inside you there are two dogs [you are the dogs]

not outright said but its about my daily dealing with possible trauma, grappling with possible abuse, processing childhood shit, and age regression

They should just make Satan canonically autistic at this point

This was easily one of the best Lupin episodes

Things like prolonged abuse can give people very uneven social and emotional development. They can be very responsible and "mature for your age" in some areas and also very stunted and immature in others.

This can also happen for, say, LGBT people who were closeted during pivotal periods of development too, where dating and discovering themselves happens later and there can be a development gap for a time. And grief around never getting to be a kid when they were a kid can be a thing for people once they try to connect with the things they had to cut off because they weren't safe to feel them. I went through some of that myself, from various sources, so I have a lot of empathy for that and how absurd/frustrating it can be.

(And a lot of hope - it doesn't, as far as I've seen and experienced, take someone very long to "catch up" after a while of fumbling around like an idiot)

Anyway - sometimes I see people reading Carmy's "accidental fuckboi" behavior in terms of how a grown man who's been dating since he was a teen would be thinking/feeling, if he behaved like that. But, for me, I interpret that differently because of the “first” situation and the developmental stuff. IMO, he's basically being a feckless/inexperienced teenager dating for the first time here, because in this area of his life he is still developmentally a dumb feckless teenager (and one who is trying and failing "not to be shitty" without much of a clue what that looks like).

Doesn't make the harm less real, but the intent I think is shaped deeply by the fact that, for the first time in his life, he feels safe enough (because of how much responsibility Sydney and Nat are taking on and that is absolutely not fair to them!!) to try to enjoy things. And he thinks maybe he can even make that work with being responsible somehow, but... utterly clueless about how.

There's the caveat that he didn't go out and choose to start dating at this pivotal moment for the business - dating found him and there's complexities around how much he wanted it to find him right here and now and how much he feels obligated to be what his family/friends/Claire wants him to be. I think he'd have been able to turn down anyone who wasn't as deeply tied to his family as Claire, and I'm not ignoring his agency in the situation, but they chose to bring someone in who he'd find it incredibly difficult to balance pleasing/doing what he's expected to do by while balancing everything else for a reason.

The "executive function" stuff where he's staring at the calls coming in and unable to answer either of them is key for me, in terms of this being someone who just isn't functioning well rn at all and is coming to a real crisis point and trying to ignore that/salve that any way he can think of. Masking really hard and deep in denial and trying to keep a lot of plates spinning without being very intentional about any of it.

It leads to sucky behavior and he's responsible for that--and the other characters can and should hold him responsible for that, but especially for actually addressing the core gravity warping untreated mental illness that's motivating a lot of this frantic rushing around and being a prick-- but I don't personally see much of it as a crime of intent. Intent requires a level of insight and experience that he doesn't have in the area of dating specifically lol

That balance of someone being responsible for their actions but also, for various reasons, in a place that mitigates and shapes what they're able to do--based on the tools they have--is an interesting part of the story that gets touched on again and again through various characters. It's interesting and it can coexist with the people around someone having the right to protect their own peace and boundaries.

Consider This Scenario:

Makoto Kagutsuchi getting sick with a bad cold for the first time ever in his life.

He'd totally be the type of lunatic that would drink cold medicine or cough syrup directly from the bottle like it was an energy drink. And there would be multiple bottles.

It WAS medicine right? It would make this stuffy and yucky feeling go away so he could go back to work??

(Spoilers) TW// vomit mention

He was immortal, what could possibly go wrong?

...

Only for him to suffer the HEAVY consequences of intense hallucinating, a higher fever and a lot of vomiting later.

Then he’d have a seizure and die.

…

And then when he comes back,

He would never do that again.

...

well maybe just one bottle next time.

(makoto no)

So. Alastor is meant to be a serial killer with a moral code that plays into who he kills. Alastor killed most of the old Overlord regimes, publicly.

So, why doesn't he take out any of the existing Overlords now?

Something else that makes me sympathetic to Pharma's situation is like. Idk if there's an actual term for this or if someone smarter and more academic wrote it about some real life context that actually matters.

But, so we've already established among Pharma stans that the circumstances at Delphi were blackmail/torture with no real way out that wouldn't involve Pharma being responsible for people getting killed (either killing patients for the deal or having everyone die bc he failed his end of the deal).

And I feel like while "he's still in the wrong because he killed people" is part of it, another sort of implicit part is the idea that Pharma should've been willing to take more personal risk, maybe even risk dying? I mean, Ratchet does ask "why didn't you just detonate it near the DJD" (to which Pharma responds that he did try to get Sonic and Boom to do it, but they refused) so like

Idk I feel like we do have this social notion of martyrs as a very romantic ideal, people you can praise for being so brave and strong and righteous that they ended their own lives for their cause, while you can also coo about how sad and tragic it is that dying is what it took for them to do the right thing. But at the same time I feel like in reality, having an expectation that people become martyrs is kind of a toxic social norm bc like. It's very easy to demand that others sacrifice their lives for some Ultimate Moral Good when you yourself aren't experiencing the same hardships as they are. And ultimately it is kind of fucked up to tell someone "the moral thing you should've done was risk your life/kill yourself" because asking someone to pay their life to do the right thing is no small request. And sure, the typical response would be to call them a "coward" for caring more about saving their own skin instead of doing the right thing... but again, death is a really scary thing and self-preservation is a really strong instinct, so it kind of feels like having this binary view of "you're either a Brave Hero who sacrifices your life for everyone else or a Dirty Coward who's too scared of dying to do what's right" is kind of fucked up?

I guess the best way to describe it is that if someone willingly gives up their life as a sacrifice to others, it can be a noble thing because it's a choice they made willingly, but if it becomes a Moral Standard that in order to be a Good Person you have to be unafraid of throwing your life away and if you aren't willing to die you're a Cowardly Bad Person, that's when it becomes toxic.

Idk, I guess how this ties back to Pharma is that he was never in a position where he expected to make these kinds of moral decisions/ultimatums. He's a doctor who doesn't even get into combat, his job is to heal and not to kill, he's behind the front lines in a hospital that's supposed to be a safe, neutral place for him to heal people. So in the face of suddenly having a "murder people on behalf of me, or I murder everyone you swore to protect" ultimatum thrust upon him, I understand why Pharma wasn't """"""""""brave enough"""""""""" to "do the right thing" (whatever that would've been in the case of Delphi). You could argue that maybe a frontliner soldier accepted the burden of possibly dying for their cause and they've become used to it as someone who lives that reality every single day, but I feel like for Pharma, who's a doctor and a protected non-combatant (from what we can tell), that sort of risking of his life/living with the fact his life could be snuffed out any day isn't something he would've been prepared for at all.

And for me personally, from an outsider's perspective, it strikes me as kind of unethical to go "oh well he should've just detonated the bomb himself even if it killed him" bc again, there's a difference between witnessing a moral conundrum as a bystander versus being the person living with it and being under time pressure where it's do-or-die. Just as part of my personal standards, I feel like death is such a huge consequence/burden of someone's actions (literally you are no longer alive, any potential you had left is cut short, you cease to exist on this plane) that it feels rather callous to go "Well you should've just been willing to die for your beliefs if you really cared that much!!!"

2024 year of charlie gets a fucking break (hopefully. maybe. tbd.)

how would you talk CS lewis into trans acceptance? just wondering because this is theoretically the coolest concept i can think of

ok buckle up.

In my experience it is not actually all that difficult to convince someone who is christian but holds the character of god to be of higher importance than a strict historical literalism view of the Bible that sex and gender are different. This is because it’s blatantly true and people who are of that persuasion are more likely to be able to comprehend blatantly true things, and much more empathetic to the experiences of others ie. listening to a trans person’s life story.

We know that cs Lewis did not hold a strict fundamentalist view of the historical literalism of the Bible, as he was open to the idea of evolution as a process guided by God (this forces you to interpret the creation story as somewhat allegorical, which yknow. It is. because it’s made up.) in fact historically it’s very rare for people to actually hold this view strictly in the way that we see today from conservative evangelicals. Even Martin Luther, their main guy, thought the epistle of James kinda sucked and wasn’t really right.

from sex & gender are different it’s a short hop to gender as a social construct - something these people usually understand due to renegotiating biblical views of women wearing head coverings or not wearing any jewellery. from there it’s sometimes possible - not always, but sometimes - to get them to understand that a person may experience incongruous sex and gender, and that this is resolved by living as a different gender to the one they were originally assigned based on sex.

The important thing to note to them at this point is that this does not erase their previous experience of living socially as their assigned gender, nor are they so deluded as to believe it magically makes them cisgender. At this point the analogy of biological father vs adoptive father is very useful, both being real fathers and indeed reflections of God the Father.

You can also raise to them “why is God depicted as male if he’s not a human?” and put to them the idea that people choosing their gender presentation is a reflection of God’s image in them - existing in a created state while still creating their mode of identity using the soul and spirit he gave them. Didn’t Paul change his name from Saul when he gave his life to Christ? In some ways, a gender transition can be seen as a transformation gifted to that person by God, the same way God gifts all of us with transitions throughout our lives, from child to adult, mother to grandmother, condemned to redeemed, hopeless to hopeful.

Then you can say that this is just another choice God puts before all of us: whether to marry, what job to get, what church to attend, what gender will you live as. And in all choices, as in all things, a person may glorify God. Thus if a person is trans, their identity is no different to any other chosen or re-formed identity, and we can love them by understanding that, respecting it, and protecting them as a sibling in Christ.

Idk maybe it’s crazy, and there are points along this that many Christians would fight against for many reasons. Most of those reasons though are sheer conservatism and an unwillingness to allow minor scriptures to be understood as culturally rooted. If that’s someone’s position then they are always being unequal with how they choose to renegotiate scriptural relevance ie. they are choosing to be transphobic because they just want to be, and you are going to get nowhere with them.

But cs Lewis was a kind man, who valued camaraderie and joviality and rebirth and love. I know he’s dead so it’s irrelevant. But I like to believe he could’ve been a hashtag ally.

have to say also that the more time goes on the more rin’s whole promise to archer and her saying “i promise i’ll get him to love himself” kind of rubs me the wrong way. like i guess rin’s just going to spend her entire life being shirou’s emotional caretaker who nags him to take better care of himself then? Heaven’s Feel had Shirou organically develop that self love all on his own but i guess this is also a thing you could do.

Its kind of just slapping a band aid onto the problem of shirou’s near suicidal lack of regard for himself. like yeah its real bad that shirou keeps constantly endangering himself and running himself ragged for others and it’ll push him towards a destiny of ruin. but dont worry. rin’s got it handled. she’s just going to dedicate her life to staying with him and nudging him away from the archer path whenever he strays too close to it. that’s going to be her whole life, managing her high school boyfriends emotions for him.

yusuke and sensui were the perfect foes to each other. what do i mean by that? both were what the other was not. yusuke was everything sensui was not. sensui was everything yusuke was not. this dynamic made it easier for the viewers to see faults for both of these characters because the narrative forced them to interact. where sensui was calculated, yusuke was unpredictable. where sensui was manipulative, yusuke was direct.

this is precisely why i loved the black chapter arc.

ways to say "i want a ghost movie that intricately focuses on the dysfunctional and damaging relationship between copia and imperator in some way and includes more horrible little hints at imperator's emotional distance that will cause me harm i will never recover from and also throw a shart joke in there" that make me sound normal.

Y’all: Adam was such a wasted character. They took this twisted paragon of a genuinely good cause that was warped into something violent and profane and reduced him into nothing more than a jealous ex-boyfriend.

Me: 👏THAT 👏IS 👏LITERALLY 👏THE 👏POINT!! 👏

to be like frank here, redemption is an ever going cycle. when youve been the problem, the toxic ex, the abuser, you have to know you will have to apologize for that for the rest of your life. you will always have to live with the guilt and conscience of knowing how you hurt that person, or mutliple people. and you have to constantly CHOOSE to not repeat that behavior, and its not easy.

when you meet a new friend the topic of who you used to be will come up eventually, and if you have changed youll be honest with who you were. you cant run from it. you cant try to round the corners and make it seem like the other persons fault, or like it wasnt as bad as it was. its really really scary. because everytime you open up about it, its not just the wound of guilt but its also the fear that theyre going to look inside and not like what theyll see.

but you have to keep moving on and you have to keep being honest. and you have to remember that everyone is applicaple for redemption, you just have to work for it and admitting you were wrong with no buts is the first step.

.

The newspaper got Cody and his brother's images have revealed , wouldn't that be leaving them in a disadvantage since they are completely exposed to Dunn's "business partners"

Interesting thought! That drawing is mostly meant to show off all the characters involved, so take its canonicity with a grain of salt. But! The kids would have been put into the public eye no matter what. Their staying with Bishop was primarily to afford them his top-of-the-line security, specifically because their involvement being made public was an inevitability. So it's not necessarily that avoiding getting photographed puts their safety at risk any more than it already would be, more that it makes them uncomfortable. Hope that makes sense haha!

--Adelram