im gonna start a fight; and, at the same time, i need you to take this in the most good-faith way possible, but:

videos that involve body-checking and intentionally (and uncritically) show a mealplan of an unhealthy number of calories are just a revamped version of pro-ana food diaries.

and yeah, i know there's arguments. i address some of them under the cut. but at the end of the day, we're just coming back to romanticizing mental illness; we've just found a better platform for it.

this is already something we've done. we knew it was wrong and tried to stop it. and tbh. it just wasn't enough.

there are people who argue "well, what if you have an eating disorder, you can't help it if you don't eat!" except that as someone with an ED; we are not infants. we know what we're doing. part of having an ED is that you are like, maybe too self-aware. even if we can't help our own food choices, we don't need to fucking romanticize the disorder - something we've been warning you about since 2013. there are hours of setup, filming, and editing that go into these videos. they do not happen to fall into place randomly. there is a reason they are pieced together to be beautiful, bright, inspiring.

there's this woman who pretty much only posts daily plans under a normal amount of calories, and everyone defends her saying but it's better than nothing! and i'm like. except she opens those with images of her showing off her body and provides no context in the video or caption that suggests that she believes what she's doing is unhealthy. she has hundreds of thousands of followers on a platform designed for young kids and teens. i refuse to believe that by accident her content just happens to be cheery advice on "healthy" versions of starving.

for any other symptom of mental illness, we would be incredibly enraged by this kind of placid acceptance of a "tips and tricks" fast-start guide. imagine if people posted pink & pretty videos saying "best places to cut yourself" as if it was a fucking storytime. we, as a society, are so fucking fatphobic that we would rather accept blatantly harmful displays of self harm than admit that we are obsessed with a hyper-thin body type.

i am not suggesting someone never talks about their disorder. i talk about mine. actually, it's a plot point in my book.

here's the difference: i recognize it's a fucking mental illness. i am very careful to never mention a specific weight, eating pattern, or calorie plan. i always make sure to position it as something that ruined my fucking life. i do not put cheery music in the background and hearts and sparkles over my worst moments. i do not film it in bright light. i do not start each passage with an image of a thin body followed by "here's how to look like her."

eating disorders should not be framed as aspirational. and the problem is that society worships the "after" image, so long as you don't get too sick. there is a reason so many people who quit being "influencers" will later admit - i wasn't eating well that whole time; an obsession with food was completely destroying my life.

we let any uncredited, uncertified person write the most backwards, fucked up shit about how to get the body you desire! because the underlying, secret belief is: well, at least they're thin! and the real thing that fucking gets me each time - they make fucking money off of it. their irresponsibility and societal harm literally pays off for them.

"why do you care so much." "don't like it don't look." "so what if people experiment with new ways of thinking of food?"

thank you for asking. we're about to get extremely personal. it's because when i was 18 i discovered "thinspiration"/"thinspo." and it absolutely influenced, shaped, and codified my pre-existing eating disorder. i went from having some troubling habits and traits to being incredibly unwell within what felt like a matter of days. there were actual pages designed to train me on how to have an ED correctly. it was all so suddenly easy. i was sick; and the nature of the illness meant - i wanted to be sicker.

it takes an average of 7 years for a person to fully recover. i know this personally - even now, 10 years from the worst of it, i still fucking struggle. i am so much happier now and i eat what i want and i literally don't think about food at all (19 year old me would shudder) and yet - i still fucking know the calories of plain toast with butter.

an eating disorder is one of the deadliest types of mental illness. over 1 in 4 people with an ED will attempt suicide.

and i'm sorry. i just do not see the exchange rate of "high rate of engagement" versus "the value of a human life."

i think mostly we as a culture need to stop pretending media is for us and instead recognize that it's for the people making it. "the show didn't do the thing I wanted it to" is so not the point. did it do what the people making it wanted it to do? did it tell the story they were trying to tell? than it was successful. if that doesn't align with what you wanted to happen, don't get up in arms about it. don't badmouth the creators and throw a tantrum. that's what fan works are for. the text is the text, and it told the story it was telling. you wouldn't be like "ugh shakespeare is insane for act v btw like there was no reason for juliet to kill herself she should've just waited and then her and romeo could have been together wtf this ruined the whole play" like no!!! the themes were there the set-up was there the foreshadowing was there shakespeare did what he intended to. just because it wasn't a happy ending and just because you thought it should've went differently doesn't mean it was bad. read a fic where juliet lives and move on.

if sasuke was the main character then he probably would've been a LOT more sympathised with than he is now (which is to say rarely). like the narrative wouldn't even need to change to show his pains or 'his side of the story', bc it does that plenty. it's just that he is not the main character. and idk what it is about our human minds but we tend to sympathise with main characters automatically (unless ofc you go off the rockers insane and do something like obliterate almost everyone from the planet *cough* eren yeager *cough*)

an instance that comes to my mind where this does happen is with lelouch from code geass. while i don't agree with his character motivations, people generally do sympathise with him as he is the mc and as viewers we know he isn't inherently evil. sasuke's goal towards the end is slightly similar but ofc people love to hate him so they don't even try to understand where he is coming from.

my point is, most people while engaging with the naruto story don't read between the lines and so don't see how traumatised and in pain sasuke is and hence don't understand his character motivations. heck, they don't understand a single bit about him and so they automatically hate him, as he is supposedly going against the main character's goals.

which is really sad given all that he has been through.

fuck it, headcanon time. the psychology siblings and the von karma siblings are insufferable to watch tv with for different reasons -- athena and simon can't stop pointing out mental illness symptoms and diagnosing characters, while franziska and miles just tear into every tiny mistake together with relentless, scathing criticism. people ask the von karma siblings what's the point of watching something if they hate it and they're like "i literally never said that?? i love this show what are you talking about???? i just think that it's inexcusable that the crash mat was slightly visible in that one frame and that the continuity errors with the characters' clothes in that one scene were-"

nothing will make you sympathise with conspiracy theorist ideology more than having a seemingly rare reaction to a vaccine lmao.

society if the duffers had gone through with their original plan to have mike go to the upside down in s1 to find will

it's crazy finding out you're autistic as an adult bc then you start to notice the ways it affects you and has affected you throughout life

and then it becomes a hyperfixation bc you're like "omg this makes so much sense now" and you start feeling a bit better about yourself knowing that there's an explanation to everything

Begging Adachitoka to not make Yukine an orphan after the hell he went through and Nora brotherless bcs wtf wtf wtf they don’t deserve that

I am so torn between "Yato dying to save Hiyori would be a wonderful, tragic reverse of their relationship up until that point, in which Hiyori half-died saving his life and then served as his lifeline; it would also ultimately prove gods CAN change and love, as the Yato from the beginning of the story was very vocal that he intends to die for no one and that his own life was the thing most precious to him" and "FOR GOD'S SAKE ADACHITOKA JUST LET THEM BE HAPPY FOR ONCE IN THEIR LIVES JUST LET THEM BE"

franz ferdinand (the band. not the historical figure) is such an anomaly to me. it feels like everyone's heard at least one of their songs - take me out - bc when i play it they go "oh yeah i know this one!" or "woah this is really good!" yet i don't know anyone aside from myself who actually regularly listens to them. many don't even know their name or only recognize take me out by its riff. one of their songs is now an anime opening 20 years after it originally came out

(mgv) good morning. picture this: house's leg acting up while wilson is over so wilson offers to massage it for him. house gripes for a second, jokes about them not beating the homosexuality allegations, but relents. and while wilson is working out the knots, the relief is so palatable that house lets out the purrs he's been keeping a tight hold on ever since the spasm started. they're good ones, too, the tone and breathing just right to let you know he feels good. at that point house has relaxed back into the couch with his eyes closed so he doesn't see how wilson visibly perks up when he hears it. mr needs to be needed, bitching provider, doctor husband -- compounded with his status as an alpha, having proof that he makes house feel better, that he's good at what he's doing, he preens, working the muscles harder with a smile. it's so domestic and soft that wilson starts purring too, his lower and more rumbling compared to house's.

(they don't talk about it once the moment's over. back to the status quo.)

.

i'm cry laughing some people on twitter are now saying "izzy bashing" needs to be tagged in fics. how did these people ever survive watching this show where izzy is the CANON ANTAGONIST i'll never know

benefit of the doubt but i think most of them have gotten to this point gradually. when they first watched the show they were not attached to izzy the way they are now. i know for a lot of people it was blorbo at first sight with izzy but i've also seen izzy enjoyers say they didn't like him at first, and then fandom made them care about him.

like i'm pretty sure for a lot of ppl it started off with isolating themselves from ppl who made posts that they didnt like, like ppl who criticized ofmd for being based on two real people with direct connections to actual real-world slave trade (which is an incredibly valid thing to criticize abt ofmd).

another one that i think funneled a lot of fans towards being so delusionally attached to izzy was people pointing out or complaining about the disproportionate amount of fan content for izzy compared to prominent characters of color—which is a consistent issue in fandom no matter what the media, and is also a very easy one for people to be uncomfortable with whenever they see it get pointed out. people venting that "fans care too much abt this white man" often make fans who care abt that white man very defensive right off the bat, and then rather than engage with why they feel defensive or question if maybe their enjoyment of this character is fueled by implicit bias (which it might not be, to be clear! im not saying—and i have never said—that everyone who enjoyes izzy likes him for racist reasons), they stop listening to the conversation abt white favoritism and continue blorboposting as much as they want. it's incredibly easy for fans to brush off this convo as "just starting drama" and avoid the topic altogether because "fandom is for fun!" and they dont want to think abt difficult topics like racism and implicit bias, they just want to enjoy their blorbos in peace.

so they kept narrowing the takes they were seeing until they were in an echo chamber that kept moving more and more towards complete woobification of izzy hands. these people are now looking at the show entirely through izzy's pov, making posts abt how sad it is that none of the other characters are ever nice to him, how frustrating the show is from his perspective, how it feels to be deeply in love with someone who doesn't love you back. they've stared at gifs of con's micro-expressions and read angsty fanfiction and looked at endless izzy fanart and their entire ofmd fandom experience revolves around empathizing with this one character even tho the show itself continually makes him the butt of the joke.

at this point, telling these people to rewatch the show doesn't even matter. they've spent so much time over-analyzing every single one of izzy's scenes to the point where the emotional responses they get from these scenes are not the emotional responses anyone would have watching the show for the first time. they've warped the entire first season to fit their version of the show and are forgetting how often the show itself bashes izzy.

and the icing on the cake is the trolling. there's like, one or two people on here who go around sending anon hate and leaving nasty comments on instagram posts and harassing people on twitter for... like, i would say "for liking izzy" or even "for saying positive things about izzy" but like. i've gotten these messages, and the most sympathetic i've ever been to izzy was the post i made like "maybe he's mean bc he has chronic IBS. i'd actually understand him more if that were the case." so when i get these messages it's easier for me to just laugh them off bc it's so obviously just someone trying to make me upset, but people who do care about izzy (a lot of them being the same people who avoided engaging with the "why does fandom care so much abt white characters" convo) get these absolutely horrible messages about how they deserve to get hate crimed and they should kill themselves. and these fans who didn't want to even see vaguely negative posts abt izzy bc they just want to enjoy fandom in peace are now like "im targeted for just liking a character!"

so that's how we get to people saying that "izzy bashing" needs to be tagged. never mind that their definition of "bashing" almost certainly includes things that are not bashing but are just things that contradict the way they headcannnon him.

dear gods i adore horror tbh but i am way too sensitive to it

ok i might need to force myself to not romance astarion bc i don't want to know what it says about me to turn down karlach, the woman of my dreams, the character made to cater me personally, like, if she was real i'd bring the moon and stars down for the chance to see her smile, she's everything i've hoped for in a rpg companion, what does it say about me if i turn that down for someone like astarion

it takes so fucking little to trigger the most despairing rejected feelings inside me. this is so lame