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serknighted · 8 months

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Danse & Hancock's parallels are eating my sanity slowly so by God I will write them here

So. Usually incredibly shy about posting my feelings about characters and my interpretations of them, but I don't think I can sit idly by without addressing 1. how much I love this post about Danse and how his story ties back to the isolation and loneliness of autism, and 2. how much I need more content between Hancock & Danse to exist, because my god sometimes I forget they hate each other in-game. (I strongly suggest you read the post mentioned & linked, they do a fantastic job framing Danse in a way I don't think I could fully articulate)

Danse & Hancock both have stories filled with themes of intense loneliness. Despite their hard work, effort, and prowess in the things they love, it doesn't take good sight to realize that neither of them are very well liked. It's not that they aren't respected, but whether it's Danse's all-too-formal approach to speaking, or Hancock's combination of hard drug use & almost constant overbearing presence (on top of years of slander from bigger cities, but we'll get into that), people see them as a tool of success and a good asset to have around, but not much of a friend, so to speak. Especially in Hancock's case, many people he is overly-affectionate with are often more annoyed by his presence than anything else (even if they do like him).

For Hancock, despite how much he claims to not relate to the isolation of the common ghoul, he's likely over-exaggerating his charisma in an effort to make himself more easily approachable, mostly for his own peace of mind rather than for others. While he sounds quite passive about things many others would react strongly to, I feel it's a combination of him having replaced a layer of how he truly feels with an element of sass on top of the drug use that makes all the trauma more easily bearable (to mixed effect).

One of his lines that has always struck me as conflicting with how he portrays himself is a common generic line he has while traveling with Sole Survivor, praising them for "living out the day" when most others could not. Hancock has seen so many people die to the brutal hands of the Commonwealth; whether it be Vic and his boys gunning down innocent drifters, seeing people succumb to the elements, or, in this case, simply not surviving their travels with him, Hancock seems to have a track record of never properly establishing proper bonds with others before they either die, or decide he's too overbearing to deal with further. He's one of those characters who desperately wants to have a deeper connection with those he loves, but he has consistently lost the chance to do so before he was ever ready, and so he chooses to fill the void with meaningless sexual relationships and one-night stands- anything to make him temporarily forget how much he hates himself and his almost comical lack of social understanding. It's a train of thought that I, as an autistic person, can really understand and relate to-- the desire to know people, but always feeling like no matter how you portrayed yourself, no one seems to want to be around you if you don't provide them with what they desire. It's caused him to deeply undervalue both how much he's done for people (since he believes its expected of him to constantly bend over backwards for the needs of others), and himself, all at the same time.

I don't think Danse fully recognizes how lonely he feels, a lot. He's been so heavily indoctrinated by the Brotherhood of Steel into believing that this is how he should be treated, that his work is for the betterment of humanity, that his sacrifice is a necessary one. The way he speaks almost carelessly about late brothers and sisters in arms makes me think really hard about how rooted this idea of only existing for the "greater good" is. Individuality is questionable & almost taboo, being different is outright abominable. It's the reason why the rhetoric of "Us vs. Them" works-- the BoS as a collective believe that they are doing good for all of humanity, and any outlier to that "perfect" formula is a threat not only to the BoS, but to everything they know. Danse is expected to bend over backwards for people, and no longer questions his loneliness or isolation, as he has all but given up his sense of self for what he believes is right. Another thing that I and many of my autistic friends relate to; a sense of justice so strong that it's overpowering. Like us, Danse is willing to sacrifice anything to do what's right... including himself.

Knowing this, it's easy to understand why he hates Hancock, and that backwards mindset is the reason Hancock hates him. It's an especially vicious cycle that constantly feeds into itself if unchecked, and Hancock knows that he alone cannot convince Danse to break that cycle. Hancock knows he can't beat Danse in a fight; all he has are his words, and logic is useless against an enemy that heeds to no truths. Even after Danse discovers his true nature... you can't expect him to unravel the years of constant reassurance that what he was taught was right in a single night. "Rome wasn't built in a day," and no one gets over their trauma so quickly, either. It's traumatic to have an explanation as to why people hate you. A catch-all reason to people's fear and distaste to you, that is also something you can never, ever change. Danse would sooner hate himself for what he is than accept those he used to murder without a second thought. It's the difficult reality of anyone attempting to unlearn painful conservative narratives; the shame & guilt of hurting others that are more similar to you than you ever wanted to know is sometimes more painful than realizing what you really are.

Hancock, albeit not even close to "recovered" from his mental woes, is much further along the path of acceptance to Danse, but not far enough away that he wouldn't understand where Danse is coming from. For so long, he sat idly by and watched people get hurt, even during his time in Diamond City. The constant conditioning to accept other people's pain as long as it wasn't happening to you still eats at his consciousness; just like Danse, he knows it was wrong to accept it, but the guilt makes it harder to deal with. He, of all people, would understand what it feels like to try so, so hard to fit in, to be normal and accepted, but never quite hit the mark of understanding where he fits in society. That's the reason he is the way he is now; his signature, his "Hancock," is to be as loud and out-of-place as possible-- a constant rebellion against what people expect him to be, a rebellion of oppression and unfair treatment. Danse's sheer existence is an involuntary rebellion of all BoS values, and even if Hancock would be hesitant to become close to Danse for a long while, I think he would be impressed by him, in the end, and more importantly, understand where he's coming from.

Their combined interest in both protecting the people they care about as well as the collective societies those people come from, as well as how nerdy they both are about US history... I think, eventually, they will realize how similar their lives were, how similar they are to each other, and maybe even find some comfort in knowing that they aren't alone in all of the waves of shame, guilt, and loneliness. That there is an overarching group of people who understand them, and that they do have a place in this world. I think once they recognize that similar traumas can manifest in polar opposite conditions (ones that they used to have a narrow, black-and-white outlook on), they'll also find that there is no real reason to hate each other anymore; the world has told them that they must hate each other, but they no longer have any need to listen.

TL;DR autistic Danse & Hancock ftw

#fallout 4 #john hancock #paladin danse #sorry for the long analysis im just rotting over them so hard #fo4 #i think they deserve the world #and maybe also therapy #fuck you todd howard for not finishing Danse's arc i cry #ARGHHH i hope people understand my vision...

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genericpuff · 8 months

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"oh my god, the comic that opened its plot by saying that removing corporal punishments from schools was a bad idea and the teachers need to go back to beating up students turned out to be racist, who could have seen this coming!!"

Listen, okay, I don't want to dunk on the people who enjoy Get Schooled and genuinely didn't see the racism coming, but like... as someone who doesn't read Get Schooled and checked it out to see what the plot was even about following all the controversy these past couple days, y'all, the description is a hard fucking pass.

And I still checked out its first episode to give it more benefit of the doubt and... nah fam. Not saying we should have seen the racism coming a mile away but I'm baffled as to why people read this at all. I'm all for manga and webtoons with senseless or comical violence, but you still need to set the baseline for where that violence is taking place and what context it exists within. Naruto? Yeah, sure, students fighting the teachers, this is a fantasy universe based around the ninja arts, makes sense they're gonna fight each other and it seems like a mutual agreement. Assassination Classroom? The teacher literally isn't human and he's training his students on how to kill him otherwise he'll destroy their whole planet. Shit, even fucking Matilda handles it better because it's one kid being abused by the principal and that principal is so ridiculously abusive that the parents don't even believe the abuse is happening (to the point that this form of abuse and manipulation is often nicknamed "The Trunchbull Method" because it's designed to be so absurd that no one will believe the victim), so it winds up being on Matilda's shoulders to use her newfound gifts to teach her a lesson - but the story itself is meant to remind adults that kids are people and just because they're smaller and weaker than you doesn't give you a free pass to be abusive.

Point is, in all of those examples, you can create that suspension of disbelief in how the teachers and students behave towards one another because their entire plots require suspension of disbelief.

But Get Schooled is literally just... it's set in Korea, it's a normal high school story, there's nothing supernatural or unique going on with the students or the teachers, and there's no moral or lesson it's trying to express, it's literally just taking real life and saying, "hey, adults should be allowed to beat up kids". When has combatting violence with more violence ever been a solution in that kind of context? Why is this a comic that even exists, let alone on a platform that's regularly marketed to teenagers?

It's depressing. And just for the record, I was spurred on to make this post by the recent response from the team behind Get Schooled regarding the VERY racist plotline it recently released on the Korean version of the app.

Like... this is shit WT shouldn't have even been allowing to fly under the radar to begin with. The bar is on the floor. I also love how the creators of Get Schooled admitted to the fact that they were raised in a homogenous society but still thought they were up to the task of "bringing the issue [of multicultural racism] to light", when they, in fact, do the complete OPPOSITE within that episode by suggesting, "actually, if you're mixed race then you're the REAL bad guy, it's the pureblood Koreans who are the oppressed minority, there are so many immigrants these days!!" And "stopping hatred" sure is a big claim when the entire point of their comic is combatting hatred with hatred, or in Get Schooled's case, bullying with corporal punishment.

Yikes. Big fucking yikes.

#tw abuse #tw racism

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traffic-light-eyes · 9 months

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Ninja as influencers

My previous post got me thinking, and now I have to write this down.

Kai:

He for sure has Twitter/Chirp and uses it regularly. Very popular. He also has the ninjago equivalent to Instagram and is also very popular there, too. I could imagine him having a yt channel and doing silly vlogs and the occasional game, but that's about it. The other ninja were a bit weirded out by the vlogs at first because they didn't really want to feed into the whole idolizing the ninja thing, but realized that they could show the world that they're just. People. Normal people who save the world sometimes but are normally just passed out on the couch. They all love being in his vlogs now. When he records something embarrassing, he makes absolutely certain that the person it's of is okay with it being posted. Like, he gives them weeks to think about it. He has a video of Zane singing let it go (due to Jay's programming skills), and he was ecstatic to be able to post it. He's also a tiktok star. He does the silly dances and lip-syncing.

Nya:

She has Chirp but doesn't use it for social media purposes? If that makes sense. Like, she mainly only scrolls through her friends' chirps and responds to those. She gets into the groove and made a really sweet and chill community once the people that were only there for the "inside scoop" of the water ninja's life left. Now there's just her friends and a bunch of nice people. She comments on and rechirps? a lot of fanart, though. She has an Instagram but only to comment on Kai's posts with a thumbs down. She has a tiktok. It's secret. She posts little edits about her artwork or mechanics. It's fairly popular. She sometimes uses the filters and makes videos using them but never posts them.

Cole:

Similar to Nya, he has a Chirp account but doesn't really use it much. He'll respond to fanart and fans, but he only really posts occasionally. His posts normally consist of song recommendations or riffs of his friends. He threads callouts when he feels especially petty. It's pretty chill. He probably has a secret second account for art. He doesn't want people to like his art just because he's the earth ninja, so he made a second account. He has a tumblr too. I don't make the rules. He tries to stay in the loop with everyone's thoughts and shuts down the gross people. He's pretty well-known on the site. He likes reblogging the ship content and misdirecting people because it's funny. Pixal found him drawing techno and he scrambled for an excuse but she silently put a finger to her lip, winked, and left. He was very confused. She was absolutely dying on the inside from laughter because she knew of his account but wanted to freak him out. He couldn't look her in the eye for a week because he thought she thought he shipped them or something. She purposefully spoke to him often. He kept trying to explain, but Pixal always had an excuse to leave or change the subject before he could say it.

Lloyd:

He has Chirp. He has tumblr. He has ao3. He's not allowed on Instagram. He has a yt channel where he exclusively talks about comics and games. On his Chirp, he is completely unhinged some times, and other times, he posts cute animals he finds on missions or on patrol. He found a stray cat once and named her mittens because a follower commented it. He has #mittensmonday, where he posts a picture of her. It's always trending on Monday. His tumblr is once again about games and stuff, but he has a semi-secret side blog for Ninja Shenanigans where it's theorized that it's him, but no one has proof and he doesnt give a direct answer. He has unknowingly reblogged and messaged Cole on multiple occasions because he doesn't know about the Secret account. Cole doesn't know what to do. His ao3 account is mostly to check up on what people are thinking. If he sees something unsavory, he immediately logs off because that's him. Avid tiktok enjoyer. He could make a video of just him staring at the screen, and it would go viral. He finds it hilarious. It's his goal to find the most obscure thing to post and for it to finally not get viral.

Zane:

He has Chirp, but he hasn't used it. Either that or he uses it so terribly incorrectly. I could be convinced that he has a cooking yt channel. He'd call it something nerdy or informational, but people kept chirping about it calling him cookingmama, and he doesn't get it? But due to Jay's persistence, he changed his @ to cookingmama.

Jay:

He has Chirp. He uses it to keep up with the world + just talk to fans. He has a gaming channel and a Twitch account. He streams at least once a week. He loves it! He has a pretty chill community, and he often asks his friends to play with him. He makes sure that the games he play with them are suited to them first. He doesn't ask. He just knows. He picks action-based games for Kai - maybe LoL or, like, Left 4 dead. He plays silly smart games with Nya, like Portal or Keep talking and nobody explodes (they are ridiculously good at this). He and Cole would play scary games. They exclusively play them at night; phasmaphobia has caused many of the ninja to awaken to a shriek. Comfy and typically non-violent games are his and Lloyd's go-to. They'll play Minecraft or stardew for HOURS before they realize the sun is coming up. He and Zane play semi-stressful cooking games, or Zane is just there for commentating. They'll be seen playing overcooked or cooking simulator (they always play that one with a challenge somehow). He makes silly follower goals, and he has unfortunately had to do many, many things because his followers keep rising.

Honorary Ninja, Pixal:

She has an account for every platform that the ninja have just to crowd control + to support them in their comments. She rarely, if ever, posts anything aside from commenting on her friends' posts. Hc that Borg owns every platform, so she uses that to weed out the weirdos by asking him to make the platform very buggy on their device specifically. It's only a matter of time before they delete the app, and she loves watching the downfall via their posts and complaints about the website. She knows of everyone's account, even the Secret ones. She never lets them know that she knows of them, even if they do something strange because of it (check Cole's). She loves messing with them. If someone posts something recently, she conveniently talks about it the same day and gives them whiplash because what are the chances that she said that today. She's the go-to gal if there are any tech issues on stream or during editing.

Here ya go! Hope you enjoy my brainrot <3

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shipandrunforit · 6 months

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Dropping some Heartsteel head cannons I have bc these thoughts won’t leave me alone and I’m curious how much they are going to tie in magic with this (bc Kayn and Ezreal still have their powers)

Kayn and Rhaast

Was a street kid growing, something happened that lead to him being orphaned and living on the streets for a few years

Accidentally released rhaast while trying to steal things from a museum, Rhaasf was not happy about having the situation and tried to leave but Kayn didn’t let him go out of spite.

Two slowly grew to be friends but aren’t the healthiest of friends with Kayns ego feeding into Rhaast, especially when their on stage, and Rhaast has a tendency to voice and pressure kayn to follow through on intrusive thoughts or actions.

Rhaaat was the one who thought of them entering the music industry (wanted everyone’s eyes on him) and so they worked their ass off to get into the industry.

Rhaast also enjoys the dramatics, got very board sitting in the weapon for years and enjoys putting on a show and being a show off.

Ezreal

Was sort of like those Disney kids from the Mickey Mouse club, was how he got into the industry at such a young age. (Also could be why kayn calls him the pop star Prince, is bc he was everywhere for a while).

Is an orphan and is being raised by his uncle

Not sure how he got teleportation when he doesn’t seem to have the gauntlet but he very much loves using his abilities to jump around the city and do parkour.

Would probably also use it to sneak out at times either to hide from his old manager when he was in trouble

First time he did this in front of the boys was bc he was too lazy to walk to the kitchen and he scared the crap out of K’Sante, still make jokes about it.

The dog sleeps in his room, was also the one to name the dog.

Good af editing, especially on computers

Yone

Started out as a dj and went to music school and even taught his brother a few basics of being a dj as well.

Still had a falling out with his brother bc he saw how bad the industry was and didn’t want Yasuo to get involved. Led to them having a fight and haven’t really talked since

Is very into mythology and folklore (is why for his section of music video we see the azukana spirt. Is also partially bc I have no fucking clue how else to tie that part of his backstory into this).

Boys played a prank on him by switching his coffee once, long story short they all (including Rhaast) collectively agreed never to do this again bc of how terrifying the results of this prank where

Yone is one of the best drawers in the group besides Sett and the two talk about animations sometimes (Yone animated the fox in his section)

Has made the boys Dino nuggets at one point

Sett

Is a big fan of comics, animation, and pfp fighting games

Did the drawings for his section as well as the animations for the background (am referring to that scene in the end of the music video)

Dad was a boxer who left when Sett was young

Sett also knows how to box and worked as a boxer for a bit as well as a bouncer maybe. Rap was more of a hobby but when he got signed onto a record label he switched to doing it full time

Punched the paparazzi bc they were harassing his mom

Favorite anime’s include jojo’s bizar adventures and one punch man

Meet Apjelious before Heartsteel at a meuseum that showcasing a new planetarium exhibit. Two hit it off and are now dating.

Aphelios and Alune

He and his sister were involved in choir when they were younger

Alune went off to college to get her degree in business in management and aphelios went stayed home and did his music.

Aphelios lost his voice either due to medical reasons or because of an accident, Alune transferred to a closer college to be with her brother when the news broke out.

Aphelios had a hard time getting further in the industry, was often discredited or people wouldn’t want to work with him bc it was “too much of a hassle”.

Was nervous for his sister to meet Sett only to realize the two get along great and would 100% commit crimes together

Is also a gamer and will do dates with Sett that’s just them playing video games or Sett listening to him ramble on about movie or video game scores.

Aline was very chill with the boys breaking into the studio bjt did tell them not to break anything (spoilers, they did and she was not happy about it).

Alune is the older sibling and will tease her brother and the other boys and is not afraid to fight them if push comes to shove.

K’Sante

Has written and preformed a lot of songs before Heartsteel

Used to work on songs with his ex boyfriend but the two spit up due to the strain working together put on their relationship

Is the relationship expert in the group and will give the others advise or flirting or planning dates or anything else they need help with if they ask.

Loves going to the gym with Sett, might have been how the two of them meet in the first place. They got to talking about music at one point and when they found out the other was looking for someone to collaborate with they decided to work together.

Spot for one another when in the gym

Is the other mom friend of the group but a lot more chill, let’s them get away with more things then Yone would

Is good at filming and old school editing. He and Ezrael did most of the did for the music video and let the others scribble one what they compiled then approved it.

Was against the coffee incident and straight up left the building when it happened.

#heartsteel #aphelios #heartsteel sett #heartsteel aphelios #heartsteel kayn #heartsteel rhaast #heartsteel yone #Heartsteel K’Sante #ksante #shieda kayn #alune #heartsteel alune #headcanons #heartsteel headcanons

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autisticcassandracain · 1 year

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I dunno man I feel like most statements along the lines of ‘Batman isn’t REALLY x, he’s y’ don’t hold much water because usually, there’s a pretty good chance a number of writers over the years have written him as x, you just didn’t like it or think it doesn’t count for some reason.

For example ‘Batman isn’t REALLY a good parent, he’s actually a bad parent’, when Batman has been written as a good parent by a number of writers, and has, in addition, been written as realizing that he’s screwed up with his children and resolved to fix it by even more. At the same time, stating ‘Batman isn’t REALLY a bad parent, he’s actually a good parent’ is also incorrect, because Batman has been written as a bad parent by a number of writers, either intentionally or not; in addition, the pattern presented by the tug-of-war between writers who believe he should be a good parent and writers who don’t has, over the years, created an unintentional pattern that strongly resembles that of an abusive relationship. So, stating he is a good parent is inaccurate and dismisses a bunch of his canon writing, but stating he is a bad parent also dismisses a bunch of his canon writing and the intentions of the authors that wrote him.

The secret here is realizing that Batman has had so many writers over the years that it’s practically impossible to find a universal truth about him beyond the basic premise and maybe very, very basic characterization keystones. Writers with different beliefs about both the character and the world at large have written him in accordance to their worldview, and sometimes that worldview will align with yours, and sometimes it won’t.

Like, at this point, Batman is more an idea than he is a character. He is the bare-knuckled fight against injustice, but what ‘injustice’ is depends heavily on your worldview, as does what ‘bare-knuckled’ and ‘fight’ mean. Batman has been interpreted in dozens of different ways over the years, and singling out a few of those as the True Batman is largely arbitrary and dependent on your personal taste and belief in what the character should be. The only ‘objective’ measurement you could apply here are the old Golden Age comics, and I think most fans can agree that measuring modern Batman comics by how faithful they are to the Golden Age comics is, more often than not, a little ridiculous.

For the record, I do think that arguing about what Batman should be matters; if right-wing assholes use the character as a mouthpiece for their worldview we can and should critique that, but not because it’s ‘OOC’, but because the worldview espoused by those right-wing assholes is harmful and shitty. Batman should be a good parent, not because it’s ‘OOC’ for him to be a bad parent, but because having your paragon of justice be a child abuser is pretty shitty. Etc.

I don’t really have anywhere specific to go with this, I just think it’s a little strange when people try to view Batman as a character with a clear-cut characterization, rather than a concept that many people have approached in different ways over the years. Can that concept be mishandled? Sure. But it’s usually mishandled for reasons a bit more substantial than ‘a previous writer wrote it differently’.

#part of me feels like it's a cop-out to say #'batman isn't really a character so much as a concept and he can rarely ever be truly ooc'#'because he's been written by so many different people that practically any interpretation of him has canon back-up'#but at the same time. when you have a decades long history as one of the most well known pop culture icons of our time #i do think you kinda stop being a character and start being more of a concept #this post was inspired by a lot of stuff but the thing on my mind rn is conversations about why batman doesn't kill #and a lot of people being like 'saying batman doesn't kill because he thinks it'd turn him into an unstoppable killing monster is wrong!'#which. isn't true. that's a take many writers have on his character.#you may not like you or think it's stupid or whatever but. it's an interpretation of the no-kill rule with canon backing #and for that matter. even 'batman doesn't kill' is kind of up in the air with many writers taking a more relaxed stance on that #or even outright doing away with it. batman was also written before the concept of him not killing was added to his character #like. with a character with a history as long an profilic as batman. shit's complicated i feel #bruce wayne #my posts #infodumping

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dingle-dee · 9 months

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Hey serious callout time

Never thought I'd make this kinds post tbh

I first have to say please do not witch hunt, harass any of these individuals nor my account, I am only looking to inform you about the situation at hand.

If you try to witch hunt, dox or harass me you will be blocked. I do not condone any if that shit.

First of all must say this callout is about the recent AU appearing in the Pizza Tower Fandom called Asylum tower.

The AU compromises of peppino in a straight jacket commonly used to detain violent, unpredictable or malicious intending mentally unstable people, which on record has been used last in 1956. Peppino has a unamed mental illness similar to schizophrenia, psychosis and delusionry (despite the creator claiming he has none/unspecified*)

* which causes confusion with the straight jacket since if he wasn't mentally unstable why would he need a straight jacket

As someone who has experienced/ has had family who've experienced psychosis, delusionry and schizophrenia this is highly disrespectful and glorifying the aspect of Asylums and mental illness.

The creator has been harassed for these reasons exactly *either in a constructive or harsh way* but has either deleted all claims or come back in a non professional manner.

One of their posts which has now of today been deleted from their account had an untasteful way of handling the situation along with a disrespectful PTSD joke at the bottom.

I find it highly suspicious that someone would delete this covering up their distasteful way of handling things. And not actually point out the AUs many many problems

1. The term asylum isn't used anymore and is often associated with torturous conditions, unhealthy ways of coping and treatment and is only used in serious films/serious TV series and is glorified by hollywood. The term used now is mental clinic or just hospital in general.

The way they treat patients now is much better but from personal experience than I share with others and my family is it still torturous and brutal and half the time you end up worse or , worse case scenario the end doing suicide. So using this theming must be treaded lightly.

2. Straight jackets are no common place anymore and are mostly used In Hollywood as a way of dramatization of a scene in general and is a very unethical way of treatment. Using it for simple means like psychosis, delusionry or schizophrenia is like killing a thief for taking an apple. Unethical and a ill stereotype. In general not a fun cute wholesome thing and shouldn't be bounced around.

3. White padded rooms are are the stuff of movies and really padded rooms are torturous and not a fun thing at all that is not funny in a comic light that they re trying to portray.

4. The handling of this situation on the creators part is fishy at best, as I said one of their explanation posts was unprofessional and made a half baked joke that is honestly offensive. It seems like they are really try to play up the victim card here. I understand the feeling of being harassed since I have been under that light as well, I understand the stress but these posts/way of handling things from all parties has been a mess.

The creator has stated that some traits that the pulled are meant to be funny but they simply don't line up.

Claiming that a character isn't crazy but your clearly making them crazy in a straight jacket doesn't look good and is honestly doing the opposite for you.

Honestly these feel like cover up lies as well as dismissing the criticism given.

There's is nothing comedic about this au in its current stage, and honestly it should stay that way. The AU is distasteful all round.

People are dancing around this and making fanart similar to the clover kit situation. Only no one is acknowledging the larger image and only think at base value.

I'm pulling myself away now and anyone involved in the Asylum AU/ fanart chain please do some research/ please pull yourself away as well. This is not a quirky thing and never will be. If you condone this I'm not gonna block you but i will raise an eyebrow.

#dingus talks #pizza tower #peppino spaghetti #can it dingle #controversy

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detailtilted · 4 months

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Index of Enhanced Edition Con Videos

I'll maintain this index in a pinned post for easy reference. Click the links to go to the YouTube videos, or click here for a more readable Google Docs table which includes these links plus a tab noting which events I skipped, temporarily or permanently, and why.

2007-11-11, Chicago - J2 Breakfast (00:23:42)

2007-11-11, Chicago - Jensen Solo (00:21:55)

2007-11-11, Chicago - Jared Solo (00:29:44)

2007-11-11, Chicago - J2 Main (00:38:24)

2008-07-27, San Diego Comic Con - SPN Panel (00:50:52)

2008-11-16, Chicago - J2 Breakfast (00:26:16)

2008-11-16, Chicago - Jared Solo (00:26:20)

The main panels from CHICON 2008 are up next. They'll have better video quality (for the most part) than the Breakfast panel from that event.

Thank you to everyone who has shown an interest in these videos. The reblogs and likes all made me very happy, and I especially appreciated the kind comments some of you left in your reblog text and tags. I'm unsure of the proper Tumblr way to respond directly to that in a way that won't annoy people, but I've definitely noticed and appreciated it!

An explanation of this project and my tentative plans for it are listed below the break. A lot of it will be familiar if you've read my earlier posts, but it's more detailed -- and excessively long! There's also some info on how you can help, especially if you have any old videos or audio files that you'd be willing to contribute.

Why Do You Call These "Enhanced Editions"?

The videos I'm using are not my own, but I've spent many hours adding enhancements to them. Credit and links to the original videos are in the video descriptions. These are the typical enhancements you'll see:

I'm upscaling the videos as best I can. It isn't remotely perfect, but it's a little more watchable than the originals. I'm not experienced with this and the videos I'm working with are very low quality by today's standards. They were also recorded under difficult circumstances. Video taking wasn't permitted at most of the earlier cons, so the people who took them did so at the risk of getting kicked out. They couldn't exactly come waltzing in with a tripod, so the videos are shaky, they don't always have a clear view of the stage, and sometimes they cut off at unfortunate moments. They can be frustrating to watch, but we owe these people a debt of gratitude for capturing this footage because otherwise it would have been lost altogether.

The original videos are usually in multiple parts, but I'm editing them together into a single video as cohesively as possible. I may use videos from multiple sources to provide the most complete video possible, and I'll select the ones with the highest video quality available. Sometimes there just aren't a lot out there, though.

I'm adding extra content to help clarify references people make during the panels. The videos I've worked with so far don't take up the full width of a modern video frame, so I've taken advantage of that extra space to display the extra content to the side where it's less obtrusive. There are explanations for obscure references that are way funnier when you understand what they mean, plus episode references to help jog the memory for those of us who haven't rewatched the show a million times. In rare cases where I think it will enhance understanding, I'll insert brief episode clips that highlight what they're talking about.

I'm putting a LOT of time into adding good, color-coded English subtitles that can be turned on and off with YouTube's CC button. These videos can be frustrating to understand because the audience often drowns them out and Jared and Jensen tend to talk at the same time when they're together. I can't always figure everything out, but it's far better than the crazy, auto-generated nonsense that many videos have. The color-coding helps with telling who's saying what: red for Jared, blue for Jensen, green for the general audience, yellow for the current fan at the microphone, and white for other people such as staff.

If there's missing footage that I can't find anywhere, then if I can find a source that seems to have reliable details about what was discussed, I'll add still images with a brief summary and a link to my source in the video description.

What Conventions Do You Plan to Enhance?

I don't want to make grand promises that I'll enhance videos for every old convention, although I definitely love the idea of doing so. How far I go with this will depend on how much sustained interest there is from other people and how much spare time I have myself. My output speed will probably be erratic depending on what's going on in my life at the time.

My general plan was to start with the oldest conventions and work my way forward. For now, I only plan to enhance the panels with Jared and/or Jensen since they're my main interest. I may temporarily skip over conventions that they didn't both attend, but with the intent to go back and fill those in later.

One big constraint will be whether I can find enough videos to work with for a convention, and just how bad the quality is. I've found that some videos are too poor of a quality to upscale, at least with my limited skill. Since these videos are painful to watch in their raw form, I suspect people will be less interested in watching "enhanced" videos that don't include at least some noticeable improvement in visual quality, but please do let me know if I'm wrong. For that reason, I'll probably skip past cons if I can't upscale the videos, at least for now.

As I work through the old conventions, I'll make a good attempt to upscale the available videos. If I don't have much success, then I'll skip over that convention with the hope that someday either the technology or my skills will improve, or maybe a more skilled fan will be able to accomplish more with it. If I make it through all the low-hanging fruit, I might come back to those problematic conventions and just create a cohesive edit with special content and subtitles even if I can't substantially improve the video quality.

These are just my general thoughts right now but the project is young, so my strategy may change.

Can I Help?

If you have any old convention videos or audio files that you're willing to contribute, please message me! For now, let's limit it to content from 2010 or older. Maybe I can use them, maybe I can't, but the more I have to work with, the better chance I have of creating something more complete. If I do use your material, I'll credit you in whatever manner you prefer.

My main source of videos has been the Supernatural Wiki convention pages and the playlists that sil9800 has put together on YouTube. If your videos can be found there, and if the links to them still work, then I've probably found them already. There are a lot of dead or private video links on the Wiki though, and also dead links on various LiveJournal pages linked to from the Wiki, so there were more videos out there at one point. (If you have any videos you don't want me to use for this project, let me know and I'll respect your wishes.) I also run keyword searches on YouTube, but I rarely find anything that I hadn't already found from those other sources.

Even if your video looks terrible, you might just have a missing piece of footage that I couldn't find anywhere else, or your video might upscale more easily than another. If nothing else, I might be able to hear something in the audio that will help me fill in a subtitle I couldn't figure out.

Likewise, audio files can be helpful even without video. If nothing else, they may help me fill in some subtitles. If the audio file is consistently easier to understand than the audio on the videos I'm using, I can also substitute the audio from your file in place of the video's audio. If you have audio of sections of the panels for which no known videos exist, that could also help me fill in those gaps.

If you're watching my enhanced videos with the subtitles turned on, please do let me know if you catch any errors or if you can clearly understand something I marked as [inaudible]. I can't change the videos themselves on YouTube, not without breaking the links and causing confusion, but it's pretty easy to update the subtitles because they're a separate file. It's important to me to try not to put words in their mouths that they might not have said, so I'm trying not to guess based on context. However, there were times when I felt like I should have been able to understand what they said but I just couldn't manage it, and I'm sure someone with different ears may be able to figure out some of the parts I couldn't.

#enhanced edition con video #j2 #jared padalecki #jensen ackles #sam winchester #dean winchester #supernatural #index

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anticmiscellaney · 1 year

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no pressure to answer and im sorry if you've said this before but where did the title new/old/rare come from?

It's named after a very average record label compilation that I bought way back in 2002 because it included a song I couldn't get anywhere else by a band I used to go see all the time. I always liked the title and it seemed appropriate for this project for a range of thematic reasons, but also Blueline Medic came from a band called Caustic Soda, who wrote a song called Photocopied, which was the first song I successfully turned into visual artwork, and I discovered Jawbreaker from the sticker on the bass guitar when I saw that video on Rage one night as a teenager, and then when I finally saw Jawbreaker in April 2022 I came home and wrote this comic about Louis seeing them in March 1996, which led to me figuring out the overall story of what had up until then just been a series of loosely connected drawings.

Before everything was available on the internet, releases being old or rare often meant you couldn't get them, you might not ever hear/see them, and new releases may take months or even years to become available to you. Part of being into film and music was searching, archiving, collecting, sharing, bootlegging, waiting, and speculating. These days I likely wouldn't have to buy a whole CD just to hear one song. Smalltime local band singles are available on Bandcamp, not just at their shows. Archives of old or niche films are often hosted on streaming sites, or even lovingly restored and rereleased. This is all cool and I enjoy it, but it's new. Please remember that it's new, that in my relatively short lifetime it has changed hugely.

People have always cared and now it's so much easier to share these things, but there's still value in things being tied to times and places, in parts of life being ephemeral and transitory. I think you need external markers of times in your life that you can revisit or avoid as you choose, otherwise you'll end up adrift. Something being rare or limited isn't always bad; of course we don't get to experience everything we'd like to and it's important to pursue and value what you can. I pursued live music single-mindedly from when I was 12 or 13 until I moved overseas at 19, and while I've never stopped going to see bands or being very into music, that particular time of my life was unique. I can't replicate it and I don't want to because as much as I joke I've not changed (and wear band t-shirts I bought in 2001), I'm not the same person. I still remember though.

This story is partly about the balance between digging through the past and making space in your life for new things, about handling change and choosing what to let go, what to archive, what to keep, what to keep looking for. It's also literally about music and film.

Most of the places I used to go are gone now of course, and most of the bands have broken up and moved on. I'm gone too, I live on the other side of the world, but I like to put references in my work. I guess it's my way of saying this happened and it was important to me, these things other people made, those places, that time, they were small and brief but they mattered and I remember. Some things don't come back and all you have is memories of them, but sometimes bands who broke up in 1990 do a reunion show and you score a ticket.

Don't count on it though. Enjoy what you can when you have it, and if you miss it, don't dwell too much. Looking for the next thing to be excited and intrigued by is the best way to find it.

In the comic linked above, when Neil says they'll have a chance to see Jawbreaker together soon, he's wrong: Jawbreaker broke up a few months later and didn't play again until 2017. I think they would have gone together then though, I think they both remembered.

#replied #newoldrare

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dlartistanon · 9 months

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so i follow you on twitter, and i was thinking about the tweet you made a while back about how stupid the bloodline jokes are and it reminded of some stuff i saw when cantabile was first released on cn with her elite 1 promotion voice line... it was fan translated as like "So this is how it feels to hold life inside me" or something and straight cisbro arknights fans were making "lol doctor got her pregnant" jokes. it was honestly infuriating because that voice line is just supposed to be her finally realizing she holds her own life in her own hands, and she doesnt have to be afraid of being thrown away anymore. i adore her character and found family undertones and just seeing all of it reduced to the same stupid "bloodline" shit made me so incredibly angry

anyway sorry i know this was probably random and you dont need to answer this or anything but i just appreciate the fact that youre so open about how much that joke sucks because i see it way too much.

p.s. i really love your art and youre the biggest reason i got into the saria and muelsyse ship, cause i wasnt able to do dorothy's vision and havent been paying attention to cn news for a while

I don't have Cantabile, but I can believe it :/ Sorry to hear that; if it's not about how she's meta, it's about breeding. Disgusting.

Cishet dudebros, gachabros, waifubros (they're all synonymous with each other really; we need another moniker other than 'bro' to describe them because 'bro' implies friendliness and these generally aren't the type of people you want to interact with anyway) are all the same.

Haha, NTR Knight. Haha, SilverAsh pimping out his sisters. Haha, Mlynar pimping out his nieces. Haha let's repopulate the Draco/Aslan/Elf/etc. race. All the same braindead lowest-hanging fruit "joke" that somehow just won't die. Yes, because reducing a female character to nothing but a hole is funny. And even if they say "it's not that serious, chill", one look at their timeline and it's full of egregiously sexualized pinups of anime girls, if not outright male-gazey porn.

I do my best to insulate myself from dregs of society but every so often they escape containment and I see things I don't want to see against my will (often by people who don't know how to ignore/block and feel the incessant need to dunk to feel morally superior).

Thanks for telling me. I'm glad that I'm the kind of person that people feel safe being around, and a reprieve from those types of comments.

And thank you again, I love SaMuel very very much and I encourage you to read Dorothy's Vision and the translated Rhine Lab comic (Records of Originium: Rhine Lab) when you can. That's what started the brainrot and I've never been the same since.

#dltext #batloverwillow #dl talks ak

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charmwasjess · 28 days

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This unstable spring weather is reminding me of when I was a teenager, I had a massive, irrational phobia of tornadoes, despite growing up in an area with little to no chance of them. It was so bad that my mom took me to a psychologist because I'd do irrational things like hide in the bathtub instead of going to school if there was any chance of severe weather. It didn't help. Every time the sky got dark, I'd get that weird, frantic, achy-itchy feeling.

And then, one day, I'm sixteen, working my first job at a coffee shop and I get a panicked call from my boss. I look out the window and almost comically, like it showed up just for me, to make some point, there's this beautiful white tornado dancing right towards us. I remember thinking it looked like the skinny part of an hour glass. It's true what they say about them appearing to hold still when they're heading for you, so I got a very good look at it. The trees were bending flat to the ground and the double doors of the shop were getting sucked open. Me and the other teenaged employee crowded the kids (we were also an ice cream shop, there was a birthday going on) into the center room, and we sang "happy birthday" over and over again to drown out the sound of it hitting the building. We were okay, but it took off several adjacent roofs and smashed up cars in the parking lot.

This was a weird way to start loving tornadoes. (cut for weather geekery)

They are like dreams - for all the data, we know relatively little about why they happen. We can see their ingredients: moisture, atmospheric instability, wind sheer, but sometimes all those pieces are in place and a tornado won't form. In fact, most often, it doesn't. They're still rare. The language we use to talk about them endlessly fascinates me: they are born out of thunderstorms called super cells, which have a 'lifecycle.' One thunderstorm can birth a single tornado, or many that live and die along the greater lifespan of the thunderstorm. The way they multiply is fascinating, one tornado can be circled by wispy, smaller, satellite tornadoes, or more rarely, two full-sized tornadoes side by side, a pair of twins. A group of tornados is a "family."

They come in all shapes and sizes. Mine was a skinny rope funnel, and a relatively weak example - F1 on the scale. The 1925 Tri-State tornado, F5, the strongest on the scale, was the longest recorded tornado in history with a 219-mile track. Part of the danger of that storm was that nobody even realized it was a tornado until it was right on top of them because it was so huge: it was said to look like a red, boiling fog from horizon to horizon because it was rain-wrapped, and had sucked up a lot of red river mud. Water tornadoes and fire tornadoes are both a thing.

They behave inconsistently too. The El Reno tornado that killed the storm chaser and scientist Tim Samaras in 2013 is often personified as evil, a storm set out to kill storm chasers, because it seemed to behave with particular, intentional nastiness. In 30 seconds, it went from a small tornado to a 2.6 mile wedge. It's hard to even imagine the scale of something like that: someone observing from a safe distance miles away is suddenly inside the literal tornado within less than a minute. Most tornadoes move in a more or less straight trajectory - this one repeatedly changed directions. But this is just another example of how even when scientists know how tornadoes generally behave, we're still figuring them out.

Of course, all of this is not about overly romanticizing a phenomenon that kills a ton of people each year, a fact that is only going to get worse with climate change. And certainly research funding and money for early warning systems or national weather services being less prioritized in the politicization of climate change.

I still have tornado nightmares a lot. I had one last night, which is I guess why I'm still thinking about the shapes. It's always the same: I'm standing in a house, usually my childhood home, and there are families of tornadoes that go right past it, but never hit. I still think they're so interesting. And it's funny the way anxiety can turn into fascination under the right circumstances.

#tornadoes #weather nerding #sorry this isn't about count dooku I just wanted to gush about tornadoes for a minute #story time #charm stuff #tw tornado

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abigailnussbaum · 2 days

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Dead Boy Detectives

I'm sure this will be all over my tumblr feed in a couple of days, but I just wanted to get in early and say that Netflix's adaptation of the Dead Boy Detectives comic is extremely charming and fun. I went in with zero expectations, given the track record of previous Neil Gaiman-based series (Good Omens, carried on the backs of David Tennant and Michael Sheen's performances and charisma; American Gods, a glorious mess at times but still a mess; Sandman, meh), not to mention Netflix's rather low bar when it comes to fantasy adaptations, but I was very quickly won over.

The key, I think - and this probably has something to do with the production team overlapping with the Arrowverse/Doom Patrol people - is that this is a show that does monster-of-the-week extremely well, spinning elaborate and often whimsical supernatural mysteries. There's a bit of a Pushing Daisies vibe in the quirky small town setting and fun guest characters (note: this show isn't nearly as good as Pushing Daisies, but even making me think of it is a feather in its cap). And the supporting characters are really well done, and manage to make the setting feel rich and multifaceted in a very small number of episodes.

It's not a flawless show by any means. The dialogue is pretty unimpressive, and like most Netflix shows these days (and again, most Netflix fantasy shows especially) every frame looks like it's been run through a murky-grey-and-boring filter. Most importantly, for as good as the show is at guest and supporting characters, the main characters - the titular dead boy detectives and the living girl who joins their partnership - are also its least engaging. Maybe this is because these characters are where the bulk of the show's melodrama lies, but while it was clear these people would die for each other, I never really believed that they were genuine friends who enjoy each other's company and like doing stuff together. They all ended up being more fun to watch with other, supporting characters than each other.

Still, that's made up for by the fact that the show is never too self-serious - unlike other recent, youth-oriented fantasy shows on Netflix like Sabrina or Wednesday, it doesn't lose its light touch even when the plot gets heavy. And with only eight episodes, it still manages to tie up a lot of plot and character threads while maintaining its episodic structure. The resulting season ends up feeling satisfying and delightful, but also leaves you wanting more.

#dead boy detectives

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drifting-pieces-blog-blog · 9 months

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Breaking down the Comics: Elias Spector's Death

Okay. Okay. I'm going to try to be....a little comprehensible.... I'm going to fail. Just a warning.

I want to talk about the first run of Moon Knight. Specifically the last issues of the first run. There were 38 issues in the very first run of their own comic. After that, they reached out to a larger audience and started to print differently and started over with #1 because comics suck at a comprehensible numbering system.

In the start, we meet Marc Spector, see him have a conflict of heart, die, come back, and become Moon Knight. He starts to add in identities of Jake and Steven as a way to be anyone else but Marc Spector and claims they are just him starting over and trying to use their lives as a way to do things better. (a system that has not yet realized that it is a system. Denial is not just a river).

We see him fight some of his villains that start to play bigger parts later in the series. We see him make friends as Jake and money and love as Steven. We see bits of his past and some stories of Marc Spector’s adventures. We meet Randall and even get to see Marc fail to save people (Crowly’s son, Randall, Gena’s friend). We see him struggle with Khonshu and his identity a bit. We even see him break down a couple times.

But the way that fist run ends is to me the real defining moment for Moon Knight. Let’s take you to:

Issue #37, The Ghost.

It opens with Elias dying of cancer in a hospital in Chicago. On his deathbed, he calls for Marc.

The comic notes that they have been estranged for 18 years.

In this comic, Steven has finished organizing the files on Marc and is still grappling with the fact that he and Marc are in fact two different people. He thinks once he has organized Marc’s life, he can lock it up and they can become Steven Grant forever and never have to deal with that unpleasantness again.

Up to this point, we have been seeing them struggle with their identities. Still under the illusion that they are one man putting on different identities who can't decide what life to live.

Understandable, considering that Marc does not want to be Marc anymore. Steven detests the life that was lived as Marc and Jake pushes back on both lives, wanting to be with friends and a simple man of the people.

In many ways, Marc only surfaces when things of the past come up. He refuses to acknowledge that he's still around and when he is faced with that fact, he is stressed and full of rage.

We've seen clips of Marc's past. We see him working as a guide for not always good people through tough parts of the world. We see him working for hire with the Feds in capturing a runner. We see the CIA and world organizations hiring him. Is it any wonder that he's so skilled? That his past is often overlooked when it comes to SHIELD and other entities, because he probably not only worked for them, but probably also carried out shady business for them. But that's a different story.

In this issue, we see Steven watching a recording of one of the missions Marc was on. "Spector led a scout team. We took a terrorist camp in a cross border operation. The only problem was that our .50 caliber gunners couldn't be bothered with fine distinctions between terrorists, women, and children."

As much as we'd like to see Marc as a man of misfortune and circumstance, he wasn't always a good guy. He often tried his best to be good in his missions, often feeling conflicted and trying to save people or turning on those that he found to be of bad character, but sometimes he was a bad guy.

It's important to see these bits so we can better understand Marc and his intense trauma, his guilt, and his self hatred.

This issue uses this to show how far away from his father's teachings Marc fell. How he pushed so hard against his father that he ended up on the other side.

In my books, this is the most important Moon Knight story. The story of where he came from. Of his father and his faith.

His parents fled to America when Germany took over Czechoslovakia. In Europe, his father had been a great man that was "ordained a Rabbi at eighteen, and went on to become a brilliant scholar in the Kabbalah, Jewish Mysticism."

They moved to the poor side of Chicago where his father tried to teach him that "God loves a poor man. [...] Poor in goods, rich in spirit." (Something Jake Lockley adheres to).

Here, they suffered antisemitism. They were beaten and used as scapegoats for everything wrong.

Interestingly enough, he sites that his mother died when he was just a child. with the frequent beatings, fear, and death of his mother, it's any wonder Marc suffered some trauma?He became angry at his father for not standing up for himself or them.

His father wanted him to study to become a Rabbi and Marc turned to boxing and self defense.

When his father tries to stop him during a fight, he punches him. His father disowns him and kicks him out.

The next day Marc joined the Marines. He focused "for eight years" to become the best. When he was the best, he became a mercenary.

If you jump forward several writers, you find out that he was dishonorably discharged from the Marines for bouts of dissociation and mental health. But let's stay focused on the original story.

Steven has found out that their father is dying and he is refusing to go back. "He said he never wanted to see me again, he meant it. I won't go back."

An important aspect of this comic is that Marlene notes herself to be Steven's lover, confidant, and guru.

She acts as their guide in matters of the mind and heart. She's always the one that calms them and helps them to reconcile when the three of them start to fight one another and don't know who they are.

Despite her not understanding his DID, and they themselves not understanding it, she is a huge help for them.

I have a lot of conflicting thoughts and opinions on Marlene, but it's good to note that she was originally written as a very important part of his story.

"Marc Spector was always an escapist. When your relationship with your brother Randall soured you just forgot him for ten long years until it was too late and he died hating you. I can feel what kind of spin you're in, Steven, but you have to accept the responsibility, make amends now. Steven Grant and Moon Knight have no fathers. Only Marc Spector does."

That's a very interesting view into all their relationships and how they keep one another at arms length. Jake, Steven, and Marc refuse to believe they have the same past, responsibilities, or life.

Yet, when Marc is struggling with dealing with the approaching death of his father, and facing him, Steven takes the floor and tries to help Marc get out of it. (Just like Jake jumping out the window later in Lemier's version of the story. Always running...Maybe I'll do something on that later...)

While out being Moon Knight, he comes across a Synagogue on fire. He sees a man run into the burning building and finds a Rabbi struggling to save the Torah from the fire.

"The five books of Moses. He put his life on the line for this. My father would have done the same, I'll bet. Though he wouldn't lift a finger against the thugs who bullied him. I guess every man's got his own reason for being a hero."

He finds out that the fire was set on purpose by NeoNazis. It reminds him of when he was a child and he flies into a rage.

"I'm not about to let these Nazi goons get off with 'Malicious mischief' and a slap on the wrists."

He's been through this before. There is weight to the thought that a lot of Marc's childhood trauma stems from dealing with religious trauma and antisemitism.

I think as time moves on, we forget the time period that Moon Knight is set in. He isn't just a child of a jewish immigrant.

His father fled the Holocaust. There is a high likelihood that friends and family did not make it out. Marc grew up hearing about relatives he lost. Knowing that his blood line probably didn't make it out of Europe. That there are no pictures of his ancestors. That he can't go back and see the old houses and towns.

His father was a Rabbi, which means he was in a big part of a Jewish community that also probably fled or flat out came from the camps. He grew up seeing the tattoos, the poor health, the people with PTSD, and hearing the stories.

We're talking severe Generational Trauma.

When Marc finds the Nazi scum that burned the synagogue he has some of my favorite lines that define him:

"You know where I belong, punk? I belong with the decent and innocent folk who can't find a moment's peace. Not in the streets, not in their own homes, so long as punks like you terrorize them. I belong with the persecuted."

Detective Flint shows up and stops him before he kills them. (I honestly forgot Flint went back to the beginning. That poor man has dealt with so much Moon shit.)

Marc realizes he needs to face things and heads to Chicago.

But he is too late. He arrives in time for the funeral. He's handed a kippah and he puts it on for the first time in years.

Now, we get to learn a bit about Elias.

We come to find him as a man in desperate search of Self and Spirit. A man who was so stern and severe but also a man that sought truth and a just way to live.

His line of research focused on the "knowledge to see beyond the physical. To know the universe as a reflection of the divine image and to see mankind redeemed..."

It discusses how the body cannot meet G-d, but only the spirit and only in death can the spirit travel.

We find out later that he was seeking a way to bring back the departed who have met with G-D and the other side.

A man that refused to fight back against those that had done him wrong, who believed that given enough time that G-D would punish those that had brought them harm.

A man that sought for a way to face G-D after watching a world try to wipe his people off the very earth. An interesting thought.

During the eulogy, Marlene reflects that "It's almost as though he were speaking of you as Steven Grant. A man in search of self and spirit who rejected Marc Spector's materialism to become Moon Knight - A social conscience and moral force, just, severe, unknowable."

Steven later goes to visit their father's grave at night and comes across some thugs spray painting a swastika on some of the grave stones and vandalizing them. He’s emotional and outraged that even here there is no peace to be found. It turns out this was all a distraction as someone has stolen his father's corpse!

Issue #38, And the dead shall rise: (I love that cover).

We see Moon Knight struggling with his identity. Elias was not a father to them all. Marc is emotional and pissed, but still refusing to take responsibility for his part in all this.

"Moon Knight will find his...Marc Spector's father and return him to the dignity of a final resting place..." Steven refuses to say ‘my father’. Any mention of Elias is always in relation to Marc and even Marc can’t make himself be present when talking about his father.

Marlene is tasked with helping to clear out Elias' study and donate his papers and books to the university when she's attacked by someone who runs off with some of the papers.

Steven returns and has a small break down. "I'll find him, Marlene, and I'll kill him for desecrating my father's grave and memory!" "That's Marc Spector the cold - hearted mercenary talking, not you stev--" "How long can I deny it, Marlene. I AM Marc Spector!"

And Marc is finally taking charge. The first time he has taken ownership of his father and how he feels.

He sees his father in a new light.

"I may have misjudged my father's saintliness for cowardice and his genius and moral zeal for fanaticism. [...] And isn't moon knight in his own way a moral zealot fighting perhaps for the very same values Marc Spector once rejected?"

Now that is an interesting way to look at it. Moon Knight is about doing the right thing. About protecting those that need it. About believing in something unkillable and powerful. Moon Knight is about an idea of man being more than he is. Is this not what his father believed in?

We learn that Elias had uncovered a way to bring a soul back to the dead body with necromancy where it could then "utter its knowledge of God to a living Kabbalist."

Turns out one of Elias' students decided to test this out on Elias' freshly dead body.

He does manage to resurrect the dead body of Elias, who zombie walks towards Moon Knight.

Marc immediately starts having flashbacks and intense guilt. Even with his dead father trying to strangle him, he refuses to fight back: "No! I'll die before I ever lay my hands on him again, I swear it! Father, forgive me-"

Marlene shows up and manages to break the spell, sending Elias back to death.

Marlene tends to save him a lot in the earlier runs. Just something to note.

Marc once more is not present. Curled up on the floor after melting down, he is beyond emotional and most likely dissociating out the wazoo. "I found him, Marlene... I found...Spector's father."

Once more, Marc is being protected. Marc, who hated how his father sheltered him and wanted to feel the real world in violence and brutality is often in need of being sheltered. Steven, who wants to rid himself of Marc and the past is often doing the sheltering.

When it comes to emotions, Marc is often the one being overcome. Either in fits of anger and rage, guilt and regret, or just overwhelmed in sadness or traumatic responses. Steven Grant is usually the one that is shown to be calm and collected.

In fact, at the start of the issues, when Steven is watching Marc’s tapes and going through his things, he’s detached and unemotional. Steven has the ability to see things from a different perspective of ‘useful’ and ‘Not useful’. It’s rare that Steven responds to things with emotion unless Marc is involved and they are arguing or Marc has put them or someone he cares about in danger.

Frankly, it’s possible that Steven is the caretaker in the early comics. Mackay has shown that Steven not only manages their finances, but their hygiene and body care. He’s the rational and logical one. The one that can face down a villain without reacting. He’s also the one that does all the exercises and rehab when Marc puts them in a wheelchair.

The story ends with them returning home to New York. Steven notes that they almost died because of Marc's emotions. He also notes that Marc seems to have resolved some of the bitterness that was held with his father's memory. He comments that he feels a peace of mind and like a whole new person.

Steven and Marc featured heavily in this with Steven shielding Marc without even realizing he was doing it. And as a system that has not come to full realization yet, it is possible that Steven is starting to understand here, which is why he feels like a whole new person at peace with himself.

This is also how the first run of Moon Knight as a stand alone comic ended. 1980-1984.

Before this issue, Jake was featured heavily. Steven was the mansion party pretty boy that lounged around with Marlene. Jake was the one out doing his reconnaissance and hanging with Gena and Crowley.

It was a good connection to link Steven and Marc’s past with the father and Jewish faith. Jake would have been easier to connect. Jake is the son that Marc wishes he had been.

But Jake is emotional. Jake wants nothing to do with Marc’s bloody past. Calls him a killer and would be happy to spend all day in his cab. If anything, when Steven and Marc talk about Jake, it often feels like two older brothers talking about a goofy but kind younger brother.

A few issues earlier, when they ended up in a wheelchair for a time, Steven lamented that he didn’t think he could give up driving Jake’s cab, as it brought him too much joy.

So I can see why this issue needed Steven to be involved. Steven doesn’t know who he is at this point. He hasn’t been defined and given the chance to figure out what makes him happy and tick. Jake has already broken off and figured out who he is. He knows he’s Jake Lockley. But who is Steven Grant aside from Marlene’s eye candy and the rich boy?

Settling Marc’s past, seeing who he was and where he was coming from, protecting him, and facing down the Nazi threat was eye opening for him. Much like in the show, Steven needed to see where they came from to see where he belonged.

Does it get easier for Steven and Marc to interact after this? Not really. Marc is still self destructive and a danger to them. But I think when Marc falls down that path, it’s easier for Steven to know where Marc is coming from. To help him get out of the spiral and let them function.

An interesting aspect is how much Marc’s past has been re-written over and over again by different writers. His mother’s role, his relationship with his brother, his religious handlings, his trauma, and his violent past are redesigned each time a new writer gets their hands on him.

No one really knows how to handle Marc’s relationship with G-D or his specific type of trauma. Marc’s guilt is’t because he betrayed his culture or religion. He didn’t turn his back on that. His fate with heaven and hell are constructed by Christian writers that don’t understand or research things well enough.

Marc’s pain is that he can’t let go of the choices he made. The regrets of relationships that he turned his back on weigh heavily on him. His inability to save people and the times he didn’t try when he should have are agony to him.

“You can’t save everyone, but you have to try.” Marc’s problem is that he will break himself trying. He can’t handle the thought that he can’t save everyone. Each one he loses is a scar on him that eats away at him as another example of him destroying everything good in his life.

Marc has gotten to the point where a flower would wilt and he’d take it as a personal hit that he didn’t try hard enough.

He lost his brother. He was too late for his father. He couldn’t help Marlen’s father. Marc needs the reminders that sometimes he has to lay down and rest. Steven tends to be that reminder.

When Marc forgets that he’s more than just a killer, Steven steps in and tells Marc to sit down and shut up. He is balance and control that both Marc and Jake lack and I really wish we got to see more of this, especially in current writings.

I want to see that Marc is the emotional hot head. That Jake is the heart and soul. That Steven is the cool and collected protector. I want to see them wrestle with G-D in a way that makes sense to them. I want to see how Marc has healed and how they are processing their trauma. I want them to show that they can work together and know what one another needs. I want them to show that healing is possible without losing any part of themselves.

Sometimes healing looks like three guys sharing time and doing their own thing. Not one guy being in control of the body full time. Sometimes healing is one guy celebrating Purim while the other two take a back seat because it isn’t their thing.

I’m prepared for disappointment, but I hope I’m pleasantly surprised.

#Moon Knight #Moon Knight comics #Meta #moon knight meta #I'm back on it everyone #I was supposed to be writing something else and this happened #I'm so sorry #Marc Spector #Steven Grant #I'll find a good Jake one next #I wish the new guys would go back and re-read the old stuff #There's some gold in there that should not be missed or re-written #I'm not normal about Moon Knight #Marc needs more hugs #Someone get Steven off his high horse and back into that speedo #He needs to learn to relax sometimes #Jake needs a buddy #I miss the Moon Knight friends

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twiststreet · 5 months

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2023: for the "record", my favorite experiences with comics this year--

#5: Junji Ito's Dark Paradox. This was the year the Viz App became available, and that had a lot of great classic experiences over there-- switching between Ranma 1/2 and Cross Game has been ridiculous. Hall of fame, excellent material. Junji Ito's Dark Paradox was the first manga I checked out on there, and it's just ... it's just a fun "bad dream" of a comic, you know? I have a very particular range of horror that works for me, and this is in that range, something like Phantasm where there's a goofiness but the nightmare logic of it carries you through...? American comics are so bad at horror, though-- they're so bad at it that there are American comic creators who wrote entire essays about how "horror doesn't work in comics." And then you read these Japanese things and it's like... the entire continental United States, not even in the race! Not even in the race!

#4: Osamu Tezuka's Paper Fortress. It's not available legitimately as far as I know-- I think it's just too short and maybe too tough a read. It's his war memoir, and it's just... it's a rough little comic. There's an innocence to his style, that he knows how to use against a reader-- you can see that in a lot of his comics-- and I think it really becomes especially tough with Paper Fortress. If you saw Godzilla Minus One, and if you saw Boy and the Heron, I think you have to read Paper Fortress to really complete the trilogy. It's an essential third part of that trilogy. I'm not a Tezuka expert, like other people-- there are big ones I haven't read... but for me, I think it's Tezuka's best comic, or the best I've seen.

#3: Katsuhiro Otomo's Sayonara Nippon, which I wrote about at numbing length over here. It's the greatest action comics artist of all time, but doing a hang-out, edgelord comedy (with nods to R. Crumb!) set in Harlem that is probably unprintable now because of its, uh, "political incorrectness", let's go with that, let's use that phrase. It held my attention, haha. But despite the parts I have a discomfort with, it's Otomo-- he's one of the best to ever do it, for me-- and it's Otomo doing something I'd never seen him do. I had a good time. I don't necessarily recommend it.

#2: Fumi Saimion's Tokyo Love Story. Another scanlation-only deal-- I don't think it's available legitimately. I misidentified it as a josei comic, while it's technically seinen-- either way, it's just a comic about young adults trying to figure themselves out romantically. I think you'd call it a "manic pixie dreamgirl" story, but Saimon's a woman, so-- I think a manic pixie dreamgirl lands differently when it has a woman creator. Maybe that's a mistake on my part, but-- I see that more as a kind of wish fulfilment, and interesting as such, I guess?

But I don't know-- for me, it's just how Saimon draws... It's so loose, but it's just enough. It's not burdensome at all, when you look at it. So you just get to be with the characters-- the art's never trying to get in the way. It's the kind that makes you want to draw because it doesn't seem impossible to draw-- like, "oh drawing's fun." I see comics now, American comics, and none of them make drawing look fun-- they all make drawing seem like work. All the lighting effects, you know?? What kid is at home with a pen saying to themselves, "Oh I can do that" and copying a drawing with that much lighting going on, where you can't see the lines because they're all holding colors, etc. When I look at these comics... it's certainly not "lazy art" or "bad art." It's just that you get to be with the characters.

And then easy #1, mentioned briefly here, is Kowloon Generic Romance, particularly the first volume, which is available legitimately (rare for this list haha!), and is just... It fucking knocked me out, man. It's hard to articulate the why of it, but it's like... if I made comics more often, it's something I wish I could make. It's off the charts horny, which I don't think I could do in a comic, not as unashamedly as that. But it's just got this-- it's just the vibes are immaculate, man.

Like, I think the thing that unites all the comics I've mentioned... comics having a breath of life to them. Where ... you feel like you're watching people that exist. I think when you're a kid, you get that from comics, and a lot of the angry people you see online are people for whom "Spiderman is no longer alive" because they can't keep it up as they get older, and their imaginations wither, and they think the reason why is "politics" and not... you know, the sad clawing of mortality against their flesh.

But like-- Kowloon Genric Romance, it's not just that the characters are breathing but they're like... hanging out in apartments, smoking cigarettes, being hornballs, swooning, feeling nostalgiac. They're alive and they're in a Wong Kar Wai movie?? That is ... That's pretty gnarly, to me.

There's a science fiction element that was dragging it down in the last volume I read (I think a couple came out since then, I'm behind, but). But it's just-- it's very much a manga set to Citypop-- you can hear the soundtrack in your head, and I bet if I compared notes to other people who read it, our soundtracks would overlap significantly. It demands it, you know? It's just... It's vibes. It's just so good at vibes...

Worst Comic: the Viz App has Hot Gimmick and Hot Gimmick is a mess. I had a fun time with it because the wrong choices have a sort of... they're almost funny because it's like "why the hell did they make this like this" quality to it. But that is trash. I can't defend it. It's kind of unacceptable. I read every page.

Honorary Mentions: like I said, Cross Game and Ranma 1/2. I thought Yasuda Kasumi's drawings on Fool Night were very very pretty. I thought Wild Strawberry started strong in that respect too, though it's lost my attention fast when it became more of a standard shonen. I'm very confused by One Piece lately but continue to enjoy that and Chainsaw Man (where I'm very behind as I figured out I enjoy it more binging it a little).

I decided to be a manga guy about 3 years ago, and get American comics out of my life, and stop writing about them, and blah blah blah, but that said, I continue to be very involved with the comics, in all kinds of weird ways, whether it's stuff I can't talk about, making notes for future projects, trying to get into "drawing shape" again (that is *not* going well), etc. I had a very, very good year as a reader this year, too-- that hasn't always been true, but ... I feel like as a reader, this was a year far above average for me, or what little I settled for as average prior to 2020. I hear things are rough out there but I hope that's true for other people, too. Anyways, that was my year.

#manga #year in review

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psychologicalwarclaire · 7 days

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Asking some writers/artists I follow:

Is there anything in your fic/comic that you as the author know about, but won't end up in the actual story?

There is. a lot.

Spoilers for Spider's Web With Strings Attached (and a really long rant) below the cut

When she took Donnie's mask after Heinous Green bashed his head in, she kept it in her vault in case she needed to perform some sort of magic that required his DNA some day.

Big Mama never intended for Donnie to die.

That being said, she still recorded and sold copies of Donnie's death. It's her most sold recording ever.

Viper requested to fight Leo. Big Mama only agreed if she kept him alive and able to fight.

Like she got the orb that she captured all of New York in from Draxum, Big Mama got the spider brooches from Draxum many years ago. She only had two; she was lying about the other two for Raph and Mikey.

Before he knew where the twins were, Mikey kept having visions of them fighting people and getting hurt. He thought they were just nightmares.

Heinous Green was in the arena because Big Mama often partners with the Hidden City police. Criminals can work of time by serving the community. In this case, they serve the community by providing entertainment Roman Coliseum style.

Big Mama's family introduced arena fights to the humans.

There was going to be a fight where Tyrian fought a scorpion and writhed with agonizing poison for a chapter, but I forgot about it until it was too late to add it -_-

Raph and Mikey's arena names would have been Rouge and Terracotta.

Big Mama was panicking the majority of the fic. Because she kidnapped them very illegally, she had to manage their food, housing, medical care, and fight arrangements herself so none of the people who normally do that (legally) would get suspicious. Honestly, Big Mama didn't expect them to become SO well loved, and then worried about keeping audience interest by putting the twins in harder fights, but not killing off her greatest assets. She, like everyone else, thought that Leo would snap first. When Donnie snapped first and proved to be a very effective killer, some of the audience grew worried about what was happening behind the scenes and raised questions Big Mama couldn't answer. Panicking, she set up the death bracket, hoping that becoming the champion would turn public opinion of Tyrian positive again. She miscalculated, and Donnie died. She also didn't intend for Leo to get mixed up in the bracket. A LOT of people lost a LOT of money, and her stocks dropped. At that point, it became less about business and money making and much more about getting revenge via torture. By the time she offered Astros the 'out' that was one final fight, she was stressed out of her mind with upholding her reputation. Had Leo been in his right mind, he would have seen how much she was unraveling.

Todd turned his non profit lemonade into a fundraiser to find the twins back when they were first missing. There were a LOT of posters and Big Mama had a FIELD DAY trying to take them all down.

Mikey and Raph tried for DAYS to get the trackers back online, but it never worked.

After hearing that Donnie had died, Hypno, Warren, Meat Sweats, and Repo got together and made the Hamatos a gift basket.

April is failing most of her classes right now.

At some point during the recovery arc, Donnie snuck out to secretly turn every blinking red light in the Lair green. You know exactly why.

Raph was wrong when he said crime had been way down since the invasion. Casey Jr had been handling it without anyone knowing. The Purple Dragons hate him a lot now.

Draxum learned slang words from school, but April taught him what they meant

#those are the ones off the top of my head #i might mention them at some point but for now consider these headcanons from the author #writing #my writing #behind the scenes #fanfiction #swsa #rottmnt fanfic swsa #asks #cookie crumbs

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