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#BUT LIKE. I FEEL SO STRONGLY ABOUT BOTH OF THOSE THINGS

ms-demeanor · 21 hours

Note

You posted about adhd and I was hoping to follow up to clarify something. I’ve explained to my partner a million times about how the borderline-hoarding mess of his space is very mentally draining to me, and he understands but we’ve both essentially accepted he won’t clean his mess because he can’t because of his adhd. You’re saying he’s actually being a shit head?

This isn't necessarily an issue of him being a shithead, but it also isn't a sustainable situation. It's not good for you and there's a level of clutter that's probably not good for him either.

Large bastard is a lot more clutter-y than I am. The solution we've come to is trying to keep our messes at least isolated from one another; he can have his messes and I can have mine, but he can have those messes in his spaces, not all over the place. Sometimes those messes migrate, and that's when it's important for him to make the effort to rein them in rather than trying and failing to make a daily effort to keep our entire shared space tidy.

I think when you say "we've both essentially accepted he won't clean his mess" what I'm hearing is resignation; you're not happy about this but you don't know what to do so you've thrown up your hands and he feels helpless and unsure of what to do to improve the situation. This is the kind of "it's fine" that isn't really fine.

I think it would be worthwhile for you to each separately think about the mess and talk about it together. Are there areas that YOU *need* to have not-messy? Both for utility and your mental health? Are there areas where you can tolerate more mess than otherwise? Are there areas that are going to be harder for him to keep the mess out of than others? Are there things he doesn't *know* about cleaning up the mess?

I'm obviously a big "communication communication communication" person so I'm going to recommend a lot of talking about stuff, which is probably going to mean a lot of thinking about and interrogating stuff. I'm going to say "talk to him about why the mess bothers you" which means you also have to really articulate to yourself why the mess bothers you (for instance I'm not actually *bothered* by a messy kitchen, but I know it's going to reflect badly on us - and me specifically b/c of presumed gender roles - if someone pops by and the kitchen is a disaster, AND a messy kitchen is going to be harder to use). Genuinely, sometimes knowing *why* something is a problem might make it easier for someone with ADHD to do something. And it's not that he doesn't care that it upsets you, it's just that "Oh if I don't wash my breakfast dishes Anon won't have clear counterspace to make lunch" might be stickier in his brain (and less hard to look at emotionally) than "this thing I forget to do upsets my partner so I should do it."

For the record, I think that people with ADHD should read up on Demand Avoidance and see if it might explain some of the issues that they have in their day-to-day life; I've seen some really unfortunate situations with friends where trying to do things that their partner needed became the subject of demand avoidance. *I* have experienced negative outcomes of demand avoidance. The solution to that, however, isn't to stop making attempts to do the thing OR to simply try harder to do as they're asked/told (which reinforces the demand), it's to work on setting up a situation where the partners' needs are not interpreted as a demand. This is fuck-off difficult and requires a lot of patience and care and many attempts to succeed and will be different for each person and relationship.

(Also for the record demand avoidance isn't *super* strongly linked to ADHD and it's not a definitive symptom; like Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, it is something that occurs in some number of people with ADHD and can be a useful lens through which to examine various behaviors; you don't need to have DA or RSD to have ADHD, and having DA or RSD also doesn't invalidate your diagnosis; they're symptoms. For me, DA often feels like "if I don't look at it, it can't get me" - If I ignore all the messages I've got they aren't real and don't have real consequences so I'll just ignore my texts. If I don't look at the vendor email about the order, the problem with the order isn't real and it won't get added to my task list. If I don't look at the requests in my inbox I can't let people down when I don't do them. It's a self-protective coping mechanism but it's *maladaptive* and I can't just ignore the vendor email or all my texts. I need to work on a way of doing the stuff that I'm avoiding in a way that makes it less stressful and doesn't hurt the people relying on me. That takes a lot of effort, personal insight, trial and error, and )

But before I dive into specifics I want to be really really clear about one thing: sometimes people are simply incompatible. Sometimes one person has such a low tolerance for "mess" and the other person has such a high threshold for "mess" that it can't be reconciled. It sucks that this can end up being a thing that people break up over, but it is MUCH better to acknowledge incompatibility as early as possible instead of spending years and years building resentment.

There used to be a great forum called MiL's Anonymous that I spent a lot of time on. It had a lot of people in a lot of difficult situations struggling to get by and hold their relationships together. The question that was used as a litmus test to approach each situation was simple: If you knew today that everything about living with this person would be the same in five years, would you stay?

Because you can't control your partner. You can't control the future. You can only control yourself and your proximity to situations that are harmful to you. If you knew, 100%, that things wouldn't get better in five years, would you be okay with staying in this relationship? If the answer is "no," then that's that. Don't worry about questions of whether or not your boyfriend is a shithead, start the process of ending the relationship because there's a good chance the situation is going to be exactly the same in five years.

If the answer is "yes," and you'd stay in the relationship regardless of whether or not things changed, then it's time to take actions to improve your life within the context of the relationship.

(No judgement on that yes or no, btw. If you would hate living like this for another five years, and you would feel like you'd wasted your time and hadn't done the things you wanted to with your life, get out. Bail. Go. It will be better for you and better for your partner if you split instead of spending half a decade building resentments and and problems that you'll have to spend another half a decade healing from.)

Also, a note: you describe your boyfriend's mess as borderline hoarding - is the issue *mess* or is the issue *clutter*? I have friends who are very tidy, but whose homes are very cluttered. They like things, they have many things, they keep many things around, but their houses are always clean and well-dusted and orderly, just with a tremendous amount of *stuff.* I am addressing all of this as though the issue is mess, not clutter. If your boyfriend's situation is clutter (the space is busy and packed with things but it is functional and clean) and your issue isn't with *mess* (things out of place, things not having a place, things that need to be cleaned up gathering in stacks, falling behind on regular chores like laundry and dishes and taking out the trash) then you definitely need to assess whether or not you are compatible.

For instance here's a room that is messy but not cluttered compared to a room that is cluttered but not messy:

That first room is a *mess* but it would be very easy to clean up in under an hour. The second room is fairly tidy, but would take significant effort to pare down and declutter. BOTH of these can be difficult to live with but the second one is not dangerous or threatening to anyone's health. (The second one is QUITE cluttered and if every room in a house looks like this it can be overwhelming to live with; this is actually harder to deal with in a relationship than the first one in a lot of ways. I don't have a lot of advice for what to do if your partner is a high degree of tidy-but-cluttered because I don't actually think it's a problem or wrong to have thousands of books or bins full of lego or a million kitchen appliances as long as you have the space and can keep it safe and well-maintained; this is a really significant compatibility issue)

Okay, all that out of the way, here's the hard work.

Talk about this shit

Talk to your partner and define "mess." Make sure you are on the same page about what you mean when you're talking about what a messy room looks like versus what a tidy room looks like. Gather reference pictures. DRAW reference pictures.

Explain not just that the mess upsets you, but *why* and *how* it upsets you. In this context don't think of it as your boyfriend's mess, think of it as an unpleasant roommate. Discuss this using "I-statements". "When I have to pick up laundry all over the apartment, I feel like a parent more than a partner." "When there are piles of miniatures all over the table, I feel like I don't have anywhere to do things I'm interested in." "When there are dishes in the sink, I feel frustrated because I have to clean before I can feed myself."

Discuss, frankly and openly, whether he knows how to clean. I'm not trying to make excuses for him here but a lot of people with ADHD have a lot of stress and avoidance around cleaning because they spent a lot of time getting yelled at for not knowing how to clean properly.

Discuss your needs, be firm about what you require but willing to compromise. You *need* some spaces to be clean, and some spaces may be harder for him to keep clean than others. It may be MUCH harder for him to keep a bedroom tidy than it is to keep a kitchen tidy; if you need a clean and empty bedroom with everything put away and he simply cannot do that, that is a compatibility issue. But perhaps you need *your* side of the bedroom to be very orderly and can tolerate a moderate level of mess and clutter on his side. Maybe you're really really bothered by a messy kitchen, but it doesn't bug you if the dining table is covered with projects and papers. Figure out something more workable than "his mess goes everywhere and i live with it because he's incapable of cleaning" because he probably is not incapable of cleaning and you deserve to have places in your home that are comfortable for you.

Reduce friction for cleaning

Sometimes the problem isn't cleaning, the problem is the many many steps before cleaning, or not knowing where something should go when you are done cleaning. One of the absolute best things I've done for myself for cleaning my space is getting a broom holder and mounting the broom to the wall. Sweeping is now essentially thoughtless. I don't have to find the broom or pull it out from a pile of fans or go scrounging around for a dustpan it's right there on the wall, frictionless. So here are some ways to reduce the barriers to cleaning:

Make sure you and your partner both know how to use your cleaning supplies and know where those supplies are. When I switched dishwasher soap I had to re-show Large Bastard where I was storing it and how it was used, because to him what happened was the dishwasher tabs just vanished one day and he didn't know what I was putting in the machine or the process I used. He sometimes puts tools away in places that I can't see (he's more than a foot taller than me) so sometimes I can't get started on a maintenance project until he shows me where he put the battery pack for the drill.

Consider making a how-to chart to or having him make a how-to chart to keep someplace accessible so he can reference it while cleaning. Goblin.Tools Magic ToDo is great for this. Basically a lot of the time people with ADHD have trouble knowing what to do from step to step even if they've done something before, so having a step by step guide can make it easier (I have notebooks full of step-by-step guides for everything from paying for my tuition to removing licenses for my customers to weeding my yard)

Remove obstacles; don't keep cleaning chemicals in the garage in a box that's behind a stack of parts, keep them in the room you'll be cleaning. Don't keep the cleaning supplies that you use to clean the bathroom in the kitchen. Sometimes this means buying two bottles of bleach solution and two scrubbers and two sets of cleaning gloves but having fewer steps (fetch the windex, fetch the paper towels, fetch the gloves) is often the key to getting things done (open under-sink cabinet and grab windex, gloves, and paper towels that are there instead of in the kitchen).

This sort of overlaps with the next category, which is:

Create Dump Zones

One thing that I've found that seems very different between people with ADHD cleaning and neurotypical people cleaning is that neurotypical people are good at getting to a point where the cleaning is "done." They have checked off their tasks and they have finished and it is over. There are *SOME* chores that are like this (taking out the trash is a binary state, the trash has been taken out or it has not) and some chores are perpetual (horrid cursed dishes) but I think with people with ADHD, some chores that are binary for neurotypicals are actually perpetual chores. For instance "clean off the counter" is not a one and done for me. "Clean off the counter" may involve a three day reorganization project. "Clean off the counter" does not mean "wipe down the tile and put dishes away" it means assessing whether or not I need to make vegetable stock and bleaching three tea containers and reconsidering whether or not the sharps container should live somewhere else and going through the mail and figuring out what needs to be responded to and taking out the recycling and on and on and on.

We have had company at the house for the last two weeks, so I asked large bastard to clean off the dining room table, which is largely a project zone for him. Cleaning off the dining room table meant putting away his meds (and since he's a transplant patient that involves a 30 gallon rubbermade tote), throwing away some trash, and totally reorganizing his workshop. It also incidentally involved picking up a table from facebook marketplace and moving my plants, which has now involved moving my former plant rack outside (moving buckets, finding and organizing planters and gardening tools) and taking the former table to the thrift store (not done yet) and cleaning the rug that was under the former table. So "either the table is clean, or it isn't" isn't really true for us.

HOWEVER "hang on we can't eat until the table is clear so let's drive to Pico Rivera to get that console table right now" isn't a workable plan, so you create dumpzones as areas of holding between the start and the finish of the chore.

A dump zone can be a laundry basket. It can be a craft bin. It can be a back room or under your bed. It is a place to put things that you are going to deal with later because if you deal with them now it is going to derail the thing you are actually trying to do, which is set the table for dinner.

Dump zones are vital to cleaning with ADHD and I recommend them for day-to-day cleaning as well. The day-to-day dump zones might be more for you than for your boyfriend. For instance, Large Bastard works with bullets and he sheds bullets all over the house. I used to get stressed when I found bullets when I was cleaning because are these work bullets? Are these recreational bullets? Are they in testing? Do they need to be pulled? Do they go in the workshop or the office or the garage or does he need these today so they have to stay on the counter? And the answer now is "that's not my problem naughty bullets go in the jar." Which is perfectly sensible because he gets to say "mystery yarn goes in the bin" and "art supplies go in the bucket."

I feel helpless when cleaning a lot of the time. I'm frustrated and lost and I don't know where stuff goes and everything I pick up spins off into three projects in my head and every step feels like a wall to scale. Dump zones help me with that when there's pressure or a reason for cleaning beyond day to day home maintenance. People are coming over? The bedroom is a dump zone, I'll deal with that later. I'm just cleaning up because I need to? Okay I can find a permanent home for this new dish soap.

AS A VERY IMPORTANT COROLLARY TO THIS:

Active projects do not go in dump zones while you or your partner are cleaning. This may mean designating a project sanctuary area like a corner of the table or one particular chair in your main room where a project can be placed so as not to be disturbed. (if my current crochet project ends up in the yarn bin, that may mean that I don't pick the project up for another three months, it lives on the windowsill behind the couch because that's where it'll get worked on)

Do not put things away for your partner, put them in the dump zone for your partner. Your partner has to be the one to put their own stuff away in a way that works for them. I tend to find that this naturally puts a limit on the time stuff sits in the dump zone, because eventually you'll go "hey where's my thing?" and will put stuff away. If that doesn't happen, it's still generally better to have stuff in a dump zone than all over the home.

Do not decide you know what things go together from your partner's stuff and try to "put like things together." The neurotypical urge to put like things together is the mindkiller(j/k). You do not know which things are "similar" in your partner's organization schema and attempting to organize things on your own is going to end up with all of the things "organized" being functionally lost forever from your partner's perspective. Large Bastard's mom would do this and it was infuriating, she'd say "oh I put all the electronics stuff in one box" and she would mean soldering irons, transistors, ham radios, HDMI cables, and cellphone chargers. We are *still* going through boxes of stuff that she "tidied up" when he was hospitalized in 2020 and 2021.

To prevent the need for quite so many dump zones over time, you can work on setting up landing zones and "homes" for projects and tools.

Landing Zones

Landing zones are places where things go when you come inside from doing various things. Sometimes your landing zone only needs to be a tray for your wallet and keys, sometimes your landing zone needs to be a place to take off muddy boots and put a trowel and gloves down before you shower.

To make an effective landing zone, consider what behaviors you're trying to minimize and whether the people using it are ACTUALLY going to use it. For instance I was tired of the corner of my hearth getting cluttered with random junk so I hung up some hooks and put a shelf and a basket there and it became a really effective landing zone for my bag and keys and the mail, but it was VERY ineffective for Large Bastard because it's by a door that isn't the primary door he uses to enter the house. As a result I always know where my keys and bag are but he has trouble finding his keys and wallet. He tends to enter the house through our bedroom and has an overloaded valet next to the door and that's usually where his wallet ends up. Mounting a shelf to the wall above the valet and putting a basket and a hook on it will be a better place for his stuff to land. It's not that he's not using the first zone because he doesn't know that it's there, or because he doesn't care about lost time when I'm searching for my car keys after he borrows them, he's not using it because it's not by the door he uses. That's all.

I have a landing space for when I come in for gardening that's different than the one when I come in from grocery shopping. I have a landing space for when I walk into the dining room instead of the kitchen when I get home.

Landing spaces prevent stuff from piling up all over the place because they are a limited functional space that should be used frequently. Mail ONLY goes in the landing zone. If you have mystery mail or if you're not sure it's safe to toss, you put it in the landing zone. You can't let the mail get piled up too high or you won't have a space for your keys. You can't let the change in your wallet tray get too deep or your wallet is going to slide off, etc., but you also don't just put change on the coffee table or your nightstand because the landing zone is right there.

Homes for items are just what they sound like. They're the place the item goes. It lives there. My meds live on my nightstand. You would not believe how poorly I did with taking my meds on my vacation because they weren't on my nightstand. A while back large bastard lost one of his sets of sorted meds and we tore the house up looking for them because he couldn't find them in his nightstand, which is where they live. *I* found them in his nightstand because I emptied out the entire top drawer (he had only looked on the top layer) and found them underneath a radio and a hammock. Even though they were *hidden* they were in their home, so they were findable. I recently needed ink for an art class. Art supplies live in a dresser by my desk. Ink lives in the art bin or the top left drawer. The ink was not in either of these places (it was on a cabinet in the dining room behind a teacup) so it took me weeks to find it.

Sometimes the reason that ADHD spaces are so messy is because objects have been assigned homes in places that are visible and if they get moved they get lost. This is a genuinely difficult problem that requires a lot of effort to solve and can involve a lot of trial and error for creating a tidy living space. For some people, open shelving and visible storage might be a good solution. For some people, assigning a VERY clear home and inculcating that location by habit is the only way to clean up a space. For some people one very cluttered corner to at least isolate the chaos does the trick (for me and large bastard open shelving doesn't work because anything in one place for too long becomes invisible; that means that I rely on assigning things homes and large bastard relies on having contained chaos and a general idea of where to search but what that DOES NOT mean is that he is clean or tidy. His spaces look like an explosion. But he can mostly find his stuff and do what he needs to do and as long as that's limited to specific places in shared spaces I can live with it; the dining room table can be a disaster, the kitchen cannot).

People organize things differently. It often takes a while for neurotypical adults to settle into an organizational style that works for them and ADHD adults may need to settle into a new system every few months for it to continue working. The cleanup and declutter is most likely going to be a permanent project that is always going to demand some level of attention from everyone in a shared space, but "my ADHD means I can't do it" is not really going to fly. Maybe his ADHD means that he can't keep his space tidy, but it doesn't mean you can't move stuff from shared spaces into dump zones or that he can't do stuff around the house.

If he's insisting that his ADHD means that he can't clean it is possible that he's not being a shithead, he just feels helpless and doesn't know where to start and has adopted the belief that he's a useless piece of shit who can't even keep a tidy space like a grownup because he's internalized a lot of shitty attitudes (hello, my internal monologue about keeping a clean house). But it's also possible that he's just being a shithead.

It's something that's worthwhile to investigate with him. If he's unwilling to make an attempt, then he's being a shithead.

It is also not your responsibility to rehabilitate another person. If he wants to clean and it's something he feels bad about and needs some help and support with the way that someone might need help or support for learning to use a mobility aid, that is fine but you don't have to be the one who gives him that support if it's detrimental to your health, and you don't have to be the one to teach him that stuff if it's not something you're capable of. And if he is NOT interested in working on making your shared living space more accessible for you, that is not your suitcase to unpack and you just have to ask yourself the question from the start: would I stay with this person if I knew the situation was never going to change?

IDK, I'm sure a lot of this reads like "anon you must take on the emotional labor of training your partner to be an adult" but it's really meant to be more of a way of assessing yourself and your relationship. If you created landing zones do you think he'd use them? Would he get angry if you assigned a laundry basket as a dump zone for his stuff while you tidy the living room? Is living with him long-term going to be comfortable for you if nothing changes? Do you have enough of a shared definition of "mess" that you're at least in the ballpark for what counts as a clean house?

anyway good luck, and a reminder to folks that I'm compiling a bunch of adhd resources and other information on my personal website, ms-demeanor.com. It's coming along slowly but it will eventually include stuff like ADHD cleaning tips and how to tackle a hoard, so maybe keep your eye on that space.

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ladypeonies · 2 days

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"Acting is a dangerous profession."

credit.

Some people will watch this extract and just brush if off perhaps as fanservice and miss the point completely. What I like about Chris and Xuan it’s how candid and honest they are about the whole process.

The host says it all, “acting is a dangerous profession,” and both actors agreed. She’s right. So many fans don’t get it, and they focus on the superficial. It’s not just a dangerous profession in Asia. In my opinion it’s more challenging there because most of entertainment industries in Asia rely a lot on Method acting and immersion. You have notice how they call themselves by their character names, on and off set and it has several purposes. I won’t dwell on them here because this post would be too long.

And you have method acting which I have several issues with. It’s basically psychology. I’m not going to write an essay on it here, it basically means one can convince themselves of anything and you can become anyone you want. It’s becoming someone else entirely for a time, by changing your habits based on your environment. You study a character and become them, by assuming their point of view, mannerism, state of mind etc. If they drink you start drinking, if they love someone you love them too etc. Some actors are strongly against method acting for a reason and stick to use their imagination which is way safer. In a live Xuan talked about how physically and mentally it impacted him.

You are still yourself but you can’t escape your character, their emotions bleeds into you. And you use it to play the best version of them by using your body. Of course, Xuan fell in love with his co-star and had all those “evil” thoughts. He learned to fall in love with him and make him the centre of his universe. The preparation for the role, to build a bond took longer than the whole filming.

So, any actor in their shoes will feel the same, if they say no well, they are either lying or just bad method actors, that’s it, no in between.

The trick is to use those emotions while filming and then to be able to let them go. And that’s the issue, because for many it takes time to do so and get rid of them. Notice how Xuan doesn’t say while they were filming NC scenes he had evil thoughts but he was sitting there, so before or even after. The thing is if you hold on to those emotions it can hurt your mental health. They can be addictive. Under those circumstances sometimes there is a co-pendency which appear between actors. I remember an actor explaining how he basically went through a heartbreak because he got attached to his co-star who was engaged to someone else and he was full of emotions for his on-screen partner. And those emotions weren’t there before they started filming. And they knew each other, they were friends before and he never felt that way about them. And his mind knew they weren’t a good match but he kept longing for them.

I talked here about the bubble actors found themselves in. And the best remedy to get rid of those feelings, thoughts are a healthy distance, and being back to oneself. I hear often, “they’re just acting, it’s their job…” etc. Actors aren’t robot. There is a process to play a role and they all have a process to get out of a particular challenging role. Obviously, all roles aren’t the same.

Another thing: Chris and Xuan are friends and were friends but under the circumstances, they don’t have the same friendship they had before filming, the one from a year or two years ago. Friendship 101 had specific boundaries, and now there are new ones in friendship 201. It’s not possible to know the taste of your friend’s mouth, their skin, and be in the same exact friendship. Actors are not robots there isn’t a reset button. Now there is a new set of boundaries. Perhaps before there wasn’t any skinship now because there are use to each other touch, there is more skinship. Before they wouldn’t talk about certain subject, now they can. I believe they gain and also lost some things. The only possibility MAYBE to go back to friendship 101 would be a complete separation for weeks, reset. But it’s not happening because there are promotions and also, you get use to seeing each other all the time, I guess.

Now method acting and falling in love, it happens of course, but has to go through the test of time and distance.

One has a girlfriend/boyfriend and start method acting with a co-star LOL. 9 out 10 people will break up with their significant other, the GF or BF will leave, it happens all the time.

PS1: I also took the opportunity to answer a couple of asks.

PS2 :Translation by Wava please be kind to your translators and grateful for the work they do, I personally hate translating it can be so taxing.

#unknown the series #unknown bl #chris chiu #kurt huang

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ghostwithpants · 2 days

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Ghost Of A Titan

This is a DPxPJO story idea I’ve been playing around with, I will eventually turn this into an actual fic but until then feel free to continue yourselves!

Anyway. I love me some ghost!dad Clockwork and I thought it would result in some very interesting in dynamics the PJO universe, so go crazy with it! ;)

You can’t just kill Time itself, cut it into tiny bits and cast the remains into Tartarus and not expect that to backfire spectacularly.

So when the Olympian Gods had to do just that, there was two paths for what would happen next:

Option one, with the killing of Time, time itself would stop existing. Which was never anybody’s favourite idea, since that meant that everything else would also become Stopped.

And then there was option two, upon Time’s death and during the fracturing of its soul, Time could refuse to let go. Could refuse so strongly that while the rest of Time lay dead and scattered in the underworld, part of Time’s soul would break away to form a ghost, one of ancient power and with the singleminded goal of keeping the timelines flowing as they should.

Fortunately, Time went with the second option.

The Olympians, forced to yield to this compromise least even they would Stop, allowed Clockwork to exist but enforced harsh restrictions on the new Ghost of Time. Unable to leave his lair in the Infinite Realms, Clockwork was only allowed to watch, to exist, so time may flow as it was meant to and nothing else.

And to guarantee that this was enforced Zeus, in all his infinite wisdom, created the imbecilic Observants to quite literally “keep an eye on him”.

If they weren’t so obnoxious, Clockwork might have found some humour in that. Instead, his new overseers continuous ignorance of what was actually required to keep the timelines flowing made his own job increasingly difficult and frustrating. But for the sake of the timelines, Clockwork made do with what he had, he stayed in his tower, he didn’t interfere with mortals and he only watch to ensure the timelines safety.

But inevitably, timeline threatening events began to happen in the mortal realms and he was still not allowed to interfere, so Clockwork had to get creative about getting other ghosts who stumbled on his lair to fix it for him, without either the gods or their obnoxious little spies noticing.

However you would be surprised how often these sort of events arose and while the Gods were free to meddle how they pleased (and had heroes and demi-gods to meddle on their behalf where they were forbidden) Clockwork was not allowed to even talk to those that didn’t find his lair themselves and choose to enter. Which was making it incredibly difficult to fix these catastrophic incidents.

Clockwork endured this for eons, for time is both different in the Infinite Realms and different for Clockwork himself. He likes to consider himself slow to anger but even he was getting frustrated.

He was also very lonely.

The observants, the wretched things, were constantly looming over his shoulder and, even worse, trying to throw their weight around outside his tower and doing their own meddling in the greater Infinite Realms itself.

Clockwork was definitely reaching his limit, he was-

… he was witnessing a very interesting anomaly.

The creation of a Half-Ghost, the first of its kind. In any stream or realm.

So Clockwork watches with great interest as Plasmius was forged. Watches as a portal was ripped open with Vladimir Masters on the mortal side and a nameless blob ghost on the otherside, the blob ghost was ripped to shreds immediately and forced to bond with Master’s body and soul, stopping the same thing from happing to Vladimir. The resulting creation was crude, haphazard and deeply unstable at first… But it did work.

It worked and the cogs in Clockwork’s mind and core began turning rapidly.

He could see that with a stronger ghost on the otherside, strong enough to not be obliterated and even able to guide the process of the Forging…. He could see exactly where every misshapen mistake could be turned into a symbiotic artwork, how life and death could be balanced on a knifes edge to create a being that could effortlessly walk both worlds.

How he could have the one thing he thought he’d never have since his own making: something that was a part of him, but free from the restrictions he suffered. Someone to share existence with, a Child!

Clockwork was not what the Titan of Time had been, he had never had the opportunity to create anything that could even be remotely similar to a familiar bond. The Ghost of Time wanted that nearly more then his own Obsession.

And when he saw there would be another, a boy, who would go through the same process but would be obliterated because there was no ghost on the otherside to power the Forging.

He couldn’t resist.

Clockwork didn’t need to be able see into all of time to know he wouldn’t be able to keep this a secret for very long. But if he was oh so careful, there was a small chance that the boy, Daniel, would have enough time to develop and maybe survive the Godly fallout that would follow Clockwork’s actions.

There was an even slimmer chance that Daniel would thrive and be happy. Be grateful that Clockwork saved him.

There were a lot of other, much worse, chances however. Filled with so much pain and suffering and death.

But still the Ghost of Time couldn’t resist that slim chance of happiness. Drawn like a moth to a flame, Clockwork slipped from his tower and slid through time and space to arrive, just in time, to be that oh so necessary ghost on the otherside of his new son’s Forging.

#danny phantom #percy jackson #dpxpjo #phandom #ghost!dad clockwork au #clockwork was Kronos before he was cut to ribbons #danny has no clue this happened or that clockwork is his ‘ghost dad’#ghost writes things

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isan0rt · 6 hours

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@lightandfellowship re: your tags on this post (just to kind of bring this out to a different post).

I was thinking about making a separate post to expand on those tags anyway because they were a little off topic to the op, but I was like, you know, it's that Xehanort was worse to the Dandelions than Luxu was, yes. But Luxu was supposed to be that callous to the Dandelions in the first place. He was supposed to think of them as tools and to just let whatever fucked up thing was supposed to happen to them just happen. And with anyone else he can, but he can't put his personal feelings aside enough to 'do what needs to be done' for this set of people alone.

But Xehanort can.

And I think that's really interesting when looking at Xehanort as the 'replacement Luxu.' Xehanort who, as observed by another post I don't have immediately to hand, speaks with MoM twice. Xehanort who is chosen by MoM and manipulated into doing his bidding the same way Luxu was, given the same coat and made the heir to Luxu's keyblade, Xehanort who actually is allowed to take action to bring the Keyblade War about and revive the Lost Masters while Luxu is only allowed to watch.

Actually I started this post with a different thesis ('Xehanort is able to put his personal feelings aside and be ruthless even where Luxu fails to follow his role') but writing that paragraph I've changed my mind actually. Because Luxu has basically no agency in this situation, whereas Xehanort does.

Like, both of them are assigned roles by their mentors but Xehanort isn't really given a road map about how to fulfill his role. He's being manipulated, sure, but he's also making choices himself all along. They're choices that are fucked up but he understands they're fucked up and is choosing them anyway because he strongly feels it's necessary for the greater good.

Luxu has been told these things are necessary for the greater good. He's been told what to do. He's been told to just watch and that he can never take action. He doesn't even have the illusion of agency that Xehanort, who is actively choosing to lean into his feeling that destiny is inevitable, does. What is that like, to live hundreds of years never having any sense of agency? For Luxu, helping the Dandelions is fucking up. It's doing what he knows he's not supposed to, what he's been told is against the Plan, but he has no agency and this is his little way of rebelling, even if this is, to us, the 'right' thing to do. There's a question of what actually is 'right' and 'wrong' here and whether Xehanort is a 'better Luxu' than Luxu for choosing to simply follow The Plan.

Also I'm rambling here but putting things together as I go, sorry to also expand on other tags on posts I reblogged from you lol, but like. Luxu also very clearly has Lucifer stuff going on, the same way Xehanort does, down to the name. Xehanort takes on the Satan imagery over time - but it was Luxu's first. And Luxu is the one who actually tried to rebel against his Creator by deviating from his role (only to watch) and intervening with the Union leaders.

The thing about angels is they are not, in Catholic traditions (I can't speak to other denominations) is that they are not supposed to have free will. Free will is for humans; angels only follow The Plan, with no agency or say in the matter. They're messengers and avatars created only to execute the will of God. The Foretellers seem to play this role, if you will, in relation to Master of Masters. He hands them roles to execute the plan he's already designed. If we're, in this analogy, considering Master of Masters to be in the role of 'god', both Ava and Luxu are ultimately fallen angels - they both question the will of their creator, both rebel - but Luxu rebelling was built into the plan. He is Lucifer, and Lucifer rebels, and so he was still allowed to come back to the fold at the end of kh3, having fulfilled his duty even considering his rebellion. He still had no agency in the end, even having done what he thought was exercising it by saving the Union leaders.

Anyway I'm just rambling on at this point and don't really have a conclusion to this but the whole interplay between Luxu and Xehanort, agency and servitude, angels and devils, light and dark, feels really compelling to me.

#not to be getting theological on main here either but also to do that #I have more than a decade of intense religious education and even though i no longer do organized religion like #it's a topic that kh seems to have a lot of themes kh engages with #Luxu #Xehanort

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spiritstein · 2 days

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spirit albarn has histrionic personality disorder, change my mind

i often see people ask what the hell is wrong with spirit, which is a great question. that guy's got issues. here's my take on explaining some of them!

notes: i have HPD myself so some of the evidence/examples i'll give will have personal anecdotes (although i've avoided projecting to the best of my ability for this post.) this is based mostly off the anime, as i have not finished the manga.

full post under the cut as it's ended up both very long and image heavy

one of the major traits of HPD is dramatic and exaggerated behavior/expression of emotion, which spirit displays nearly every time he's on screen. (typically in regards to either maka or his past and potential future romantic pursuits, we'll get to that later.)

this is typically played for comedy, but i don't think that discounts it as evidence at all-- kid's OCD is often used for jokes but that doesn't mean he doesn't have it.

these outbursts often involve very sudden shifts in his demeanor, and almost feel like an internal switch is being flipped on or off. this can make how he acts seem shallow at times, which is also characteristic of HPD. (emphasis on seem-- i do believe he's expressing his true emotions to the extent he feels them. the exaggerated self-expression of individuals with HPD is often tied to feeling those emotions far more intensely than the average person, at least for me.)

note how quickly he returns to a "resting" or "default" expression in the second gif here. he's kind of got a resting bitch face, honestly.

another defining trait of HPD is excessive flirtatious and sexual behavior, regardless of the person's attraction to whoever they're making advances on. i'll be using manga screenshots here since dialogue is important, but this is the symptom spirit shows most obviously by a long shot.

(not pictured: many, many more examples of this...)

he tends to flirt or otherwise get involved with women regardless of if the situation calls for it, and often to the detriment of his relationship with others.

the most blatant example of this detriment is his divorce with maka's mother and maka's subsequent dislike of him. no images provided since i presume you're familiar with that if you've gotten this far.

notably, he appears to feel guilty about this trait, yet does not or cannot curb it. one could easily read this as spirit needing the attention and approval from these women. excessive desire for these things (along with a more general need to feel liked or loved) is a major driving force behind other HPD-influenced behaviors and is a symptom in and of itself. while there is no concrete evidence behind this explanation for his provocative behavior, there is one person we know he desperately seeks approval from-- maka.

while nearly any parent would want for their child to love them, spirit wants for maka to merely pay any attention to him to a degree far beyond average.

in all of these examples, he's upset by her not even acknowledging him (or the thought of it) as opposed to hating him. the thought of her loving or admiring him appears to be a far-off fantasy to spirit, to the point of barely being able to handle it when she interacts with him positively:

...to the point of vomiting after this, which i won't show because that's gross.

maka is by far the person spirit's most shown to value the attention and approval of, but he still likely seeks it from others in more subtle ways. inversely, he reacts very strongly to both perceived and actual rejection, which is another HPD symptom. he assumes the worst when lord death calls for a meeting of all the death scythes, and is shocked when he finds out he assumed wrong.

people with HPD also tend to be gullible and easily influenced, which is most obvious in spirit's interactions with stein. he allegedly didn't catch on to the fact that stein was experimenting on him until his ex-wife pointed it out, as well many examples of stein just sort of fucking with him over the course of the series.

this could also just be that spirit's a dumbass, so take this part with a grain of salt.

that's everything that i can directly tie to HPD symptoms, but i'd also like to note that alcoholism is common in histrionics and they're at higher risk of divorce. as well as these manga screenshots of spirit being Just Like Me Fr as someone with HPD that i couldn't find anywhere else to put.

i hope this wasn't too clunky of a read and possibly gave the 5 spirit fans something to consider in their characterization of him! thank you for your time ^_^

#soul eater #spirit albarn #death scythe #how the hell else do i tag this??#se

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stuck-in-the-ghost-zone · 10 months

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what kind of cratures do you think the trigun gang would be?

CREATURES IN GENERAL OR SEA CREATURES. BECAUSE MY FRIEND MONTY N I WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT TRIGUN FURSONAS THE OTHER DAY. but i am the sea creature guy at heart so im gonns give u those i hope that is ok 😌 there are many benefits to being a marine biologist.

Vash: he is... so very shark coded to me. everyone looks at him and sees a dangerous killing machine. frequently covered in scars. do u see the connection here. he is specifically a thresher shark to me because of the whole sharpshooter thing and also the sad sad puppydog eyes 💙

Wolfwood: i am torn between two different types of eels for him. giant morays are more aesthetically pleasing but personally i have to go with a wolf eel both for the name and because ive worked with these guys before and theyre sooooo cool so im biased

Meryl: not technically a sea creature because she is just so bird coded to me. White-Tailed Tropicbird

Milly: is it cheating to have two cephalopods on this list. because i think i really want to say giant pacific octopus for milly. either that or a whale shark 💙 yes those are two completely different animals no i will not be taking criticism at this time

bonus Knives because i love him and i feel the most strongly about this one:

BOBTAIL SQUID.

... and also a bristle worm . for what i hope are obvious reasons

#NORMALLY THOUGH meryl is an egyptian plover #shes sooooo so very much an egyptian plover. hold on i made a post about that the other day ill reblog it again for u :] hehe #i worked at an aquarium last year and every time we would pull a bristleworm out of one of our tanks id be like ohhh my god its knives.....#i love every opportunity to push my sea creature knives agenda. hes so sea creature to me. hes so marine biologist to me.#OH MY GOD ALSO LIVIO. LIVIO IS A GOLIATH GROUPER TO ME . <3 #side note also . have you ever seen that picture of a hermit crab using a human skull as a shell #(<< the image is fake its photoshopped BUT)#thats legato. to me. except with a blueleg hermit crab. he is a blue leg hermit crab with a human skull for a shell #which is bullshit because i dont think legato deserves something that cool but alas it is unfortunately perfect for him #(<< this is /j i think legato is a cool and interesting character #i just think he has a punchable face and like 2 pretend i hate his guts cause its funny)#HI !!!! THANK U FOR GIVI G ME AN EXCUSE TO TALK ABT SEA CREATURES ILY <3333 #asks #madnessmadness #sorry if u meant like... actual land creatures. unfortunately i am the fish guy forever <3 #YES I REALIZE VASH AND KNIVES ARE TWO TOTALLY DIFFERENT CREATURES AND THAT MAKES NO SENSE BC THEYRE TWINS #BUT LIKE. I FEEL SO STRONGLY ABOUT BOTH OF THOSE THINGS #i could be persuaded to make knives a shark if needed bc there are so many cool shark species i could assign to him #but like. hes just soooo bobtail squid coded to me ive been saying that since i first saw his fuckin. snuggie in tristamp

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astriiformes · 1 year

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I know it's very likely to end up romantic in the show but like I am choosing to see Huntlow as Queerplatonic until otherwise stated because it's just so sweet

I'm going to tell you fun little a secret anon: You can see it as queerplatonic no matter what! There's no rules against it!

Like perhaps this is something we lost the plot on a bit in back in the aspec discourse mines of 2015-2018, but there's nothing wrong with preferring a duo as queerplatonic instead of romantic -- they're both meaningful types of relationships that, depending on the people involved, can look incredibly similar. I'm a little baffled by the fact that so many people talk like you can only think that up until a point.

People ship non-canon ships, I don't see why we're not allowed to do the opposite and say we like it when two characters that appear to be a couple are actually into each other queerplatonically. Especially with characters where the shoe really seems to fit. I know I happen to like queerplatonic Willow and Hunter because the two of them remind me so much of my and my qpp (Which is one reason I'm not a fan of how a lot of shippers tend to talk about them -- it's fine to prefer it as a romantic relationship, but looking at their interactions and saying the "only" explanation is romance or there's no way the two of them stay "just friends" makes me feel pretty uncomfy, seeing as Willow and Hunter don't really act any differently than she and I do with each other)

Anyways, that's just my two cents, but I really do hope more folks take it to heart. I've seen a lot of people saying they would like to interpret them as aspec or in a queerplatonic relationship but feel like they won't be able to anymore if the show does certain things, to which I say: Be free! Queer headcanons are tethered to our wants and desires, not some specter of what we're "allowed" to do. Queerplatonic partnerships are not obligated to exist only until eclipsed by romantic desire! We are allowed to steal them back!

I know I've got at least one aspec Hunter fic idea I intend to write sometime after TOH ends regardless of how things play out in the show (and possibly even influenced by them), as does my qpp if her curse allows, and I hope other folks who like aspec/queerplatonic Willow and Hunter as a dynamic will join us.

Queerplatonic-ing ships is good for the soul! Don't settle for having dynamics that bring you joy stolen from you! People like us are allowed to take up space and tell stories too!

#i hope this doesn't come across as patronizing i just feel very strongly about it #sending love to my comrades fighting the good fight #i met one of my best internet friends because we both had STRONG feelings about queerplatonic luke/mara in like 2014 #and we were so right #anyways folks who queerplatonic ships are cool; folks who ship those ships but just let us do our thing in peace are cool #we can in fact all be cool to each other. in fact i encourage it #f: us weirdos have to stick together

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prettyboysdontlookatexplosions · 2 years

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(re: language, & i have thought about this some and i think that is important to include people who aren't women who are directly impacted by restrictions on abortion access, but i also think that anti-choice rhetoric & activism is driven by misogyny, so it is also important to me to consistently name women as a group when abortion specifically is being discussed. and i think obviously you can't separate misogyny from a lot of other things, but i also think something is lost when you lose the ability to name misogyny in contexts where it's central or relevant, which i feel like i have seen happen not infrequently. i have thought about specifying "cis women" but if the issue is that not all women can get pregnant and therefore not all women have the potential to require access to abortion, that's true even if you are talking specifically about cis women, and it would feel strange to be like, "cis women without infertility issues who are between menarche and menopause." in mulling that over i landed on something like: i think that ultimately any manifestation of misogyny is relevant to all women, even if for whatever particular circumstances of their lives specific individual women may not ever have to deal with that. i don't have to deal with tabloids dissecting my perceived physical flaws because i am not a celebrity, but i do have to deal with being a woman in a culture where women's bodies are considered acceptable sites of public commentary and beauty is considered an obligation women owe the public. similarly, a woman who can't get pregnant, whether it's because she's trans or because she had uterine cancer, technically doesn't have her life impacted by a lack of access to abortion, but she is still impacted by the underlying ideology of restrictions on abortion access, which is that women's lives are not inherently valuable and women cannot be trusted to make decisions about their own bodies or reproductive futures. hence, "women & others who can get pregnant" is where i have landed for my own use in this and similar contexts, for now at least.)

#i don't... like i feel pretty solid about my choice here but i don't like #feel particularly strongly about other people's decisions #& i think that maybe i think it's kinda good that right now pro-choice sentiment sometimes reads 'women' and sometimes reads 'people'?#idk. i'm ok with having both out there.#and... hm. and i guess also feel like... aggressively being against either one of those... would be a red flag for me personally lol.#but. language is a living thing! & when it comes to linguistic options that are kind of in flux #i think it's really worth it for people to document their own rationales #not necessarily to convince anyone or argue #but to give glimpses of the ways that people can think about things #(martha biondi at the head of her book that i read i cannot remember #gave a little blurb about why she capitalized black but not white #which did make more sense to me than any other explanation i had seen #but also just seeing it was very influential on me. i was like. oh yeah everyone should do that all the time)#so. here's where my thinking currently stands.

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regallibellbright · 1 year

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Fun fact about me: I have several years of training in literary analysis in particular.

Other fun fact about me: I also write creatively.

Third fun fact about me: I am very autistic.

Fun conclusion about me synthesizing these three details: I have studied a lot about what makes a story tick mechanically, and so I can in fact occasionally go on an absolute RANT, with very little prompting, about stories in video games and why certain ones do or don’t work, at least in my opinion. This is fun for me. Genuinely. If I ever DO get around to writing that thematic analysis of the Ace Attorney games formatted like a goddamned academic thesis, it will be because I had the free time and the motivation finally aligned to spend a month or two doing something like this, and I will be happy for it. I genuinely do want to, just. Time, energy, million other projects in my brain.

... In other news, my local gaming discord was talking about Mass Effect earlier.

#tag rant #and it turns out every time I think 'oh I've hit the bottom of why this doesn't work for me' I get another 'and one MORE thing!'#and how thematically and mechanically this can make the ending so thoroughly hard of a sell #but basically the short version is that they could keep the ending as is or they could make a golden ending for rannoch #but they couldn't actually do both and still make it work. like. pretty much period. for that ending to work you can't do it #golden rannoch in particular just SO THOROUGHLY refutes the ending's central argument #and none of the endings actually challenge that argument enough to match up to the fact that your actions have.#not with the amount of work you put into ACHIEVING the golden ending for Rannoch. not in an interactive medium #if all that work still ends in 'nope. sorry. you have to choose' then yeah THEN I'd buy the central premise a bit more!#I'd still find it a thematically inconsistent premise on some routes but whatever you've supported your thesis with evidence #... yeah anyway that's the SHORT version #you have no idea how many tags I cut for this #fun fact I am not even all that invested in Mass Effect. I never played them myself. I just feel THAT strongly about this specific point.#(I did however watch my brother play it's not like I have NO investment. But I was not the one making those choices.)

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allthoseotherworlds · 2 months

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I feel like I see a lot of people being kind of mean about how other people relate to stories, so just to be clear:

1. It is not morally wrong to enjoy stories or characters that depict bad things. Liking a bad thing in stories is not the same as liking it in real life.

2. It is not morally wrong to enjoy stories or characters that depict bad things, and to not be particularly interested in discussing the bad things because you like other aspects more. You don't have to talk about the bad things the characters/story has to prove that you know they're bad.

3. It is not morally wrong to prefer stories or characters that do not include certain things that make you uncomfortable. Blacklisting content and looking up trigger warnings is not a sign that someone is weak or immature.

4. It is not morally wrong to like a story or character and to be uncomfortable with certain criticisms or types of discussion about that story or character. Blacklisting certain types of discussions because you don't want to see them is not hurting anybody and does not imply anything about how you treat real people.

5. Seeing stories or characters as entirely fictional is not morally wrong. They're characters and stories and were created by people and can be played around with by people. Writing or thinking about bad things happening to fictional characters is not hurting anybody.

6. Seeing stories or characters as real in some way is not morally wrong. People who find fiction important in ways that feel deeply personal are not hurting anybody by feeling that way and do not deserve mockery for it.

The only things that do have moral relevance are how you treat actual, real people:

Don't harass other people for how they feel about fiction, one way or another. Don't harass or mock people for saying bad things about your favorite character or for liking characters or stories you think are immoral. Don't harass or mock people for thinking of fictional characters as being their friends or for needing to blacklist things sometimes or step away from certain discussions.

No fandom space is going to meet everybody's needs or preferences, but people having those needs or preferences is not morally wrong. It also doesn't inherently say anything about how that person acts or feels in the rest of their life.

So if you're going to mock someone for how they are acting in a fandom space, I think it's better to focus on the thing they're actually doing that's immoral, not the internal feelings they may or may not have.

#I am talking #I am just some guy (gender-neutral)#fandom meta #sorry everyone I just saw one too many posts that felt weirdly judgmental about other people's internal feelings #disclaimer here that I am someone who feels strongly about some things in ways that are personal #and I think there's an unfortunate availability bias here #where people who turn that into everybody else's problem and harass people about it are obviously more visible #so people sometimes end up acting as though feeling in certain ways about stories inherently means you are going to harass people #but that isn't true #they just don't see people who mostly resolve these things by blacklisting and taking breaks from fandom stuff #I have no hard feelings towards anybody who criticizes or dislikes the media or characters that I like #but I can't help if it makes me feel bad sometimes #and that doesn't make me a bad person either. neither of us are doing anything wrong! we're both just people relating differently to storie #and those incompatible needs aren't nearly as much of a problem as the way people sometimes talk about those incompatible needs #if that makes sense #I'm not vaguing anybody I follow by the way. I just spent too much time in the for you section

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