Luffy: Liberates entire countries and saves the lives of countless people

Also Luffy: Alright, let's steal from these hoes.

I feel bad for Starlo.

Star has a point, idk what the four were ticked off about, there is like 99% chance everyone willingly participated in the trolley problem, based on what we've seen of his behavior thus far it's not like Starlo to be that big of a jerk/drag them by force/yell at them to do it. Ed's words:

he does it because Star asks NICELY

clearly jealous

It genuinely seemed like a fun time/fun roleplay, especially since every day is the same. Like, the five are supposed to be a rowdy and adventures bunch, what exactly did Starlo do wrong, I'm genuinely confused and curious. Except taking a big liking in Clover (his posse should know that this is a big moment for him, according to Blackjack they've known each other since high school and had the same liking for westerns. So they were basically a nerd gang.) Starlo was kind, patient and considerate towards Clover the whole time, even warned Mooch about them not being bandits, taught Clover gun safety, wanted to bring his posse along for a fun time, thanked Ace for telling him about getting Clover a new hat...

Sure, at first he only liked Clover for being a human, but as Ceroba says, that changed and he grew to genuinely care about them, plus I can't help but think Star saw himself in Clover and that's part of the reason he was so proud of them all the time even when they messed up (I'll talk more about this at some point)

What exactly made Ace want to leave the gang? He even said how he doesn't mind "getting run over by the fake train"

he's so nice. says sorry for forgetting the safety goggles even when he was scatterbrained due to his excitement. I love him so much

The only real "faults" (I'll call them temporary faults) I saw in Star during the Wild East section was that he was even more enthusiastic and more proud than usual. But how couldn't he be when he met a member of the species that he has admired for so long because they have real cowboys and sheriffs on the surface (who are seen as brave heroes who deliver justice, while Star canonically feels like a nobody farmer). His posse should have realized Clover wouldn't be there forever and just let their boss enjoy himself with his "deputy who'd have to leave sooner or later anyway"(or be more patient with him/ask him why he feels this strongly towards Clover/if there's a deeper reason for that). His friends including Ceroba just turn their back on him so quickly instead. The moment he's gotten the chance to feel valued for once and put himself first and not have to take care of this whole town and everyone in it and live his dream of meeting a real human, suddenly "his personality is damaged?"

Star's literally built this whole town, organised everything, he worries about everyone, Ceroba (plus was the one to give her emotional strength before and after Clover's sacrifice), Kanako, the monsters, his family, struggles with feelings of worthlessness yet never wipes that smile off his face, always does his best to be hopeful and optimistic and make others laugh, gave his posse a nap time so they don't become exhausted, gave Ceroba a free home, didn't act upon his feelings towards her and was a 110% supportive, caring friend instead. THAT'S who he is. He's the papa bear of this friend group, the glue holding everyone together.

He was just *really* excited. Y'all know he's insecure and just wishes to escape who he is and yet y'all blame him for liking Clover so much. Yeah, the four are very clearly jealous. But why won't the four of you control your feelings for a while? As mentioned, Clover WILL HAVE TO LEAVE EVENTUALLY. They won't be Star's "deputy" forever (the kid who's just as into westerns as he is, who values justice just as much, who also values doing the right thing. Someone he clearly felt understood in the presence of, whom he loved; just look at the way he talks about Clove during Showdown). Star seems genuinely confused of what he did wrong poor guy just wanted to live his fantasy for once and feel important:

Even at the beginning Moray's like "oh no Martlet is upset" Mooch replies "don't be a buzzkill nothing exciting ever happens around here" and Ray's like "Yeah you've got a point"

If you all agreed to have a little fun with a human who will very soon leave forever why is Starlo's enthusiasm such a big problem? If the posse weren't into this after all (unless they were simply too jealous which could have been solved with a honest talk and a little patience) why are you doing this "rowdy" job with Star in the first place? Do you want your boring routine day to day life so much back? Or just for Clover to leave (which they will soon enough)? You, western enthusiasts, literally met a real human, A HUMAN FROM WESTERNS YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE PASSIONATELY INTO (clearly not as passionate as Star but passionate ENOUGH to understand where he's coming from).

... okay.

Me after reading The S Class That I Raised immediately after reading TCF: i love you main characters that keeps putting yourself in situations despite saying you only want to live a peaceful life (thinks about orv) oh... Not you tho Kim Dokja, you always planned to kill yourself and i love you for that but PLEASE stop

I think a part of the reason I feel so connected to JGY and XY is that I, too, think everyone is lying about what a good person they are. Sure, there may be a few genuinely good people, but those are in the minority and never claim the title.

I don't know about never; some people are pretty straightforward.

And in some ways the whole point of the concept of 'a good person' is that the feeling of losing the right to consider yourself one can impose instinctive recoil from doing wrong, in situations where you don't have the leisure of working your way through an ethics diagram and choosing the logically moral path before reacting to a situation. It has practical utility.

But that system can backfire pretty horribly too, in a lot of ways. It can be hijacked by definitions of 'good' that actually make you recoil from ethical acts because they're deviant. It can lead to disappearing up your own ass lmao.

And definitely the threshold for 'talking about how you're a good person' enough that it makes you suspect as either a) a liar or b) someone who values that self-image over objective reality and other people's wellbeing is. Not very high.

Jin Guangyao, ironically, is one of those people who's so performatively A Good Person in his public life that in retrospect it looks like a red flag. Which knowing this about himself in an ongoing fashion ofc just reinforces his own cynicism about everyone else lmao.

Even Lan Xichen, who I think he may see as a genuinely good person, he also sees as an easy mark who will reliably choose what is comfortable over what is 'right,' if you just structure the scenario to make that an easy choice that's easy for him to justify.

Xue Yang's bitterness is in many ways more exciting than Jin Guangyao's because he has a way more unusual relationship to reality, but it does share a lot of notes.

The role of deception in his psychology fascinates me because as far as I can tell he's as instinctively straightforward a person as Lan Wangji, albeit along quite different lines involving a total lack of impulse control, but has adopted 'deceit' as a weapon against the wicked world in the same way he has adopted 'murder.'

But when he feels someone is not merely lying but papering over bad behavior with principles they are not living up to he is livid.

People claiming to be better than him because they're 'good' when 'good' is a construct of privilege, is the underlying idea he's not equipped to articulate. Except he takes that and applies it to 'hitting me to interrupt my random murder of some guy who happened to be within arm's reach when I wanted to hurt someone.'

Which isn't like philosophically perfect, but the underlying problem he's actually reacting to is that he understands the social contract as a lie that has never protected him but seeks to control him, while protecting rich men it has no power to control.

Which it is fair to be mad about, but then his feeling is that since that's the nature of the world and all people, he is entitled to amass for himself the power to inflict hurt without consequences as much as he possibly can, and to use it against the vulnerable for fun, and no one is entitled to interfere.

Which brings him to a place where he is violently angry at anyone talking about trying to treat other people well as a value, because either they're a hypocrite and a liar or they threaten his entire system of rationalization for why he can be The Worst and still In The Right.

'Everyone is equally bad, actually' is like, an understandable take for anyone who's had cause to become embittered. Everyone is free to make whatever philosophical peace they can with the world and by and large there's no ethical weight to any such opinion, in itself.

But it's an ideological crutch people tend to wind up leaning on very heavily when they can't or don't want to take responsibility for their own behavior.

Which is an approach that Xue Yang, Jin Guangyao, and Su She all share, and which not only is shitty of them, it...traps them in a wheel of doubling down on their own worst impulses because rather than going 'that was bad and I shouldn't do it again' they've repeatedly invested all this energy into making what they did actually the correct thing, according to their interpretation of the context. Which means they're more likely to do it again.

(I think this is how Jin Guangyao became a serial killer, for example. He followed a doing-a-murder-impulse and then internally doubled down on how he had nothing to be ashamed of, so he was more likely to do it again, every time.

Wei Wuxian's strain of self-righteousness about his revenge was less...thorough than Jin Guangyao's, because he had the benefit of going after people on the opposite side of a war from him while Meng Yao's first known murder plot was against a shitty boss. But it probably didn't help him not try to solve army-shaped problems with mass murder, even after that stopped being allowed.)

If any of them had just like, zero moral sensibilities they would have created very different problems, and very possibly fewer of them. It's making a central goal of your operations 'self-vindication in your own internal narrative, created retroactively via reframing' rather than 'figuring out what I think I should do and trying to do that' that traps them in the self-reinforcing murder pissbaby vortex.

So if you look at it one way, these three villains are themselves perfect examples of how pursuit of the 'feeling of being good' (or at least 'not the bad guy') can make you worse.

Notably Wei Wuxian was also extremely sensitive to hypocrisy in his youth; it was the only part of Madam Yu's behavior he was ever shown objecting to. But he's sufficiently mellow and cynical from regret and burnout by the 'present' timespan after his resurrection to just get disgusted and alienated about it, rather than outraged.

He wasn't even all that mad at Xue Yang, though honestly that may be partly because he stopped entirely characterizing him as a person at some point during their interaction. Like, there's no point being angry at someone whose moral sensibilities operate exclusively on the plane of 'is this unfair to me' for manipulating and destroying people who were good to him, and then getting obsessed with his own self-pity about it. This is not a person who understands how not to be, metaphorically speaking, a cannibal.

And Wei Wuxian did know better and still got roughly the same result, so what business does he have getting angry?

Anyway yeah those two villains are both delightfully relatable if you sit down and put their perspectives together; they are clearly operating with the same basic suite of human needs and emotions as everybody else, without that being in itself particularly exculpatory, which is honestly refreshing. They've just got the most fantastically toxic interpersonal habits that knowing them counts as some level of Suffering A Curse.

Jin Guangyao and Xue Yang do both stand as scathing rebukes of the society that created them. But within the narrative, wherein they're people, the fact is that each of them had agency and one of the things they chose to do with it was develop rationales for why they were the most special little guy and everything was someone else's fault.

And their moral nihilisms, while also grounded in serious trauma, ping me as emotional masturbation of this variety.

little rich boy sirius who gets disowned and can barely survive without his expensive brands and the basic human need to eat at least once a day meeting the entirely too generous james potter who just falls for the vanity and sincerity of the reformed rich boy and decides that once sirius stops caring about brands and status and rich boy things and just cares about what matters in life he decides to spoil his boyfriend to pieces because he’s secretly sitting on a fucking fortune

Richard,

I hope you don't mind, but I happened upon you deep in thought in the castle courtyard and...well, the sight took my breath away.

I used a Muggle contraption (I believe they call it a camera) to capture these still images. You look almost corporeal...

E 🖤

E, my dear,

I am most intrigued by this Muggle contraption, and even more so — by how well you were able to capture me and my heart with it. And what a coincidence! I must admit, I had no idea that anybody was there at the time as I was most likely preoccupied with matters regarding me... Well, you said it yourself, looking corporal. If you have the time, allow me to explain.

You see, for the past two weeks I have been experimenting with something known as ancient magic. I cannot really see it but I can feel it when I am somewhere near the source, and I can really feel it if I touch it. If I spend plenty of time doing just that and focusing on being corporal — I seem to become so! Well, whatever part of me is surrounded by magic anyway.

That photo you took — I believe it was the first time that I have attempted to fully step into the stream of magic a day or two ago. The reason I needed to conduct some experiments first is rather serious as well: when the magic starts sipping away (and it never holds for longer than one day) I... Well, I am yet to find a way to make the transition back to my ghostly form less painful. As much as I was craving to feel, I forgot that pain is an integral part of life as well.

Needless to say that as fun as being able to be me again was, by the time I walked all the way back to the castle in my human form (and I got lost so many times since I could not just fly above the land toward the castle, oops) I was so tired that I just fell asleep on a bench somewhere near that area your camera captured me. When I woke up — I was a ghost again. At the very least, whatever pain I might have gone through that night, I slept through it.

I do hope that you are doing well, my darling. The sight of me should not be taking your breath away but instead making your heart beat and your soul soar. I hope you continue working on those still images because I did not get a chance to look at myself in the mirror that night. You are my only witness and I am honoured to have you share that special moment with me.

Thinking of you, always,

Richard Jackdaw

P. S. May I hope that someday I would be granted permission to call you by your proper name, my lady E?

You know sometimes I think that the reason I stopped being on the sokai ship online is that the reasons why I think the ship is nice are so separate and different from how I see most people interpreting the characters and wanting the ship to be that it just loses all appeal to me.

I tried watching some of the Ian/Mickey scenes from season 11 and it made me ill. These are IMPOSTERS. That is not Ian and Mickey!! Especially Mickey!!! Look at how they massacred my boy. But one of the most frustrating parts is that if you watch the deleted scenes it shows that someone in that writers’ room DID know how to write Ian and Mickey but the producers or whoever makes that decision were like “nah, no meaningful conversations that show how much they love and respect each other and are working on their relationship. These fans who’ve been watching the characters struggle for a decade want them to continuously argue and beat the shit out of each other and act like they hate each other!”

Yo thanks for drawing Jesus as like… a happy, kind, and healthy person. I grew up going to church every week and saw nothing but his misery and crucifixion. Every depiction of Jesus I’ve seen fills me with guilt, dread, and anxiety. But I came across your + volcanoid piece and it made me happy. The kind of happy where you can’t help but cry a little because something so simple shouldn’t have such a big impact, but it does.

Idk I’m rambling now, but that drawing you posted is low key healing my religious trauma. And I don’t fucking care if someone thinks it’s blasphemous or something. That is the Jesus I wish I had.

hii! i want you to know that i took my time trying to come up with a response to this because i just wanted it to stay in my inbox for just a little while longer... wahh. this is so touching.

i think there is absolutely a sore lack of depictions of a happy christ, and i'm really glad you've found such relief in my drawing. it makes me really really happy ;_; i don't think my any means is it a stretch to say that showing children the beaten body of a man who was gored on a cross is... not good for them. if it were up to me, yeah, all images of jesus shown to children would be of him pre-crucifixion

thank you so much for sending me this... i'm gonna be thinking for a while on it. u are the best

Why did Dracula "save" Jonathan for the very last night until his journey? We know from how he fed on Mina for three days she was pale and weak, but not dead, so he could have been feeding on him for a few days/week until he succumbed.

But he kept him unbitten until Jonathan's final letter was written and only then Dracula declared that "he is mine tonight", and the rest is history.

Dracula prefers foreplay over the climactic act when he's enjoying himself rather than pressed for time. He likes playing with his food and/or future conscripted vampires. With Jonathan, he gives the superficial reason of wanting the Englishman around to learn how to speak in the same way. Which might be part of it! But to have him prisoner and literal captive audience for two months implies the more likely desire of just enjoying the cat-and-mouse of it all. Teasing things out until the last possible night and what Dracula assumes will be Jonathan's last night as a human being full of terror before the Brides have their turn with him, forcing him into inevitable vampirism.

Even with the Demeter crew, we see him playing. None of the men aboard strike him as anything other than another revitalizing meal in potentia, so the only fun he has is playing the torturous game of picking them off one by one in the dark, but the play is there.

You mentioned how different his MO with Mina was--how brisk. I'd say it's because it was all business. And petty vengeance. Not only was he striking at an enemy by trying to conscript her, not only was he violating her and her husband in what played out very much like a rape and a hovering promise that in time she will very literally be another of his pretty undead pets like the Brides. It was also to (unsuccessfully) give him eyes and ears on the group using her borrowed senses. He was on the clock with Mina, which is why she gets the quickest treatment.

Though I think there is something else worth mentioning in how he preys on Lucy; the character we're meant to assume is the template for how he hunts out new undead members to the Dracula club. And what do we learn from her case?

We see that if it weren't for Mina, Van Helsing and the suitors' intervention, his playtime with Lucy would have been far, far shorter and had even less impression on him than the book already showed. Lucy has friends. Lucy has people giving her new blood to stall her undeath. Lucy's conscription keeps getting stalled--and that is what keeps Dracula interested. It's a matter of engagement, pride, and, most likely, the only reason he really bothers to play more extravagantly with her. Hence the theatrics of getting poor Berserker in on it.

And after all that back and forth and bleeding and biting and Bloofer Ladying? He immediately loses interest and starts sniffing after the Pretty Girl in Piccadilly. Which, while indicative of him being a glutton for beauties, shows another very lopsided treatment compared to how he toyed with Jonathan.

I've pointed out before how Jonathan is the only character in the book Dracula goes out of his way to have whole conversations with. Mina gets one villain monologue, the group gets some fist-shaking and moustache-twirling at the Piccadilly house, but even when he has no reason to, Dracula really does go full gothic horror 'courtship' mode with Jonathan. Chatting, cooking for him, maintaining the whole castle charade; true, with increasing acts of abuse and psychological torment, but he actually engages with Jonathan.

This, when Lucy doesn't get so much as a 'Hey xoxo ;)' and Mina is given a traumatic speedrun to get her into vampire mode ASAP.

Dracula shows minimal finesse with Lucy, none with Mina, and devotes two months to Being Very Intimately Weird with Jonathan. Which means the question is less 'Why did Dracula wait so long to bite Jonathan?' and more 'Why is Jonathan's treatment so different from every other victim of Dracula's period?'

One thing that I find both fascinating and deeply sad in TSatS is that when Will asks if they're going to Percy's house to ask him to come with them to Tartarus Nico says no on the grounds that he doesn't want to involve Percy in it... but when asked why Bob wouldn't ask Percy for help, Nico's immediate thought is that Bob didn't think Percy and Annabeth would help him. Like, that's his one and only theory. I suspect that there's a part of that where... Nico thinks to himself that Bob doesn't think Percy and Annabeth would help so that he doesn't have to think that he doesn't think Percy and Annabeth would help. In other words he's thinking it's Bob who didn't call for Percy and Annabeth because he didn't believe they'd help him, because the alternative is for Nico to say "I'm not asking them for help because I know they would say no and I don't want to face that refusal". And it's not that he wants them to come! If Nico had had his way he would've gone alone, he doesn't want to put anyone in danger, it's just that he managed to find the only demigod as stubborn as he is and made the mistake of telling Will what his plans were. But it's one thing to not want to involve people in something incredibly dangerous; it's quite another to know that if you asked for their help, and in this case their help saving the person they owe their lives to, they would say no. I'm sure they would be properly apologetic about refusing, they do seem to feel genuinely terrible about forgetting Bob (which... good) and "I'm not going to superhell again" is a perfectly understandable boundary to have, but I think Nico just... doesn't want to admit to himself that he was willing to go to Tartarus for Percy but Percy would never do the same for him. Hence him leaving it at "I don't want to make him do this" when asked if he'll ask Percy to help for his sake, but thinking quite openly to himself that Bob probably didn't think Percy and Annabeth would help, because Bob helped them out of loyalty to Nico so it isn't devastatingly sad to admit they'd never do the same for him the way it would be for Nico to admit that Percy would never go to Tartarus for him despite him going to Tartarus largely to help Percy.

Also, it's deeply disappointing that it doesn't come up again later in the book because please for the love of god Rick can we please have a discussion around Nico's fatal flaw being his "will literally go to hell and back for people who he knows would never do the same for him" level of loyalty and not holding grudges, and also how literally the only evidence even his own sister could offer for holding grudges being his fatal flaw was that he's the son of Hades and also was still upset about his sister dying six months after it happened. Now that he's got someone as loyal to him as he is to everyone else (Will refusing to not follow Nico to hell is so good after so long of Nico constantly being prepared to give up everything for others and getting next to nothing in return) it's a great time to get into how despite basically every other POV character going on about Nico being creepy and morally dubious actually his most consistent character trait is being the most loyal character in the whole series (and possibly the whole Riordanverse, honestly) no matter how many times that loyalty burns him.

To add a little more to that post about how peaches represent SWK and Mac's relationship:

In the mountain, Macaque is the one to crush the peach in his hand. He offered it to Sun Wukong, and when he didn't accept it and instead yelled at him, he destroyed it and threw it on the ground

In the end, it was Macaque who left first, not the other way around. Now, their broken relationship isn't completely his fault, but he did play a part on it

SWK screamed at him when he tried to mend their friendship, so instead of trying again, he left. That's what broke their relationship for good. Not Sun Wukong yelling, not Liu'er Mihou not looking for him, but Macaque leaving and (as far as we know) not coming back. La gota que colmó el vaso, we could say. Stuff had already been going on between those two. SWK never seemed to genuinely listen to Macaque and his promises of staying forever were empty (he never would've been able to stay in one place for so long) and Macaque never even bothered to communicate his negative feelings over this, so when he warned him he was ignored

Sun Wukong left again and again and again, looking for more power to "be strong enough to protect them", and eventually he lost sight of why he was doing it. But no matter how many times he left, he came back. Macaque didn't

Me seeing posts that say Kaneki is kind: well yes but actually no

DARLA AND ANGELANGEL THE SERIES SEASON 2 EPISODE 3

I think PrinceZam should be put in a saw trap. Not that it’d be good for him just that it would force him to either confront the worst of his mortality and all of his fears and force him to reckon with the parts of himself that he continually tries to deny. Or die trying