As a black person I actually find the logic of many Zionists to be audacious.

My people were sold and kidnapped. We were enslaved for hundreds of years. We had the most despicable things happen to us. I’m sure you may relate, we were put into breeding camps, they used our parts to make clothes and furniture, allegedly they ate us, they tortured us, etc.

There is more than enough proof I am indigenous to Africa hell I found and reconnected with the family one of my ancestors was taken from. I am very lucky.

At no point have I ever thought about going to West Africa and taking the land back, stealing property, imprisoning, and murdering people who’ve lived there for centuries and still live there today. Even though there’s a possibility that they’ve participated in the selling of at least one of my ancestors.

Just because I can trace my heritage there doesn’t suddenly mean I have a claim on the land. I have heard so many Zionist say they belong there more than Palestinians, that there claim on the land is stronger. Maybe it’s not all of them but it is enough to be concerning.

Also bring up Liberia if you want. We didn’t ask for that.

This is a fair critique and it brings up one of the most important aspects of Zionism, and of all Jewish life in the modern era and from now on: that Zionism was always morally RIGHT, but it did not have to be morally NECESSARY.

For decades there was a raging, controversial, legitimately two-sided intracommunity debate over Zionism, like nothing you see among Jews today, memorably portrayed in Chaim Potok's novel "The Chosen" (and subsequent film version). The Reform Jewish Movement, our largest denomination, was governed by an explicitly anti-Zionist platform for over 50 years..... until they changed their minds in 1937. The Jewish people always trace their heritage to Eretz Yisrael, always could claim a rightful place there - but things should never have been allowed to get bad enough, fast enough, that in the truest sense their only choice was to create a state of Israel or die.

As early as 1920, Hitler said his goal was total extermination of the Jews. Nobody cared. America sealed its gates to Jewish immigrants in 1924. Germany began visibly prepping for genocide around 1935, again nobody cared. At Evian 1938 - "the great betrayal" - pretty much every powerful state in the world acknowledged that the Jews were about to be wiped out, and knowing that, refused to allow refugees to enter (except for the Dominican Republic, the mensches). England bowed to Arab terrorism and sealed off immigration to Mandate Palestine - which was a violation of international law under the League of Nations but, again, nobody cared. Nobody, not one single country, fought to protect the Jews or to help them escape. The Allies couldn't be bothered to bomb the tracks into Auschwitz, but they would heroically sink refugee ships. After the war, 250,000 Jews lingered miserably in displaced persons camps for YEARS, with not one single country being willing to admit them, and in nearly all cases there being nothing to return to anyway. There were still Jews kept in Dachau, guarded by Germans, until 1951.

From a 1945 report to Truman: "Many Jewish displaced persons … are living under guard behind barbed-wire fences … including some of the most notorious concentration camps … had no clothing other than their concentration camp garb…. Most of them have been separated three, four or five years and they cannot understand why the liberators should not have undertaken immediately the organized effort to re-unite family groups…. Many of the buildings … are clearly unfit for winter…. [Author contrasted these conditions with the relative normal life led by the nearby German populations and wondered at the contrast] ...We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy...."

Those who attempted to return to their former communities were routinely murdered (seen at the end of "Maus"). There was a massacre of Holocaust survivors in Kiev, Ukraine in September 1945, another in Kielce, Poland in July 1946.

The Jews saw Palestine as their only hope, because it was. And when they saw their enemies there were led by actual red-handed Nazi war criminals, and heard that the stakes were once again their total genocide? Well, that's when you fight.... damn hard... to build the state and the military that will, FOR ONCE, protect you.

You talk about "At no point in my life have I considered claiming a part of Africa and fighting the people who I find there". Well - what if it was extremely obviously that or death?

A popular saying among Jews: "Israel was not created because there was a Holocaust. The Holocaust was created because there was no Israel." It's true - but it should not have been necessary to have an Israel to prevent the Holocaust. The rest of the world should have done that, and they didn't so much fail in preventing it as much as they succeeded in enabling it. You are correct to say that African-Americans did not ask for Liberia. The concept was made up by white people to try to get blacks out of America (though it gained popularity with black people after "milestones" of new cruelty such as the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, and I believe Marcus Garvey is well-liked to this day). Well, Jews did not ask to have no government in the world grant us equality or defend us from genocide. We did not ask to have no choice. And we do not ask for our response to the latest attempted genocide to be condemned by the same nations that enabled the last several.

Today about 90% of Jews are Zionists. Not just out of the everlasting moral principle, but because of the life-or-death reality that when we needed ANY OTHER OPTION TO WORK, NOTHING DID. And since then, there has been even clearer demonstration of the tenuousness of Jewish survival and the depths of inhuman hatred we face from our enemies, as the 3,000-year-old Mizrahi Jewish civilization was successfully uprooted and purged from dozens of countries (which had already been oppressing and massacring them long before Zionism) as collective racial revenge against Israel. The mere fact that that was logistically possible - that it could be done, quickly and repeatedly - speaks worlds about the normalized culture of eliminationism surrounding us. What do you really think are the chances that African-Americans could be altogether physically purged from the USA or some of its states? Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and Eritrea finished their Jews within the last 5 years.

As "critics of Israel" have made it extremely clear that all Jews worldwide remain legitimate targets, that all "colonizers" (unquestionably including Americans like me) "deserve it" ("it" to include infanticide, rape, kidnapping, and mass murder), and as America visibly decays into algorithmic racist authoritarianism and climatic desperation.... you should not expect that 90% to change.

I just cannot get over this one kid in the cinema who went "But he isn't evil!"

We are talking children here! Children don't really know or understand anything about ptsd and trauma (mostly, yet) they just observe! And if a KID between the age of 5 and 10 observes Magnifico and can read between the lines and conclude he isn't evil, what excuse does that leave for haters calling him one?

Now, more analysing cause you've been loving those and I enjoy doing them 🛡⚔️ (I might repeat some points but in a alightly different way)

Every single arguement I've seen haters or anti-Magnifico people make so far was either straight up stupid, ignorant, uneducated, defiant, baseless and or senseless. And then we also have the hardcore Amaya/Asha fans who just go on hating on Magnifico just "because!"

Or those who go "He's the worst villain ever." Yeah, Sherlock, maybe thats because he isn't one? 🤨 Like, seriously, you take Magnifico, compare him to aaaaall the REAL villains like Jafar, Frollo, Scar etc. And you wanna tell me he was anything like them because his trauma forced him to get himself posessed by evil trapped in an evil book and only went bonkers after he was literally posessed? And his sole motivation was to protect and keep safe at all costs ?

And then come the arguements 🫴🏼

"He's vain and narcissistic!"

Because he acknowledges the fact that he's handsome and like's to see himself in mirrors? 🤨

"He didn't grant every single wish! He shouldn't have kept them."

He didn't grant every single wish because of his trauma caused fear/paranoia and kept them for the same exact reason. However, he always meant well.

Yes, I agree that a traumatized person shouldn't be in any leading position, nor should they be in the position of making important decissions. But lets take a look at his motivations and goals again!

His motivations :

- Never have anyone suffer a fate like he did

- Never have people have to see their hopes and dreams get shattered

- Never have his past repeat

Quote - "Everything I do is to make sure that never happens again!"

His goals :

- Protect and keep people safe

- Make sure people live happy, content, free of hardships and strive

Further comparisons

All the other villains when singing - Sing openly about their evil plans, desires etc. showing they're evil!

Magnifico when bursting into song :

"promise as one does, I will protect you at all costs. Keep you safe here in my arms. I will protect you at all costs."

"If you're ever feeling like you're lost, I'll come find you. Man all fronts, there's no ocean I won't swim across to be right by you. And not just once, here and now I swear on my response. I'll remind you-"

"I let you live here for free and I don't even charge you rent. I clean up all your messes and I'm always there when you need to vent. I give and give and give and give, you'd think they'd all be content. And all I really want is just a little respect."

Back to the arguements Anti-Magnifico people make and even more comparisons ⬇️

More for the vain and narcissistic

Gaston - treats everyone like trash and thinks the whole globe spinns around him only. Doesn't care if he walks over dead bodies looking good.

Evil queen - Wants to kill her stepdaughter because she's prettier than her.

Mother gothel - Kidnaps the baby princess, locks her up because the magic hair makes her stay young and pretty, doesn't give a toot that the king and queen are suffering immense heartbreak and guilt. And to keep the princess locked in, gaslights and belittles her.

And then we have Magnifico ✨️

"I'm handsome and I know it." Likes to look at himself in the mirror and is happy and content with his looks. Hurts not one single fly with it. Doesn't put others down.

"He's power hungry!"

Why did he want to keep his power? - Because he was terrified if he would lose it, he wouldn't be able to protect anymore and his past would repeat.

"He threatened everyone and destroyed wishes!"

Again, he was posessed? Do people understand what posessed means? Amaya knew this book would control him! Not him controling the book!

In the end, I don't even care for people who disagree with me. But one thing I just don't get is : Why are some people so out to prove to us Magnifico-defenders that he's evil? Like, are these guys for real? We push forgiveness and love and the other side pushes hate, ignorance, unforgiveness and bitterness. Why does someone feel the need to spread negativity rather than positivity?

I won't stop defending Magnifico 🛡⚔️🩵

DISSECTING SAKURA - WHY IS SHE SO TERRIBLE?

INTRO

I promised to write a post about Sakura’s character long time ago so here’s that now. If you want to read my Hinata post it’s here.

Sakura is a character that is very hated in the Naruto fandom. Many people acknowledge she’s one of the worst female characters in anime. And yet, she also has many dedicated stans that defend her character and insist she is simply misunderstood, that she’s actually a good shinobi and a person, or not as bad as people think. While there are many videos and essays about Sakura, my issue with them is that they often either praise Hinata who isn’t any better than Sakura or they do not acknowledge Sakura is supposed to be the way she is. She is intentionally written as an unlikeable person and she was never supposed to be inspiring or a positive character. I will try to explain this to you the best I can by dissecting her character. As usual, if you’re a fan of her character you might not want to see what’s next. This will be tagged under the anti tags so if you see it in the character tag that is not intentional.

SAKURA AS A SHINOBI

I will first focus on Sakura as a shinobi and her skills in fights since Naruto is a battle manga. Sakura is, as it's often acknowledged to the point of memes, pretty useless. A lot of her stans don’t understand why. She might get to punch once every 200 chapters or heal fodders but in the end she is featless. She is placed in many important situations where she does nothing to contribute or even gets in the way. This is not acceptable for a main character that has a lot of screentime. Naturally, this is something that annoys many people but it’s made even more annoying by the fact Sakura is constantly talking about how much stronger she has gotten and how she wants to be on par with Naruto and Sasuke.

In the beginning, during the bell test, Sakura doesn't even attempt to get the bells from Kakashi and only ends up fainting. In the Land of Waves, because Sakura was able to climb the tree due to her chakra control, she became smug and overconfident and thought she doesn't need to train. Which is funny considering she does nothing except stand around during an actual fight while Naruto and Sasuke actually contribute to the fight with the main antagonists. She's tasked to protect Tazuna, yet she can't do that either, but Kakashi has to intervene and get injured. It’s also worth mentioning Kakashi pointed out that during the tree climbing Sakura was able to control her chakra better because she had little chakra to begin with. Thus Kishimoto establishes very early on Sakura as someone who brags and overrestimates her own skills.

In the Chunin exams, Sakura hopes that Naruto and Sasuke aren’t foolish enough to cheat during the written exam, and she’s sure that she can answer the questions based on her knowledge. But what she doesn’t realize is that the real intention of the test is for the takers to use their observation and deductive skills to gather information and cheat. We find this out in the same chapter through Sasuke. Sasuke, unlike Sakura, realizes that the test makers want them to act like a shinobi. Sakura is book smart and a rote learner, but as we have seen in the Land of Waves and what we will see in the rest of the Chunin exams, being book smart won’t help her on the battlefield. Kishimoto wanted to show us that Sakura is just someone who brags and thinks she’s got everything under control, despite the fact she’s not the right kind of smart to be a shinobi, she doesn’t think like one.

In the Forest of Death, we then see she isn’t able to actually put anything into practice and Naruto and Sasuke again do all the work, while Sakura does nothing except stand around, scream and cry. Sasuke even has to yell at her to stop merely standing around. Eventually though, when Naruto and Sasuke are knocked out after the encounter with Orochimaru, Sakura has no choice but to protect them from Orochimaru’s henchmen. But she of course fails. She sets traps that fail, and gets mocked for her amateuristic skills by her opponents. We see characters like Kiba are able to put up traps that actually work, but Sakura who is supposedly smart isn’t. Then Rock Lee arrives to her rescue. After he gets beaten up, Kin grabs Sakura by her hair and calls her out on her vanity and tells her she should have trained more, which is basically what Sasuke did at the beginning of the arc, when he told Sakura if she has time to flirt maybe she should use that time to learn a jutsu or two. In the chapter cover she is also seen brushing her hair in front of a mirror in the forest, so Kishimoto makes it pretty clear Sakura is someone who cares a lot about her looks even during a mission. Kishimoto uses the villains to point out Sakura’s flaws, since the main characters can’t do that considering she is one of the main characters. So we see Dosu point out Sakura’s lack of observation skills and talent, and Kin point out her vanity and boy chasing personality. Sakura then dramatically cuts her hair and gives a speech on how she wants to walk in front of Naruto and Sasuke and wants them to look at her back. Despite the little fight she puts up, she is easily beaten down and is saved by Ino, Shikamaru and Chouji, before Sasuke wakes up and beats up Orochimaru's henchmen, driving them away. Sakura acted like this was going to be her moment, yet it wasn't at all. She had five other characters, 4 of them supporting characters, all of whom showed much better ninja skills than her, come to her rescue.

During Sakura and Ino's match, Sakura starts boasting how Ino is nowhere near her level. What happens is despite her bragging, she falls right into Ino's trap. Unlike Sakura, Ino actually used her wits and shinobi like strategy during the fight, using Sakura’s ego against her to successfully trap her. But because Naruto yelled Sakura's name, her inner Sakura somehow interrupted the fight and it ended in a tie. I think Ino should have won this fight but regardless it didn't make Sakura look good, just an overconfident brat who got lucky.

The rest of Part 1 Sakura spends moping over Sasuke and getting one-paneled by Gaara in the Konoha crush arc where she again becomes a damsel in distress to no one’s surprise. Her uselessly holding a kunai has become a meme because she does it many times during the series. Despite being a liability to her team she never thinks about how to better her skills nor tries to train. After Sasuke leaves and Sakura fails to stop him, she goes to Naruto and begs him with tears in her eyes to bring Sasuke back. Considering how many support characters have contributed massively in Part 1, a main character like Sakura achieving nothing just puts it into perspective how useless she really is. She has been a damsel in every single arc. When Naruto fails to bring Sasuke back, Sakura decides to ask Tsunade to train her, and tells Naruto next time she will go with him to get Sasuke back. The thing is, she should have had the resolve to train and change herself already before Sasuke left. She should have realized she put her team constantly in jeopardy by being weak. She read all about what life of a shinobi entails yet she seemed to treat it as some playground where she can play damsel while everyone around her protects her. It’s only when her crush left and Naruto failed to bring him back that she bothers to make an effort.

At the start of Part 2, Kakashi gives Naruto and Sakura yet another bell test, and Sakura shows some potential by showing off her chakra punch. But in the end, they manage to finally get the bells due to Naruto's plan. Some people act like Sakura is the smart one in team 7 yet she constantly fails to showcase this smartness of hers. Next, team 7 is assigned by Tsunade to rescue Kazekage Gaara. Sakura swears that this time, she will save both Naruto and Sasuke. Again, she sets up a high goal for herself, only to never achieve it. Sakura does however, mix up an antidote to heal Kankuro after he got attacked by Sasori. Next Chiyo and Sakura get ready for a fight with Sasori. Notice how this is the only fight where Sakura actually manages to not fail? It's because Chiyo is literally directing her moves, both verbally and physically. But I will give her credit for using the antidote to survive Sasori's poison, and taking the hit for Chiyo. Sasori was also apparently suicidal and didn’t avoid the last hit but I don’t dwell on that too much.

Now I need to mention something that is very important to note when it comes to Sakura’s character writing. Whenever Sakura does anything she’s complimented countless times by Kakashi, Chiyo, Sasori, and basically everyone she comes across. Kakashi starts to talk about how she might be able to surpass Tsunade, just because she punches the ground once in front of him. Chiyo hails her as a girl who can surpass Tsunade as well, before even seeing her fighting abilities. Hashirama thinks her power might be greater than Tsunade’s despite not even seeing what his granddaughter can do. And this goes on and on. This is Kishimoto intentionally raising up the audience's expectations, only to later intentionally bring them down. Superficial readers think she is smart and could possibly surpass Tsunade because other characters say so, but people who actually read the manga and pay attention can see that Sakura never lives up to the expectations placed on her.

Right after this arc, Sakura goes back to being useless and not contributing much especially considering the screentime she gets. Despite being able to avoid Sasori’s attacks with the help of Chiyo, in the Tenchi Bridge arc she gets first knocked out by Kabuto's flying butt because she's not watching where she's going, and needs to be saved by Yamato. Then she doesn’t let Yamato do his job and gets knocked out by Naruto's 4-tailed form, and needs to be saved by Yamato and healed by Kabuto. When they finally meet Sasuke she charges at him with no apparent strategy and needs to be saved by Yamato again, who gets injured in the process.

So after the entire part 1 of being useless, and 15 chapters of not being useless, Sakura needs to be saved multiple times by Yamato while contributing nothing. To people who paid more attention when reading the manga, this arc made them realize Sakura was never gonna change and this is how her character would always going to be. But others were still starstruck by the previous arc, and would only realize it later.

In the Akatsuki Suppression arc she pretty much does nothing worth mentioning. She is tasked to go help Shikamaru but the latter has already taken care of Hidan by himself. In the Itachi Pursuit arc she doesn’t do anything either, but only follows the dogs tracking Sasuke’s scent. In the Pain arc a lot of characters contribute in the fight against Pain, even Konohamaru who is just a kid manages to defeat one of the paths of Pain, while Sakura is again shown crying and screaming for Naruto. What was that about saving Naruto and Sasuke? If she’s so strong as she acts like she is she could have at least tried to buy some time for Naruto instead of crying like a total whimp.

There’s also a constant pattern of Sakura trying to demonstrate her "powers" or "strategy" and failing. This happened again in the start of the Five kage Summit arc when she tried to fight with the Kumo warriors, got immediately facekicked to the ground and had to be rescued by Naruto yet again. And this is not even the worst. In the same arc she attempts to take down Sasuke by herself, drugging her teammates so they can’t help her, and ends up failing when Sasuke figures out what she’s trying to do and she needs to be saved first by Kakashi and then by Naruto. As always, she aims too high and falls flat on her face. She ends the arc moping how she can’t do anything except to trust Naruto. Of course, Kishimoto doesn’t forgot to mention that Sasuke is resistant to poison, so Sakura’s attempt of killing him whether she succeeded stabbing him or not would have been futile either way. Again, she is failing to come even close to her own goals she set for herself. She is once again a liability that needs saving. And so the audience is frustrated and annoyed with her character. They are thinking, why is this girl who is constantly bragging about her skills constantly making a fool out of herself, crying pathetically and needing to be rescued? Well, that would be because she is supposed to be a person who is completely misguided about her own skills.

In the war arc, Sakura isn’t any better. The war arc only amplifies what we already have seen and know. That Kishimoto uses subversion to show Sakura’s character as overall irrelevant, and to show she’s all talk. In part 1, Sakura is said to be smart and she boasts about her skills yet she can’t do anything in an actual fight, but has to be saved by multiple characters, including Naruto, whom she considered inferior to herself. This of course made people annoyed with her character. When part 2 started, other characters were again commenting on her potential and how she had supposedly grown. So many people got hopeful that she had actually grown a lot and changed. And yet, as I have pointed out, she tried to show off many times and failed miserably. Which made people even more frustrated with her. Because they had gotten their hopes up. The Five Kage Summit arc was definitely the ultimate breaking point. After Sakura’s ridiculous attempt to manipulate Naruto, her drugging her teammates while leaving them defenseless on the ground and her trying to take down Sasuke and failing, she was certified as the fandom’s laughing stock. But some of her stans still remained, and thought she would redeem herself. Somehow.

Then comes the 4th shinobi war. Sakura has mostly been in the background healing people, but when Sasuke shows up, she is suddenly motivated to show off for real. She even gets pissed when Naruto is about to go with Sasuke and suggests to her that she could take a break. Sakura insists she is also part of team 7 and that she surely can keep up with the two of them. We have a panel hyping up Team 7. Then Sakura gets a moment to make a big punch after which she boasts and thinks she’s better than Tsunade, insulting the latter in the process. But she’s not paying attention to her surroundings and needs to be saved by the boys, after which she starts to boast how she will steal the Hokage seat from Naruto and how now they will all fight together with their backs to each other. She then reaffirms herself that she has finally caught up to Naruto and Sasuke. This level of arrogance needs to be backed up, otherwise the audience will get annoyed. And it did annoy a big portion of the fandom, considering they had seen for the past 600 chapters or so Sakura talking about how she wants to be on par with Naruto and Sasuke, how she won’t be a liability anymore and it all leading to nothing except disappointment after disappointment. Sakura’s confidence and ego are greatly disproportionate for someone of her capabilities, which a big part of the audience notices, whether consciously or subconsciously. And this is of course intentional.

She is left on the sidelines again when Naruto and Sasuke are too busy being ”the main act” and fighting perfectly in sync. Sakura has to ask Hinata what is even happening with the two of them. Sakura keeps healing people, but eventually Naruto’s chakra starts to help her with the healing.

Then we get to one of the most infamous moments with Sakura, that resembles another infamous moment in the Five kage summit arc, when she tried to take down Sasuke with a poisoned kunai. In this moment Obito is asking Sakura to stab his rinnegan eye with a kunai. In both moments, she can’t come up with a resolve to use her kunai but just trembles centimeters away from her target. Taking her time shaking she then gets attacked by her opponent, and ends up being saved. In both cases, she wastes her chance because she’s a total whimp who has no resolve to do what she pretends she can do. And thus, the audience is annoyed once again. And the people who always knew what she was like make fun of her.

But Kishimoto won’t stop there. In the very same chapter, when Sakura is trying to heal Kakashi, Naruto takes over and not only heals him but also gives him a brand new eye, something Sakura of course isn’t able to do. Healing was the only thing she could do and even that was taken from her! So much for her being a relevant member of Team 7 who is on par with Naruto and Sasuke.

Kakashi then starts reminiscing about Team 7, and it ends with him reminding the three about his first lesson, which was team work being the key to success. So what happens?

Sakura begans to once again nurse her own insecurities and tries to show off to satisfy her own ego by charging at Madara and telling the boys to follow her. She has no idea of Madara’s strengths and weaknesses and what would you know, her punch is stopped and she gets stabbed in the chest and is once again rescued by Naruto. And what does she do? Mopes that Sasuke doesn’t pay attention to her nor seems to care. She cares more about showing off to Sasuke than defeating Madara, even when this is about a threat to the whole world. What a great shinobi. It’s a callback to part 1 when she moped over the fact Sasuke didn’t care about her climbing the tree. Just like with her shaking with the kunai, it’s just another moment that shows she never truly changes. Not in ways that matter.

And then we see Naruto and Sasuke actually fight Madara, and Sakura literally just stands there in awe of them. She’s shook by Madara’s power which she obviously had no clue about. Of course Sakura still tries to go after the boys but Kakashi stops her and says it’s pointless to do so unless she has a plan. And she stops, and stares at Naruto and Sasuke’s backs as they disappear. Hah. She once again, has failed to achieve the goal she sets for herself. Kishimoto hyped up team 7 yet constantly showed Sakura failing and being left behind, despite how much she claimed she could keep up with the two of them. The way Kishimoto writes her, by making Sakura herself or others hype her, and then showing she’s actually lame is very consistent and relentless.

Taking into consideration that she’s a main character, and all the times that she’s promised major improvement, what we received was just pathetic. When you add it to the fact that she’s a member of such an over-achieving team, it makes her look pitiful in comparison. But it’s supposed to be. Don’t even think this is unintentional from Kishimoto. Sakura was supposed to be someone who never changes.

SAKURA’S PERSONALITY AND HER RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS

Now a little more on Sakura’s personality and the way she interacts with others which is definitely one of the reasons why many people hate her.

In the beginning, she is introduced as a shallow girl who is focused on her looks and getting the attention of the popular boy in the class, rather than being a good shinobi. She gets called out on her vanity by not only Sasuke but also by her enemies. She is pretty quick to give up on the bell test which annoys Sasuke. One wonders why is she even a shinobi when her resolve is so weak. She beats and berates Naruto and is only able to treat him better by mimicking Sasuke. Despite Kakashi’s comments on all of them maturing Sakura hasn’t changed at all at the start of the Chunin exam arc but she keeps asking Sasuke on dates instead of training and also squeals for him like a fangirl. She mopes that she’s not good enough for the Chunin exam and only gets motivated when Sasuke compliments her. This type of shallow and weak characterization made many people instantly dislike her.

In the chunin exams we also find out she broke her friendship with Ino after she found out Ino liked Sasuke as well. This is something that gave more background to her character but at the same time made people dislike her even more, since Ino is someone who reached out to Sakura and helped her build her self-esteem yet Sakura simply dumped her and started a catty rivalry over Sasuke. In Part 2, they only interact once, and during that moment Sakura wants Sai to call Ino ugly. You can’t really call it a beautiful friendship when Sakura is constantly shown as catty and the only person who does anything for the other is Ino. It’s Ino who reaches out to Sakura. It’s Ino who comes to her rescue in the Forest of Death. It’s Ino who compliments her after their match. What has Sakura done for Ino other than wanting her to be called ugly and teaching her kid to keep Ino away from Sasuke?

During Sakura and Ino’s match, Kakashi says Sakura isn’t the type to brag and bully others, even when we have seen her do both constantly. Already in the Land of Waves she bragged how she doesn’t need to train despite not being able to do anything in a fight. She also constantly berates Naruto and acts superior to him, aside from punching him all the time over nothing. Sakura having a bloated sense of superiority and tendency to brag about her skills is a consistent character trait of hers. But she never manages to truly back up her arrogant attitude but comes off as weak and overall irrelevant, which is yet another thing that makes her an unlikeable character in the eyes of the audience. In the war she also insults Tsunade, the one who taught her, while boasting how she is better than her like she’s some badass when she is far from it. When has she created her own jutsu or made anything revolutionary? During the same chapter she also brags how she’s gonna steal the Hokage seat from Naruto. Yes Naruto, the guy who keeps saving her useless ass all the time.

Speaking of Kakashi, he is a character that Kishimoto used in his writing as someone who treats Sakura with kid gloves and coddles her. This is one reason why some people defend her character, and why some people ship the two of them. If you’re a Sakura stan, it must feel validating when some character constantly defends your fave’s stupid behavior. But Kakashi is someone who not only admits to not understand Sasuke, but also someone who clearly doesn’t understand Sakura, as we see from the earlier image how Sakura’s behavior contradicts with Kakashi’s claims since the beginning. Basically, if you need to know how Sakura really is like, just flip what Kakashi says about her and you’ll know. Since Sakura is part of the main team, Kishimoto needed some character to defend her behavior so she wouldn’t be confronted about it too much. But smart readers aren’t fooled. It’s also worth noting that Kakashi tells Sasuke Sakura still loves him despite the fact Sasuke tried to kill her, while conveniently omitting the fact Sakura went there to kill Sasuke herself. This makes Kakashi look hypocritical but Kishimoto needed some character to do this because of Boruto, and it’s not like he was gonna use Naruto, the one he himself called Sasuke’s ally.

Then we have Sakura’s hypocritical behavior, that Kishimoto also consistently portrayed. During Sakura and Ino’s match, Sakura says Ino is a girl who is focused only on her looks and that she wouldn’t want to be on the same level with her, despite the fact Sakura herself was shown brushing her hair in the Forest of Death and getting dragged for her vanity. She also got upset and hit Naruto when he tried to pee in front of her, saying she’s a lady, yet thought to herself how she would like to see Sasuke pee in front of her. When trying to plead to Sasuke to not go, Sakura says revenge won’t bring anyone happiness, but when it doesn’t work she flips completely on what she said and asks Sasuke to take her with him so she can help him. Even if she acts like she cares about Sasuke’s well-being, what she really cares about are her own feelings. Sasuke unsurprisingly finds this annoying as do many readers. Sakura makes fun of Naruto and insults him, yet gets enraged when Sai calls her names and she proceeds to hit both him and Naruto. She also gets mad at Konohamaru and Naruto for their sexy no jutsus, yet when Konohamaru showed her hot boys naked, one of them being Sasuke, she went all gaga over it.

Sakura is also introduced as a bully who beats Naruto up and mocks him in front of Sasuke who then proceeds to call her out on her terrible behavior. In this chapter, Kishimoto made Sakura call Naruto ”annoying” and then made Sasuke throw her own insult back at her when Sakura mocked Naruto, by calling her annoying. Something that is worth noting is that while Sakura also reacted to Lee badly at first, after he saved her she didn’t do anything bad to him anymore. Yet while she later realizes she was wrong about Naruto’s resolve, and that he cheers for her when she needs it, and that he saved her countless times, she keeps beating him up over nothing and berating him. She still keeps calling him stupid and acting like she knows better. This is why whenever she cries for him, it’s hard to feel any liking to her, because she comes off as more like a poser who will surely soon bash his head in if he dares to behave like himself, or drop him for the sake of Sasuke. Her treatment of Naruto is unreasonably bad at times, but it’s easily explained. In the beginning we find out Sakura dislikes Naruto because she thinks he comes between her and Sasuke. And we see many instances where this notion is amplified by the text. But Sakura is too delusional to understand the reason there is distance between her and Sasuke is simply because Sasuke isn’t interested in her, she’s too shallow and juvenile for him to pay attention to.

Her fake confessing to Naruto and trying to manipulate him made a lot of people lose all respect for her. She also showed she knew so little of Naruto she accidentally managed to tap into all of his insecurities in her confession. She also somehow believed Naruto was really chasing Sasuke for her sake and that he would give up if she offered herself to him.

Her second confession to Sasuke is also very telling of her jealousy of Naruto and Sasuke’s bond. She yells how she can’t exchange blows with Sasuke, how she can’t get close to him, how the only thing she can do is cry and beg. Considering how Naruto is the one who is about to exhange blows with Sasuke yet again, and how Sasuke after their fight talks about how Naruto kept coming closer to him, Sakura is clearly thinking of Naruto when she is having this meltdown. Sakura was shown to be jealous of Naruto’s improvement and skills in Part 1, but she is also jealous of Sasuke’s care and love for Naruto, which she wants for herself and thinks she is entitled to. Even at the start, Kishimoto said Sakura thinks Naruto stole Sasuke’s first kiss which she thought belonged to her. It’s no different at the end of the series. Her outburst is her fighting for what she thinks is rightfully hers, Sasuke, despite the fact he has given no indication that he loves her. But this makes sense. Afterall, we see Sarada come between Ino and Sasuke while Sakura laughs nervously in the background. Despite everything Ino has done for Sakura’s sake, she still sees her as a threat, to the point her own kid is doing the dirty work for her.

Let’s talk more about Sakura’s relationship, or lack there of, with Sasuke. We know Sakura was portrayed like any other fangirl of Sasuke in the beginning, who liked his looks and how cool he was. She never tried to approach Sasuke as a friend but only kept asking him on dates despite his blatant rejections. She never says why she loves him, or even likes him. According to herself Sasuke never says anything to her. Her first confession showed how little she understood Sasuke. She was the girl with everything, with family, while Sasuke and Naruto had nothing. Yet she had the nerve to say if Sasuke left she would be just as lonely as he was. She’s comparing the massacre of Sasuke’s family to a boy she never talks to leaving her, while disrespecting her own parents in the process. How juvenile that must have sounded like to someone like Sasuke. In Part 1 Sasuke occassionally protects Sakura because she’s too weak to protect herself, and in part 2 Sakura probably wanted to entertain the thought Sasuke would still have this consideration for her. But in Part 2 Sasuke treats Sakura like a fodder ninja. She doesn’t manage to get a proper reaction out of Sasuke who focuses on Naruto everytime he meets up with his former team. Sasuke also leaves Sakura to die couple times while choosing to save Naruto instead. Despite all this, Sakura still thought she’s entitled to Sasuke, and in her second confession she started to yet again scream how much she loves Sasuke and how much she hurts due to it. In both of her confessions she is guilt tripping Sasuke and trying to make him pity her. In both of her confessions she makes everything about herself. She admits to herself she can’t do anything for Sasuke, yet she tries to win him over by pity. But she annoys Sasuke once again, and he puts her in a murder genjutsu. Sasuke then says they have no reason to love each other. And he’s right. What does Sakura know about Sasuke? Clearly nothing, considering she said the worst things she could have said during both of her confessions. She heard Sasuke talk about wanting change, yet she started to scream how if Sasuke stays with her, things can go back to how they were. It’s like the most basic things she doesn’t understand. She’s just an overemotional child who has nothing of worth to say. Kakashi who coddles her tries to talk to Sasuke on her behalf as well, insisting Sakura suffers for loving him. Sasuke then thinks of his family and says perhaps those are ties to a failed past. As in Sakura literally lives in the past. And she does. Despite the fact everything has changed, she thinks about the moment when Sasuke thanked her, and ignores him calling her annoying for her ignorant comments, or the fact someone who wants change obviously doesn’t want to go back to the way things were. This brutal rejection though still won’t slow Sakura down, but after Sasuke is leaving to his atonement trip Sakura blushes like a school girl and asks to come with him. After him mocking her and putting her in a genjutsu, this is what she does.

And Kishimoto still won’t stop there. After all of Sakura’s boasting that ended in failure, after the brutal genjutsu and her being made mostly irrelevant, we see her destroy her own house because her kid asked about her marriage with Sasuke and she got insecure. I have to ask how do some people not realize Kishimoto despises Sakura and writes her as a terrible person? She is a bad daughter who doesn’t understand how lucky she is but is ready to ditch her parents for an indifferent boy’s sake. She is a bad student who disrespects Tsunade for no reason. She is a bad friend who treats Ino and Naruto badly out of insecurity. She is a bad person who treats the target of her crush like an object instead of a person. She is a bad shinobi as well who is most of the time a liability. And she is a bad mother as well. When she’s insisting to Sarada that Sasuke cares about them, she’s sweating and looking nervous, she’s clearly not confident in what she says. Kishimoto also drops two implications that Sasuke never kissed Sakura. Because that is apparently important for us to know. Sakura then tries to insist a forehead poke is better than a kiss. Yet when Sasuke is leaving, she is waiting for a kiss and not a poke. And she is rejected, and looks like a wet rag just like everytime Sasuke rejected her before ever since she was a kid. It’s hard to think of a female character that is more pathetic than her.

And yet, we have SS insisting Sasuke surely knew Sakura could take care of herself, that’s why he left her to die and saved Naruto instead, who didn’t need saving. Surely Sasuke thinks about Sakura as an individual and not just a member of team 7. Despite the fact we have never seen Sasuke think about Sakura outside of team 7 context nor say anything about what he likes and admires about Sakura. Surely Sakura is the most important person to Sasuke, that’s why Kishi wrote Sasuke say to Hagoromo, to Naruto and to himself that Naruto is the only one he still cares about. That’s why Kishimoto wrote Sasuke say Naruto is the only one who never gave up on him. That’s why he wrote Sasuke say Naruto alone saved him. Despite the fact Sakura wanted to be part of saving Sasuke with Naruto, Kishimoto would never let her. Because he doesn’t like her, or SS.

As a final note, a lot of the manga revolved around the importance of family and bonds, yet Sakura, the girl who had parents unlike the rest of her team, is shown to disrespect them everytime she brings them up. And she’s never redeemed on this. This is also intentional from Kishimoto, of course. Sakura is too selfish, too ungrateful and shallow to understand what she has. She’d rather chase a guy who keeps rejecting her like he’s some trophy she owns, all the while trivializing his pain over the loss of his family, by acting like she understands. And she’s ready to throw away her parents, her friends, and her dignity for the sake of this guy who was never interested in her. What’s worst is she had many opportunities to change and mature, yet she choose not to. And thus she remained the same self centred, superficial person she always was.

Actually this is the final note: @sneezemonster15 is a co-creator of this post. She has also talked about Sakura on her blog, for example that war arc part here. Another example is here (but you can just generally go through her anti-sakura tag). But I wanted all this on one big text since certain people are very stubborn about us “picking” supposedly minor things to bash Sakura for when this is throughout the whole manga. And since tumblr doesn’t let her add more than 10 images to a post for some reason I decided to write this down.

Armys indifference towards jimin is eye opening to me. Has it always been this way? I think ever since I became a solo I’ve started to see things a lot differently that’s why I don’t outtightly judge the Armys that make it seem like they’re making it up because I was them at one point and unless you’re heavily biased towards jimin or a solo stan you’re just not going to see the vitriol hate he receives. I used to be a shooter account in 2020-2021 I had a large platform defending the members all the time and even though I biased jimin, I never saw even a fraction of the shit I see now as a solo. That’s why when armys say “they all get hate” it’s coming from them only seeing what their timeline provided to them, they’re not going out of their way to see what Muri or people like him say about jimin and no one is bringing it to their timeline and this is not me defending them because I think it’s ridiculous to not even acknowledge it but in a way I understand why they are the way they are. But the part where you said they’re not to6 and most bias the two youngest members is true, taekookers are the majority of the fandom and a lot of them see jimin as the big threat not only in the fake relationship they have made up but musically too, jimin does nothing and you’ll have people constantly name drop him and his music is loved but fans even though I’d say he doesn’t have nearly as many solo stans as the other two. I think the fandom in general hold Jungkook to a much higher standard than the rest especially jimin, I remember when jimin got a #1 and a lot of them were saying “wait until Jungkook comes” like it was a threat and how he will outdo jimin like they have something to prove. It’s pathetic to witness it everytime. Ot7 is a myth no matter how much they sugarcoat it, even the members are liars, they do see each other as competition maybe less of jimin and Jin but most of them care about the charts and how they perform

No, the current indifference was a recent change. Mostly because of how well face and lc did in comparison to dday which was the catalyst. Armys have always been “fine” with jimin but almost purely in the context of bts. He’s the only member that they never allow to be anything but an extension of bts and they’re pushing him even more into that role now because they find him digestible as the group cheerleader. It’s always “jimin and his brothers” as way diminish him as an individual or use him as a prop. It’s also why Jimin can’t have anything to himself. Not even the hate that he gets because armys always have to trivialize it by making it a maknae line issue and it’s done purposefully.

They’ve crafted the narrative that pjm solos are the worst, so whenever something proves the opposite they have to derail it. And that’s why I can never give armys the the benefit of the doubt of them not knowing about the hate jimin receives at the hands of jjks/tkkrs/kths because I know they see it. They follow their accounts and they interact with them (which is why I curse the day hybe hijacked the 7 symbol and made it jk’s brand)They just do their best to shield those groups from callouts because in doing so they’d be attaching th and jk’s name to them and they don’t want those two to get dragged. But anything with jimin attached to it? Automatically in the wrong and gets witch hunted.

I’ll never forget when a jimin biased army exposed a shooter on twitter for being a giant kth solo and jimin anti and armys outright defended them despite overwhelming proof that it was the truth. They even ran the jimin biased person off site because that account being a blink doxxer was more important. That’s when I knew that the bulk of armys do not care to “defend” jimin past blinks or the kpop stans who attack him from the outside. And even when they do that, it’s still to his detriment cause a lot of times they’ll offer him up as bait using his achievements unprovoked and get him dragged in the process.

That’s another thing in itself too. Armys are also only okay with what jimin has accomplished if they can lord it over kpop stans because as soon as we bring up the fact that jimin achieved what he did with no payola or label aid, all of a sudden it’s shade to jk. I used to HATE whenever armys would be under jimin’s chart tweets with that “just wait until jk debuts” BS because it just shows how desperate they were to restore that status quo and the hidden rule in the fandom.

Jimin is allowed to be good but he can’t be better than anybody else. He’s popular but tk are the most famous members. He can dance but hobi’s the best out the group. He can have writing and composing credits but it will never compare to rapline. Jimin has always been the outlier in bts because he’s always underestimated and put into a set role. Imagine he’s the only one out of maknae line that put any effort into his album and armys still ended up centering face around joon when that documentary came out just because he gave jimin advice. Not only that, but armys also do the most to find any way possible to give tk credit for those two albums that they don’t deserve. And all because those two didn’t live up to their own pretentiousness.

This isn’t news cause I’ve shared this same sentiment before but I never believed that jk deserved the high pedestal people put him on. He doesn’t do anything significantly better than anyone else in the group but because of his looks he gets that extra boost. I’ll never lie and claim that he’s not talented but that’s about it. He’s given more room to not live up to expectations while still getting heralded as the group prodigy. And it’s like, okay? But how long will you wear that out before you actually do something worthwhile to live up to that title?

There’s plenty of things that have made me realize that outside of the group, some members just don’t appeal to me. So it’s not that they potentially see each other as competition that bothers me or makes me think that they’re liars but some decisions that have been made that has made me resentful to some degrees towards them. And I don’t think that’ll change tbh.

Nuance is something that can be soooo hard for online spaces to hold onto. Hell, offline spaces too, for that matter. Today I'm thinking about kink and the concept of kinkshaming, when I think about nuance: that people should be allowed to enjoy and engage with kink, especially in fictional and fandom spaces where even bad kink etiquette can't actually harm anyone should be a given. Personally, as long as someone is tagging correctly and creating with self awareness, anything goes in a fictional space, you do you, your content deserves to exist online. I have personally created a variety of kinky works, both publicly available and not, and would really not have a leg to stand on trying to declare otherwise. In a time where people are cracking down heavily on kink and trying to decry it as deviance that shouldn't exist, being kink positive can be a very important, good thing.

At the same time though, the people have squicks, and when it comes to kink and a good culture towards sex in general, people have to be allowed to have squicks. If anyone's hearing the term for the first time, a squick is essentially a concept that just grosses you right out, you do not want to see it, you do not want to learn more, maybe it even distresses you to see it, but not to the extent that you would consider ot triggering content. A couple of common tend to bodily excrement: piss and shit, alongside guro (extensive bodily mutilation combined with sexual imagery). A squick doesn't have to be extreme, it doesn't have to be unusual, it's just something that grosses an individual out, and they don't want to see it. (And because this is tumblr and it must be said: no, racism is not a squick.)

Sometimes, we lean so heavily into the negative that we refuse to allow positivity. Sometimes, we get so into positivity, that we refuse to acknowledge negatives. People are allowed to talk about their squicks. If people see something that grosses them out, they don't have to shut up about it just because it's someone else's kink. Kinkshaming, the idea that someone would go up to someone else and tell them they're gross for their kink, is something people shouldn't do in general. But expressing disgust and distaste for a kink in general isn't kinkshaming - that's just talking about your squick.

Your Kink Is Not My Kink And That's Okay is about not hating on other people or demanding their works not exist because you hate the kink, not pretending that you find every kink, fetish, or sexual concept totally wonderful and would never react with disgust towards one. This idea in fandom that if you don't like something you should never say anything publicly because what if someone does like that thing, and is upset that you publicly don't like that thing, is ridiculous, and it has been for a while. Negative emotions have a place in fandom, especially in regard to sexual content. You shouldn't harass people who share a kink (especially when their content is tagged this is why everyone should read the tags) - but you also shouldn't go around saying people aren't allowed to use their own online space to process their disgust.

I've been seeing a lot of people lately saying anyone discussing how much they dislike a kink concept is just a kinkshamer, an anti, the purity police, and it's getting beyond ridiculous. We have the right to engage in kink, to write about kink, to make kinky art, create audio for it, and to in general delight in all kinds of kinky works. We also have the responsibility to make sure we're tagging correctly. Others have the right to dislike kink, including our own kinks, and to talk about how much they dislike those kinks. They have the responsibility to make sure they're curating correctly, that they're reading the tags and warnings on a work, and that they work out their negative responses in their own space.

Multiple things can be true: kink is a great way to explore sexuality and desire and a wide range of topics. people deserve to share their interest in kink without harassment or being belittled. one person's joy can be another person's squick. people deserve to share their squick without harassment or being belittled.

ROTTMNT 60s AU !!!

UHHHH JUST WANTED TO PUT THIS OUT THERE WHILE I'M STUCK IN DENIAL ABOUT MY WRITER'S BLOCK

raph

please this man has SOUL

he sings in clubs in new york, he has a record coming out in '67 with his band Raphael and The Digg

his brothers didn't feel like joining the band, so it's up to some talented musician girls he met without a trained main vocalist (digg, with prairie dog, honey badger, and groundhog)

they're super popular in harlem and they make it to charts

raph meets other motown records signees and they always find he's the gentlest of giants

he and his band DESERVES a grammy

leo

he's a surfer !!!

he loves competing in surfing tournaments in long island

the boy's a legend, other surfers think he's a fish at first

if he didn't have separation anxiety for his brothers (a post-kraang headcanon) he would have gone to the west coast where the real competitions are (they never feel like leaving new york for very long)

for now he's happy surfing the coast of long island

he loves when todd surfs with him, his favourite part is the lemonade he gets afterwards

donnie

donatello is OBSESSED with the space race

he managed to hack nasa for rocket blueprints

he got caught and they asked him if he was a communist but there was no found evidence that proved he was so he was let go and his name was cleared

he managed to improve the blueprints he got his hands on and built more efficient rockets, then he used computing tech to make his very own battleshell

he has a super-powered telescope he nicknamed shelldon

donnie predicted the states would win the space race in 1965 because it had something to do with the war, i myself don't know how he used that data point to draw a conclusion

mikey

mikey is such a hippie he has mugshots of his charming smiling face framed to prove it

very anti-war, very pro-civil rights movement, pro-dope and lowkey anti-united states government

he was at the stonewall riots !!!!!

he not only fought for human civil rights, but for mutants too, so that he and his brothers could be acknowledged as citizens

humans turned into mutants are already citizens, but the mistreatment they get is unfair and mikey chose to be a leading pioneer for mutant rights

leo (hesitantly) opened portals for mikey in the south so that he could stand with people of colour in their trying times

misc notes !!

lou jitsu was popular in golden age hollywood, he won many accolades for his films until big mama made it look like he was signed to stay in the battle nexus

jupiter jim films are actually westerns, his name is junebug jim instead

big mama is a big mafia boss woman regardless of the era she's in, though her battle nexus is televised for all ages

instead of becoming criminals, mutants follow mikey's lead protesting for mutant/yokai rights and new york is the first city to acknowledge it

the turtles' beach parties are insane, there's always some people other than the siblings lingering around at midnight

april is the best reporter out there, she reports on the turtles' exploits all the time and she makes mad BANK over it (successful 60s black woman slay)

the foot clan is a cult a lot like the manson family, the turtles hate their guts

baron draxum does the same thing he always did, brood in his lab trying to destroy the humans (that is until mikey gets through to him)

sr. hueso's run of the mill pizza is still the turtles' favourite pizza spot, though the establishment is beachside because he's on good terms with his brother, who mainly does imports

casey jr. is a star hockey player, he also avoids the draft because he's from the future, so the government doesn't have his records

but cass protests against the war with mikey whenever she can, she's also anti-war

donnie also managed to be the first mutant on the moon by his own means, it's been a childhood dream since he saw laika's launch in sputnik 2

aight that's all i have for now, i hope you enjoyed !!

what are your controversial wwx views? 👀 (asking as a fellow controversial wwx view-haver)

In the grand scheme of things I personally think my opinions are pretty lukewarm but I got a lot of shit a while back for making a post saying that it's important to acknowledge that wwx has privilege as a male cultivator member of the gentry and certified genius, and that that's important because even though he knows that his position in society is extremely tenuous and that so many people are willing to fight to force him to lose it, he still chooses to stand up for those even lower in society (in that post I was thinking specifically of the women in mdzs, particularly the brothel women because they're basically never considered). And then? A bunch of people started shittalking me because apparently wwx is the most underprivileged character in the story? And he's lower status than even the non cultivating sex workers because he was homeless as a kid?

I'm also neutral-positive on Jiang Cheng and made the great sin of making a completely neutral poll asking for people's opinions on him correlating with if they grew up with siblings and got a bunch of accusations of being a wwx anti, rigging the poll, and misrepresenting the answers (the results of which were completely even btw) based off . The fact I used a picture of grapes as the poll banner. Yeah . Wwx was never mentioned in the poll at all also. You can probably still find all that shit if you search my username, anons were just fully accidentally pinging me and everything, it's why I don't name search any more even though I know some people make posts based off my ideas but are afraid of pinging me (don't be btw!!! Please ping me 🥺🥺)

I actually really didn't like wwx in my first read-through of mdzs because I really related to teen lwj and felt very personally about the idea of overly pushy boundary breaking teenager attitudes, but I definitely grew to like him lol. I don't know how much that shows through in my posts, I think I've made a few comments about thinking that he was definitely a little bit of a dick as a teen but I don't know how controversial that is

So overall I'm sorry to disappoint, not very controversial opinions, but I've gotten so much grief for them anyways you'd think I posted some shit like wwx is my least favorite character in all of fiction 😵‍💫😵‍💫 there's probably more stuff that could be considered controversial but I'm so disconnected from mdzs fandom at this point that I don't really know what the general consensus is. I'd love to hear yours though!!!! Feel free to anon or message or whatever you feel comfortable with, I won't judge

Some wild musings on the ways the terms for older and younger siblings are the same and different between Thai, Korean, Taiwanese and (to a lesser extent) Japanese shows.

(Please note these are uniformed observational musings typed so my brain will shush and also cause it’s a heatwave right now and I can’t sleep - Australia Problems.)

Okay the mix of shows I am watching right now have got my brain spinning around the ways the terms for older sibling and younger sibling as romantic and non-romantic terms are the same and different across these four countries (based on their depiction in shows, primarily but not exclusively BL shows so like --- no accuracy is guaranteed)

(Please note I use the terms “older sibling” and “younger sibling” throughout this post with the full awareness that these terms in all the languages have broader implications – heck I’m talking about the broader implications – it’s just an easy way to keep track)

What started this spiral was twofold

The use of didi by robot boy in Anti-rest to denote himself as “younger brother” despite the romantic/possessive nature of their relationship

The use of “ge” vs “da-ge” in Unknown and the fact I have seen da-ge translated as brother, first brother and big brother and I really want to know what the da prefix actually means since ge is brother they also use da as a prefix to the general term for “uncle” in H3: MODC (yes I am watching MODC, Yes I know, No I don’t get myself either).

SO MUSINGS

Lets start with Thai!

Thai is interesting because their older sibling term (Phi) and their younger sibling term (Nong) are both gender neutral and widly used, but calling someone Phi can have romantic connotations but calling someone Nong…can’t, (or well rarely/never does).

The BL boys seem to use “Phi Nong gan” as a way of denying romantic relationships, “we’re just brothers” – it’s platonic.

So “Phi” is potentially romantic but Nong isn’t.

However Phi is also casual to use (as in people can use it even with strangers) so there is both intimacy, politeness and casualness all tied up. It’s not formal but calling someone Phi is not necessarily intimate.

Next up Korea!

I find the Korean terms utterly fascinating since they have four different terms for older sibling, all of which gender both the speaker and the recipient: Unni (Y girl to O girl), Noona (Y boy to O girl), Oppa (Y girl to O boy) and Hyung (Y boy to O boy). (Y = Younger, O = Older).

All of these terms seem to be equivalent but some are used more freely than others

Calling someone older sibling in Korean seems to be a mix of intimate and respectful, it inherently acknowledges the age differential that is important in Korean society, sometimes people use the term straight away, especially Oppa, other times (more often) it’s something that is built too, or offered as a progression of comfort/intimacy in the relationship.

Korean, interestingly has one term for younger sibling, dongsaeng, and (like nong) this term is gender neutral to both speaker and recipient. It, like Nong, seems to never get used in a romantic context and, again like Nong, being denoted “dongsaeng” seems to be something to be actively mad about/avoidant of if you have a romantic interest in your “older sibling.”

Also Oppa is interesting since the term is also occasionally used in both Thai and Taiwan and seems to simply denote “Handsome/Dateable boy” in these languaes, without gendering the speaker. (Presumably this is the result of Korean romances being primarily younger girl to older boy so the use of Oppa was most commonly the term for the male leads and this got picked up).

Quickly Japan.

Japan doesn’t seem to use sibling terms to denote romantic relationships at all, in anime (but not what I’ve seen of live action so far) the terms for older sibling are used with strangers (much like Phi) but this is primarily by children and again anime so... (is anime a less reliable representative of normal speaking than BL do we think? Maybe it depends on the anime…or the BL).

Terms include:

Aniki (older sibling) – gender neutral of both speaker and recipient, rarely used in anime, seems to only be used with actual relatives in live action.

Ototo (Younger sibling) – opposite of aniki (also maybe only younger brother, unsure)

Onii-san (or other suffixes) - older brother

Onee-san (or other suffixes) – older sister

And Now Taiwan (and China)

Taiwan is interesting because “ge” is brother but their language seems to come with prefixes that change what kind of brother term it is. I’m only just starting to follow (read: hear) the terms but for example in Unknown right now Lili calls her brothers “ge” but Zhiyuan calls his brother “da-ge” and Lili uses “da-ge” when talking about their oldest brother with Zhiyuan. Yet all these terms are just translated as brother

Meanwhile in MODC, Hao Ting keeps calling Bo Xiangs older man “Uncle” and Boxiang keeps correcting him to “Big brother” but both words (uncle and brother) seem to be using the Da prefix so I think Da may be like… additionally respectful maybe…or formal, it doesn’t seem to be respectful when Haoting uses it lol? So I am thinking “Da” must mean oldest/first or something similar.

If The Untamed is to be believed “Da-ge” is first brother and “er-ge” is second brother but idk for sure

Then we come to my spiral thoughts, because the younger brother term here is “didi” as far as I know, but unlike nong or dongsaeng this term doesn’t seem to automatically denote the younger person to “only a brother (read: platonic).” Our young robot boy in anti-reset being the current example, but not the only. I’ve not heard an older boy denote a younger boy as “only a brother” (nong/dongseang) in Chinese so far using “didi’, though maybe that’s a sign I need to watch even more Taiwanese BL…

Anyway, that’s all for now, sleep is calling.

(I would like to reiterate I know nothing and have looked nothing up, this is literally a random English speakers eyes and ears and that’s it, all thoughts welcome, if anything is blatantly wrong, or worse offensive, feel free to let me know)

hi riki! this is a bizarre question ngl, but im wondering if you could please tell me about why you are anti-Zionist? Since i have FRESHLY (last month!! Woohoo!!) become bat mitzvah, and I’m not going to beit Sefer every week now, I’m starting to realize that what I was told about Israel and zionism miiiight be innacurate. Please feel free not to, but I would personally feel more comfortable hearing about Antizionism from somebody who is for sure not hiding any antisemitic biases. Thanks and I hope it’s not a bother!

Mazal tov!

I was debating if I should reply to this and how. You're only one year older than my son and I never considered talking about this with a kid other than my own children. But if you're online reading and looking up information about this, I'll just answer the way I would for anyone. Like I said, I don't mind explaining. But I don't have the energy to collect sources for you. I'll do that later if you'd like. For now it'll be a bit of a rant.

Basically, if you ask different people what zionism is, you'll get different answers. Some people say that zionism is just the acknowledgement of our connection to this land. That's not what I'm going against. I'm not denying that this is our ancestral homeland. I've never known a different home, I grew up near Hebron. Our history means everything to me. So maybe you could create some definition of zionism that I wouldn't be against. But then I'll be against the use of the word because in practice, politically, the movement has been colonialist. And that reality is more important to me. So when I say I'm antizionist, I'm not talking about whatever pretty idea someone might have, I'm talking about things that to me are very concrete.

Zionism uses whatever political terminology is useful to it at the time. Currently, it tries to paint itself as a sort of landback movement, placing us as the indigenous population of this land. This is a distraction. If you mean "indigenous" as "this is where we originated" - both us and Palestinians are indigenous, which makes this term pointless to this situation. If you mean "indigenous" as "a local population facing colonization" - they're indigenous and we're the colonizers. That's the more politically useful distinction.

And the thing is, zionists knew they were colonizers. Ben Gurion was welcomed by the local population and expressed hope that they're nomadic and could be persuaded to leave. Ze'ev Jabotinsky argued that no land has been colonized with the consent of its natives, so we should just take what we want like other occupying forces did. They knew what they were doing. At the time, there wasn't the broad political pushback against colonialism that you see today, so they didn't really hide it. They saw themselves as the colonizing force and the Palestinians as the natives and this distinction had them placing themselves above the Palestinians.

When I was in school, I was made to believe that Palestine was never truly a country and the population here was never a cohesive nation. You might see questions like "Who were the Palestinian prime ministers and presidents? What was the Palestinian coin? What Palestinian wars were there before the creation of Israel?"

These questions tell you nothing other than the fact that Palestine has been under foreign occupation for a very long time. They try to lead you to believe that Palestine and the Palestinian identity are fictional constructs designed to deny us our place in this land.

But Palestinians have their own dialect of Arabic. They have their own varieties of Middle Eastern foods. They have their own clothing, their own embroidery patterns, their own dances. They have a very rich culture that wasn't just made up from nothing within the last century. I still have to battle against cognitive dissonance every time I find something of the sort, because Palestinian culture goes against everything I was taught.

The truth is, the British had no right to occupy Palestine, and they had no right to offer it to us. If we pretend there was no population that was wronged when we took Israel, we can be "the good guys" with Palestinians being a sinister plot to ruin us. This turns normal families, normal people, into a conspiracy made to hurt us. We're not fighting a military force - every Palestinian person is a threat to our legitimacy. Israelis don't even really use the term "Palestinians" - they're just Arabs, their individual identity is stripped from them. We pretend that they belong to other countries around us.

Israeli propaganda will tell you that we only ever act in self defense. It's in the name of our military, it's called a defense force. Israel boasts that it has the only ethical military in the world. The only defensive one. But like I said, we define threats very broadly. And we whitewash a lot of history. I was taught in school all our fighting was defensive - and then I spoke to an elderly man and he said "of course we killed whole villages, it was war, that's what you do." Only as an adult I found out about things like the Sabra and Shatila massacre and our involvement in it.

For the existence of Israel as an ethnostate, every Palestinian is a threat. A lot of people are all in favor of Israel, but against the government actions of ethnic cleansing. The truth is, the ethnostate is not sustainable without the ethnic cleansing. You can't accept one and expect it not to lead to the other. An ethnostate is never a justified goal, and that's always been the goal of zionism as a practical movement.

And I know why this exists. We've had two millennia of persecution. Antisemitism is one of the oldest forms of bigotry. And we just experienced an attempt to industrially exterminate us, we lost millions, including from my own family. We want shelter and safety and the ability to defend ourselves. I just can't see that as justification for what we did and continue to do.

You can look up our human rights abuses, but personally, there were moments that hit me. When I saw a whole warehouse of mail intended to reach Gaza, mail that's been kept from them for years, including items like wheelchairs, in such bad conditions that some envelopes got moldy. I still think of the people who spent all that money to get a wheelchair and were prevented mobility because we decided to hold their mail.

I watched the biggest apartment building in Palestine collapse under our bombs and I cried thinking about the people inside, and about the potential survivors and everything they lost.

I watched our people beat up the pallbearers at the funeral of Shireen Abu-Akleh, a Palestinian reporter. They almost dropped the casket from all those beatings. They were no threat. They just carried her. There was no reason to hurt them.

On the news, after Shireen Abu-Akleh died, the description of the Palestinian response to her death was that they're "חוגגים על המוות." The literal translation is that they're celebrating over the death, but that's not what it means. The meaning is that they're exaggerating their pain and their grief. They're acting, pretending, milking the injustice of it for show. And that's a common Israeli narrative, that Palestinians make a big deal out of things and pretend to suffer more just to make us look bad. We've dehumanized them to the point where we don't believe their grief.

And before all of this, growing up, I saw what the "us vs them" mentality caused in children. I grew up in Kiryat Arba and the population there is very strongly zionist. It's a settlement. It's largely Dati Leumi (national religious? I'm not sure how to translate, dati means religious and leumi means national). Over there I saw children as young as six cheerfully talk about joining the military and killing Arabs. I saw a kid throwing chocolate past the electric fence separating us from them, and laughing when a small Palestinian child went looking for that chocolate, calling her a pig. I saw my high school classmates questioning if they should help the family of a six-months-old baby, first demanding to know if the sick infant is Arab.

The Israeli left has a bit of a slogan. הכיבוש משחית. The occupation corrupts. It means that being an oppressive force changes what we are. It ruins us. And I truly believe that. It taints so much about us and our culture, about our compassion and our ability to have solidarity with other humans. Many principles that kept us safe in diaspora are used now to harm gentiles living under our control, and Palestinians suffer most of all.

So these are the reasons I'm antizionist. I hate what we do to Palestinians. I hate what it does to us. And more fundamentally, I'm against colonialism.

i think i fundamentally disagree with the thesis of the latest GMTK video about balatro. mark compares balatro's "cursed design problem" (the fact that the exact score of your hand isn't shown but can technically be calculated if you're determined enough to do it) with the binding of isaac's lack of item descriptions, as a case study of what happens when players "optimize the fun" out of a game and go against a developer's intended design choices. mark acknowledges that the comparison isn't perfect, but i think the comparison is just straight up not applicable. as someone who's played both games and is generally a big roguelite fan, the lack of a score preview in balatro is fundamental to the game's core experience, whereas the lack of item descriptions in isaac can actually be downright frustrating at times. sometimes items' effects can be obscure and very difficult to figure out, and there are so many items in the game at this point that it'd take a lot of time and effort to properly remember them all, and especially since some items can have detrimental effects, not remembering what an item does can actively hamper your ability to play the game well. with item descriptions, the game does not feel fundamentally different or worse; there's still a sense of discovery when you first encounter an item, because you won't know what it does until you pick it up, and there are still surprises to be had even if you know what the item's effect is (e.g. interesting and unexpected ways to use the item, or how it might synergize with another item). apparently, according to the video edmund mcmillen (creator of tboi) did consider the lack of item descriptions an important part of the game, and was dismayed that most players opted to deliberately circumvent it. and as much as i love the guy, unfortunately i think he's just wrong. he's wrong in that most players don't find the mechanic fun, or at least not fun enough to compensate for the downsides. the primary fun of isaac is derived from the moment-to-moment combat, the meta-progression of unlocking new items and characters, the rng of what items and crazy synergies you'll get this run, and the strategic choices you make on, e.g., which deal with the devil items to pick. learning what exactly items do is not on that list; most items are simple enough that their short in-game description (damage up, triple shot, homing shots) make them instantly graspable anyways, and hiding the exact numbers doesn't really enhance anything (i doubt players are experiencing a sense of wonder when trying to deduce exactly how much damage their tears have increased by). it's true that the most optimal way to play balatro is by painstakingly calculating the point value of every possible hand and then choosing the highest one. but it's such a tedious experience that i doubt that any more than a tiny fraction of players will ever start playing the game like that regularly. players will certainly "optimize the fun" out of a game; if you offer players different weapons and one weapon is boring but by far the most powerful, then yeah, players will tend to pick that one. but the vast majority of players will only do it if doing so is the path of least resistance; optimizing balatro to that extent is so time-consuming and obviously anti-fun that most people simply won't ever do it. the players who do opt to do it are like speedrunners - a niche, outlier group of players who are extracting fun out of the game in an entirely different way from most players. but they will never be more than that: a niche, outlier group. anyways balatro is fucking amazing and i highly recommend it unless you value your time for some reason

One of the most unfortunate notions to have emerged from the afterbirth of the very odd resurgency of Puritanical morality (in regards specifically to literature as well as to fictive works of film and/or television) is the idea that characters must be inhuman in their goodness.

Not in that they must be angels, or that they must be without moral quandary, but that they must, in the end, transmute these struggles into redemption, or, at the very least, into qualities which render them more sympathetic than condemnable.

That, however, renders a disservice unto readers. As poetry, if one were to align one's views with Wordsworth, the purpose of a literary work is to contain "the spontaneous overflow of feelings," and thus to evoke such in those who consume it.

There must be catharsis. A good character is not so necessarily because he is morally good, or because he is an embodiment of our most noble and admirable traits (though well-written and well-rounded characters certainly can be so), or because he serves to bolster a work whose exigesis would extoll the virtues of a parable, but because he is deeply human; because he is multi-faceted; because he is flawed.

Humans are not paragons of virtue. To hold a character to the standards of perfection expected of martyrs is to divest the character of his humanity, and, thus, of his use to us. Characters do not need to be role models, or motivational, or inspirational, they simply must speak to our humanity.

It is dishonest to claim that humans (at least, those worthy of respecting, according to those braying the loudest within communal spaces that they have never experienced an incorrect thought, nor held a questionable belief, nor behaved in a way they would wish to keep from being broadcasted across the Internet) do not possess traits which are reflected in well-crafted, realistic characters: in Byronic heroes, in Romantic heroes, in Picaresque heroes, in anti-heroes, in the wicked, in the cruel, in the sadistic, in the mad.

It is necessary to recognise these traits within ourselves and to endeavour to become truly, intimately familiar with them. You must know the darkness of yourself as well as the light, if you truly wish to grow into a functional, kind, and well-balanced individual: you must learn to deal with your shadow. Those who pretend it does not exist within themselves often struggle the most with its existence, and often are the most easily consumed by it.

Characters who are darkly relatable to us, in their quickness to anger or in their sardonic, mean-spirited wit, or in their selfishness, or in their impulsiveness, or in their stubbornness, or in their wrath, are the most instructive in conveying the importance of goodness.

There must be catharsis. There must be purgation. We must see the darkness behind our eyes reflected in the faces of these characters, and we must see them fail because of it. We must see them hurt those they love because of it. We must see them lose everything because of it. We must see them destroy themselves because of it.

We must be allowed to explore the darkness of humanity within fiction, because it is that acknowledgement of darkness that allows us to wrestle with it, to know it, and to best it. No monster in the closet has ever been defeated by refusing to look it in the face and to name it. You cannot heal if you do not identify and treat the wound.

It is through the morally upright and the morally contemptible characters that we find traces of ourselves, and that we are allowed to proceed forward on the path to becoming the well-rounded, mature, and critical-thinking individuals we aspire to be. To continue to strike down 'problematic' content and characters is to sit beside the book burners of Fahrenheit 451, to worship Big Brother in 1984.

The good and the bad aspects of oneself must be explored in equal measure to grasp reality by the shoulders and to sit upon the throne of your identity, confident in the knowledge that your mastery of yourself and your answer to who am I? can never be shaken by outside forces.

The best and safest way to explore these aspects is within the sheltering confines of literature, of music, of film, of television, to see ourselves in the faces of others and to know what that means. To know what it means in others. To grow empathy and compassion and acknowledgement that all are human, all are imperfect, all are light, and all are dark -- and to not only acknowledge these facts, but to accept them as being inescapable, as being inherent, and as being okay.

I know is-the-owl-video-cute is calling my system (and Agro, and Poppy, and Rani, and now a minor, and even more people than that) zoophiles, but

a) I'm not a zoophile by its most literal definition since I don't experience attraction towards real life animals and, in addition to that, I also don't find the term one to be even remotely or theoretically applicable to myself for my forays into furry art: so that accusation is entirely wrong no matter how you slice it as I both don't meet the definition and would never/have never called myself such,

b) it's worth pointing out that I've done more anti-bestiality work online in alterhuman spaces than Owlvid ever has, even if you just take the widespread use of my Beware against a known pro-bestiality forum and it's administration into account and additionally the anti-bestiality and the anti- """zoosexual""" policies I created and implemented in the online spaces I admin and moderate for, so my anti-bestiality stance is already very well-known and established, and

c) if "People experience bad thoughts but that does not mean they do bad things, and stats seem to support this; if we ostracize people for things they've never done and automatically equate them to the people who have done those things, abusers have and will take advantage of individuals in especially vulnerable positions; we have to hold people responsible for their actions, not their feelings," is considered a controversial opinion that makes someone a "zoophile," then I feel like we've kind of fucking lost the plot here.

There's a lot of nuance to be had in this conversation beyond that, don't get me wrong: if someone identifies as no-contact but still interacts actively in the pro-contact zeta community and supports it, that's still an action they should be held accountable for. If someone is promoting "zoosexuality" as a sexual orientation (and especially if they're arguing that it's somehow a queer identity), even if they do not identify as a zoophile, that is once again an action they should be held accountable for. If someone is trying to make "zootherian" spaces that are "contact-neutral," that is an action they should be held accountable for. If someone hosts a major alterhuman event or community and allows pro-bestiality individuals to interact or attend or hold important positions in the space, that is an action they should be held accountable for.

But when people like Owlvid divide the lines into quite literal "if you have ever even so much as had a whisper of these thoughts you're a literal animal rapist" vs "everyone else," you see any sort of accountability completely thrown to the wayside. You entirely lose the nuance of any of the above, because people like Owlvid do not actually give a shit about long-lasting community effects. They don't care about the zeta community forming from their exact rhetoric, they don't care that their "if you have Bad Feelings then you can never, ever be a therian!" perspectives are a part of what led bestialists to come up with the idea for """zootherian""" as a term, and they certainly don't care that equating zoophilic thoughts with actual bestiality makes it incredibly easy for people who have actually had sexual contact with their pets, missing stairs like LycanTheory, to hide amidst individuals who have never done more than own a Bad Dragon horse dildo.

We need to toss this black-and-white language and perspective for feelings and thoughts we don't like. It is demonstrably dangerous for our community to have at all, and we've seen the consequences of it occur in real time. And, fucking shit, it doesn't make us "zoophiles" to do so. In acknowledging that these feelings can and do occur in individuals and not immediately throwing people who have those feelings to the wolves (no pun intended), it's going to result in less people feeling ostracized and turning to or getting picked up by others who will encourage them to do harm. Instead, this acknowledgement will result in more individuals being encouraged to seek IRL help and support if they find that they're having difficulties due to their thoughts and feelings. It'll result in individuals learning healthier ways to approach such feelings, useful outlets and different focuses, instead of just trying to bottle it up and ignore it and inevitably making everything worse for themselves.

After all, when we tell people, "This is a personal moral failing. You ARE your feelings and thoughts, regardless of your actions," is it really any surprise when they end up believing us and when that makes everything spiral to hell? The solution seems pretty obvious to me: don't fucking tell people that.

And this type of approach should be extended to all problematic feelings, mind you, not just what we're talking about here. Individuals who get murderous or violent thoughts, or who get cannibalistic urges, or who have to wrestle with extreme hunting instincts aimed at pets and other non-food animals, also aren't inherently a danger and shouldn't be treated as such.

The idea of an innate sin or corruption that permanently mars someone isn't real. It does not exist. There is nothing in this world that people involuntarily experience that automatically makes them an evil person. There is no elect, you are not configured by destiny to either be a Good Person or a Bad Person. And hiding behind that culturally Christian idea is fucking useless, and only serves to try and hide one's own insecurities and flaws, because absolutely no one is always and eternally perfect in their thoughts and feelings. People can always choose to be good, because being good is always a choice. Stop trying to take that choice away from someone.

I have just seen this and maybe you have talked about it before but Effie x Walburga

I’m like shaken because I can’t imagine James mom ever wanting to be with someone probably cruel from birth. I mean they would have been together in the fifties, idk it made em giggle

would you all still love me if i said i was a walburga defender… :(

ok ive been pondering this all day, and ive also spent an insane amount of time on public transport trying to find a post i made in defence of walburga. @sugarsnappeases pulled up her laptop as my own personal hacker and stalker and couldnt find it either. however i found a snippet of an ’what are ur unpopular opinions’ ask and found this:

and that’s the gist of it. if anyone remembers the post i made or know how to find it pleaseeeeee send it to me. me and kara went through hell and back to try and find it :(((((((

anyway!

1. i hate the concept of people being born ’cruel’ or ’evil’. people are people and sometimes people do bad things. i think its important to still acknowledge that abusive people aren’t monsters who just couldn’t help themselves. abusers are people and those people chose to treat you like that. that was a choice they didn’t have to make, but they did. abusers aren’t monsters or monstrous. it’s important to me, due to personal experience, to remember that abuse is a choice. it allows me to feel betrayed and hurt and angry that a person chose to do that to me

2. i think walburga was a victim her whole childhood. atleast my own depiction of her. it’s different when she becomes an adult, has children, etc, and she should know better. there’s no excuse for her abuse towards her children/no excuse ever for abusive parents. and i want to be very clear about how there are NO excuses !!!!!! i am not team walburga and will never ever be team walburga !!!!!

3. walburga was a woman in the 70s, she held no power over orion what so ever. he was the man in the house. the head of the family. the abuse was allowed because quietly sat back and allowed it. absolutely ridiculous to me that walburga would be worse than orion. i simply think its an ignorant and misogynistic take. a silent father will always scare me more than the active abusive mother. like.. the patriarchy in the 70s in pure blood families ? lets be real here

ive seen posts saying orion was scared of walburga and thats why he never did anything. like are we being serious here. no way she got to choose her husband. and he’s a powerful man from a powerful family. in the seventies. why woud he be scared of her she has absolutely no power what so ever

4. i love exploring the womens narrative in the marauders fandom because their canonical narrative is based on sexism and the nuclear family. i guess you think it’s outlandish that effie would fall for walburga (cruel from birth) because shes james’ mother, and the anti walburga in the way she opens up her home and basically adopts sirius and makes a home for him ? to me that’s not interesting sadly :/ i love effiebarty because i get to explore good housewife effie tearing down her walls and acting on her desires and urges. like…. i want her to leave both james and monty behind out of pure selfishness. like.. im the girl writing the baby killing fic where lily is the sole survivor….

5. to me walburga is sort of similar to alicent from house of the dragon. what did she ever do that wasn’t expected of her? she was a girl in the 60/50s in a powerful family and had less choices than either reg or sirius ever did. she didn’t leave like sirius did. she stayed like regulus. and for similar reasons reg stayed probably. and she’s a woman. her sons are more priveliged than she will ever ever be. even disowned sirius is more priveliged than her.

6. i want to be very clear again. i am not a walburga apologist. i think there’s a clear distinction between her child- and adulthood. at some point the abuse becomes a choice. she didn’t break the cycle and she’s bad and rotten woman who abused her children. no excuses !!!!!!!!!! however. it is interesting exploring the circumstances which led to the woman she is

7. to actually answer your question. i dont necessarily care for effie/walburga but i can see the appeal. maybe i’ll get into it we’ll see……. like honestly they wouldn’t be that different from jegulus?

There's a lot of content to go through but definitely check out Jensen, Danneel, and Robbie's commentary in this interview with Nerds and Beyond about making the SPN universe more inclusive.

Some bullet points to note:

Jensen acknowledging the era SPN started in and the limits the mothership had. "And I also want to say too just to touch on that because you mentioned Supernatural and the mothership, we did have a lot of older white, straight men. That was just the nature of the show and how it was built and laid out. Everyone was always well aware that it was that and we needed to make an effort not to do that and to diversify." Jensen went on to talk about bridging the eras and drawing on the knowledge of the old guard while opening the universe up to new voices. "we’re looking at things more from a 'let’s make sure we’re getting this right, let’s make sure we’re bringing in people who can do that' but then 'let’s also make sure we’re using every chance we get to broaden our horizons.'"

Danneel talked about the importance of inclusion but also, emphasized that it's accurate for the 1970's: "Yeah, it was a goal, but it’s a reflection of what society truly is and truly was in the 70s. It’s just that television never was an accurate representation of us as people."

Robbie about the inclusiveness on The Winchesters discussed the importance of found family: "Diversity is great, inclusion is better. So we had an opportunity from the jump to really differentiate ourselves by having more than just the two hander. Obviously, this is John and Mary’s supernatural love story, but within that it was who are the people with them? The thing that I really, truly loved about Supernatural whether it was season 1 or season 15 was that family don’t end in blood is really about, to me, is about the family that you find. There’s the family that you’re born into, and for some people like myself they are blessed, it’s a wonderful thing. For others they’re not as blessed, it’s a terrible thing. But then there’s the family that you make and that was really important to be as inclusive in that family as possible from the beginning."

Robbie also mentions that his father is Mexican and his wife is latine. Something to keep in mind.

Robbie differentiating between "diversity" and "inclusion" is also really interesting. To me, that is a reflection on how diversity can sometimes winds up being checking off ticky boxes to fend of accusations of not being diverse enough. Inclusion is far deeper and more thorough. It means the characters are given sustained pov and are crucial parts of the story, not tacked on to say "look how diverse we are."

The link between family don't end with blood and these inclusion issues with SPN has always been fraught, and it's at the point where the anti-found family discourse is very tangled with narrow-minded thinking that wants things to stay stuck in the past and stick to just 2 brothers in the car.

Robbie's acknowledged elsewhere how SPN started out with a small cast, and then grew, so it's not even right wrt the mothership to say it was "only" one thing. But The Winchesters has an opportunity to go much farther and everyone at CMP is taking it. Supernatural is for everybody and that should be reflected on the screen and behind the scenes. I'm really happy about what they want to accomplish here.

Modern AU Jonrya + Divorced!RhaeLya Snippet

Test-running this the same way I did NHAT's first chapter! Keep in mind, this is not specifically RhaeLya or anti-RhaeLya. That said, Rhaegar, by virtue of being raised as more of a 'boy prince' than actual prince, has a characterization you may not agree with! But I don't care, it's my fic lol. Not a lot happens in this first snippet, it's more to establish the home-life Jon is coming from, the dynamic between Rhaegar and Lyanna, and because I find writing from this perspective funny. There is not a lot of Jonrya and only the set up for conflict. Enjoy! Please, tell me what you think.

It’s an age-old story. A real crowd favorite. Boy meets girl. Girl meets boy. Boy sings a sad song. Girl cries. Boy gives her roses. Girl looks pretty with flowers in her hair. A classic love story, one for the books.

Things may have progressed a little quickly after. But, still, nothing truly out of the ordinary. Girl got pregnant. Boy proposed. Well… Boy had to get a divorce first. But it was a quick divorce.

Sure, maybe after the shotgun wedding, Boy and Girl had to hide out in the desert for a while, disappeared from the public without telling anyone where they went, resulting in a media-fuelled frenzy, a nation-wide search party involving everyone from paparazzi to armed police to private investigators…

Maybe her family had publicly accused him of kidnapping before the dust had settled. Acquitted of all charges, both in the legal court and that of public opinion.

Still, when Rhaegar looks back at how he and Lyanna first met, first fell in love, it really did feel that simple, that… uncomplicated, at the time. The politics, their respective family drama, the music scene and the industry bullshit, the age gap that was only a little less scandalous at the time…

He hadn’t cared about that. Neither had magazines, or newspapers. If anything, they’d eaten it all up. It only made them more sympathetic. For the most part. According to all the important publications, anyway.

Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen had been... the love story to end all love stories. Had been, as in, weren’t anymore, because, as anyone could tell you, they hadn’t been married for, say, like… a decade now? Somewhere between a decade, and thirteen years, four months, and twenty-one days.

And yet, it still smarts to think about it. Better not to, if he can help it.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing in the great, empty expanse of fucking woods he’s staring down to distract him. Why does Lyanna live out here again? Shouldn’t someone running a non-profit live somewhere with actual people around, in need of help?

Frankly, he never understood why they divorced in the first place. But I respected her wishes. Because I loved her.

Obviously. He wouldn’t be leaning against his car, waiting for his son to finally emerge from his aloof (second) ex-wife’s cabin in the woods if that wasn’t the case, all so he could spend a weekend enjoying the kid’s brooding company, pointedly not asking questions about how his mother was and what she was doing in her spare time when she wasn’t too busy saving the world and ignoring his calls.

Rhaegar taps his foot. Crosses his arms. Checks his hair in the passenger window. Uncrosses his arms. Checks his phone, again. Nothing. He texted Jon about his arrival three minutes ago.

Maybe, sometimes their conversation verged into discussion-of-Mom territory. But there was only so much for him and Jon to talk about. The kid was almost sixteen, permanently unimpressed with him, and he made no secret of the resentment he felt for him.

Rhaegar wanted to connect, he did, but he also had to acknowledge certain limitations to his position. The one thing they both shared was Lyanna. It made sense to fall back to common ground in lieu of any other options.

And he’s curious. Sue him. The woman is a bank vault when it comes to her personal life. Always was. Just ask the press. They'd tell you.

Rhaegar checks his phone. Four minutes. He thinks he can get away with ringing the doorbell. There’s literally ice on the ground. Even his openly embittered son doesn’t actually want him to freeze to death.

Well, he assumes. But the void of interest in Jon’s gaze as he opens the door and claps eyes on him might make him reconsider.

“Hey, champ.” Rhaegar forces out, and pretends like he isn’t internally grimacing at his own words. “Uh, I texted, but…”

Jon nods, already turning around, walking away and leaving the screen door to drift shut on his father. “I know.”

Rhaegar wedges a foot in before the heavy screen can shut him out completely, then shifts awkwardly in the doorway, propping it open. “You ready to head out?”

“Almost.”

He takes that as an invitation to step inside. Jon’s disappeared into a door beyond the stairs - the den, or the dining room? It’s been a while since Rhaegar got to really see the place. He’s never gotten an actual tour, technically, has maybe been in the kitchen twice, ever, let alone the rest of the place. Technically, it's a converted ranger station from back when the family held private ownership over the woods. For all he knows, it's an armory back there.

He glances around surreptitiously for a second, wondering if he has enough time to poke his head around - innocently, of course - only for Lyanna to skid into view before he can even move past the wet room. His pulse quickens, but before he can pull out a greeting as equally as cringeworthy as the first, she interrupts.

“Oh, good. You’re here. I’m heading out then.” She pushes an earring in with lethal precision and force, not even sparing a glance at the conveniently-placed hall mirror, calling back into the house, “Jon? I’m heading out! Did you hear me?”

Rhaegar almost has a heart attack when Jon pops his head in from the nearest room - he could’ve sworn the only way to the back was through the main hall, last time he was here - with a furrowed brow and a playful scowl on display. “Yeah, I’m right here. You don’t need to yell.”

Lyanna is doing her eyeliner, but she pauses to raise her own brows at him in warning. “Sometimes I think you could do with me yelling at you more, actually.”

He rolls his eyes. “Is that even possible?”

She smacks her hairbrush in his general direction in response, a fruitless gesture so familiar to Rhaegar it hurts. “Would you get out of here? With your… teenage… attitude? Ugh.” She fixes her lipstick then shoves her tools in her purse.

“Brutal, mom. Do you have my charger?”

“Our charger,” she insists. “It’s in the den. Go watch some dumb, scary movie, would you? Have a good time with your dad. And get out of my hair!”

Jon gives her a brisk salute as she hurries past.

“We will! Uh, have a good time,” Rhaegar assures her, but his eyes get caught on her cocktail dress, as she scoots past him, adjusts the skirt, and grabs her coat. “Where are you off to? Didn’t think you were even allowed to leave the woods.”

She gives him a slightly withering glance, then shrugs, smiles. “I have a thing.” By now Jon has joined them in the wet room, and she turns to give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Lock up when you leave. I’ll see you two later.”

“Gross.” Jon waves from the door as she sidesteps the ice in her heels on her way to her truck. “Bye, mom. Be safe!”

“No worrying, kiddo! Have fun.”

“I know. But still.”

“Thanks, honey,” she clambers into the truck, blows a big, fat kiss from the window, intentionally over-the-top. “Mwah.”

Rhaegar follows her out, takes advantage of her patting around the front seat to plug her phone in. “Seriously, we never talk anymore. What’s the big occasion?”

She gives him a look he decides is indecipherable, then sighs. “Just meeting up with old friends of the family.” She finds the right chord to plug in her phone, then shoos him away from the window. “Okay. Really, this time - I’ll see you guys later.”

By the time she’s pulled out, and he’s shaken himself from his suspicious stupor, Jon is joining him out in the driveway. He shakes his head, then turns and gives him a fond, knowing look. “Where is she actually going?”

Jon, shrugging and hiking his backpack up his shoulder, returns the knowing look, if... decidedly less fond. “Some kind of double date.”

“What?” Rhaegar scoffs. “With who?”

“Uncle Ned and Aunt Catelyn.”

Interesting, but irrelevant. “No, who is she going with?”

“I don’t know. One of the Baratheons.” Jon is walking toward the car at this point.

“Shit!” Rhaegar jolts to follow, stops and curses as he almost slips on the ice, resumes his path with more caution. “Shit. Which one?”

“I don’t remember,” Jon says, popping open the trunk. He throws his luggage in the back.

Rhaegar rubs the back of his neck, exhaling a little in relief at just making it to the car without face-planting. “It can’t be Robert, is it? That’s insane.”

Jon pauses getting into the passenger seat to slip his backpack off his shoulder and spare his father a faintly exasperated look. “Dad…”

“Look, I - I know your uncle and him are friends, I’m sure he’s… fine, but… your mom hates him,” he rushes to clarify. Jon rolls his eyes and gets in the car, and Rhaegar scrambles to follow suit. “She always has.”

“I mean, it’s really none of your business.”

“Right, but… Right. I’m not saying she can’t. I’m just saying it would be stupid, and I hope your uncle hasn’t convinced her to give him another chance, when -”

“Are we going?” Jon interrupts, then sinks into his seat with a strange expression. “Arya and I have been waiting to see this for ages.”

“Uh…” Rhaegar blinks. Thinks. Starts to dig out his keys. “Yeah, we can go…” He starts the engine, but doesn’t take it out of park. “Just, let the engine warm up… How is Arya doing, lately, by the way? She wants to see this film?”

“Yeah,” Jon answers, slouching in his seat. “Has wanted to, for a while, now.”

“How’s she doing? You get to see her much, now she’s getting older?”

Jon turns to pretend to look at something out the window. Rhaegar knows he’s pretending. He was staring at the same goddamn woods waiting for a text for four minutes, so. “Not as much.”

Rhaegar takes this as an opportunity to change the address on his phone. “Is she busy tonight?”

“No.” No uncertainty. Not even a pause.

“You want to invite her along?”

“Seriously?” 

“Why not?” Rhaegar starts backing out of the driveway. “She’s allowed to watch scary movies, right?”

“Yeah, we watch them all the time.” Good. It was a fifty-fifty bet, considering what Catelyn and Ned are respectively like as parents.

“Why don’t you text her? We’re early anyway. We can start heading down that way, and if she says no, we’ll just… You know. Course-correct.”

“Okay. Yeah. I’ll text her.”

“Good. Great. We’ll just… head for your uncle Ned’s.”

And if they happened to run into Lyanna when they got there, well... that's a non-issue.

❦

Thanks so much for reading! Hope it piqued your interest, even though there wasn't a ton of Jonrya right away. It's partly written but not enough to share for feedback. I'm curious to get feedback on the Rhaegar and Lyanna dynamic - I know the characters have huge fans and huge antis and frankly I'm half curious and half worried as to how either party will be reacting to the situation, lol! Anyway, thanks again.

I'm just gonna say this because I am SO done with seeing this shit.

As a trans, enby, demisexual lesbian, I am fucking sick of seeing people hate on huntlow because its "straight"

Like that is such a dumb fucking reason to hate on a perfectly healthy ship. Who cares if its queer or not? It's still a wonderful written ship. And it might not even be straight!

Like I said I'm literally queer myself and I far prefer huntlow over the two cannon queer ships. I don't prefer huntlow because its not queer, and I dont prefer lumity or raeda because they are queer. By that logic every queer person would have to prefer every queer ship in existence over a straight ship, even if the queer ship's rep is done poorly or is straight up offensive. That logic just makes no fucking sense. I've seen people call huntlow shippers queerphobic for preferring huntlow over the cannon queer ships. NEWS FLASH: MANY HUNTLOW SHIPPERS ARE QUEER THEMSELVES. (Including me!)

I prefer huntlow over Lumity and Raeda simply because I think its written the best out of the 3 and simply because Hunter and Willow are my favorite two characters in the show. I just don't care about Eda, Raine, Luz, or Amity NEARLY as much as Hunter and Willow. I'm not saying I don't like these characters or lumity or raeda, I'm just indifferent about them. I fully acknowledge just how well written and important these ships are to queer rep and queer history, and there is literally nothing wrong with them. These ships and characters just don't do it for me the same way Huntlow does. You can just not care about a ship and not have to morally justify your reasoning. I don't care about Lumity or Raeda, yet do you see me trying to aruge those ships are morally wrong? No. You don't. There is literally nothing morally wrong with them. Same thing applies to huntlow. There is literally nothing morally wrong with Huntlow, yet I constantly see people pull shit out of their ass to try and morally justify their reasoning to hate huntlow.

News Flash: You can hate something and not have to morally justify why.

Plus, Huntlow is still amazing rep. It's not queer rep, sure, but we already got two MONUMENTAL queer ships in TOH that have literally made history. Huntlow has a different kind of rep, as it's the best plus sized ship rep I've ever seen. How many times does a boy described as sickly and scrawny fall in love with a plus-sized girl? And how many times does that happen where the plus-sized character doesn't try and diet or gets a "makeover" and loses weight so their love interest will love them more? This kind of rep is so unheard of and it is INCREDIBLY important, especially in a kid's show. I have heard countless stories of plus sized young kids (and adults!) talking about how much this kind of rep means to them. I heard from a person who was told that they would never find love because of their weight, find extreme comfort with huntlow's plus sized rep. This ship could literally save lives with this kind of rep. (Could prevent people from failing into eating disorders, or could help people recover). This rep is SO important for plus-sized people.

Also people who say huntlow gets more attention then Lumity or raeda, I seriously DO NOT know what rock you're living under. Lumity and Raeda are pretty much universally accepted in the fandom as the top 2 ships, while Huntlow has pretty much remained controversial from the very beginning. Sure, now the majority of the fandom supports huntlow, but back in the ASIAS days it was fucking brutal. (I literally almost quit shipping it because of the blacklash on my first huntlow post). And even now, despite it being a minority, there is still a good chunk of people in the fandom who are huntlow antis. Huntlow is NOT getting more attention then Radea or Lumity just because its straight. If anything, Radea and Lumity are MUCH more popular in the fandom then huntlow. Like are you fucking kidding me with this???

Plus we don't even know if this is truly straight! For all we know Hunter or Willow could be bi, pan, omni. It could just be a straight passing relationship, and people aren't less queer for being in straight passing relationships!

So yeah. Go find a legitimate reason to hate on a ship.