Question why does law have uh skin discoloration....? In the modern au?

it's permanent scarring from Amber Lead Syndrome! in the au i want to explore stuff like disability and chronic illness, he's got nerve damage in the discolorated skin, his hair also got white patches but he dyes it to make it less obvious he's got ALS because of the everything with flevance.

weird how its harder for me to imagine bride mozart than salieri, but still

a lesson on good karma digimon survive week 2024 day 4: supporting characters

2023 reads

The Spider And Her Demons

YA Australian urban fantasy/horror

about a Malaysian-Chinese girl who’s half spider-demon, just trying to keep her head down and survive high school

when she accidentally kills and eats a man in front of the most popular girl at school, they strike up a strange friendship and she starts to learn more about herself and the supernatural world

aroacespec/sapphic ish

I had a dream last night that me and Docm77 were trapped in a warzone and he tackled me to the ground to save me from gunfire and then together we took out like ten guys.

I'm sure this says something about my psyche and that something is that if I ever met Docm77 in real life I think we would commit war crimes.

Being ADHD(+ rsd) and having friends & customers who do not mask their autism by preforming ‘neurotypical’ emotional responses--is a very healing thing once I properly realized “oh, the flat tone doesn’t mean they hate me and my work. When they say ‘Thanks. I love it.’ or ‘yeah, fun.’ they mean it at total face value!” The number of times my rsd has started to flare up before my conscious is like ‘autism-!’ it’s like...a calming weighted blanket on my nerves. I can trust that there’s no disappointment to read in between the lines of their tone.

My favorite thing is characters turning into monsters (horrifying)

My second favorite thing is characters turning into monsters but having to go on about their lives as usual, meaning they have to do normal things while looking like a monster (silly)

pls i need to provide updates

sorry for complaining about people getting fleetway super sonic wrong again but i dont really get the personality people give him thats like . silly goofy trickster type villain whos super manipulative and calculated and likes playing mind games and stuff . because from what i remember he was not doing much of that he just liked biting and scratching and killing and does it very impulsively also

There's so much BSD lore that we're just never gonna get for a while.... or ever.

Double denim. With aviators!

—denied bodily autonomy from childhood —denied basic self identification from childhood —infantilization apparently occurring well into adulthood —possibly a complicated relationship with hair —EXTREMELY COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP W/ HIS OWN NAME... —possibly regards himself as somebody who is not meant to have Normal Relationships or be a part of Normal Life —MUST CREATE HIS IDENTITY WHOLECLOTH W/ THE SUPPORT OF HIS FRIENDS, HAVING TO DESTROY THE ONE HE WAS ASSIGNED BY HIS CARETAKERS.....................

yk the more i think about it the more i’m like literally why was there so much audience laughter at brokeback mountain. like i can’t understand it

Man, I still can’t believe how many people read that article about how six religious Tongan boarding school boys belonging to a culture of boating and fishing, who were close friends before they got lost, behaved when they found themselves stranded on an island, and went “This completely invalidates every idea William Golding had about how 50+ random British boarding school boys emerging from a plane wreck might handle it.”

i've had dysfunctional Honda family on the brain lately, and i got to thinking about Katsuya's sister—better known as Tohru's bitchy aunt who had no respect for Tohru's boundries and treated her like shit. she and Tohru's cousins are set up as an inconsequential first boss, out of Tohru's life and the story halfway through the first act, and then she's barely in the series ever again. canon-wise there's not really much to be said about her: she's a shrill, selfish woman who's basically a Japanese Karen. there isn't anything more to her character, and in the context of the story there doesn't need to be.

but i just got to thinking—what was she like as a kid? what was it like for her growing up, when she had a strict and uncompromising father, a mother who died when she was a teen/young adult, and an older brother who grew up frustrated and repressed?

Tohru's grandfather said that he and Katsuya were always struggling, with Katsuya striving to meet his father's unfair expectations and Tohru's grandfather (who henceforth is going to be called Toshiro bc i can't keep typing out "Tohru's grandfather") unwilling to accept that his son wasn't the person Toshiro wanted him to be. imagine having to live in a house where your older brother and your father are always fighting, where your brother slowly becomes a different person over the years and your father won't stop pointing out everything that's "wrong" with your brother.

(i think it's also important to note that the story takes place approximately from 1999-2001, which means Toshiro is very firmly from the war generation. that almost certainly influenced his values and approach to life, from the sharp focus on education to how he expected "good etiquette" from his children. and i dunno—not to drag a far bigger can of worms into the mix, but i think there is something to be said about how horrific worldwide cruelty deflates into systematic national cruelty which trickles down into mundane societal cruelty that somehow becomes "just the way things are", which feeds nicely into the series' themes of generational trauma and how people come to normalize abuse.)

we don't know much about the Hondas' domestic life, but we do know this: Toshiro was unhappy with his kids and his kids were unhappy with their father. then the mother died and Toshiro lost what was probably his strongest connection to both of them. Katsuya and Toshiro didn't really get along until after Kyoko came into their lives, which was probably a good several years later. meanwhile, we don't know anything about Toshiro's relationship with his daughter, but clearly there isn't the same kind of bad blood between them as there was Katsuya and Toshiro.

and it's just. Katsuya's sister. his younger sister, the one who grew up beside him. a woman who married a faceless (but respectable) man, who has enough money to take vacations and hire private detectives and completely renovate houses, who looks down on Kyoko and can't stop judging her own brother's child for being raised by an ex-delinquent.

do you ever think about it? how the unnamed sister spent her formulative years in a house that was never at peace. her father was proud and stubborn, clearly not willing to deal with anything other than what HE thought was right. her mother likely tried to play peacekeeper, because that's often what the wife is reduced to in a fight between family members, and who knows what her relationships with her kids were like in the face of that. her brother started out as someone like Tohru, but slowly became a different person as their father's expectations pressured him into walling off entire parts of himself. she constantly heard her father talk derisively about Katsuya for being less than his ideal (maybe even to Katsuya's face). and she clearly comes from a high-status family who have no qualms with being assholes toward "unsavory" family members, if the flashbacks to Katsuya's funeral are anything to go by. every time she met with family—aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, in-laws, what have you—she was reminded that you had to marry the right sort of person or you would be openly sneered at, receive no help or support, and be virtually disowned.

do you ever think about how she probably absorbed her father's ideas of an acceptable life because that's all she ever learned to value? how she took cues from her other family members and crafted a respectable persona that they would all approve of? that she possibly dotes on her family and supports her son's dream because she never got any of that love and acceptance for herself? her life is one of a stereotypical upper-middle-class suburban housewife, the kind who's obsessed with status and appearances to the point of becoming a shallow, cruel miniboss in a story about far worse cruelties and far less shallow motivations.

listen. listen. Tohru's aunt is an annoying person but also one that's easy to read. she felt "uneasy" around Kyoko. she wanted her son to succeed in life. she judged Tohru—a sweet girl who had literally never done anything of suspicion in her entire life—solely because of Tohru's parentage. she loved her father. she thought her father would support her in deriding the "distasteful" member of the family and she was wrong. she lost her mother at a young age. she refused to see Kyoko as worthy of respect. she thought Tohru was a delinquent like Kyoko who was shacking up with three strange men, but she still called to inform Tohru of Toshiro's illness and offered to go to the parent-teacher's conference with Tohru. her own father called her and her children "nasty by nature." she is a product of her childhood and also a deeply unpleasant person because she never chooses to extend compassion or kindness to others, much less any inklings of good faith.

and it all drives me a little nuts because Tohru's aunt is decidedly a minor character, and i don't think much thought was put into her characterization or backstory—she's the shitty judgmental family member who's there to be a roadblock for Tohru, and that's it. but the nuggets of information we get on Katsuya's past also creates a path for his sister's backstory, one that points to a quietly dysfunctional family, high pressure to be an acceptable member of society, and other unfortunate circumstances that led her aunt to becoming such a shallow, hardhearted person.

anyway. dysfunctional Honda family is very interesting.

Realizing that I went and wrote a bunch of intentionally aro relationships and my partner was like, "Idk, it seemed like normal relationships to me," and I was like, "I mean yeah it's not that different from ours, I guess, I was kind of going for 45° off from 'normal' romance," and they're like, "Okay, but ours is also pretty much like that," and I'm like, "Yeah, true," and now I'm like, damn hold up, are we both some kinda arospec and THIS is how we figure it out? Because I wrote a long-ass fic about intentionally queer-coded (among other things) robots? Life is weird, man.

Like I've been prone to extreme long-term crushes on a very few (mostly unattainable) people over the years, but I wouldn't have known what to do with them even if they worked out, and cough my ex was not even one of them. I just kind of assumed I was failing to feel a thing I was totally supposed to feel, there, and quite a lot of that relationship emotionally was me going, "Okay, I care like This, but I think I'm supposed to care like That? I'm pretty sure he cares That way. I'm not sure I do, but I mean, there's really only one way*, so maybe I'm just misreading this and actually I do care like That, I'm just bad at it."

*This was me being very incorrect, it turns out. There's all kinds of ways to love someone. It's a very inadequate and nonspecific word.

When I confessed my feelings (which I'd been sitting on for a year) to my partner, their reaction wasn't to be particularly romantic about it. In fact they told me they'd help me move to California if I wanted to. And after I got over my initial confusion of being kissed on the forehead (which is also not super romantic as a gesture and I couldn't decide how to even read that so I kinda skipped over even trying for a while), I was thinking, Awesome, that is a yes. They have promised to assist me with difficult stuff, and said nothing at all about emotions, because that's not a big deal anyway. The important thing is that I can rely on them and vice versa. Cool. We are basically together forever now. Which ended up being true. I just never moved out and now it's like 13 years later, go figure. But that's not what I think actually passes for reciprocating feelings for most people? Worked great for me though.

Anyway I feel like I have accidentally learned something about myself, lol. I guess romance is okay I guess, like it's not repulsive, but seriously, it's WAY more satisfying to me to guess someone else's Quiplash answer because you know they know you would think it's fucking funny, and you do, and because you think it's funny and you're well aware they know your type of humor and you know theirs and that you wouldn't expect them to use "cum" as an answer because that's not usually how they roll, so of course that is the only answer they can possibly give, which is instantly evident to both of you with no conversation whatsoever on the topic. When you got just one brain cell and it's quantum entangled with their just one brain cell so you have a lot of null discussions where nobody has to say anything but it's fully understood anyway, that's The Dream, if you ask me. And like I don't really think that's romantic by the usual definition. You can have that with friends and family, too. But that is what it turns out I prioritize in relationships, which I'm starting to feel like isn't what the majority of people are here for?

TFW it's hard to tell because I've been assuming I'm totally alloromantic so everything I experience must be typical totally alloromantic stuff too, but I'm starting to think it isn't maybe? But how do I even tell, this is like being colorblind, lmao.