way they live works for them because it’s theirs. it’s not so much that either of their lifestyles are in dire need of correction, but that the other represents the possibility that they could be living better.

and this is fantastic because it means that, despite what they think, neither of them are in the “wrong” and must learn to change their idiot ways or that the solution is to strong-arm each other into some kind of compromise. it’s a battle of perceived weakness. they need to, naturally and individually, accept that the traits they’ve always deemed immature and beneath them can be just as vital for survival, even when it’s not necessarily their own.

jounouchi and kaiba are essentially the most extreme example of two people who want what’s best for each other (gone wrong!) and puppyshipping is appealing because them getting together requires that they stop punishing themselves for who they used to be. they expect too much out of themselves and then inflict those demands onto each other, but if they’re not wrong for the ways they’ve overcome the circumstances they were left in, then it’s equally true that the ideals they abandoned to survive weren’t inherently naïve just because they weren’t given the space to utilize them. sometimes life will push you to your limits in the hope that you fail, and there’s no deeper meaning to it. it’s not life’s way of teaching you a necessary lesson to make you stronger or a test to see if you deserve to live, or that it’s your fault when it breaks you. sometimes there’s no great meaning to suffering. things happen, and you will adjust to it in order to live. when kaiba and jounouchi believe they know each other as much as they know themselves, pairing them is the hope that they’ll respect themselves enough to respect each other, that they’ll one day be able to embrace the parts of themselves they’re the most ashamed of.

(or, you know, for the alternative crowd, they most definitely can make each other worse.)

for two men who claim to be so self-assured in their own lifestyles, jounouchi and kaiba are fascinating because there’s so many layers of denial at play: the denial that they see anything in each other, denial that there may be aspects of the other that they’ve come to envy, denial that they even care, and it's so tempting to imagine if all of it was forced open. jounouchi and kaiba choose to maintain this delicate equilibrium where they never actually confront anything because the idea of admitting vulnerability viscerally disgusts them, and it begs what would happen if the balance irrevocably tipped for once. watching them is like watching a pencil teetering on the edge of a desk, always this close to some kind of breakthrough. i won’t even lie to you puppyshipping pisses me off half the time because i just want to shake them around until something metaphorically breaks.

kaiba and jounouchi never let each other become complacent in their pasts: whenever their personal tragedies and childhoods are brought up in the context of one another, it’s never because they are being vindicated for continuing to dwell in them, but because they are being contested on how much the mindsets they’ve carried over from their pasts should be allowed to determine their futures.

returning to canon, kaijou operates through the language of competition. jounouchi tries to prove himself as a competitor so remarkable that kaiba can no longer deny him, while kaiba already knows he’s remarkable, and that is precisely why acknowledging it pisses him off so much. so they’ll play their game: jounouchi will provoke kaiba into fighting him because he enjoys going up against challenging opponents in the hopes of becoming stronger, whereas kaiba keeps trying to set up situations where jounouchi will lose to the point of letting him die because he wants so badly to believe that losing does equal death and jounouchi’s existence is the most inconvenient counterargument of all. and obviously, jounouchi keeps not dying. and it's endlessly infuriating—almost slapstick at this point, that much to kaiba's frustration, no matter what he does, he can never make jounouchi submit for very long.

jounouchi and kaiba spur each other on to a ridiculous extent: kaiba enjoys pushing jounouchi past the breaking point, whereas jounouchi enjoys getting pushed to his limits to test his own capabilities. whether that’s necessarily a good thing though is…well…hmm. anyways.

their dynamic is the type of messiness only two prideful high schoolers can get up to. maybe it’s just kaiba's repression and jounouchi's recklessness, but there is a fascination with each other that they’re incapable of leaving alone. there’s intimacy in knowing someone so well and fearing that fact, but kaiba and jounouchi never respond to this fear by avoiding it—they’re engaging with it time and time again. they infuriate each other with a passion that never sits still. kaiba and jounouchi seek a validation from their counterpart while simultaneously denying each other from it, and it’s mean, but invigoratingly so.

at some point, it’s not even about wanting validation anymore, but point-blank wanting its keeper by any capacity: wanting a visible reaction to their effort as proof of reciprocation, proof that says “i’ve finally affected you just as much as you affect me.” because kaiba and jounouchi want to leave a mark on each other, they want their counterpart to fully understand how much they’ve affected them, and they want to witness that reaction themselves. it’s no longer this big, nebulous ideological debate with a reflection: the pull between them is made both physical and personal. so, like, not to go the trite route of arguing that two men who can’t stand each other were ~secretly attracted to each other this whole time~, but how else are you supposed to word this?

in some hypothetical universe where they do come together, even the ways they love manage to compliment each other in its own clumsy way. seto kaiba never does anything in moderation: if he hates something he will destroy it, if he loves something he will possess it, and if he is obsessed with something, he will single-mindedly pursue it at the expense of everything else. his repression manifests itself in a passion so pressurized it’s all-consuming against everything it comes to contact with. inversely, katsuya jounouchi loves freely and transparently: showing affection comes as naturally as breathing to him. he embodies the belief that love is not only about the grand gestures, but the day-to-day acts of warmth and casual acknowledgments that it's there. a man who wants to be wanted by someone so badly it aches paired with someone who makes no reservations as to what he's committed to, capable of a love so overwhelmingly insatiable that it is neither fickle nor delicate, and a man who finds the act of trusting others with his affection so unthinkably humiliating that he’s convinced himself it’s something beneath him paired with someone who makes it look infuriatingly easy. they are going to invent a new language to love each other with. i believe in them. i would not write two separate essays titled “here’s how puppyshipping can still win” if i did not believe in them.

ultimately, it feels cheap to build kaiba and jounouchi’s relationship off what life lessons they could "teach" each other reformation-style when they already have a legitimate dynamic in play. they can be good for each other, or they can tear into each other in ways they’d never expect to be capable of. there’s something exhilarating in knowing there’s someone who has that kind of power and wanting to keep them within your reach, a buzzing excitement in knowing someone who can not only withstand you at your worst, but fight back at you with twice as much vigor. sure, there’s potential for growth here, but that’s because there’s potential for literally anything.

kaiba and jounouchi inspire reinvention and self-determination from each other at the best of times and enable each other’s most self-destructive tendencies at their worst. so i think. puppyshipping is the most fun. when you ship them the same way you leave a fork in the microwave to watch it explode. the end.

TL;DR: me x the guy who keeps breaking my worldview and forces me to reevaluate myself every time i see him which i hate so much that i just want him to DIE

#puppyshipping #violetshipping #seto kaiba #joey wheeler #ship analysis #character study #not intended to convince anyone of anything this was a silly project to do on the side for MEEE #also i genuinely dont think any of the points i make are new #in my quest to be as holistic as possible and read every puppyshipping-adjacent meta analysis i could get my hands on #defense essays. criticism. livejournal blogposts #ive found several times that every point i make has already been made before in some kaijou 200k longfic posted in like 2011 #so if this essay is for ANYONE who isnt me.#its for the kaijou fic authors who have put in the work. god's strongest soldiers etc etc #actually. might reblog with an actual afterword citing my favorite ygo analysis i read in prep for this lol #i allude to a few of them in certain sections but i think youd have to be REALLY chronically online to notice #(coughing)#anyways special thanks to the friends who kindly beta read a document titled 'YAOI THESIS FINAL.docx'#fer + voski + cherry + sully + eric + cleo + gabby + chris + clover + vio #dear god i have inflicted this essay onto so many people #i love you.#you have enabled me and now we're all paying the price #yugioh

522 notes · View notes

kickbutts-singsongs · 2 months

Text

Guys

Tenko and Eri are parallels

TENKO AND ERI ARE PARALLELS

TENKO AND ERI ARE PARALLELSSSSSSS

Let’s compare.

Tenko:

Has a (potentially) destructive quirk

Was abused and treated harshly

Killed member(s) of their family with their quirk

Needed a hero (needed saving)

Red eyes

Eri:

Has a (potentially) destructive quirk

Was abused and treated harshly

Killed member(s) of their family with their quirk

Needed a hero (needed saving)

Red eyes

But for all their similarities, what separates them is the people that “saved” them; the first people that showed each of them kindness, did so for two very different reasons.

For Tenko, he was acknowledged and taken in by someone that had ulterior motives, someone that had plans for him and intended to mold him into something that he wasn’t. And this involved utilizing Tenko’s trauma instead of healing it.

The man that “saved” Tenko didn’t see a scared, lost child that needed protection; he saw the perfect model for his future successor; he saw a puppet.

But for Eri, she was brought in by Midoriya and Co., people that genuinely wanted the best for her. They slowly helped her work through her trauma, and helped her with her quirk—and not for their own gain, but to help her learn to safely control it.

The people that saved Eri saw a scared, imprisoned child that needed rescue, and so they rescued her.

If we put Eri in Tenko’s place, in AFO’s hands, I believe that her story would have gone the same as Tenko’s, with Eri being manipulated and turned into a weapon of mass destruction.

But I also believe, from the bottom of my heart, that if Tenko were somehow found by Midoriya—when no one else saw him, and all hope seemed lost—I truly believe that Tenko would’ve healed just as Eri has.

I used to dislike the Overhaul arc. I thought the tone of it didn’t match the rest of the manga (fighting destiny? changing fate? feels a bit more magical), and although I adored Eri, I just couldn’t see her as being much more than a plot device for rewinding things (and of course, the cute factor she brought into every scene was unmatched).

But upon seeing her in the latest chapter (415), this revelation hit me like a ton of bricks, and honestly, I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner; she’s basically the blueprint for Midoriya’s rescue of Shigaraki.

#has anyone already noticed this?#am I just dumb and illiterate?#bnha #mha #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha 415 #mha 415 #midoriya izuku #eri #shigaraki tomura #shimura tenko #my thoughts

87 notes · View notes

viasplat · 1 year

Text

I finally figured out how to get into the Pentiment game files (after downloading five different extractor programmes lol) and decided to look through the glossary page marginalia that I ignored/missed on my first playthrough.

We all know our man Andreas is a cat fan, so it’s no surprise that there are quite a few drawn throughout the game. But there are also these two cats, which aren’t quite in keeping with the style of the others:

It’s a lovely piece of art, just like everything else in the game and now I can access the texture files I’m one step closer to making a sticker set for my laptop lol. But look at it for a bit longer and then tell me they don’t remind you of one of our fave Pentiment couples…

I think @mintymyths has mentioned before that some of the illustrated frogs share a likeness with Andreas — so I like to think that these animal cameos are a recurring artistic feature of his <3

#Just Master Artist Things™️#pentiment #pentiment spoilers #of a sort #You cannot convince me that these aren’t cat versions of Wojslav and Matilda #And if you can convince me then I don’t wanna hear it bc this is the cutest thing #I will admit though that I didn’t look at the marginalia much at all during the game #so maybe everyone has already noticed this lol #((If anyone is looking at that picture and wondering wtf im talking about —#the ears of the grey cat are reminiscent of Matilda’s headdress - and they share the aquiline nose and sharp cheekbones #whilst the lighter cat is round like wojslav and has the same blond wavy hair #But most importantly they r both in love <3 🥺🥹))#sister matilda #brother wojslav #ANYWAY guys it rly did take me so much time to work out how the game files worked lol so if anyone wants to know pls just ask #or happy to extract certain images / icons for people if they have any in mind

198 notes · View notes

desib717 · 1 year

Text

I was watching a reaction to chapter 8 and just noticed this... were they about to say something like "But you're my home"??? CRWBY how dare you???

#idk if anyone else has already pointed this out but it's the first I've noticed it #RWBY #Ruby Rose #RWBY Little

88 notes · View notes

wherevenusholdssomeofficespace · 6 months

Text

When you think about it, the fact that Reginald is a daredevil who isn't easily fazed by anything kind of explains a lot about Ferb and Lawrence. He skateboards, tried to jump a gorge, and can fly a plane. He's really got a lot of tricks up his sleeves, so Ferb having a lot of random skills makes sense too.

Lawrence isn't really phased by anything including his sons making all sorts of implausible things. He spent his childhood letting his younger brother beat him in all sorts of absurd contests, so him having weird skills makes sense too. Especially if he was raised by his father who participated in these hobbies. While I don't think he's "capable" in the same way as Reginald and Ferb, coming across as more of an airhead, he's not unskilled per se. Lawrence may not be as technically savvy as Phineas and Ferb, but he isn't completely hopeless there either, as seen in the things he DOES build or show a capacity to built.

So of while Ferb is of course quite and doesn't emote as clearly as them, he still has the same nonchalant nature. The Fletchers are just fearless, a penchant for learning and mastering various obscure skills, and fun loving. Of course Lawrence wouldn't be fazed by Phineas and Ferb, maybe he didn't do anything quite as wild as a kid, but her probably got into some pretty wild situations.

Of course Phineas is also really hard to faze too, which is part of why he and Ferb are joined at the hip. Though this isn't JUST a Fletcher thing.

Clyde is also a bit eccentric, though he has Phineas's more cheerful, eccentric, obliviousness if that makes sense, and Candace has her grandmother's violent obsessiveness. Both Flynn grandparents are fun loving and passionate who are always up for shenanigans.

Tiana is an adventurer herself, doing all sorts of exciting things. Which makes sense if she grew up with her nature loving parents who enjoy shenanigans. There's thrill seekers on the Flynn and Fletcher sides of the family.

All this said, while Linda is supernaturally oblivious to her sons shenanigans she has her own wild past with being a pop star and a background in astrophysics.

I feel it's also worth mentioning that as an adult, Linda is still expanding her skill set by taking a cooking class and participating in a Jazz group. The parents once went spelunking just because. Lawrence gives lectures in addition to selling antiques. The parents don't do just one thing. So their children's diverse passionate interests match that.

The real question is why Linda would be fazed by her sons inventions but that's a whole other issue.

#this isn't so much the Flynn-Fletchers are all weird #because all of danville is weird #weird used here as a general catch all #but it is easy to see that the traits the kids got from their grandparents #Also every time someone calls Linda the “only neurotypical” in the family I have to disagree #she has like 17 different hobbies she is passionate about #is just as attached to the routine as anyone #she's just better at playing “normal” because she's playing “mom”#where do you think Candace and Phineas got it?#do you really think Linda grew up with parents like that and has a thrill seeking younger sister and isn't at least a little weird #pnf #phineas and ferb #I KNOW I already made a post about the Flynn-Fletchers #but the Flynn-Fletcher's are like THE family #I can't believe I just noticed that both Linda and Lawrence are older siblings #idk what to do with that information but I realize it now

24 notes · View notes