Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!
Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.
16K notes
·
View notes
Apparently much-needed reminder that reposting artists' art (by saving the images or screenshotting them and reuploading them yourself) on other platforms without the artists' expressed permission and without credit is theft and an insult to their passion and craft. You are profiting (in views, in attention, in feedback) from someone else's work and ideas, who do not get that feedback for sharing their creation.
If you are an art reposter, you are a thief and I have no respect for you.
4K notes
·
View notes
I was cleaning up some broken links on my old silly Pokemon fansite, the Neglected Pokemon Lovers Unite (NPLU), and I realized that it has now been open for 25 years. TWENTY. FIVE. YEARS. That is an ASTONISHING amount of time for a site to stay open! Even if the last substantial update was like back in 2009 lol. The world around it has changed so much, but I think it's still valuable as a time capsule of a certain time on the internet. I wrote up a new essay about it on the site and did some general clean-up here and there.
Anyway to that end, since so much of the fic and art there is so old, I decided to compare Radic's oldest form to his newest! Radic was always a human boy but I just couldn't draw humans at the time so I made him a furry lol. Eventually I figured it out.
I also thought it'd be a neat challenge to mimic my own style back when it was really wonky and bad. And it was! It was kind of fun actually. I don't have too many shots of Radic from back then (it was hard to get art on the internet in the late 90's-early 00's), but I do have a few - hugging Kitsune, two old kiribans if you want to compare. I had a lot more old shots of Parasects though to reference unsurprisingly, they were very triangular lol. I think I did a pretty good job of matching what my art used to look like. I had a clear see-through Gameboy back in the day if you can't tell what Radic is holding lol.
("Isn't Radic the faceless avatar of your gamer self as depicted in Handplates-" yes, but Pokemon!Radic is the only one that actually became his own character, all the rest are shells)
If you do go poking around the NPLU, please keep in mind that almost everything there is very old and most of the fic and art is pretty bad (and shockingly violent). Plz do not judge me! My younger self was a cringey weeb but she was trying very hard. :<
[patreon]
194 notes
·
View notes
some viktors in czech and polish folk costume and a less specific miscellany from the past few months :-) i have to draw very very small with this pen which feels appropriate for him
[id: two pages of digital drawings done with a fine pixel brush. the first image is a series of coloured drawings of viktor standing in a variety of costumes. common articles across the outfits are puffy white shirts, colourful breeches, embroidered waistcoats, and decorative flowers. in each drawing viktor is smiling and leaning on his cane. the second image is a selection of drawings of viktor standing and sitting in various poses, looking generally cheerful. in one he is sitting next to barbie, who is smiling at him. the text beside it reads ‘Barbie (they are friends)’. end id.]
619 notes
·
View notes
one benefit of the helmet, i imagine, is that nobody can see how scared you are, or how sad, or how lost. the severe and stoic features of the beskar conceal that world-weary little boy sometimes still hiding in the cellar.
726 notes
·
View notes
I keep seeing people suggest Crowley's presentation in 1827 was feminine, and listen—headcanon what you want, I'm not your mom. But the justification is that he's supposedly dressed in feminine, as opposed to masculine, clothing? He isn't. You're just looking at Regency fashion with 21st-century eyes.
Both Aziraphale and Crowley are exemplaries of well-dressed gentlemen of the early 19th century, just in different styles.
On the left, a many-caped greatcoat like the one Aziraphale is wearing; on the right, a coat with puffed sleeves and a narrow waist like the one Crowley is wearing. (Both images seem to originate from Journal des Dames et des Modes, 1811 and 1826, respectively.)
I also saw something about Crowley's fob watch actually being a chatelaine?
Again, I have to disagree. What Crowley's wearing just looks like a watch chain, which both men and women wore. What you can see is the chain and a charm at the end; the watch itself is tucked into a pocket (same as with Aziraphale's).
Watch chain (left; another plate from Journal des Dames et des Modes) vs. chatelaine (right, from here).
While a chatelaine could possibly refer to a decorative watch chain, the chatelaines specifically associated with women are the accessories worn by female heads of household or housekeepers (hence the name) to hold keys and other useful items. They could get quite elaborate. Crowley's doesn't look particularly like a chatelaine more than it looks like a watch chain, to me.
To sum up, there's not really anything I can see about Crowley's fashion choices in 1827 that specifically says "female presenting"; it all fits in with men's fashion of the time. You can headcanon whatever you want! But this particular era isn't one in which Crowley's wardrobe and styling definitively reads as feminine.
Note for a couple people with poor reading comprehension: TERFs are not welcome on this post. Fuck off.
274 notes
·
View notes
one pet peeve of mine in founders-era fanfics is when madara's whole,,,, everything is solved by izuna just being there
like maybe this is just me, but i don't think izuna surviving or even coming around to the idea of a truce with the senju would've been enough to keep madara from the path he ended up on.
izuna wasn't the reason he left - he was definitely part of madara's issues, but he wasn't the why. even if izuna had stuck around, and even if that had been enough to keep the uchiha clan from losing their faith in madara, i think he would've still come to realize konoha wasn't what he'd hoped it would be.
best case scenario, i think izuna's survival might've caused madara to stick around a bit longer, but i don't think it would've lasted. honestly, even then, that might've just made the inevitable break-up between madara and hashirama even more agonizing (particularly for izuna)
it's a fun idea to play around with for sure, but frankly i don't think canon!madara could've ever been 'saved' from that path. certainly not if the hidden village system ended up getting set up in the same way.
95 notes
·
View notes
Guinevere being tied to the pyre for treason and Arthur refusing to assist but hiding in the tower and watching from the windows and realising it's going to be too late so he asks Merlin please, just please, to bring the rain so as to delay the execution just enough for Lancelot to sweep in and save her. Arthur watching his knight saving his wife and them both running away as the rain falls, both unaware that the same king that passed the sentence was so gutted at the thought of their deaths that he broke all of his laws and crushed his own pride and begged for help just to see them safe and sound, if far away, if without him.
102 notes
·
View notes