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#which clearly i am also into
aadmelioraa · 2 years
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every woman in her lifetime deserves both a mysterious morally ambiguous frenemies with benefits* situation and a steadfast supportive malewife if she so chooses
*exact benefits may vary
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centaurianthropology · 11 months
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One thing that I think a lot of Disco Elysium meta misses (likely because a lot of it is very clearly written by young Americans writing from an intensely American-centric cultural perspective without even really realizing it) is that one of the singular and central themes of the game is massive-scale generational trauma in a home that is economically collapsing as its resources and people are being drained by an occupation.  People have noted that no one tries to help Harry, despite the fact his mental illness is incredibly obvious to everyone around him.  He tells Kim that he completely lost his memory, and Kim politely asks him to focus on the work.  He tells Gottlieb that he had a heart attack, and Gottlieb tells him that if he’s still alive it couldn’t have been that bad.  That he’ll drop dead sooner or later, but then so does everyone.
And that’s the most important thing: so does everyone.  Look at Martinaise.  Look at the world in which Harry lives.  It is not our own, but it is adjacent to ours.  More specifically, it is clearly adjacent to the states of the Eastern Bloc: overtaken and occupied by a faraway government that clearly doesn’t care about Revachol or its people.  And that is obvious in every tired face, every defeated citizen, everyone trying to eke out a little happiness or meaning in spite of the overwhelming trauma and damage around them.  The buildings are still half-destroyed.  The bullet holes are still in the walls.  The revolution was decades before, but it still feels to the people there like a fresh wound.  The number of men of Harry’s generation who are not alcoholic or otherwise deeply fucked up are very few.  Some, like Kim, hide it better, but the deeper you dig into his history, the more you realize how damaged Kim is.  He’s more than a little trigger happy, and hates that about himself, but he is a product of his environment: Kim’s entire life is seeing people he cared about shot and killed, so his instinct now is to shoot first himself, to protect those few people left who still matter to him.
Harry is not unique in his trauma.  He is a distillation of an entire culture of people who tried to rise up and make something beautiful, and were instead routed and occupied.  He is trapped between the occupation and the people on the ground, along with all the rest of the RCM.  Their authority comes from the occupying government, but it is implied that they were formed out of the remnants of the citizens militia which sprung up from Revachol itself as a way to try to mitigate some of the horrors being committed on its streets.  The Moralintern sure as hell wasn’t going to get their hands dirty, so they happily conscripted (and therefore could better control) this group, who are only recognized in certain places, and whose authority mostly amounts to giving out fines.  The RCM is corrupt, but it is corrupt in the same way its culture is.  Bribes are considered standard with them, not a moral failing, but a necessity, so long as those bribes are correctly logged as ‘donations’.  It’s how the RCM stays afloat, and the rest of Revachol completely understands that.  Everyone would take a bribe if it meant they kept eating.  Everyone would take a little under-the-table money if it meant keeping a roof over their heads.  The officersof the RCM certainly don’t make enough to see a doctor.  They have an in-house lazarus, and if he can’t fix them they just die.  Mental health care?  What mental health care?  Harry doesn’t get it for the same reason no one else does: it doesn’t really seem to exist.  There are no counselors, no psychologists, no psychiatrists.  How would they even start?  If the world is what is broken, if everyone is suffering a similar catastrophic amount, it makes sense that Harry’s trauma would simply get rolled up with all the rest.  Kim asks him to get on with the job because Harry’s suffering is not remarkable in Revachol.  He is one of an entire generation who have an astronomical number of orphans from the revolution, and so many younger people are left more or less orphans as their parents drink themselves into oblivion like Cuno’s father.  So Harry’s truly unique attribute is embodying all that trauma, having it all inside of him, filling him to bursting.
To really engage with the themes of the game, engaging first and foremost with the reality of Revachol is imperative.  Imposing our own reality onto Revachol, particularly if coming from an American perspective (which tend to have the habit of both viewing the world through an American lens and not realizing they’re doing it because they’ve never experienced a different lens), will always feel shallow to me because of this.
All that is to say, I would love to hear some more explicitly European meta about this game, and especially Eastern European meta.  If anyone can point me to some good, juicy essays from that perspective, I would be grateful!
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witherbythesword · 5 days
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if the theory of sam reich being replaced by .. evil wizard dalton reich (and i cant believe i am partaking in this discurse) is true..
i've seen some people asking the question about what those childhood tapes mean. Well i am one of the ancient ones that owned vhs tapes and you know you could replace whats stored on those tapes with overwriting it with new material but it would slowly degrade the quality as the magnetic tape the information is stored on isn't necessarly made to be re-recorded on indefinetly which would also explain the degrading quality of the gamechanger episode.
So my theory is that dalton reich wants to erase sam from history and to do this he is slowly erasing any proof that could hint on sam and dalton being two different people. One thing he appearantly needed to do is overwrite these old vhs tapes of sams childhood.
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uhbasicallyjustmilex · 4 months
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“i believe in the idea that old bits of equipment have songs built into them already, like a ghost in the walls.”
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atopvisenyashill · 5 months
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i was thinking more about characters Performing Gender, but not necessarily Transgressing Gender. I wound up focusing on Ned and Sansa bc I feel like I understand them the most but-
Sansa as a hostage is imo the most obvious (bc it’s so well done) moment of someone clearly Performing Gender but not being transgressive in that performance. Which isn’t to say it’s not a complicated performance; it’s a fine line Sansa walks between weaponizing her gender to protect herself without seeming too fake. She’s trying to placate the Lannisters by playing the perfect, dedicated, air headed betrothed because it’s the only defense she has - if she outwardly rebels, she will be punished in a likely violent and/or sexual way (which isn’t even conjecture - when she says “or maybe he’ll give me yours” Joffrey has her struck with an armored hand). She’s not quite successful in being convincing but that’s because it’s a rather extreme situation; despite no one believing her, she does make herself seem meek and stupid enough that no one suspects she’s plotting to escape with Dontos until she’s well away from KL. The fact that she even has Dontos to confide in is because of Sansa’s relationship with gender! When she saves him, she covers her rebellious slip by playing up Joffrey’s intelligence & his role as King; she reaches for “tools” of her gender AND of ~proper manhood~ to save a life and herself from another beating. Her retreats into the godswood and silence are very much Sansa attempting to recharge from these draining interactions, the same way a knight would need to stop and eat and rest after a fight. She is fighting, constantly, by forcing herself to stay within the narrow confines of a specific type of gender performance as a way of shielding herself from harm.
Ned yelling at Cat is another big one, and I’ve seen the scene referred to as Ned using his patriarchal power to scare Cat, which is a great description. It feels like a Performance because Ned is putting on this terrifying Lord Stark mask in an attempt to get Catelyn to stop asking about Jon (and Lyanna). This is not how he usually acts with those he loves! When Ned is with His People, he is welcoming of questions, curiosity, emotion, even transgressive thought (to a point! the idea that Ned is a feminist because he lets Arya learn to fight is Not accurate but you can’t deny he allows significantly more flexibility wrt gender expression than most of the fathers we meet in this series. the bar is in hell tho). Yet when Cat asks him about Jon’s mother, Ned scares her so well she stops asking & still remembers the moment bitterly over a decade later. And if that snippet we see through Bran’s eyes of Ned praying that Cat will forgive him does come after she asks (like it’s suspected), it’s clear not only that this is a performance he’s putting on & weaponizing against Cat, it’s one he does not like using as a weapon against someone he is close to. After using the power his gender gives him to cause harm, he retreats to the godswood and silence to pray and rest, much like Sansa. A spiritual cleanse, the way a soldier may pray after battle, to reset and reconnect Being A Proper Man to Being A Kind Man.
I think there’s something interesting in that two of the characters most widely defined by how well they adhere to Westerosi gender norms both dislike feeling like they had to weaponize their gender. They are exhausted by the performance, because it’s a performance. This isn’t Sansa getting excited over tourneys, or Ned teaching his sons to fight; it’s toxic masculinity, it’s structural misogyny. It’s something they’re good at, excel at, and connected to something they enjoy but when it’s paired with violence, whether done by Ned or done to Sansa, it crosses over in their minds from an innate part of themselves (The Gender) to a performance necessary due to survival (The Gender Role). And that after these performances, both retreat to nature & god as a way of resting and cleansing from the experience.
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caeslxys · 8 days
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Zephrah actively postpones ruidusborn births. It is believed that the actual number of ruidusborn in exandrian history is much larger than has been officially recorded because the stigma of it was so intense that people lied about it. Alyxian, one of the few recorded ruidusborn heroes of the calamity who received direct blessings from three different prime deities (our very own Changebringer, the Archheart, and the Moonweaver) , has been all but forgotten (read: likely erased) by history.
The Archive of knowledge that revealed the truth of Predathos and Ruidus was never some forgotten thing—it was intentionally hidden by the elites in Vasselheim. And we have no idea how long they have been operating with that knowledge. We have no idea what they have been doing with that knowledge, what silent wars have been waging for years or decades or centuries. But we saw what they were willing to do, in Hearthdell. We saw the violence and suppression they were willing to commit. We saw the pettiness of the exandrian pantheon in the Dawnfather’s response to Deanna’s: “Are you worth saving?”. In the Changebringer’s manipulative change of course in her pleas to FCG. In the Wildmother’s rejection of Opal. In the knowledge we have that Imogen spent so much of her miserable time in Gelvaan begging the gods to aid her to no avail—just for Kord to reach out only to demand that she not let them down.
Liliana’s point that Vasselheim and the other faithful elite of the world will hunt ruidusborn down to negate even the potential of this happening again isn’t new, it isn’t something this solstice and the machinations surrounding it caused, and it isn’t some unsubstantiated, fearful claim—it has been happening.
The vanguard—and Liliana—are unequivocally wrong in their means. But can you really fault them in their desire? Can you really fault the conclusions they have drawn from the experiences they have lived? If you spend your entire life being rejected by the people and the pantheon of your world for means you could not possibly control, would you not seek out someone and somewhere that would accept you? And if you found it, if some being that has been connected with you your whole life welcomed you home and wrapped you in an embrace that felt like your mother’s and says that it is starving; well, aren’t you, too?
There is likely a holy war brewing. At the end of it all, is it truly the sole fault of the people and not the organizations and society that expelled them?
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maggiecheungs · 5 months
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when i say utena is a show with countless different possible interpretations, i don’t just mean it like ‘different people interpret it differently’; i mean it like ‘at any one moment i am interpreting it in about seven different and often mutually exclusive ways, and it deeply enriches my viewing experience’
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thrumugnyr · 6 months
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Lucien making sure Tamlin is extra pretty to woo the human!
(This one is for @taymartiart who requested Lucien braiding Tamlin's hair~)
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aroaessidhe · 7 months
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2023 reads
The Spider And Her Demons
YA Australian urban fantasy/horror
about a Malaysian-Chinese girl who’s half spider-demon, just trying to keep her head down and survive high school
when she accidentally kills and eats a man in front of the most popular girl at school, they strike up a strange friendship and she starts to learn more about herself and the supernatural world
aroacespec/sapphic ish
#The Spider And Her Demons#Sydney Khoo#loveozya#aroaessidhe 2023 reads#you give me a teenage girl with giant hair spider legs who scuttles across her bedroom wall on page 3#and then eats a man and i am already sold.#also aus books are always so familiar compared to US books :)#and yes sexuality stuff is ambiguous but basically: a bunch of discussion on relationship hierachies (ie friendship equally/more important)#themes of feeling unlovable bc you're different and different forms of love#multiple times the MC says she has no interest in dating or relationships and also is touch (and maybe sex) repulsed#- but of course that Also has to do with the whole Being A Monster thing#and it definitely shows some kind of attraction to dior - ie looking at her lips/bare skin; blushing; etc#and ends on sort of hand kiss / 'is this something??' vibes#I asked the author and they said they see them as QPR / platonic soulmates but are not at the point where they would know what to call it#which makes total sense to me!#the part of me who wants more obvious aroace YA wishes it was a little more specific#but also I DO love ambiguity and I think it wouldn't be true to the characters#who are clearly not even ready to start figuring that stuff out.#and also. aroacespec sapphics is like. also something i want#also like. I think it's reductive to assume just because 'looks at lips' is a common allo attraction trope....doesn't necessarily mean#it has to be that. yknow.#anyway. i loved it a lot.#gross spidergirl (affectionate)......#also dior is such an interesting and complex character. like another book could have made her nicer or less fucked up
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pandaspwnz · 3 months
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So I don't think this is actually the case but what if Eliza and Isaac's deaths werent over a petty amount of cash and a robbery gone wrong? What if, instead, Dutch had seen Arthur spending time with them, had perceived him slipping away as a threat: a threat to himself, his gang, his security, his family, afraid of losing his lead enforcer - whether he truly at that point did love him like a son, or not. And in his insecurity or fear or whatever other reason, he finds someone rotten, unrelated to the gang, and he pays them to murder Eliza and her little boy, so no one will ever tempt Arthur away from the flock, and he instead puts all his energy and time into the gang, the only family he has left.
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utilitycaster · 2 months
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I'm still thinking about that post about how female characters and especially wlw and f/f ships are treated in fandoms because I got a reply that I deleted on my post about how all the Nein were big shippers on deck for Beau and Yasha that boiled down to "haha Caleb making a tower so the useless lesbians would admit they liked each other!" and it's like. He made the tower to Beau's orders. She had already asked out Yasha, who in turn had of her own volition written Beau a phenomenal, beautiful letter instead of a poem as recommended by Jester. This is factually incorrect and obnoxiously dismissive of a genuinely great dynamic and attributes all agency to a man. When you say shit like this you sound like you are Chat GPT. No new thoughts no time actually spent analyzing a relationship dynamic just "ooh i see a woman in fiction what is the phrase most associated with this ok done onto the next task".
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I am once again going down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out the ages of the Gallifrey characters
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rotzaprachim · 7 months
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fundamentally the combinations of unhinged anti Arab racism and antisemitism that paint middle eastern people as inherently suspicious and crafty have fused with modern anti intellectualism under a nouveau-faugressive banner to say take the “in conditions of war all journalists are presenting particular sides, compounded by both press and national interests and the confusions of mass violence” (very true) to Therefor I Can Distrust What Every Journalist And Government Reports and go by Analogies to My Personal Experience and Vibes Alone (terrifying)
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thevioletcaptain · 8 months
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if you as a fic reader ever become possessed by the urge to do a popularity bracket with the fics other people wrote and shared for fun and for free, consider:
don't ❤️ 
#just!!!! make a rec list!!!!!!!!!#popularity contests do nothing but drive writers out of fandoms by pitting people against their friends#and invariably result in people being assholes in the comments as if the people who wrote the fic can't see it#like ''oh clearly fic x is better than fic y''#or ''why is fic c even in this poll?''#nobody gains anything by you doing a bracket to see which fic is the ''most popular''#a stat which could be found more easily & less cruelly by simply hitting the sort by bookmarks/kudos button on ao3#anyway ugh. i saw that one of my fics was being pitted against one of my friend's fics in this bracket that's going around#and i have no idea who is ''winning'' because i refuse to look. but either way it's gonna feel bad!!!#because i want my friend to get his flowers so i want him to win!!! but i also would like to know that people like my fic!!!!#so it's just a lose/lose situation even though i generally don't give a shit about numbers#but this turns it into a schoolyard popularity thing#and the emotional response to having people *vote* on if your work is *better or worse* than other fic is hard to ignore#cannot reiterate enough JUST MAKE A REC LIST#or if you absolutely must do a bracket like this do it in a private chat server or something#don't create a public forum for people to pass value judgements where the authors can see it#and feel bad if they get told their fic is ''worse'' than someone elses#but also feel bad if they get told theirs is ''better'' because it came at the cost of telling another author they weren't good enough#ANYWAY i still feel sick with a super sore throat and a headache & am probably extra cranky because of it#(still testing negative thankfully so it's probably just weather/allergen related)#gonna go make some tea and prep the fic updates i want to post today#cass says things#fandom problems#wank adjacent
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ride-a-dromedary · 1 month
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the darkest of nights, in truth, still dazzles.
a halsin fanmix  [listen]
01. Heart of Spring - david arkenstone | 02. Cé Hé Mise Le Ulaingt? / The Two Trees - loreena mckennit | 03. Pussywillows, Cat-tails - gordon lightfoot | 04. Maybe Tomorrow - f&m | 05. Don't Stop Me Now - queen | 06. I Was Born Under a Wand'rin' Star  - bryn terfel  | 07. A Tenuous Bond - derek duke | 08. Closer - nine inch nails | 09.  Into the Darkness - jeremy soule  | 10.  Colorblind - counting crows | 11. Natural Light - ludovico einaudi | 12. Under the Greenwood Tree - royal shakespeare company | 13. The Grove - bear mccreary | 14. Blood Upon the Snow - hozier & bear mccreary | 15. A Quiet Darkness - houses | 16. Spellplague - alderfall | 17. Empty Chairs at Empty Tables - jonathan antoine | 18. Only Everyone Can Judge Me - crywank | 19. Blue Skies - kathryn calder | 20. The Buzzard - old blind dogs | 21. Constant Craving - k.d. lang | 22. The Cave - mumford and sons | 23. Jim Cain - bill callahan | 24. I Won't Back Down - johnny cash | 25. The Ash Grove - laura wright | 26. The Wind - yusuf/cat stevens | 27. To Someone From A Warm Climate (Uiscefhuarithe) - hozier | 28. The Logical Song - supertramp | 29. Tapestry - don mclean | 30. Big Yellow Taxi - joni mitchell | 31. Eat Your Young (Bekon's Choral Version) - hozier | 32. The Flock - david maxxim micic | 33. Changes - david bowie | 34. Ri Na Cruinne - clanaad | 35. The Moments of Happiness - ken page | 36. My Back Pages - the byrds | 37. If This Journey - tom hanford | 38. Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season) - Live - pete seeger
#BG3 Musing#BG3 Fanmix#Halsin BG3#Halsin#Halsin Posting#my fanmix#i give up this is about as done as it will ever be - i've been talking about this enough i need to get it away from me#i could have made at least one or two other playlists with the number of songs i cut from this#there were some things that hurt me to cut but i figured others had them in their playlists so they're out there#(the impossible dream you will always be famous i am so sorry :(()#i had three goals with this 1. make it more of a timeline in that it follows a narrative order (which hopefully is easy enough to follow)#(it makes sense to me about as much as it is ever going to lol)#2. try to avoid using songs that other individuals have used in their playlists (with a handful of exceptions - i highly encourage you also#take a listen to the others around! lots of good stuff and i figured if you were missing it from this one you can find another with it)#(and if i did use one the context might be different#'closer here is being used in a different way than i usually see it - it's putting more emphasis on the 'you can have my isolation' bit use#in context of the matron and patron for example)#and 3. focus as much as possible on non-romance path elements of halsin's character - i.e. again that's a topic that is highly explored#in other fanmixes to great success - this one is about the childhood he references and the adventures and the capture in the underdark#and the shadow curse and the burying of people he loved and the uptaking of the archdruid position and the healing he did#and possibly did not do#and the radicalization he comes into when his goals are met and he's faced with injustices#and the struggle he has of redefining himself and figuring out who he is after all of it#hopefully the 'eras' are clearly defined but hey it's all gravy from here#honestly if there is one song to listen to that encapsulates halsin for me it's tapestry - highly recommend that#anyway i am blabbing - let the lyrics and such talk for themselves jemi please#but if fanmixes aren't your speed have a kinda nice edit i guess#edit: now with bonus song i just had to add after shamefully forgetting it
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mamawasatesttube · 28 days
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heres how t4t timkon can still win.
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