i think the thing that really gets me about pre-canon durge is their absolute sense of duty, and their utter isolation outside of the cult of bhaal.
most of the cultists seem eager to see durge upon their return, and one even says they were the first to feed him flesh. gortash tells them of an exhibition of a bhaalspawn's corpse and another bhaalspawn's creations and durge immediately plans to attack the hall of wonder to recover them. they then apparently entrust said bhaalspawn's corpse to sceleritas fel to "restore" through taxidermy. they deride orin for her artistry with corpses explicitly because "bhaal will never care" and because orin "[does] not understand lord bhaal".
even their infamous prayer for forgiveness is framed around their absolute submission to bhaal's plans, and the crime that requires forgiveness? admiring his rival's chosen. that's one line, and the next three paragraphs are swearing to carry out his plan exactly as they've been told to, all for his forgiveness.
hell, even their room reinforces this. orin has barely touched the place aside from installing her mother's corpse and her manifesto - and that is some of the only decoration. what was it before orin, an empty room with skulls, a bed, a desk, some chests and a wardrobe?
the durge didn't have any semblance of a life outside of bhaal, aside from gortash. and is it any surprise? the only other hint they ever had a life outside of the cult is the flashback of kid durge murdering their adopted family, all thanks to their father's urging.
bhaal even tries to force them back into isolation after they've been tadpoled by forcing them to kill alfira, and then trying to force a durge who resists him to kill their lover. if they continue resisting, bhaal kills them. bhaal will not allow them to have a life outside of him and, if it weren't for jergal, he would've succeeded.
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Actually going insane over the implications of Jason asking Dick to be the Robin to his Batman in Battle for the Cowl.
Like I initially took it at the purely surface-level of Jason wanting a partner in the general sense. Which made sense, it's a huge responsibility and a lonely one so an assistant/sidekick/partner seems a no-brainer if you can get one.
But then I really thought about it, because Jason is not asking Dick to be his partner in the general sense; he's not even asking Dick to be his Nightwing. He's asking Dick to be his Robin.
And they both know exactly what Jason means: "Be the light to my darkness. Be the smile to my scowl. Be the hope to my fear. "
He's saying "Be 'Robin'; be the embodiment of Love and Justice and Goodness. Be the exceptional person that you have always been. Be the slightly-less exceptional person that I was when I wore your colors. Be the person that I was in the process of becoming and might have been (or might still be), if only Joker hadn't clipped my wings."
He's saying "I am prepared to become vengeance, become the Night. And I will go further than Bruce ever dared to, because it is what is needed. I will be the necessary evil. But you don't have to be. If Batman is Gotham's curse, Robin has always been its blessing. I will be the brutal punishment to our world, and I am asking you to be its incandescent gift."
He's saying, "Be for me, what we were for Him. Be my anchor, my comfort, my hope. Remind me what it's all for, why it's all worth it. And remind yourself as well."
He's saying "Be 'Robin' again--for both of our sakes."
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even if ronance isn’t endgame, i need nancy to have an arc where she chooses her friend. in my head, the only thing that makes sense is nancy choosing robin. not even in the romantic sense (although i would die of happiness if it was), just nancy remembering her choices and not making the same mistakes she made at sixteen.
having nancy go through four seasons of chasing/grieving/fighting for her best friend, only to turn her entire character into a plot device for steve or jonathan, would be the worst possible choice the duffers could make.
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I wonder why christian misrepresentation are rarely talked about if compared to other religion misrepresentation. Like, I've seen people really vocal about Greek myths misrepresentation in LO and such (and it's valid because it's a culture and religion) but I rarely saw the same thing with christian even though there are many media who use christian religion innacurately, to the point where it comes off as using it as an aesthetic and not a proper religion.
Is it because of rampant religious trauma especially in western world? No ulterior motives on this question. I'm not a christian and yet I'm curious about this. I apologize if this sounds harsh.
I obviously don't have The Answer(tm) to this but personally speaking (and I'm about to get VERY personal here so take this with MOUNTAINS OF SALT), I think it's just the obvious - Christian mythology is one of the most well-documented and strongly protected out of virtually any other religion on the planet. Especially here in the West, it's commonplace for kids to go to Sunday school, for couples to have Christian weddings even if they're not practising Christians themselves, even the American anthem references the Christian God. It's simply not as easy to 'misrepresent' it because the representation is written into our very fabric of society. Even Greece itself is primarily made up of Orthodox Christians.
So anyone that does 'misrepresent' it are either completely mislead hardcore Christians, or people who are doing it intentionally, such as with the intent to make a parody of it or to deconstruct it through a different context or whatever have you. And of course, people will still get mad at those things, if you're implying that people aren't vocal about Christian misrepresentation then frankly IDK what to tell you there LOL If you want a contextual example in the realm of webtoons, Religiously Gay was dragged to hell and back during its launch for having a very crude and insulting depiction of St. Michael, and frankly, yeah I don't disagree because what the fuck is this-
(like at best it's just terrible character design lmao that said, there's also plenty else to criticize Religiously Gay for, including its fetishy representation of gay relationships and the fact that it's still just the "naive person who looks and acts like a child hooks up with mean person in a position of power" trope, blech, but the character design is definitely the first thing you notice)
There are even plenty of hardcore Christians who will deadass claim "misrepresentation" over things that ARE factually correct but they just haven't read the actual Bible and simply cherry pick what works for their own agenda. And of course those people are routinely called out by people like myself who know for a fact that Jesus wouldn't have promoted the war crimes that many modern day Christians are committing and justifying today. So it really depends on the definition of "misrepresentation" here.
The issue specifically with LO and Rachel that I personally call her out for (and many others) is that she's called herself a "folklorist" and claimed she's so much more knowledgeable on Greek myth than anyone else, while making a complete mockery of the original mythologies while not being honest about her intent as to whether LO is actually supposed to be a legitimate retelling OR a parody (because it sure acts like the latter more than the former, but she still seems to expect us to take it seriously and consider her knowledge of Greek myth superior?) Which leads to a lot of her teenage audience claiming shit like "Persephone went down to the underworld willingly" and "Apollo did assault Persephone in the original myths actually" and the classic "why would Lore Olympus lie or make up fake myths?"
You just can't pull off this extent of erasure with Christian mythology because we have a whole ass book of it that's been preserved, sold on shelves, and systematically integrated into society for thousands of years. Of course, there are people who will still try their damned best to twist the Bible to match their own bigotry with the whole "Jesus hates gays" bullshit (he would never), but it's met with equal amounts of 'misrepresentation' that are actually fully well-read and are intentionally subverting and changing things to either critique, parody, or restore the original intent of a lot of stories in the Bible without all the manufactured right-wing crap.
Greek myth, on the other hand, has some stories that are well preserved, and others, not so much. And in the modern day outside of the poems and hymns, you'll also rarely, if ever, see anyone use stories from Greek myth to ostracize, torture, and murder other people. "Misrepresenting Christianity" is more often done by actual Christians who are using the Bible to commit hate crimes than the people who have actually read the Bible and are just taking creative liberties with it for the sake of deconstructing / parodying / analyzing / subverting it. Veggie Tales "misrepresents" Christian stories because obviously Moses wasn't a fucking cucumber lmao but it still accomplishes its goal by retelling Christian stories in a way that's fun and educational for children.
By comparison (on the whole, I'm not comparing LO to Veggie Tales LMAO) LO just isn't clear in its intentions beyond Rachel's initial statements that she was trying to "deconstruct" the myths, while labelling herself as a folklorist. Therefore, I'm going to criticize how she does it because the way she's done it up until now has been very mishandled and has resulted in a lot of misinterpretations of the myths simply for the sake of fandom. And yes, these people exist in Christian media as well - they're called TV evangelists.
And that's my (very heavy) two cents.
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anon being off will not stop me
which fish is the worst at sex
i'm gonna be honest i'm not a fish biologist but i don't think (most) fish "have sex" in the way we do, I'm pretty sure that the female of the species lays eggs and then they get fertilized once they're outside the female fish's body. And some fish do things like change biological sex, usually for reproductive purposes, especially reef fish if i remember correctly, so that's cool. anyway i found this online
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agh….. there are a lot of little things about kevin’s treatment in tkm especially that really hurt me, but the whole situation with telling wymack is the worst of it. give our boy a break 😭😭😭😭 he’s struggling!
SO MEAN TO HIM i was just talking to luni liaisun about this yesterday but the way kevin is blamed for so many things that are not at all his fault (neil going to evermore out of his own volition, kayleigh hiding that he's wymack's son, neil asking him to lie about his past and not tell the foxes that he's the butcher's son) and subsequently isolated from the group because of that is insane LOL i think kevin and andrew get a pretty similar treatment from the upperclassmen but by the end of tkm andrew has been 'humanized' to them through neil while kevin hasnt yet shown the threshold of humanity needed to be treated like a person worthy of grace and understanding
this is mostly a personal opinion and can be totally disregarded from canon intentions but to me kevin's isolation from the foxes is very relevant to my own experiences of navigating the world while noticeably neurodivergent, and its one of the things that brought me closer to kevin's character in the first place. i think while reading it is easy to agree with how the world at large (and even kevin himself at times) thinks kevin is, but kevin's crime really is that he's weird even among people who are weird; he's annoying and he's overinvested and he's programmed and when you're neurodivergent that's three of the top reasons why people choose to deny you kindness and humanity and understanding. i'm not sure where i was going with this and i'm not the best at articulating my thoughts on this subject, and of course kevin is annoying and intense, but that's not. illegal. you know? a person being annoying to you shouldn't make them an easy target for all of your frustrations and that's, ultimately, a very Autistic Experience
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