kinda frustrating how so much aspec content (esp stuff published in like mainstream outlets) is literally just made for allos. like it’s always some article that’s just going over aspec 101 terminology and explaining various concepts and words aimed at a clearly allo audience.
i’m not saying those aren’t important because part of the issue aspecs face is how invisibilised we are and yes! it’s super important to raise awareness and let people know we exist! but it’s also kind of frustrating how it feels like 99% of not only our time but also all wider coverage about us is spent explaining our identities and giving ted talks to allos instead of like . discussing aspec issues and identity with any sort of depth or nuance.
Angela Chen (who wrote a book on asexuality) talked about thinking about aro/ace-ness not just as an identity but also a viewpoint or a ‘lens’ to examine issues through which i thought was interesting! like how does aro/ace identity intersect with our ideas of feminism, or of race? how does aromanticism inform our critique of the nuclear family and the institution of marriage?? how does asexuality play into our view of sexual politics? how does lovelessness deconstruct our ideas of ‘humanity’? there is so much to get into and so much ground that has never been covered but we are stuck!! on giving definitions!!
idk i don’t really have a solution here! because i know that on the one hand we need these kinds of articles that give streams of ‘aspec 101’ definitions because any visibility helps, but also i am so tired of having to dumb everything down instead of having actual discussions about aspec identities and what they can tell us. like hopefully we’ll get to a point eventually where we don’t have to do this but i’m still just. kinda tired :/
572 notes
·
View notes
I was writing a much longer post about this, but more concisely, I had a kind of horrifying idea:
Tolkien ultimately attributes the specialness of the House of the Stewards, especially Denethor and Faramir in LOTR, to their indirect descent from Elendil. The founder of their house, Húrin of Emyn Arnen, was a cousin of King Minardil on the Anárioni side, but had no claim himself (most likely the descent was through a woman). So if the weird shit we see with Denethor and Faramir is ultimately coming from Elendil, then it’s possible that Faramir’s frequent dreadful dream-visions of the Akallabêth are not specific to him, but (like the RL dream that inspired them) inherited. Specifically, inherited from Elendil.
Basically, it’s not certain, but possible, that Elendil was so incredibly scarred by the Akallabêth that non-royal descendants thousands of years later are still haunted by the horror of that moment.
189 notes
·
View notes
thinking about. after sally beats that guy to death and shes like I did this. and barry’s like, You didnt do this i did this. I did this. say it, say You did this. but shes still like I did this, I did this. and theyre both right. feeling sick that this is literally the first time barry is actually truthful to her, ever, the first time he’s holding himself accountable for the violence of his presence in her life. the first time. he DID do this. he wants to take all the blame from her, the agency from her. but the contrast is stunning because for sally that truth isnt her last resort, it’s the very first thing she says, she doesnt dodge the blame or lie like barry has done for YEARS, she DID do this, she has to own that, when he never could. honestly, sally feels much worse than she SHOULD about killing a guy in self defense who was only there because of barry’s malignance. like how was any of that her fault. she was being fucking choked on the ground and was going to die otherwise. but no! she refuses! no more lying to herself, no more rewriting her own story, no more!!!!! i did this!!!!!!
173 notes
·
View notes
The state of Ed and Izzy’s relationship is so depressing because Izzy is so used to being passively treated like shit (Ed expecting him to manage all the boring or difficult tasks he doesn’t feel like doing without a single ounce of gratitude) and so sick of it, that he sees being actively treated like shit (Ed force-feeding him his own toe) as not only acceptable but wildly preferable because at least it’s, for the first time in years probably, acknowledgement.
I mean, think about it, in the first conversation we see them have, Ed is facing away from Izzy the entire time. Doesn’t even look at him once. So Izzy’s at the point where ANY attention Ed pays him, however violent, feels like positive attention by default. I don’t think he’d even know how to process being treated with actual respect or compassion anymore.
243 notes
·
View notes
re: the joker post you reblogged, I always wondered personally if people's unwillingness to forgive him compared to other rogues is cuz he reminds people of their abusers (with his relationship with harley) I tend to find fandom is often less forgiving of behaviour that hits closer to home when compared to potentially worse but more abstract stuff. Like a character who hits their wife will get more hate than one who blows up a planet, bc the latter feels more fictional? Just my theory though
(The Joker post in question)
I think you're definitely right about that. Plenty of people hate Joker specifically because of Harley Quinn (or, predating Harley's conception as a character, because of his mutilation of Barbara Gordon in The Killing Joke-- which, though not considered sexual assault by the author Alan Moore, was definitely sexualized in the art by Brian Bolland). And honestly, given the way he's written as an exaggerated parody of an abusive misogynistic boyfriend in Harley's various solo series, it's completely understandable for anyone who reads those comics to want to never see him ever again, because his appearances are not fun to read!
But I think it's also true that people who are mainly fans of other male villains use him to make their own faves look better in comparison. Though it is funny to constantly see posts in character tags that are like "[insert supervillain here] hates Joker and could totally beat him up," because invariably the supervillain has a) been depicted as friendly with Joker in canon, and b) HAVE fought Joker but lost embarrassingly.
55 notes
·
View notes
Unpopular opinion :) about naruto in general or just yamato whatever you want
hmmm thank you for the question....i guess here's one: in "modern"/non ninja AUs, I think Yamato should still be a fairly odd guy who is not really fully socialized to the intricacies of daily life.
ough. edit update 2: tumblr deleted my first update acknowledging that it fucked up my post. dont know why this keeps happening. but it does. anyway
the thing is that around 2020 i started getting into naruto and while trying to avoid certain spoilers i decided to read some non ninja au fics, just because theyre fun and creative and i like seeing how people translate canon material into au material, and i was like. suuuuper blindsided by how often yamato was portrayed (even in some yamato centric fics) as like. the everyman.
and to be fair!! i can definitely understand how they came to this conclusion, because Yamato DOES have a little bit of a manzai routine with naruto, where naruto is the boke and yamato is the tsukkomi! yamato loves to play the straight man!
but the straight man isn't quite the everyman, there's some nuance in there.
the "everyman" is somebody who is meant to be "relatable to anyone," typically their experiences in life have been """average""" in such a way that, when exposed to bizarre circumstances, they will react with an entertaining or empathy-drawing abundance of surprise and often distress.
i feel like a lot of yamato's backstory, specifically being a test tube baby created by konoha's favorite evil mad scientist and then raised and trained by a man known for having children fight to the death in an effort to remove them of their feelings, and then spending the next 10 years of his life exclusively working relatively anonymously in Konoha's black ops, however, kinda disqualifies Yamato from being an everyman? I feel like that's a pretty ah. unique. experience of life. even speaking simply in the terms of batshit ninja origin stories from naruto!
like sure! in an au, you could remove any trace of that from his character. but you could also, in an au, say that Kakashi just got that scar in a shaving accident when he was 22.
i don't know why you'd say that, but like, you could if you thought that losing his eye and all that obito shit didn't matter to his character much. i mean...the world is an oyster.
the straight man in a comedic bit DOES often serve the purpose of the "voice of reason" but, unlike the everyman...there's no prescribed backstory! it's just a comedic role. The only expectation is that they generally maintain composure in the face of Antics, and that they try to correct or give deadpan commentary to the funnyman.
this is part of why i am constantly making jokes about Yamato Deliberately practicing being "normal," honestly. i think it would be a very funny and a really funny crossroads of some of his character traits if...instead of being the straight man by virtue of never having encountered any strangeness in his life, yamato (who we know to be somebody who values preparedness immensely) just...studied for it. is there anything more hilarious than the idea of somebody who studied being normal with the goal of being able to pass as Just Some Average Joe.
Imagine say, a Yamato who was brought up by danzō in some kind of homeschooler's hell blood sports situation, who is now an adult and finds doing his taxes and going grocery shopping and all sorts of very normal and unfun tasks genuinely kind of exciting because of how rewarding he finds it to practice these Normal Skills he has put an insane amount of effort into teaching himself. I find this idea to be just. utterly enrapturing.
but that's a very extreme example of the dichotomy.
anyway. in fics which aren't about that kind of thing, it can be a narrow line to tread, and really all it comes down to is just. putting thought into giving yamato a backstory which draws at least somewhat on a few of his canon backstory details and characterizing his actions with his own logic (which one must then put effort into building), rather than a kind of default "common-sense" logic.
94 notes
·
View notes
Tuvok 1000% thought Harry was gonna come out to him in that episode where Harry literally said “I-I’m in love...and I don’t want to be.” Tuvok’s like oh my god it’s happening? “And who is the object of your affections?”
You know he was shocked when he said “Her name’s-” HER??? Harry HER?? And then the double whammy of it being literally a fictional girl. Harry. Hatsune Miku isn’t real. Ensign Harry Kim Please-
21 notes
·
View notes