Alright wise guy, what are your thoughts on the theme(s) of the first Mistborn book. This is literally an excuse for you to ramble about it, have fun.

VOID I LOVE YOU SM

So spoilers for Mistborn: The Final Empire! If you haven't read it, please beware because under the cut, Here There Be Spoilers (and also beware, Very Long post under the cut!)

The big running theme in The Final Empire is trust. Who can one really trust? Is it worth it to put your life in the hands of other people? What says they won't betray you as soon as it becomes favorable to do so?

Honestly this really is what Vin's character arc in the first book is about. At the beginning of the book, she's trapped in a low-level street gang where everyone is always out to get everyone else. Heck, the second time the audience ever sees her use her powers is when she is helping her boss betray a business partner.

Vin's brother has beaten into her the idea that she can trust nobody, not even him. Everyone is always out to hurt her or take advantage of her, and if she does not prove her immediate worth to her group, then at best she will be kicked out.

This, of course, is not helped by the fact that she is part of the literal slave class! Which is a whole nother essay tbh.

Then Kelsier takes her in and everything changes. There's a scene early on in the book, after vin formally joins the crew, where Kelsier and his men are all laughing and enjoying themselves while plotting their Big Plan™. And Vin, who does not trust any of them, is on the outside, quite literally. She's outside the room, watching them plan, wishing she could be included but not allowing herself to, because at this point in the book she still thinks they could betray her at any time.

I think now is a really good time to mention that being a Mistborn is built on secrecy and paranoia. Mistborn are literally the nobility's assassins. They hide their identities under hoods that blend into the mist so as not to be seen. So their powers cannot be used against them or their Noble Houses. In broad daylight they have to pretend to be normal people, or at best, regular Mistings. They can't trust anyone with the truth that they are Mistborn.

(Heck, even a quarter of their powerset- Copper and Bronze- create mistrust. With Bronze, after all, one can hear the allomantic pulses of burning another metal. Copper, on the other hand, blocks that; the use cases for these two metals lies in paranoia that someone else can use their Allomantic powers against you.)

Anyways! So we've explored some of the different aspects of mistrust in Mistborn, so what's the counterargument?

In a word: Kelsier.

Kelsier shakes up everything that Vin believes about how relationships work. He introduces his crew as something different- despite being a thieving crew, they operate under a principle of trust and camaraderie. "My crews rely on trust," Kelsier says at one point. In direct contrast to the dirty, paranoid crews Vin worked with before, Kelsier's crew is welcoming, understanding, and trusting of her.

But Kelsier's trust isn't just talk, either. When we learn that the crew believes Mare betrayed them in their last heist, Vin asks Kelsier how he could love Mare even though she betrayed him. Kelsier answers that given the choice between loving Mare and being betrayed or never knowing her, he would choose loving her. "I'd rather trust my men than worry about what will happen if they turn on me."

In the same passage as above, Kelsier poses a question to Vin: where has she been happier? with the old crews that we built on lies and suspicious, or with Kelsier's crew, who trusted each other and let their guards down? It's a rhetorical question, and the meaning is clear: Vin and Kelsier both are happier for risking themselves in order to be loved.

I don't think I've nearly done this topic justice. There are a million more points I could pull out and point to, but I want to end with my favorite quote from The Final Empire. It's from Vin, in Chapter 32. She says:

“Once I may have thought you a fool, but… well, that’s kind of what trust is, isn’t it? A willful self-delusion? You have to shut out that voice that whispers about betrayal, and just hope that your friends aren’t going to hurt you... Distrust is really the same thing, only on the other side. I can see how a person, given the choice of two assumptions, would choose to trust.”

“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”

— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)

i dont know how else to put this but to approach books (or any media, really) solely for the sake of relatability is genuinely incredibly heartbreaking......to have such little (or such unwilling) imaginative scope that you cannot stretch yourself, even marginally, in a different direction to what you’ve known or are used to knowing when the very POINT of stories is to transport you somewhere else, into someone else, so you can do just that........when fran lebowiz said a book “is supposed to be a door!” and george saunders said good prose “is like empathy training wheels” they were right!!! they were so so so SO absolutely entirely right!!!!!

"Gift for you."

Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girl found dead in a hidden room.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

girlbossing too close to the sun.

Oh, Hazel, look! The field! It’s covered with blood!’

Fiver is my favorite character in Watership Down, he's just like me fr. I was afraid this wouldn't read especifically as Fiver, but alas... i liked my initial sketch a lot so i kept it as it was.

"I should warn you, Boy-Who-Has-A-Name-I-Once-Loved, that not a speck of that love remains. Not a jot. Not a whisper. One hundred years of captivity has drained every last drop of that love from me, and I am cured forever."

-"How to Break a Dragon's Heart" by Cressida Cowell

===

I've been reading the OG How To Train Your Dragon books and oh boy does it wreck you. I took some artistic liberties in drawing him. I think he'd do well with whiskers like a catfish and great fin-like spines.

i love enemy caretakers. people who shouldnt be helping the injured person but their morals just wont let them stand by. a soldier patching up an opposing soldier even knowing it might put their own life at risk. a criminal talking down a gang leader to keep a detective from being killed or leaving them an anonymous tip to a dangerous situation. a vigilante keeping the person who wants to arrest them alive even if it increases the chance they get arrested. theres just so many great versions of enemy caretakers!!

—Jom. Can you stay tonight and scratch my back like you said you would? That's all. I won't do anything else to you. I promise.

I FEEL YOU LINGER IN THE AIR 💮 Episode 6

not arguing w a dude that has big brown eyes. whatever u say beautiful

(I’m only on ch 29 no spoilers pls!!!!) go wild with spoilers I am now done the book and am extremely mentally unwell

a friend of mine once said "whenever male privilege is brought up about trans men it's always about two points: being paid more and having our ideas listened to, bc those are the easiest things they can create an elaborate what-if scenario around and they can't make an argument for anything else". failproof, glad to see it holds strong

Your friend was so incredibly right and it's really funny because those are also the two most surface level social aspects of Male Privilege as a concept and it makes sense why those specific two come up.

This isn't a fully formed thought, so bear with me for a moment but, it makes sense total sense that trans people who - as a class - are usually economically disadvantaged and left unlistened to, see a demographic (trans men) transition towards a social role that they have been taught from birth is economically safe and provides a platform and they just assume that the economic security and platform must be granted by virtue of identifying with that role.

That isn't the case though because oppressive systems don't give a shit about your personal identity, they care about the labels they place onto you and those labels often misalign with your actual character and identity.

It's people explicitly buying into and believing that the patriarchal ideal of manhood is actually attainable for marginalized men when it's not. It's a cotton ceiling. It's literally radfem "gender and sex is universal and economic status, race, sexuality, and any other marginalizations don't matter because we're talking about gender" type politics that completely fall apart even farther because we are explicitly talking about a marginalized gender minority when we talk about trans men.

Like - there's a lot of reasons why those arguments don't hold up but even just on a base level it misunderands Male Privilege as like... A boon, rather than the horrific workings of centuries of Colonialist, White Supremacist gender hierarchies in practice.

If Male Privilege is treated as though it was a trait inherently afforded to men inherently by virtue of their personal identity, without acknowledging the fact that Patriarchy is a gendered tool of subjugation empowered by White Supremacy - people don't have to confront the racialized, colonialist nature of the gender binary. They don't have to confront the reality that Black Feminists have been arguing in favor of for decades that the liberation of women, especially marginalized women, cannot come without the liberation of the men in their communities because gendered liberation is racial liberation is disability liberation is economic liberation etc. etc. etc.

If it can be asserted that trans men have systemic male privilege then uncomfortable realities about the nature of the system itself don't actually have to be confronted and that's convenient for a lot of people who aren't actually genuinely interested in liberation and are only working in their own self interest.

one thing about hannibal and will that i always think about and which isnt addressed in fan content a lot (that i've seen) is that they just like each other! yes they're awful and manipulative to each other and yes they have this weird sort of planetary gravity that infects their interactions and they (or will, mostly, because by the time hannibal turns himself in for will it's pretty clear that's he's accepted it) resent that they can't leave each other's orbit. but they also like each other a lot! they're used to being the smartest one in the room (even though will is antisocial about it and doesn't advertise it unless asked) so i think it must be really refreshing to be able to parry their words back n forth and speak in metaphor instead of spelling everything out. and make references that most people won't get. and call a trout a very nietzschen fish without the person who hears going "🤨 you freak". because theyre both freaks! so you know if they actually did survive the cliff fall i always picture em in some ritzy hideaway making cannibal puns at each other

I saw something a while ago about paranormal romance/why choose books being basically trad wife fantasies, and I have so many thoughts about that

sometimes the ghost of kelley puckett (he is still alive) haunts me. does he know. does he even know. he’s so detached from the comics community and he’s such a private guy (I RESPECT THAT WHOLEHEARTEDLY) that i really and truly do not know if this man knows how much cassandra cain means to us. does he know batgirl 2000 is heralded as the bible of dc solo books, as a lot of people’s favorite comic ever written. does he know how much we love cass. how we write essays over her character and how amazing she is and how she changed our lives. does he know how adored his writing is. does he know he wrote the best comics character introduction of all time. does he even. know.

Can everybody please read what the people who designed Rapunzel's tower for the Tangled movie wrote about all the drawings on the wall!!

Here is the text:

[As might be expected, Glen Keane is as interested in what's inside as what's outside."What's most interesting about the art direction is the inside of the tower. To me, that is Rapunzel's world, and the idea that this girl is making her walls go away by painting on them-I love that.

Visual development artist (and Glen Keane's daughter) Claire Keane continues, "We didn't want it to be just decorative. This is all of her subconscious desires and all of her conscious desires. When I started trying to figure out what she would paint and how she would paint, I started looking into medieval drawings, and also the way other artists work with interconnecting their objects-Rapunzel paints on the walls and she paints on her furniture and it's all connected. I was trying to come up with a new language for the way she would paint"

Claire Keane took a very personal approach to identifying Rapunzels art. "I started on the weekends, and in the mornings, and whenever I was at home, documenting my life in a sketchbook, and turning it into Rapunzel.

Cleaning up my house, putting away my clothes, separating the dirty from the clean. I'm singing while I'm doing it. That leads into this life-as-art thing, where everything Rapunzel is doing is another opportunity for art.

Nathan and Byron also wanted her to feel a little analytical, as if she's documenting things that she's discovering. So it's not just about her art, she's also learning things"

Glen Keane concludes, "Well, you start off when she was a little girl, she just started painting very simple childlike images on the wall. It progresses in maturity to where every square inch is painted. When we're starting the story, there is no room left on this wall any longer. Her next step has to be to go out."]

Like this is so lovely!!!! Especially the last part: "When we're starting the story, there is no room left on this wall any longer. Her next step has to be to go out." I love that so much!!!