Everyone says that they will start training on Monday, or the first of the month. But Saturday morning is the best time. Come on, do at least one exercise, start today, do at least one more than zero.

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!

some captain swan honeymoon concepts…

1) wearing cute outfits

2) smooth sailing 💕

3) checking on Storybrooke on facetime a.k.a. what it looks like when Emma is handling the phone versus when Killian tries

4) being cute and romantic

BONUS: doing each other’s make up for an evening out✨ 

They got there🥺

So, Yhwach is the Soul King's son. That's an interesting twist, thematically...I'm almost tempted to construct some complicated theories about what this means for the eastern vs. western religious showdown that we've got going on here, but I think at this point the Bleach universe's own lore has swallowed the thematic inspirations.

What does Yhwach mean by "my father who has seen the future"? Does he have another father who hasn't seen the future? Is it notable that the father or the character we just established as being able to see the future can also see the future?

...

Sorry to lose my relatability but I'm not American (i just don't know half of the terms and places you guys reference in my tags I'm sorry) </3

Tossing and turning in bed plagued by visions (Ed Edgar headcanons that are definitely just me projecting my cowboy ass autistic interest in strange animals onto him bc he too is a strange southern man with autistic swag)

i expected [album] by [musician] to go way harder than that with the hype it got but i feel like it's actually less raw & ~feral~ than previous albums. most of the instrumental i feel are way more pop-y, polished and less adventurous than they have been and the themes, while conjuring beautiful and deep and important images and imagery, are neither particularly niche nor songwritten about in particularly innovative ways. i'm sure it hits for people (and i see it does!) but i feel like the hype around it comes from. well i think some of yous don't listen to a lot of variety. and that's oaky. peace and love on earth

I personally find that in the midst of misplaced character dialogue, obsessing over plot devices and defensive ways of handling unnecessary discourse, people seem to completely fail to grasp the purpose of Wanda's existence as a character in general; furthermore, I'm fazed at how media, and MCU in particular, is consumed in a literal sense only, and is stripped of nuance and complexity.

I could only speak for myself by stating that Wanda is an embodiment of things I've faced, things I've done, and things I am - and that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Growing up in the oldest European country, and by far the most ancient European city, I haven't failed to realise that the key to my success lies elsewhere due to economic factors. I've experienced discrimination due to my origin and background, I have endured extreme poverty, I have lost family. In the midst of it all I haven't had the luxury of mourning the life I never had, not when it was necessary to direct all my focus towards becoming the backbone of an environment that depended on me, and academically accomplished. While performing on stage or taking life-changing exams, I've had to leave all of this baggage 'at home', only to have my efforts and sacrifices be discredited and dismissed countless times.

I've had periods of my life where I've seen what the other side looks like; where I've done horrible things to others and myself; where I couldn't even recognize what I had become and almost failed at keeping myself alive. Yet I somehow made it into a terrifically competitive field while managing creative side projects.

I resonate with Wanda because wherever she's been at, I have returned from. She provided me with an example of having fate turning its back on you no matter how hard you try to stitch yourself back together, as well as representing my own ethnicity and origin. So go ahead, you're more than free to dwell on and obsess over comic accuracy, change of directors and cameos. I'm simply glad to have had Wanda when I most needed her.

Keep going

i need someone to tell me if this makes any sense or if i'm just too delusional but like. bram stoker's xenophobia is very much discussed in the lines of "he used eastern europe as this fantastical place full of superstition and underdeveloped structures in opposition to britain's obvious superiority", right?

now i'm just saying this off the bat and with very little actual research done yet (looking forward to my day off for that) but like. consider. every single stereotype that stoker uses against eastern europeans, while absolutely taking nothing away from his xenophobia, is precisely the kind of stereotype used against irish people like stoker himself.

was anybody going to tell me that Shakira is part Lebanese or was i just supposed to figure that out myself from an instagram story

for a minute, just a minute

Sorry I may be stupid but how is the film bro post xenophobic?

I would avoid asking strangers on tumblr for advice on understanding xenophobia

me, thinking about peggy carter and the illuminati, thinking about avengers in that universe, thinking about things that might have been different, thinking about those fics where everyone lived together in the avengers compound—

thinking about writing 838!avengers compound fic.

A short summary of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness:

A war-traumatized Eastern European tries to harm America, but eventually kills herself instead so that her pain is not too much of a bother.