#how inhumane do you have to be to not see their suffering? to bomb literal children and say 'they brought it upon themselves?' | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bli-o · 3 months

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ITAFUSHI NATION IM HAVING AN EPIPHANY LISTEN TO ME

ok so my wonderful partner @mawce444 pointed out that Will Wood’s Against The Kitchen Floor is a really good fit for Yuji and i agreed but while listening in the shower(where my brain comes up with most things) i realized it’s honestly really fitting for Megumi and then i realized it really fits both of them and then i realized it’s like a perfect duet for the two and puts the parallels between them I’ve been admiring into words perfectly. These characters are known as the Sunshine x Raincloud duo but honestly my favorite thing about them is the fact that despite being polar opposites on a surface they are fundamentally similar.

On with my ramblings about jjk characters being will wood songs under the cut—

I could go on about these lyrics for ages but I’ll give you some of my favorite outtakes. Listen to the song and see for yourself as well.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I promise, I’m doing my best. I just haven’t learned how to be human as you are yet.”

Ok, starting out with one of my favorites. This from Yuji’s perspective reminds me of how all throughout the series curses and humans alike have referred to Yuji as “Sukuna’s vessel” and denied him the right to be anything more than that. It’s also similar to Megumi’s closed off and secretive personality which only people like Yuji and Nobara have managed to crack open. I really. Really. Like the idea of him saying this to yuji in a duet cuz like… this is headcanon and projection talking, but megumi being one of the few to not only see Yuji as himself but wishing he could be as open and vulnerable—in a way more human—than him,,., this targeted me specifically oh my god

“I still don’t know who you are, I only know that I’m still lonely; that morbid sort where even company can’t cure me and the more you reassure the less I trust.”

this!!! this!!! perfect blend of yuji feeling isolated due to being a vessel and megumi’s isolation because of his closed off personality distant or lost family. Well. His family’s like entirely gone now + his only remaining father figure so like even more so now.

“I’m catatonic in your arms, crying ‘How did I cause so much harm?’ I’m down pounding my head against the kitchen floor, apologizing for my life and ever entering yours.”

IM!!! Its over for me itafushi nation. leave me. go on without me. Its literally. Perfect imagery of the shibuya incident and chapter 251. Yuji blaming himself for the deaths of the people in shibuya. Megumi blaming himself for the deaths of his only remaining family??? chat im through. don’t think i forgot about you yuji “don’t you dare tell fushiguro” itadori!!!! i know you still have a guilt complex bc you think megumi will regret having saved you.

“Don’t say ‘I’m sorry, but this can’t go on’, I know you’ve got scars of your own, but hide my knives before you go, I’ll either live or die alone.”

honestly??? feels like the parallel scenes between 251 and Yuji and Todo’s in shibuya. And the “I’ll either live or die alone” because of yuji and megumi’s respective isolations???? oh my god

I’ve gotten through the most major parallels time to move on to the more individual lyrics???

“I’ve lived more lives than enough; I havent died quite as much, but I’m not a real person, just the shit you cant make up, and…”

yuji’s lives before and after entering the jujutsu world??? the quite literal amount of times he’s died??? his role as an inhuman “vessel” or “time-bomb” or “half-curse monster”???? ugh. ugggggh. my son….

“I keep a locket with a picture on the back of my head, oh, monkey-wrench my side-view mirrors, ghost my friends.”

Megumi??? not being vulnerable and never revealing much about himself, even to the people who care about him, instead choosing to suffer alone???

ok yall. I’ve removed most of the worms from my brain with this post but you really just gotta listen to it yourself. More will wood-jjk parallels include:

Laplace’s Angel-Mahito

Outliars and Hyppocrates-Sukuna(especially in regards to yuji)

The Main Character - Gojo(Kinda? i’d have to explain.)

not to mention suburbia overture putting an au idea in my head,,,, i’ll hold my tongue because ive never kept my word on completing any large-scale writing project before but the itch to remove more of the worms from my brain is there,,,,

Anyways thank you guys for listening to my deranged ramblings. Here’s a gold star for helping with my brain eating amoeba treatment⭐️

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kiefbowl · 2 years

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frankly, that gender standards for women are so inhuman that no woman can be completely gender conforming. it's literally the whole point we are seen as objects, political objects. we're meant to suffer through compliance, we're meant to be punished if we don't comply, and we don't control when we are doing either as much as we'd like to think we can in such an individualistic society as america. the fact of the mater is gender is a social contract you have been signed up for simply by being born, and it's a malleable mythos that will always be manipulated against you. if it suits the people around you to see you as compliant, they will make a narrative around you that you are feminine regardless of what you do, and if it suits the people around you to see you as non-compliant, they will make a narrative around you that you are un-feminine regardless of what you do. gender informs everything we do as society not to just plague you individually, but to maintain a status-quo in our systems that we have running today. like, you could be makeup-less and bald, and if it makes someone uncomfortable, they'll narrow in on how "generous" and "nurturing" you are. you could be a beauty queen bomb-shell and people will still nag at you when you'll have kids. you could look haggard and have no time for any beauty routines, but people will commend you that you gave up your career to take care of your sick father so your brother didn't have to do it. you are always in the social role of woman, that is the very oppression we are describing.

#I lied about not expanding bc w/e i do what I want lol

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sgcairo · 1 year

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can you imagine anastasiy meeting klee

she’s just like teucer and immediately decides that they’re friends and is like “do you wanna see dodoco? my mom made him for me!”

anastasiy is not scared by the fact that it turns out to be a bomb that she throws into the lake. if anything he’s intrigued and wants to learn how she made it, whereas pants is having a heart attack

just. a pyromaniac and an aspiring pyromaniac hanging out, blowing up fish.

(pantalone learns who klee’s mother is and has to lay down for a while. jean is near tears when she learns who klee’s new friend’s parents are. albedo is trying his best to make sure anasastiy stays safe so mondstadt won’t be wiped out by an angry harbinger

dottore is unsure of how to feel, because on one hand he’s thinking of how to use their friendship to his advantage but at the same time pantalone is giving him a look that says ‘get her away from him or else i won’t give you any more funding’.)

I absolutely love this idea, and I raise you:

Future Anastasiy and Klee meeting, all grown up, and having the weirdest moment of deja vu in the history of Teyvat. In Fontaine, of all places. The meeting itself is rather anticlimactic, but it takes both of them a few seconds to realize that yes, I vaguely recognize that person.

From Klee's perspective: there's the aspiring pyromaniac she remembers. But now Anastasiy is a Harbinger... which actually doesn't scare Klee at all. In fact, she thinks it's super cool, and when she sees all his explosive potions- It's like they're kids all over again, talking giddily about the improvements that Klee has made to Dodoco, and how much she inspired Anastasiy's inhumane firebombs. They even make the most destructive and wicked looking bomb of all time, which makes a new lake outside of Fontaine overnight when tested on a small Hilichurl camp. It quite literally causes an earthquake, and nearly toasts the two in the process, but it's worth it, seeing the destructive potential they just achieved.

After that, they become best friends, because when you build one of the most destructive weapons known to man, what else is there to do but become besties? While Klee is out traveling, she writes plenty of letters to her new Snezhnayan pen pal, which makes Anastasiy chuckle at all the strange encounters she's had. He writes about his own escapades with the Harbingers, especially with Dottore's weird experiments and Pantalone's hoarding tendencies. Klee even invites him to Mondstadt for the Windblume festival, which almost causes a diplomatic accident when Diluc tries to smite him on sight. Despite the Knights hating the Fatui, they tolerate Anastasiy, as there haven't been as many fish casualties with him around Mondstadt.

Put two pyromaniacs in a room together and you get a questionable amount of explosives, which is exactly what happens when these two put their brains together for some serious fish blasting.

Timmie's pigeons also suffer the wrath of a crazy Harbinger and the Spark Knight, which gets a complaint filed with Jean. The Knights have to finally step in, because a Harbinger using dangerous chemicals right at their doorstep is... technically a public hazard, not to mention that Diluc's been muttering about tossing him off a bridge for quite some time, so it's not only to protect the people from the Harbinger- but to protect him from an angry Diluc. A tearful letter arrives in Snezhnaya not long after about how Anastasiy and Klee are currently locked in solitary-ish confinement, which gives Pantalone ten other headaches on top of the quarterly reports due.

An exasperated Pantalone and a giddy Dottore show up on her doorstep a few days later to retrieve their wayward son, though Dottore gets detained at least twice for telling citizens how he's going to rearrange their guts and steal their eyeballs. It's chaotic, and when Anastasiy and the others finally depart, the Knights realize that Klee is nowhere to be found.

A letter from Snezhnaya arrives for the knights a few weeks later, with a picture of Klee and Anastasiy blowing up ruin creatures together.

She escaped solitary confinement in Anastasiy's suitcase.

#klee #anastasiy #babytorre #babytorre headcanons #the giving babytorre friends agenda is in full swing #fatui harbingers #genshin impact #genshin impact headcanons #fatui headcanons

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liesmyth · 1 year

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Anyway fwiw the asks in my inbox got me to Think About It (to myself) and articulate (in private) why I feel very differently about Cytherea than I do about Dulcinea, or other characters who are suffering from illnesses in ways that are... more mundane. I like Cytherea a lot as a character but I like her in the same way I like Alecto; they’re both very inhuman to me. IDK how else to put it besides: Dulcinea is a sick person. Cytherea is a walking body horror trope. There are a lot of layers to her character and her entire arc is basically a murder suicide mission with a flirty detour, and I think there’s a lot more to her actions and her choices than needs to be unearthed - it’s been years since I first read GtN but I’m still spinning her motivations in my mind trying to make sense of her etc.

She’s a person with layers but she’s also a literal walking biological bomb, and I think that’s very much a deliberate narrative choice on TM’s part, to take something that is common (illness) and bring it to its most grotesque extremes (illness frozen in time that can be manipulated by your enemies against you, etc with a touch of the Terminator thrown in). To me, it’s familiar in the way many chilling horror tropes have relatively mundane roots, but I really can’t see it as a normal or relatable illness in the same way I can’t see stuff like necromancers’ reproductive issues o their extreme fragility as 1:1 to real life counterparts. (And I think that if you that’s a very valid interpretation, but frankly it’s not fair to expect everyone should do so)

#Also: the fact that I find her extremely Unknowable and the opposite of relatable - but I love her!- probs made me miss that many people do #in hindsight I would word that one post differently to minimize misunderstandings 20/20 etc #now I’m just going to proofread any future posts with that optic & figure out some efficient tag to say #i'm not interpreting this thing as i would RL cancer just an intrinsic price of the magical system #anyway i'm just. vibrating between 'genuinely a bit sorry' because i don't want to be the asshole minimizing people's justified feelings #and also 'ugh'#anyway thanks to anon 1 - that genuinely made me think things & confront w people and i appreciated it a lot #elle.txt #cytherea #tlt

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hello-nichya-here · 2 years

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Why do you think so many people call pretty much every villain a nazi?

For the same reason they'll call any scary villain that says "equality" a lot a comunist: Hollywood.

After WWII ended and the whole world (instead of just the goverments) became aware of all the absolutely vile shit the nazis did, the US had one major goal in mind: making people forget that not only did they not defeat the nazis on their own (and had to be helped by the fucking USSR), they almost didn't join the war at all and many nazis were welcomed into the US as if they had not been involved in the most horrifying event of the century.

There are A LOT of hollywood tropes that are either born or get insanely popular on the years following WWII and all through the cold war, and even after it was all over: the mad german scientist that does inhumane experiments on his victims, the brave americans that do not tolerate any sympathy towards nazis and defeated them all on their own, the unrelenting japanese soldiers that cannot be stopped (until you drop two atomic bombs on civilians) the evil russian spy, the poor traumatized american soldier that suffers from PTSD after the Vietnam war (the war that made the whole world see the US as the bad guy), the totally innocent and benevolent interest of the US on South America that definitively won't lead to dictatorships to "protect them from the comunists"...

Pretty much all of Hollywood drank the "america is the best and can do no wrong" propaganda kool-aid, and the ones that didn't were labeled as traitors. Even Disney was not above it: "Saludos Amigos" and "The Three Caballeros" were made to show how "friendly" the US was to latin america, and one short cartoon had Donald Duck having a nightmare that he was a nazi, and then as soon as he wakes up he sees the statue of liberty he is oh so grateful that he is american.

So yeah, it's no wonder that so many people assume that any bad guy is a nazi even when it makes no sense - they were literally trained to believe that.

#asks #nazis #american bullshit #hollywood #important

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angelspenance · 3 years

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Tell me your Inhuman Traits HCs™ for Aru, Yuno, and Minene respectively

Alright SO! Aru’s eyes glow in the dark and they only realize it when they’re investigating something with Nishijima at 3am and Nishijima points it out and they go “you’re telling me that. That your eyes DONT glow in the dark?” And Nishijima slowly goes “no. Is this why you never carry a flashlight on you.” They also have slit pupils that get fucking “stupid cat about to knock something off your counter” huge at the sight of Yuki. Aru’s got fangs that do NOT help them bc they’ve got a habit of biting their lips. They’ll literally just kinda Glow (the light mainly coming from their extensive scars) when they get really happy like Yuki and them are on a “walk” (they’re probably trespassing or something let’s be real) in the middle of the night and Yuki goes “wow ur so romantic aren’t u” when they offer their hand to help him down from a fence and then Yuki kisses them on the cheek and they increase visibility within a three foot radius and Yuki teases them so fucking hard about it. Hinata points out the borderline gradient to their hands vs their body and goes “lol is that part of your ‘god apparently doesn’t know how to create a Regualr Human’ thing or” and Aru cuts her off and goes “nah it’s my Shitty Circulation :]”

Yuno’s got fangs glowing eyes etc the Basics PLUS borderline claws like Mao asks her why her nails are always perfectly black but she never sees her paint them and Yuno goes “well” and retracts them like a cat and Mao goes “ahaha well that certainly is a Trait…” also Yuno’s veins look more pink than blue/purple/green beneath her skin with her scars tinted more goldish than silver. She can also run a Little Too Fast and jump A Little Too High and lift a Little Too Much especially for a 14 year old human.

Minene’s got the Essentials plus sometimes when she gets distracted she’ll just start. Literally floating like Nishijima will have to be like “babe u r several centimeters off of the floor :(“ Also since she’s half god I think she’s kinda got that “will hand you a blanket and it’ll end up literally indestructible ie bullet bomb the works proof” touch like I’m talking adjacent to whatever the fuck happened to Reyna’s cape in the last heroes of Olympus book but like Minene will hand orphans blankets and whoops! All extremely safe and shielding from any harm bc lol Minene good person who actively cares for children to ensure they don’t suffer the fate she did momences!!! Also she can canonically do This <3

#thank u very much… asks that make my eyes light up to be honest <3 #body horror #just in case but Minene fucking SICK canon momences <3 #anon #asks

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linkspooky · 4 years

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Hi, I’m Link and it’s time to talk about my terrible / horrible / amazing taste in men. If you are a bastard who is planning to destroy the world because of your unresolved trauma, please call me. Kiss kiss.

Also I’m tagging @thyandrawrites and @inumaqi who by law have to do this with me.

Shigaraki Tomura - MY HERO ACADEMIA

“What I really despise is everything. Everything that breathes pisses me off.”

I like how Shigaraki is severely mentally ill. He’s one of the most raw portrayals of an abuse victim. He murders his abusive father, and the story takes his side. He develops violent tendencies, he refuses to grow up, he can’t forgive. He’s just holding all of his negative feelings inside of him as he slowly rots inside out, and that’s just great.

Shigaraki is so shaped and moulded by his abuse, but he still chooses who he wants to be. He was literally raised in a basement to be a carbon copy of AFO, and yet he’s so different from AFO it’s obvious he could never live up to his Sensei. He’s too bad of a person to ever be a hero, but he’s also too good of a person to ever be the king of evil and what you get is this really chaotic mess in between.

It’s interested to see who Shigaraki chooses to be, in spite of how much he has been indoctrinated towards a cause and how many choices are taken away from him. Despite being a character with supposedly little agency you can see he always tries to fight for his own agency. Don’t deny me. He can’t be with his family even though he loves them, because they’ll never accept him for who he is. Tenko was a kind boy who played with the bullied kids. Shigaraki fights for the people who would never be saved by hero society because he wasn’t saved. He gives them what he doesn’t have, freedom and a place to belong. It’s an interesting character to see how much of him has become the unpredictable ball of trauma that Shigaraki is, while the core of him Tenko still remains in his humanizing moments of how he interacts with the league. Shigaraki who has so many choices taken from him, chooses to reach out and sympathize with the feelings of others, especially those who have been ostracized the same way he has.

Shigaraki is introduced to us as an inhuman monster, and we see him slowly work his way back from the edge. We see him regain his humanity by coming to care about the people under his wing. It gives you the message that there’s no such thing as a point of no return.

All of the heroes are good people in mha but that feels more like an informed character trait. We’re supposed to root for them because… they’re the heroes, they’re good. They have to look good because they’re the good guys. Shigaraki is allowed to be ugly and unlikable, he gets worse. But then he still always chooses to fight for ugly victims like him. I like both sides of him, I like the volatile explosive bomb that just wants to blow up and destroy others, and the gentle way he interacts with the rest of the league.

Kumagawa Misogi - MEDAKA BOX

“I want to beat them. Even though I’m not cool, or strong, or just, or beautiful, or cute, or pretty, I want to beat the cool strong just beautiful cute and pretty people.”

Kumagawa is aggressively mediocre. He’s a good for nothing. He’s like the embodiment of a bad victim, he blames everyone else, he lashes out. He has nothing but flaws but he still strives to be better than what he is. That’s what so inspiring about his character. Even if you’re miserable it doesn’t mean you have to be having a miserable time about it. Kumagawa will push back against anything, even if the whole world is pushing down on his shoulders.

He has a vibe with his character that even if you’re the worst person in the world don’t run away from who you are. You have to accept yourself exactly as you are without lies or artifice before you can start to improve. That’s why kumagawa tries to accept the ugliness of people.

He’s very sympathetic with other people, but that isn’t there to make him look like a good person. If anything he always sympathizes with the victim too much and encourages their worst qualities. At the beginning of the series hes so desperate to heal the wounds of these traumatized, people he’s taken in he just encourages them to lash out because that’s something. Kumagawa is just this very nihilistic, and fatalist character who is somehow at the same time one of the most optimistic characters ever written. He’s a lazy good for nothing, but he tries hard. He’s fickle and childish, but he never gives up. He might never get better, he might always lose in the end, but he still thinks the struggle to win is always inherently worth it. He gives all of himself in everything he does, and to the people around him. And he always gets hurt because of it, but that pain is just living.

He’s completely insane but he’s also living his life the best way he can. There’s just such a manic, insane, and positive energy to his character. Kumagawa will accept you at your worst, and yet he’ll still encourage you to be better. I also like characters written to represent the ugliness in people, and striving to find beauty in that ugliness rather than characters who are just happy all the time because they’re good people.

Natsuki Subaru - RE ZERO

“You think I’m getting drunk on my own tragedy just so I can shut everyone up?”

like how Subaru is a shitty person but not in a really interesting way, but in a really petty, self absorbed and weak way. I like it because the world doesn’t tolerate his bs, he is continually punished and kicked in the teeth for it. He doesn’t have a tragic backstory before the story begins. His tragic backstory is that he did nothing, made nothing of his life, but he still feels entitled and expects to be rewarded. There’s nothing special about him, but he wants to be treated like he’s special.

I’m usually protagonist-phobic because most stories center around the main character so a lot of the time the world bends to their whims in unnatural ways. Subaru is the main character, but hes not the protagonist, and not even particularly important which is why he’s valid.

Subaru is continually punished for his mistakes and I love the way we see how trauma changes him and shapes him. His narrative reads to me as a metaphor for a mentally ill person with the absolute worst habits constantly struggling to be better despite constant backtracking. That’s why with the constant resets in his narrative, none of his actions ever seem to matter. Even when he makes progress he loses it just as quickly, and the world seems indifferent to his suffering. Because the stroy isn’t actually about the world, it’s about Subaru’s personal journey to learn to be a less shitty person.

Subaru is confronted with the fact that hes a very self important and entitled person and he chooses to grow from that rather than run away. He’s so self aware by this point he knows hes the most annoying human on earth and he owns it.

Doma - KIMETSU NO YAIBA

“From a young age I was kind and clever. I always helped people and made them happy, because that was my mission.”

Doma’s story is hard to empathize with because it doesn’t really look tragic. It’s more like a comedy. He’s smiling the whole way through.

Doma feels like an inhuman monster and he chooses to act that way. Literally everything in this story just tells you he was basically born that way. Doma tells you himself. But like, if you look into his background he was raised in a literal cult. Doma despises the cult, because he could see through it. He could see the adults were using him even as a child. But at the same time Doma’s heart has never really left the cult either. Doma, like everybody else, unintentionally reflects the environment he grew up in.

Doma’s just never been shown real tears or a real smile, so he doesn’t know it. He sees his parents kill each other in front of them, and feels nothing, because they literally never acted like parents to him once. He sees life as empty because to him, it is. And then.

By the time he encounters the real thing it’s too late for him. I just like this part of Doma that’s like, emptily trying to imitate all the other humans around him, and feel the things they feel, and always falling short because of his jacked up sense of empathy. It’s adorable. Doma doesn’t feel human at all. He couldn’t possibly understand what a normal human being feels because he’s never lived that life. He’s a total human failure. Rather than try to be something he feels like he’s not, he decides to embrace his inhumanity.

Iichan - ZAREGOTO

“Nonsense.”

Iichan is a character who doesn’t want to choose, but wants to be chosen regardless. In other words Iichan has a paradoxical way of thinking about his life. He’s not the main character. He’s not important. So therefore, whatever happens around him he’s not at fault. However, he is the centerpiece of a tragedy. He’s still important in the sense that all of this tragic suffering is being unleashed upon him. Being the main character of the tragedy means his suffering is important and meaningful, but none of it is ever his fault, and he can’t help it.

That way he avoids ever having to take responsiblity for his actions, or do the hard work of trying to change as a person. He’s a narcicisst, but he hates himself, and he tries to balance out his total egoism by constantly playing up his own suffering and how much he loathes himself. That’s where the main character of the tragedy complex comes in.

What’s interesting about Iichan is that for all the tricks and avoidance he goes through, he’s very self aware as a character. He knows how deficient he is in comparison to others and how his problems really aren’t as important in the grand scheme of things. That’s why it’s interesting to watch all the mental gymnastics he goes through.

Knowing that the author also knows that Iichan is a tool, and clearly frames him as such, I can appreciate the more positive parts of his character. I can know that deep down, despite everything he does want to become a person that’s capable of making the other people in his life happy. He just doesn’t know how.

Hitoshiki Zerozaki - NINGEN

“What a riot.”

Iichan’s equal and opposite force. His boy on the other side of the mirror. What if your reflection in the mirror could talk, and what if it was laughing at you? That’s basically Zerozaki’s character in a nutshell.

Iichan is a character who dwells on his intense mediocrity and desires to be special because of it. Zerozaki is the opposite, he’s been special all of his life and has no idea what a normal life is even like.

Zerozaki is a murderer from a family of murderers and yet he doesn’t enjoy murder. He doesn’t feel its evil or feel a lot of remorse. He feels nothing at all about killing, he thinks people who kill for pleasure are weird, and kills at random.

What I like about Zerozaki is that he’s way more human and down to earth than his perfect foil iichan even though he’s a murderer. Despite being a psycho killer he makes connections with other killers, his little sister, and ninoumiya. A human failure who’s way too human, and that somehow makes him even more of a failure.

Emiya Shirou / Heroic Spirit Emiya - FATE / STAY NIGHT.

“So as I pray. Unlimited Blade Works.”

Counterfeit. Hypocrite. Holy shit. A fake who knows that his desire to save people doesn’t come from the goodness of his heart, but his own selfish desire to be a hero. Shirou emiya is the only valid protagonist, because he’s an extremely traumatized deconstruction of every protagonist before him. Shirou’s not a good person. Shirou’s barely even a person. He has friends but he doesn’t really feel like he deserves to have them. He smiles, but he doesn’t mean it.

I love how Shirou is so terrible at handling his own trauma that he thinks having a strong sense of justice is a personality. I love how Shirous need to sacrifice himself makes him an idiot and is something his narrative continually gruesomely punishes. He has one of the most brutal narratives ever, and the writing behind his character serves to highlight how Shirou’s bad decision making not only hurts himself, but literally everybody around him.

I love how Shirou has completely emptied out as a person and feels unable to feel basic emotions because its totally relatable. He just copes so poorly, but at the same time there’s something beautiful in Shirous struggle to be a good person. Shirou has completely given up on himself as a person, but he still wants to help other people, and so he keeps trying.

Getou Suguru - JUJUTSU KAISEN

“I hate monkeys.”

Some villains just want to destroy everything for reasons deeply rooted to emotional trauma. I feel like I’m repeating myself here.

I like characters where empathy is a dangerous quality to have. Getou is driven to villainy because he cares, overwhelmingly so. He cares about people’s individual agency and freedom and rights to be happy and sees the world stomp on it. His breaking point was that he wanted a girl who had been raised as a literal human sacrifice for the system her entire life to be able to live out the rest of her life free as a person, and being completely powerless and unable to help her as she was killed. Getou was struck in that moment by the inherent unfairness in the world and it broke him.

Empathy is such a debilitating flaw for Getou that he literally has to decide certain people are human and disqualify others from being human so his brain doesn’t completely break. Being a decent caring guy in Getous world breaks you.

Getou tries so hard not to care, to be the maniacal laughing villain he claims to be, but his empathy is the one part of his brain he can never shut off. Even as the most hated man in the world he protects weak and exploited people and takes them in as a family. He does everything he does to make a better world for the people he cares about, and that’s why he’s so broken because the ones he doesn’t care about he’s completely fine with sacrificing en masse.

Akechi Goro - PERSONA 5

“JUSTICE?! RIGHTEOUS?! KEEP THAT SHIT TO YOURSELVES! YOU AND YOUR TEAMMATES PISS ME OFF!!”

I like Goro way more for his potential rather than what we see in canon, but there’s a lot of strong ideas his character is written with. I love the idea that Goro wants to be a good person, wants to be connected to others, but is far too dmaged and because of that

He can only pretend to be a good person and play people pleaser to others. he’s someone who desires at the core of his being to be righteous, and failing that he becomes self-righteous instead. I just love how thoroughly fake he is as a person, and how that makes him covet the real thing.

I also love the insane, twisted and obsessive part of Akechi. I love how much he hates the world for rejecting him, and how much of his actions are just petty revenge on the world, his father, every single person who rejected him. I love him when he’s at his most desperate, when he’s screaming at the people he’s trying to kill asking them why nobody wants him around even though he’s famous and popular.

Ogata Hyakunosuke - GOLDEN KAMUY

Walk your own wild path. Straight and true.

Ogata is a character that is somehow incredibly complex and nuanced character with tons of carefully written development in story, and also a character you have no fucking clue what’s going on in his head. Basically, Ogata is a masterpiece.

Ogata feels like the other half of the story. Sugimoto acts, Ogata reacts. Sugimoto chases, Ogata evades. We are uncomfortably deep in Sugimotos head, but we only catch brief glimpses of Ogatas moments of Frank honesty. The entire story is about Sugimoto and Ogata chaisng after each other and everything else seems incidental sometime. Ogata’s not the main character, but he’s the other half of the heart of the narrative that’s about these really, really bad murderous men who are deeply broken trying to find a way to live in a world without war.

Its not that Ogata is unfeeling it’s that he never allows himself to feel. What other characters lost during the war, Ogata never had in the first place. He sees himself as deformed and malnourished compared to everybody else. Ogatas always been noticing the difference between - himself and others.Even if he wanted to love his brother he kept comparing himself to his father’s beloved son, and realizing how much he lacked. He just kept being reminded over and over again what a child who was loved could have turned out as. Eventually Ogata convinced himself he was unfeeling. Because somehow that’s easier. He can process everything that happened in his life if he’s detached from it all watching from a tree somewhere. He’s so repressed he doesn’t allow himself to feel guilt about his brothers death because he doesn’t view himself as a person capable of loving another. However, just like Sugis desire is to be saved from the hell of war deep down theres a kid in Ogata who wanted to be a good son

Ogata is basically my main point of investment in Golden Kamuy, I just want to see him unravel like a big ball of yarn.

#shigaraki tomura #kumagawa misogi #subaru natsuki #iichan #hitoshiki zerozaki #shirou emiya #doma #akechi goro #ogata hyakunosuke #suguru getou #spooky speaks #top ten favorite characters

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literary-masochism · 4 years

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Midnight Sun: Chapter One - My Descent Into Madness

(reposted from my blog)

I kind of want to be dramatic and say I have a long, sordid history with Twilight, but I’m not sure that’s accurate. I do have a history, but it is one of pain, tears, and frustration.

I’m a firm believer in reading a ‘bad’ book to form your own opinion on it instead of just believing what you’re told...

The criticisms against Twilight were more than justified.

It took me multiple attempts to get through the first book – The first time I didn’t even finish the first chapter. I loathed Bella Swan from the moment we met her. She whined nonstop, she bitched nonstop, and was instantly so shallow and two-faced to everyone she met that I wanted to punch her in her (at the time) nondescript face.

But I tried again and again and finally finished the series. I remember crying during the Breaking Dawn because nothing was fucking happening and there was so much left in the book and I just wanted it to END.

Then my brain, trying to save me, made me forget everything about what I read. When I realized what had happened, I checked my Goodreads to make sure I did, in fact, read those books and they weren’t just a fever dream sent by the forces of evil to torment me.

As much as I appreciated the attempt, I earned those scars... at least audiobooks are easier to get through, even though I had to pause them to rage, again, at the idiocy.

And now... Now we have Midnight Sun. I believe I skimmed the leaked book but never gave it any real attention... so, of course, the full book gets released the day after my 34th birthday.

Joy.

But it gives me an excuse to try something I always wanted to do: Snarking bad books... because if I have to suffer, you might as well too!

So... without further delay... here is the first chapter, as seen by me, of Midnight Sun.

Chapter 1: First Sight

We open up with Edward being a melodramatic prick about having to go to school and how boring it is.

THIS WAS THE TIME OF DAY WHEN I MOST WISHED I WERE ABLE TO SLEEP.

High school.

Or was purgatory the right word? If there were any way to atone for my sins, this ought to count toward the tally in some measure. The tedium was not something I grew used to; every day seemed more impossibly monotonous than the last.

Followed quickly by how much humans, especially teenagers, suck absolute ass.

When it came to the human mind, I’d heard it all before and then some. Today, all thoughts were consumed with the trivial drama of a new addition to the small student body. It took so little to work them up. I’d seen the new face repeated in thought after thought from every angle. Just an ordinary human girl. The excitement over her arrival was tiresomely predictable—it was the same reaction as one would get from flashing a shiny object at a group of toddlers. Half the sheep-like males were already imagining themselves infatuated with her, just because she was something new to look at. I tried harder to tune them out.

Don’t you just love him already?

This is only the first page... It’s not even a full page... Edward tells us how he tries not to listen to his siblings then tells us exactly what his siblings are thinking.

He shames Rosalie for thinking about how hot she is, but since that’s her only personality trait we ever got in the entire saga (besides bitch), I’m not that worked up over it. She’s hot and she knows it.

Emmett is just thinking about kicking Jasper’s ass which, I feel, is a goal everyone should aspire to because Jasper’s thoughts...

And Jasper was… suffering.

GOOD

Alice mentally calls his name and Edward is kind enough to let us know that it’s just the same as if someone said it out loud... you know, because we’re too dumb to work that out ourselves.

Also, he is so thankful that the name EDWARD has ‘fallen out of style’ in the last few decades.

Alice is worried about Jasper slaughtering everybody within a ten-mile radius because he’s become a literal statue (because Meyerpires are made of stone and this is in no way a ripoff of Anne Rice) and, stupidly, she asks Edward how he’s doing...

I guess Alice forgot she could, you know, SEE INTO THE FUTURE. Because checking to see if your boyfriend is about to go on a murder spree is a telepathy situation.

She relaxed. Let me know if it gets too bad.

I moved only my eyes, up to the ceiling above, and back down.

Thanks for doing this.

YOU CAN SEE THE GOD DAMN FUTURE!

Was it really necessary to experiment this way? Wouldn’t the safer path be to just admit that he might never be able to handle his thirst as well as the rest of us could, and not push his limits? Why flirt with disaster?

YES! WHY?!

For a group of vampires that don’t want to kill humans, so we’re told, they certainly don’t give a fuck if they kill humans.

It had been two weeks since our last hunting trip. That was not an immensely difficult time span for the rest of us. A little uncomfortable occasionally—if a human walked too close, if the wind blew the wrong way. But humans rarely walked too close. Their instincts told them what their conscious minds would never understand: We were a danger that must be avoided.

So... which is it?

Edward thinks about how oblivious the humans around them are and how they avoid the ‘odd-looking’ group.

Okay, if I had to guess, the avoidance has more to do with how fucking weird you are. A group of five incredibly attractive (And yet odd-looking? Sure Meyer) teenagers sitting by themselves with full trays of food that they don’t eat, all while wearing designer clothing. They don’t talk to each other, they barely even look at each other...

That’s fucking weird. THEY’RE WEIRD.

Meyer: They’re either so attractive as to lure their prey in for the kill or they’re so inhuman looking that no one wants to go near them. It can’t be both.

Anyway, a girl walks by and Edward starts frothing at the mouth while he and Jasper get a vampire erection over Jasper imagining MURDERING AN INNOCENT GIRL.

Also, calling her a ‘little girl’ is very creepy in an entirely different way. Just sayin’.

Edward snaps Jasper out of it and Alice lies and says he wasn’t going to slaughter an innocent human being in the middle of the cafeteria.

We had to stick together, Alice and I. It wasn’t easy, being the freaks among those who were already freaks.

Shut the ever-loving-fuck up.

And Alice, ever-so-helpfully, reminds Jasper to think of humans as people... because, you know, they aren’t really. Not compared to vampires anyway.

Someone mentally says the name ‘Edward’ so Edward turns to them as though they had actually called his name. Only it was in his head, not in real life. In case you didn’t catch that. That Edward is telepathic... so he hears thoughts as though they were being spoken to him. That’s why he looked over when someone thought his name.

In case you didn’t understand what was going on.

This is the first time Edward sees Bella and... he gives no fucks. But wait! Turns out it was Jessica Stanley thinking about him, not Bella!

In fact, Jessica thinks Bella is already crushing on all the Cullens.

Good for you, Jessica, not assuming Bella is only after the undead D. Rosalie/Bella shippers thank you.

Edward is relieved Jessica got over her fixation on him (because it’s totally normal for teenager girls to crush on weird-looking weirdos). He then goes on to show he has no idea how teenage girls (or adult women for that matter) work:

What a relief it had been when she’d gotten over her misplaced fixation. It used to be nearly impossible to escape her constant, ridiculous daydreams. I’d wished, at the time, that I could explain to her exactly what would have happened if my lips, and the teeth behind them, had gotten anywhere near her. That would have silenced those annoying fantasies.

That is the exact fantasy most TwiHards were having.

Jessica complains that she doesn’t see why all the boys are looking at Bella, thinking she’s ‘not even pretty’. I know this is supposed to make Jessica unlikable but, you know what? That is a very wounded teenage thought process. It’s immature and turning the blame somewhere else but that’s teenagers in a nutshell.

Edward comments on Jessica’s new obsession with Mike Newton – creepily calling him a child.

There is the implication that Jessica’s not a nice person because she’s being outwardly nice to Bella while bad-mouthing her mentally and... that’s such a Christian mentality: the idea that your thoughts matter as much as your actions. Just putting that out there because, clearly, we can see what Meyer’s opinion on that is… as long as it’s one of the Cullens or Bella doing the thinking, it’s fine! In Twilight, Bella was putting down everyone who looked at her until the hideously beautiful Edward was so mean to her.

No, I didn’t forget that shit.

Jessica continues being a teenager girl, hoping that with Bella’s ever-shining light of beauty shining beside her that maybe Senpai Mike will notice her.

And, of course, Edward is an asshole because he’s upset that a teenager girl has teenage thoughts.

He tells Emmett what’s going down with the new girl and tries to listen in on Bella’s thoughts to see what she thinks about all this.

And, because Bella doesn’t actually have thoughts, all Edward hears in the unending howling void.

Edward tells us he has to use his powers to protect his family! He has to listen to everyone’s thoughts in case anyone gets suspicious about the beautiful/weird/attractive/repulsive family in their midst.

I feel like that would be easier if Edward didn’t actively try to ignore everyone.

But sometimes people get it right and the Cullens have to disappear before... I don’t know. Meyerpires are indestructible by humans to the point that they can outrun nuclear bombs. The Vultori might come whine at them for exposing the secret but by that point, the Cullens disappearing would just draw even more attention.

Edward tries to listen to the new girl but gets nothing. He turns to check and all he can see is the brown-void eyes of Bella.

There’s also a bit in there where Edward wonders if Bella is still sitting there because she must be since Jessica is still talking. He turns and sees Bella still sitting there because of course she is, because Jessica is still talking to her. You see, Bella was still there and Edward suspected as much as Jessica was still talking to her because she was still sitting there.

He gets another hard-on as Bella blushes. He comments that she “looked surprised” as she “unknowingly absorbed the signs of subtle differences between her kind and mine.”

Bitch, you don’t know that. You can’t read her fucking thoughts. You’re just assuming this bullshit. This is some of what I remember from skimming the first Midnight Sun. You just make up shit about her personality to suit what you want! Reality is completely optional.

And we get this:

[...] as she listened to Jessica’s tale; and something more… Fascination? It wouldn’t be the first time. We were beautiful to them, our intended prey.

You know, the hyper attractiveness that turns people away because of how odd-looking they are but also draws people to them while also making people avoid them because they’re so inhuman.

And yet, though her thoughts had been so clear in her odd eyes—odd because of the depth to them—I could hear only silence from the place she was sitting. Just… silence.

Yes, because she’s the void personified.

Try and keep up.

Edward decides that he’s just not trying hard enough and stops blocking out all the teenager chatter – you know, the chatter he constantly listens to to ensure the safety of his family? That chatter.

Also, shout out to Ashley Dowling for obviously having a crush on Bella.

Angela Weber is the only one not thinking about Bella. I’m sure Meyer’s just trying to show how ‘unusually kind’ she is but... acting like a completely normal person doesn’t really qualify as being ‘unusually kind’.

Then Meyer, again, tries too hard to make Jessica unlikable by having her mentally calling Bella an idiot for asking about Edward Cullen. But since Bella is an idiot...

We get the infamous “He’s gorgeous, obviously.” line even though all of student body finds the Cullens odd-looking and want nothing to do with them.

And Edward gets this strong impulse to protect Bella from Jessica’s nefarious plots to... get mildly more popular for the short time people care that there’s a new student at school. He describes how fragile Bella looks and how translucent her skin is...

Then we get this little gem where Meyer, apparently, forgot Edward can’t read Bella’s mind while describing things he’d only know if he could read her mind.

It was unbelievably frustrating! I could easily see that it was a strain for her to sit there, to make conversation with strangers, to be the center of attention. I could sense her shyness from the way she held her frail-looking shoulders, slightly hunched, as if she was expecting a rebuff at any moment.

This is a one-way street, Meyer. Edward has to stay his ass in his own lane.

Edward informs us that, despite not being able to hear Bella’s thoughts, he’s not going to let himself get too interest in them just because they’re hidden from him... then immediately says he’s going to find out what she thinks no matter what it takes. No matter how petty, trivial, self-absorbed, whiny, and shallow they are! He will find out!

Emmett interrupts Edward’s obliviousness to his own faults and asks if Bella is afraid of them yet.

“They sit by themselves, never talk to anyone, and stare at the wall.” Absolutely terrifying.

Lunch is over and the Cullens to go their classes. Edward is an asshole prepared to be bored because he’s so much smarter than the biology teacher.

He also tells us the reason he has a table to himself is because everyone is avoiding him and they were too stupid to know why. Yes, that is the word he uses.

Such a Prince Charming, isn’t he?

Again, Edward laments his inability to sleep when Angela leads Bella into class! Then Edward remembers he was totally thinking about Bella just now and not wishing he was asleep!

Also, Angela? Shut up.

The Void comes in and Edward still can’t hear her and, in one of the few moments I like, he worries that he’s losing his gift. Don’t worry, nothing comes out of that thought.

Edward notes that the only available seat is beside him so he clears a bit of room for her, feeling sorry that she’s doomed to spend so much time next to his hideousness. BUT THEN!

Bella Swan walked into the flow of heated air that blew toward me from the vent.

Her scent hit me like a battering ram, like an exploding grenade. There was no image violent enough to encompass the force of what happened to me in that moment.

Now comes a page long description of Edward losing his shit. He tells us, multiple times, how much he wants to eat her, how he’ll have to get rid of the witnesses, blah blah blah. It’s basically the same paragraph repeated a few times... But you know what? It’s better than the whiny shit we’ve been getting and it’s nice to actually see the ‘good’ vampires struggle in a not completely idiotic way... so I ain’t that mad at it.

I was actually enjoying it a bit until Meyer stuck her dumb in my chocolate by having Edward rip a bit of wood off the desk. Like no one would have heard that. Or wonder why there’s a pile of sawdust under Edward’s desk.

Edward... I know that you’re far older than anyone in that room but... calling people children is just fucking creepy. Stop.

He calculates the best way to slurp Bella up and kill witnesses in the most efficient way (interrupted occasionally by an eye-roll worthy melodramatic thought about murdering innocents). I would like this if it wasn’t such a stark reminder of how Edward doesn’t actually give two fucks about humans – he just doesn’t want to disappoint his Not-Dad... who, from what we’ve seen in the guide (shudder) doesn’t really seem to care either as long as he’s not the one doing the murdering. They don’t kill people not because they care or want to protect them but because Dad said not to.

Bella sits down beside him (And he’s absolutely sure she’s terrified of him though she’s shown no sign of that and HE CAN’T READ HER THOUGHTS.)

Anyway, he whines that now he has to kill her for existing.

This is another little plothole that bothers me: he doesn’t have to stay in the classroom. He can ask to be excused, say he’s feeling sick or he has to use the bathroom. Yeah, it would draw a few moments of attention but, you know, IT’S BETTER THAN PLOTTING THE MURDER OF THIRTY PEOPLE.

Meyer decides to call me out on that thought and claims:

Every life in this room was in danger while she and I were in it together. I should run. I wanted to run, to get away from the heat of her next to me, and the punishing pain of the burning, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure that if I unlocked my muscles to move, even just to stand, I wouldn’t lash out and commit the slaughter I’d already planned.

Fuck you, he only needs to resist for the half-a-dozen seconds it’d take to get out of the room. But no, he’d rather try and resist for an hour instead.

He, again, talks about Bella’s skin and calls it ‘See-through’.

Sexy

Edward’s becomes increasingly paranoid that Bella’s ‘trying to hide her secrets from him’.

Chillax, Eddie. She ain’t that deep.

He changes tactics. He’ll try to get her alone and his plan for this is flawless!

If he asks to walk her to her next class, she has to be polite and say yes! Even though he’s certain she’s terrified of him (because he completely fails at reading human reactions if he can’t read their minds), she’ll have to do the polite thing! Because reasons!

While he doesn’t realize how stupid that is, he does notice that everyone with an interest in ladies is already obsessing over Ms. Swan so people will probably notice him leading her away like the serial killer he is.

So he plots to wait until she gets home to murder her.

And you guys, he just hates her so much! I mean, he hates himself but he hates her for making him hate himself but also her because she exists but also himself but also her but also himself...

And apparently that was his entire thought process for the next hour because class is suddenly over!

Edward runs out of the room – you know, the thing he said he couldn’t do before because even just moving might prompt him to murder everything – and mopes in his car where he realizes that ‘Wait... I don’t have to do the thing’.

He wonders why Alice didn’t break their cover and draw attention to themselves by barging into Edward’s class to help him get rid of either his murder-boner or the bodies caused by his murder-boner. He decides that she’s focusing on making sure Jasper doesn’t get a murder-boner and she’s concentrating ‘vary’ hard on that.

(Is pointing out typos a bit too petty? Maybe but I did it.)

And Edward feels a new burn coursing through his body! The burn of SHAME!

(I'm glad I got to use this Gif so early on!)

I should say that, through out all of this, Edward’s been going on about his little monster (not that one) growling around his head but all I can imagine are the critters from Critters Attack:

He decides to just avoid Bella as much as possible while being in the same building as her and goes to try and change his classes halfway through the semester.

He startles Mrs. Cope by being so vampirey, though humans are too stupid to notice that, because he came in quietly while she wasn’t paying attention. Her panties are immediately soaked at the sight of teenage boy bod (ew) and asks how she could help him. Eddie lays it on thick because... I don’t know. I’m pretty sure she’s not in charge of the classes, so there’s no reason for him to make her flood the office like this...

Even he’s uncomfortable but he still does it. Gross.

Also, statistically, women prefer men close to their own age or slightly older, so...

We get a whole paragraph of Mrs. Cope thinking of how smart and perfect the Cullens are – actually thinking the line ‘Perfect Cullen’.

When she says that he can’t change or drop the class, he tries to stare her into submission, lamenting that his eyes aren’t gold but the terrifying black instead.

Uh... dark dark brown, almost black eyes are pretty common and can be very alluring. Have you forgotten Ben Barnes exists?! Here, I'll remind you:

I’d be more freaked out by the gold.

Bella, of course, interrupts this awkward seduction and sends Edward running with his tail between his legs. He passes by some random guy in the parking lot and, since Edward is so all important, the guy wonders where Edward came from and, instead of deciding he must not have noticed him before (Like a normal person not in a SMeyer book would do) he decides his imagination is getting the better of him.

Edward makes it to the Volvo where the others are waiting. He takes off like a bat out of hell (lawl) and in a moment of stupid where Meyer, once again, forgets how her characters's powers work:

She looked ahead for me now. We both processed what she saw in her head, and we were both surprised.

“You’re leaving?” she whispered.

You see... Alice’s visions are based on people’s decisions... Edward didn’t know he was leaving until he saw that Alice saw he was leaving... which makes no sense in the context of what we’ve been given.

And so, after a moment of Edward thinking about killing Bella, he decides to flee the entire country.

And that’s the end of chapter one! It took me way longer than I expected and I used 74 tabs... This is going to be an experience and a half...

Until next time, I'm out!

#Book Snark #Midnight Sun #Twilight

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kevinbingham · 4 years

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“Not every liberal is the same, though the majority of liberals I know think along roughly these same lines”

https://www.facebook.com/thethinker42/posts/10155931022478700

Lori Gallagher Witt

January 7, 2018

An open letter to friends and family who are/were shocked to discover I'm a liberal...

This is going to be VERY long, so: TL;DR: I'm a liberal, I've always been a liberal, but that doesn't mean what a lot of you apparently think it does.

Some of you suspected. Some of you were shocked. Many of you have known me for years, even the majority of my life. We either steadfastly avoided political topics, or I carefully steered conversations away from the more incendiary subjects in the name of keeping the peace. "I'm a liberal" isn't really something you broadcast in social circles where "the liberals" can't be said without wrinkling one's nose.

But then the 2016 election happened, and staying quiet wasn't an option anymore. Since then, I've received no shortage of emails and comments from people who were shocked, horrified, disappointed, disgusted, or otherwise displeased to realize I am *wrinkles nose* a liberal. Yep. I'm one of those bleeding heart commies who hates anyone who's white, straight, or conservative, and who wants the government to dictate everything you do while taking your money and giving it to people who don't work.

Or am I?

Let's break it down, shall we? Because quite frankly, I'm getting a little tired of being told what I believe and what I stand for. Spoiler alert: Not every liberal is the same, though the majority of liberals I know think along roughly these same lines.

1. I believe a country should take care of its weakest members. A country cannot call itself civilized when its children, disabled, sick, and elderly are neglected. Period.

2. I believe healthcare is a right, not a privilege. Somehow that's interpreted as "I believe Obamacare is the end-all, be-all." This is not the case. I'm fully aware that the ACA has problems, that a national healthcare system would require everyone to chip in, and that it's impossible to create one that is devoid of flaws, but I have yet to hear an argument against it that makes "let people die because they can't afford healthcare" a better alternative. I believe healthcare should be far cheaper than it is, and that everyone should have access to it. And no, I'm not opposed to paying higher taxes in the name of making that happen.

3. I believe education should be affordable and accessible to everyone. It doesn't necessarily have to be free (though it works in other countries so I'm mystified as to why it can't work in the US), but at the end of the day, there is no excuse for students graduating college saddled with five- or six-figure debt.

4. I don't believe your money should be taken from you and given to people who don't want to work. I have literally never encountered anyone who believes this. Ever. I just have a massive moral problem with a society where a handful of people can possess the majority of the wealth while there are people literally starving to death, freezing to death, or dying because they can't afford to go to the doctor. Fair wages, lower housing costs, universal healthcare, affordable education, and the wealthy actually paying their share would go a long way toward alleviating this. Somehow believing that makes me a communist.

5. I don't throw around "I'm willing to pay higher taxes" lightly. I'm self-employed, so I already pay a shitload of taxes. If I'm suggesting something that involves paying more, that means increasing my already eye-watering tax bill. I'm fine with paying my share as long as it's actually going to something besides lining corporate pockets or bombing other countries while Americans die without healthcare.

6. I believe companies should be required to pay their employees a decent, livable wage. Somehow this is always interpreted as me wanting burger flippers to be able to afford a penthouse apartment and a Mercedes. What it actually means is that no one should have to work three full-time jobs just to keep their head above water. Restaurant servers should not have to rely on tips, multibillion dollar companies should not have employees on food stamps, workers shouldn't have to work themselves into the ground just to barely make ends meet, and minimum wage should be enough for someone to work 40 hours and live.

7. I am not anti-Christian. I have no desire to stop Christians from being Christians, to close churches, to ban the Bible, to forbid prayer in school, etc. (BTW, prayer in school is NOT illegal; *compulsory* prayer in school is - and should be - illegal) All I ask is that Christians recognize *my* right to live according to *my* beliefs. When I get pissed off that a politician is trying to legislate Scripture into law, I'm not "offended by Christianity" -- I'm offended that you're trying to force me to live by your religion's rules. You know how you get really upset at the thought of Muslims imposing Sharia on you? That's how I feel about Christians trying to impose biblical law on me. Be a Christian. Do your thing. Just don't force it on me or mine.

8. I don't believe LGBT people should have more rights than you. I just believe we should have the *same* rights as you.

9. I don't believe illegal immigrants should come to America and have the world at their feet, especially since THIS ISN'T WHAT THEY DO (spoiler: undocumented immigrants are ineligible for all those programs they're supposed to be abusing, and if they're "stealing" your job it's because your employer is hiring illegally.). I'm not opposed to deporting people who are here illegally, but I believe there are far more humane ways to handle undocumented immigration than our current practices (i.e., detaining children, splitting up families, ending DACA, etc).

10. I believe we should take in refugees, or at the very least not turn them away without due consideration. Turning thousands of people away because a terrorist might slip through is inhumane, especially when we consider what has happened historically to refugees who were turned away (see: MS St. Louis). If we're so opposed to taking in refugees, maybe we should consider not causing them to become refugees in the first place. Because we're fooling ourselves if we think that somewhere in the chain of events leading to these people becoming refugees, there isn't a line describing something the US did.

11. I don't believe the government should regulate everything, but since greed is such a driving force in our country, we NEED regulations to prevent cut corners, environmental destruction, tainted food/water, unsafe materials in consumable goods or medical equipment, etc. It's not that I want the government's hands in everything -- I just don't trust people trying to make money to ensure that their products/practices/etc are actually SAFE. Is the government devoid of shadiness? Of course not. But with those regulations in place, consumers have recourse if they're harmed and companies are liable for medical bills, environmental cleanup, etc. Just kind of seems like common sense when the alternative to government regulation is letting companies bring their bottom line into the equation.

12. I believe our current administration is fascist. Not because I dislike them or because I'm butthurt over an election, but because I've spent too many years reading and learning about the Third Reich to miss the similarities. Not because any administration I dislike must be Nazis, but because things are actually mirroring authoritarian and fascist regimes of the past.

13. I believe the systemic racism and misogyny in our society is much worse than many people think, and desperately needs to be addressed. Which means those with privilege -- white, straight, male, economic, etc -- need to start listening, even if you don't like what you're hearing, so we can start dismantling everything that's causing people to be marginalized.

14. I believe in so-called political correctness. Not because everyone is a delicate snowflake, but because as Maya Angelou put it, when we know better, we do better. When someone tells you that a term or phrase is more accurate/less hurtful than the one you're using, you now know better. So why not do better? How does it hurt you to NOT hurt another person? Your refusal to adjust your vocabulary in the name of not being an asshole kind of makes YOU the snowflake.

15. I believe in funding sustainable energy, including offering education to people currently working in coal or oil so they can change jobs. There are too many sustainable options available for us to continue with coal and oil. Sorry, billionaires. Maybe try investing in something else.

I think that about covers it. Bottom line is that I'm a liberal because I think we should take care of each other. That doesn't mean you should work 80 hours a week so your lazy neighbor can get all your money. It just means I don't believe there is any scenario in which preventable suffering is an acceptable outcome as long as money is saved.

So, I'm a liberal.

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invertedeidolon · 4 years

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The Longest Library #3: Griffin & Sabine by Nick Bantock (Or, Eidolon again talks way too much about previous relationships, also, pretty art!)

(This is a series in which I attempt to read and review all (or most of) my library of 297 books.)

Rundown: Postcard artist Griffin Moss gets a weird letter from a weird lady who can apparently see what he's drawing telepathically. They form an ill concieved bond over it. The story is told in colorful postcards and envelopes you can open and then read the mysterious things inside. 4.5/5 for calling me THE FUCK OUT and having some BOMB ASS ART.

I can't give it a full 5 because not everyone is going to have that experience when they read this. It's just going to look very strange and floaty and things won't make very much sense. This book hits close to home with me because it heavily echoes (more like yells about) my first long distance relationship. I'm not really able to see this book through any other lens, so that's what my commentary is mostly about.

So for the part that ISN'T about that stuff though: The art is amazing. Even though it's made by one person technically, both fictional artists have their own, distinct style. Let's be real: The art and the interactivity is the main draw of this book. There are envelopes inside with letters carrying a myriad of little details: Griffin uses a typewriter for his long-form letters, and bits where he's crossed out typos or added in letters with pen, or that Sabine's correspondence is something I now recognize as someone who uses quills or manual dip pens. The inconsistency in the color of her writings suggests she's using a homemade ink, brownish in color, slightly too watery. Maybe it's even watered down watercolor and not even ink at all. They've also made the background of her letters and cards a rich dark gray, while Griffin's is a clean, sterile white.

"Will you explain to me about those geometric paintings you did at Art college? I want to understand their hidden language of color and shape. It's so alien to me."

So this is about the fourth time I'm reading this book since I first got it, and now that I have to write about it, I'm noticing so many more details. Here the line "It's so alien to me."is written in smaller, slightly more rounded letters. The ink is much darker here too, suggesting she wrote this slowly, thoughtfully. What a detail!

Anyway that's it for the objective bits of the book, the rest is entirely subjective from here on out.

"The phenomenon that links us has taught me much about you, yet I am ignorant of your history."

My years and years of suffering emotional abuse set me up to be able to read and predict what was going on in your head perfectly, as well as respond in the most helpful ways with eerie precision, yet I am ignorant of your history, and who you really are (because you use such obtuse floaty language and metaphor. Who were you really? Suffering, but that's about all I could tell.)

"Why doesn't this alarm me as much as it should?"

Because we're already "in". And I "feel safe" to you because I've been trained to be the least offensive, most placating being in the universe. If I could build a business model on conversational comfort, if I could sell my goddamn empathy like the capitalist machine really wants me to, *I'd be so rich*. It would be like, a step down from therapist. Anybody want a virtual friend for like an hour? Gimme 20 and we can watch stupid videos or I can calmly talk you through bread making. It's okay, you can cry. GOD PLEASE LET ME JUST SELL MYSELF SAFELY, I WAS MADE FOR THIS GODDAMNIT.

"I want to hear everything. Write in detail. Tell me all about yourself. I demand to know - please."

This is like fucking CRACK to those with a suppressed self. An unwitnessed self. "Someone who's interested in ME, and won't yell at, ignore, or dismiss me for talking! Holy fuck I love you!"

"Finally I knew who you were. I counselled myself to be cautious and find out what you were like before revealing myself fully."

Sabine at this point is to the reader who I was to Him. A weird mythical creature, the non-human monster of your lonely adolescent imaginings, who is intimately aware of your secrets, "I've been watching you" it says before introducing you to a wondrous world free of the pains of living, where you actually feel loved and all is well forever and ever. Except I wasn't as inhuman as I wished to be.

"Occasionally I'd come home to a re-enactment of The Battle of Britain in the front room. [...] My entrance would make no difference to their dogfight, but when one of them accidentally (and inevitably) knocked over a pile of books, they'd stop instantly and unite to examine the extent of the damage."

The whole 'making light of a not-great home life because it was your normal for so long that you still haven't learned that you need to be horrified about it' thing. As well as passing it off as something funny. Thankfully this character's parents (SPOILER?) get literally run over by a truck and he gets sent to live with his mom's step sister who is really good and lets him ditch school to become a potter's apprentice and eventually go to art college. He never really deals with the grief when the step sister dies, OBVIOUSLY.

"And hearing that my existence eased your pain made my heart race. We have found one another, and I give thanks."

Hearing that my existence wasn't going to be punished but instead, made someone happy? Fucking HEROIN. Downplay it a little with grateful gentleness, I don't want to be punished for being presumptuous or for seeming like I like it too much. If I like things too much they get destroyed, hard.

"My kinsmen are responsive to me - but there is no one to reach my heart, and you who are so far away, have been closer to me than any man on the Islands."

This is something I remember. So far all they've done is shared eachother's life stories and gushed about how close they feel now. She (like my past self), has confused the feeling of 'finally, a witness! they're witnessing me! I've been Seen!' with the feeling of attachment. Of course she would feel infinitely more attached to this man. She's witnessed his most private moments as a creator for a good portion of her life. It's been a mainstay throughout her adolescence through adulthood, so of course an unwarranted sense of intimacy is going to be attached to this mysterious figure. The whole thing wrapped up in a dream like sense of mysticism.

"I remember your first erotic drawing; I was trembling from head to foot by the time you'd finished. Was that Sarah? No don't answer; I'm only teasing."

...Unless? (Man the implications hurt to think about. I REMEMBER THIS FEELING. This author has unintentionally called me out. I wonder how much of Sabine’s writing is actually calm, or if she’s reigning herself in almost constantly?)

"I was finding it hard to get over the idea of there being other men in your life when I reached the part in your letter about my erotic drawings. I stopped being jealous. We were lovers and I hadn't realized it. The drawings weren't of Sarah; they were of you."

ow ow ow ow ow ow JUST SAY IT ow ow ow ow, Also, I REALLY wanted her to be like 'bitch that looks nothing like me, what the fuck', but instead she's all like "So you've been making love to me ten thousand miles away - how tantalizing." URGH. TOO CLOSE, TOO FAST. DISENTANGLE YOURSELVES NOW. GRIFFIN GET HELP.

"I had failed to understand how unhappy you are. You cover up with jokes and a front of being self-contained. I'm worried for you."

EVEN SHE SEES IT, GET HELP.

"When you found me, I thought my loneliness had gone for good. I was kidding myself. I desperately desire your company. I haven't talked to anyone in three days. I was sure I was going to start seeing your pictures like you see mine. I've tried so hard. [...] How can I miss you this badly when we've never met?"

BECAUSE YOU MISS HUMAN CONTACT AND YOU DON'T HAVE ANY FAMILY LEFT YOU NERD, GET HELP. DON'T HANG IT ON ONE PERSON WHO IS TOO FAR AWAY TO HELP YOU IN THE WAY YOU NEED.

"Island magic works on island souls. You and I will heal eachother."

ANTIDEPRESSANTS MAYBE UUUUGGGGHHHHH

"I've started to hate this city, this country, all these stupid fucking people [...] I finally snapped. [...] I want to know what you look like."

*HEAVILY RECOILS*

"Why, my kindred spirit, are you prepared to settle for a postcard of my face? If you wish to see me, why not come here? What is there to stop you - you're clearly unhappy where you are. Come."

Yes. I offered and I offered and I offered. What's to stop you from just fucking TALKING TO ME instead of DISAPPEARING OVER AND OVER AGAIN. and then COMPLAINING THAT YOU'RE SO HURT AND LONELY. I'M LONELY TOO. WHEN I HAD THE MONEY YOU DIDN’T TAKE MY OFFER FOR ME TO COME SEE YOU, SO WHAT THE FUCK IS UP KYLE?

"Foolish man. You cannot turn me into a phantom because you are frightened."

This kind of sentiment is what lead to the breakup. This feeling of being large, and dark, and slighted. Being real and supernatural. Make your choice. Say REAL words instead of just flagellating yourself. Do I exist to you?

"If you will not join me, then I will come to you."

Unfortunately, Sabine has what I definitely did not: Mobility, the ability to make things real. She had a job and money and her own life and the ability to travel. I had a shitty little shared room in my parent's house where I spent most of the time partially starved and dodging devils in one form or another. Many many times I wanted to spontaneously show up and give him the closeness that he needed. But I couldn't. And he wouldn't take my words. He wouldn’t take me.

3 down, 294 to go.

#thelongestlibrary #griffin and sabine #nick bantock #origin1 #wri1

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marginalgloss · 5 years

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san andreas fault

The first thing worth saying about The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner is that although it is set in a prison for women, it is really nothing like Orange is the New Black. It is also not exactly a ‘prison novel’. Perhaps any description of it ought not to be centred on a prison at all; if we call it instead ‘a novel about a woman who had a rough childhood, who becomes a sex worker and whose life takes a bad turn through circumstances beyond her control’, that would be another way of talking about it. But it could also be called a ‘a novel about the post-industrial American landscape’ or ‘a novel about how capitalist ideology came to occupy unquestioned every aspect of what had previously been the prerogative of the state’. There’s a lot going on here.

Most of the chapters follow a woman named Romy Halls. Hers is one of those names which seems at first almost too Dickensian to be real, but which somehow concedes its own sort of authenticity. Romy is sent to jail after killing a man; after they met in the strip club where she was a dancer, this man began stalking her. Owing to an ineffectual public defender, this was no defence at all in the eyes of the judge. Romy is sent down, separated from her young son, with little hope that she will ever see him again.

Prison is relentlessly awful. Every pointless, inhumane, degrading, exploitative detail is noted by the author — everything from the arbitrary rules that determine what can be worn to the expensive bureaucratic monopoly of the prison telephone system. OITNB at times suggested a camaraderie between the prisoners, and reminded its audience that the reasons women tend to end up in prison are often quite different to those of the opposite sex. The Mars Room does a little of the same, but it’s far more bleak and violent. By comparison it maintains a certain distance from the other prisoners. Many of them are nasty people: murderers, baby-killers; they throw boiling sugar-water in each other’s faces. The novel seems to concede that a certain kind of person here exists beyond the understanding of a novelist.

It is a bad place and the world outside is not much better. This is California in the early 00s, a blasted landscape of decaying malls, vacant lots, fast food forecourts and dubious strip joints. It is an infinite suburbia, radically decentred, deprived by design. This is where Romy grew up; the novel opens with a long bus ride that takes her out that world and into the prison-world, somewhere nameless out in the vast west coast wilderness. Geography is notable in this novel, but most of these places seem to exist beyond names. You couldn’t point to them on any map. In this regard, prison seems like the ultimate kind of placelessness. Incarceration involves a deliberate separation of the inmates from the natural world — the barren panopticon of the yard and the running track could barely be called nature. Eventually the prisoners come to feel a kind of dread at the sight of the mountains and orchards in the distance. They are only symbols of failed escapes, can only suggest slow suffering in the wilderness.

But there are other aspects to this novel. From time to time a chapter will be written from another perspective, typically a male one. There is Gordon Hauser, a fairly average middle-class professor who runs classes for the inmates in Romy’s prison; and there’s Doc, a bent cop serving time for murder(s) in a separate facility for sensitive inmates (i.e. those most at risk from violent recrimination). Part of Hauser’s role is to stand in for the naivety of the expected audience of this book. He is educated, liberal, lightly contemptuous of the other staff, and mostly convinced that his role is to rehabilitate women who must have suffered some terrible evil to be where they are in life. He is confounded when some of the women tend towards exploiting his generosity. The reader might be inclined to be more generous towards the inmates. Even this doesn’t seem like an especially unreasonable thing for them to do, given the circumstances.

Doc, on the other hand, is one of a handful of characters here who are almost entirely without redeeming features. (Kennedy, the man who Romy killed, is the other; the single chapter dedicated to him is a portrait of entitled, predatory masculinity that is grim without reservation.) Doc is simply awful — a sneering shell of a man — uncaring, unapologetic, universally contemptuous. These chapters throw into relief a broader problem that the book has with the voice of its characters: all of them are too much of their own type. If Doc and Kennedy are villainous, Hauser is mostly just an object of pity. Romy, on the other hand, is nothing but sympathetic, and at times her voice seems less like her own and more like an authorial surrogate. The problem is not so much that she’s literate, or that her voice is devoid of an ‘accent’ that we might associate with poverty in the Dickensian sense; it’s that there’s something in it which stretches the confines of first-person narration a little too far, until it feels almost like the narrator has herself become omniscient. She reads like a person commenting on their own life as if it had been lived by someone else. (Perhaps you could argue that this is the point.)

Hauser, meanwhile, does not spend all his time in the prison. We see a good deal of his life outside, underlining the kind of everyday freedom he enjoys in the wider world. Sometimes he retreats to a cabin in the wilderness to read, to live amongst people totally unlike him and to think great thoughts. Other authors are invoked — Thoreau, naturally — but also Theodore Kaczynski, who was once known as the unabomber. A handful of extracts (notably uncredited) from Kaczynski’s diaries are blended into the chapters here. I wondered about this. Those chapters emphasise his violent reaction to the industrialised destruction he saw all around him, which was apparently so at odds with the measured quality of his prose.

Is that contrast as surprising today as it once was? I’m not sure. The Mars Room seems circumspect about the purpose of these passages. There’s a reluctance in the text to say what should be obvious: that Kaczynski went too far. Perhaps the novel is only trying to suggest that the impulse to tear it all down, by any means necessary, is still compelling. Who amongst us hasn’t been irritated by the sound of loud motorcycles, or appalled at the sight of logging in familiar patch of forest; who hasn’t felt the urge to do something?

Fifteen or twenty years ago it was the thing to hold up Kaczynski’s writings as being philosophically sound — worth reading, even if the ultimate results of his methodology were beneath contempt. I wonder if this is still the case. The outsider logic of the unabomber — the man who would set himself apart from the rest of humanity, in his cabin, with his rifle — has almost become the new normal. I say ‘almost’ because Ted thought we should do without, while the angry white men who came after him saw no reason to chase the same asceticism. But some of them were happy to take up rifles and to build bombs regardless. They saw something of the same threat in the world around them.

#books #rachel kushner #the mars room

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capaldisrighteyebrow · 7 years

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The Cost of Living - 10/Rose Fic

I wrote this story years ago, but it’s been on my mind a lot lately and I don’t think I’ve shared it here. Find it on: FanFiction.

Summary: The TARDIS lands in the midst of a worldwide tragedy, triggering wartime memories for the Doctor. Rose helps him through one of the most difficult times of his life: remembering Gallifrey's fallen children. Pre "Army of Ghosts." Mostly hurt/comfort and friendship. K+

Word Count: 4,000 | Warnings: Discussion of genocide; military attack

The Doctor was fretting over the console, analyzing scans on the monitor and adjusting knobs, when Rose took hold of the handle that would lead them to their next adventure. By the time he began muttering no-n-n-n-no-No-NO, the left door was already cracked.

"Rose! Don't!"

His warning shout came entirely too late; the TARDIS doors stood fully open.

Instead of a grassy knoll or a perch overlooking a glamorous city; instead of a high-tech hospital in need of a shop or the Roman Forum at its height; instead of someplace serene or flashy or quaint, Rose's eyes met with carnage and smoldering debris - destruction like she had never seen.

It resembled the middle of a war zone, except there was no overt military presence: no tanks, no gunfire, no soldiers. Everything was ash or splinters. Pieces that had escaped catching fire blanketed the treeless landscape like mulch. Rose couldn't make out one building or home that had withstood the decimating blast that had consumed the city and spit out bits of timber and concrete like bones.

There were people - bodies - scattered randomly throughout the debris. Though charred and disfigured, some buried beneath matchstick rubble, she could still identify their outlines. Most were small; even the figures she believed to be adults were slight of frame. These were the remains of children and their mothers, their aunts, their grandparents. . .

Rose clung to the wooden lip of the doorway at the unsettling realization. Her stomach heaved, wanting to purge her system of the stimulus that had made her suddenly ill.

Whatever glitch they'd encountered in the materialization process must have completely reset their course, dropping them in the epicenter of an event so tragic that it was only spoken of in hushed tones by the people of her time, if at all. Though it had taken her mind a moment to match the scene outside to the black and white photos in her old history textbooks, she'd finally recognized where - and when - they were.

Surely he would never bring me here intentionally, the young woman thought, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear as she attempted to compose herself. Not to this place, this date. He wouldn't do that.

Or would he?

Once, when he had worn a dark leather jacket and harbored a cynical streak as long as the Thames, he'd made her watch the literal end of her world as an almost-invited guest. While she'd passed his test of emotional endurance - or, perhaps, to see how far she was willing to go to escape the life of a shop girl - she'd only been a bystander at the event.

Viewing the planet ignite in flames from hundreds of thousands of miles away, with a plate of thick glass between her and the destruction, wasn't anything compared to the scene outside of the timeship now. Five billion years into the future, she hadn't smelled the fires, or coughed on smoke that was mixed with the ashes of buildings. . .and the ashes of those buildings' occupants. While she'd nearly died along with the Earth that day, the Doctor had managed to save her.

Here - where death perfumed the air and saturated the soil with toxins that would linger for generations to come - at ground zero of the nuclear devastation, there was nothing left to save.

A movement among the piles of wood and concrete distracted her from her sickness. Rose thought she saw the head of one of the smaller victims twist minutely. Everything else in the universe dropped away as she focused on the child's head. Her foot was on the edge of the TARDIS' step, ready to run and investigate, when the Doctor's firm grip on her elbow stayed her action, intervening with her instinctive desire to help.

When had he appeared beside her? More importantly, why wasn't he out there already, searching for survivors?

She glanced up at his clenched jaw and serious expression. "Can't we do something?"

He shook his head once. "The bombing is time-locked." His voice was tight. "We shouldn't be here at all."

Unsatisfied, Rose returned her gaze to the head. It was definitely moving.

"But we are here," she observed softly. Maybe fate or some other cosmic force had led the TARDIS and her wayward travelers here for a reason.

Once again, she attempted to step forward, but the Doctor held tight, not allowing her to set one foot outside of the ship. His grip was almost painful.

How could he stand by and watch a child suffer? Angry and hurt, she opened her mouth to accuse him of being heartless, despite having two, but stopped when she saw that his gaze was fixated on the child as well. Tears glossed his sorrowful, old eyes.

"The radiation levels outside the TARDIS are enough to kickstart my next regeneration," he explained delicately. "It would kill you in a matter of minutes."

"So we're just going to watch? We're not going to do anything?"

"We're leaving," he informed her resolutely.

His tone was much too detached, as though he was capable of shutting out all the suffering and destruction. But Rose knew the Doctor's true emotions ran deeper than expressions and intonation. His forced indifference was a sign of how greatly this tragedy upset him.

Pulling her fully inside the ship, the Doctor shut the TARDIS doors and locked them with the sonic for extra assurance his companion wouldn't try wandering off. Once secured, he turned without giving Rose half a glance and strode back to the console to enter new coordinates. His fingers punched at the keys. With a roar, he threw up the main throttle lever, sending the TARDIS up into the atmosphere. The ship creaked and groaned as it pushed through Earth's troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and finally rocketed into space.

Silence fell over the both of them. Unable to process the shock of all she had seen, Rose soundlessly slouched against the closed doors at her back, wiping private, unobserved tears on the cuff of her track jacket. Black smudges from her mascara marred the pink fabric and made her rub more earnestly underneath her eyes to conceal the evidence.

Of all the mis-landings they'd survived during their travels - the kind where they ended up miles or centuries away from their intended destination - this was the most heartbreaking. It was one thing to land in the middle of a battle or step out of the blue box just in time to foil a scheme to end the human race; it was a different thing entirely to show up after the action had happened, when it was too late to do anything but watch the dancing flames.

The Doctor didn't do aftermath. Hopelessness and desolation and damage were things he avoided.

Rose stood unsteadily, leaning against the wooden doors behind her for support, then shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans. Even sandwiched between fabric, she could feel them tremble. More tears welled in her eyes, but she sniffed them back.

Over the rumbling engines, she tried to verbalize the horrific detail that gnawed at her view of humanity. War was one thing, but the scene outside had been nothing short of the undue slaughter of innocents.

"All those children. . ." she whispered, "dead."

The Doctor visibly flinched, but carried on with his furious piloting, as if in a desperate rush to escape the topic.

Had she been a little more collected, Rose may not have continued to press the subject; however, in her current state of distress she sought a way to digest one of the biggest travesties in history. She turned to the one man who usually had the answers.

"How could someone do this, Doctor, knowing the lives they were taking?"

Her question seemed to be ignored, blocked out by the deafening rage that exuded from his tense shoulders and stiff stance. It was as though he'd slipped inside himself, fighting a battle within his mind - a penchant of his previous incarnation that reminded Rose she was only viewing one side of a single decagon. Regardless of the face he wore, the Doctor internalized his griefs and anger in the same way.

The obliterated Japanese city had struck them both to the core, though the Doctor's reaction went beyond Rose's initial shock and following disgust. Something had been triggered inside him: something dark, something secret. A fierce, almost inhuman scowl burrowed within the creased lines on his forehead and around his lips. He seemed primed to strike out at the smallest disturbance. Rose had to turn away, feeling that she was - at least in part - responsible for his foul mood.

When the engines thrummed a steady, tenor cadence, she knew they were in orbit around the planet. Only then did Rose dare to turn back. Though she expected to see him bent over the main console, brooding and moody, the Doctor was no longer at the controls. He'd managed to slip away unseen and unheard.

Then, below the central deck, came a storm of sound. His shouts were mostly incoherent noise, but they weren't pointless; the Doctor was yelling phrases in another language, one the ship wouldn't translate into English for her benefit: Gallifreyan. After a moment, Rose realized the verbal beratement was directed at the unseen, yet ever present, conscience of the TARDIS.

"Why today?" he asked in English while throwing metal bits and bobs around to punctuate his frustrated cries.

Rose didn't have a clue why today held such significance to him. Perhaps it was an anniversary of something unpleasant, though she'd always thought - being a Time Lord and all - things like specific dates would get somewhat jumbled. When she'd worked at the shop, she'd lost track of days of the week; there were only 'on' days and 'off' days. Of course, the Doctor was the Doctor. If she ever bothered to ask him for the time, he'd be able to rattle it off down to the millisecond.

"Isn't two hundred years long enough to watch me suffer?"

Two hundred years since. . .? Oh. Rose slowly closed hers eyes as everything clicked. How didn't I realize before?

It wasn't the TARDIS' fault that he was teetering along the brink between fury and despair; it was hers. She'd reacted without thinking and let unfiltered thoughts slip past her tongue to strike him. She knew about the Time War and the Doctor's actions on that fateful day, that he had sacrificed his own people in order to defeat the Daleks to keep countless other races across the universe from falling. There had to have been children on Gallifrey - thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.

All those children. . .dead. In her detestation of those responsible for the murder of an entire city, she'd vilified him as well. How could I have said such a terrible thing?

Rose inched closer to the stairs while he continued to curse the ship unjustly. When he ran out of stray objects to toss about, he took hold of his hair with both hands and pulled in opposite directions as though yanking a painful memory from his thoughts.

She couldn't let this go on any longer. She cared for him too much to watch him wallow in the pain of his past, to let what he'd done lifetimes ago drag him back to the darker days by making him relive the end of the War. There had to be some way to bring him back into the light.

From the top of the landing, she called down to him, "It's not the same."

He stilled abruptly, as though just realizing he had an audience. Dropping his hands from his hair - a grown man guilty of throwing a fit and getting caught - he peered up at her through the grating. Two people stared back at her: one, a lost and lonely young boy, the second, a stubborn and unforgiving old man.

"Yes," he said. "It is."

Extracting her hands from her pockets, Rose gripped the banister in front of her instead, attempting to focus her nervousness into the cold metal. To go head to head with the last of the Time Lords would take all her courage.

"I wasn't making a comparison," she insisted. "I didn't mean it that way."

Slackjawed, he ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth once, testing the taste of her statement. He didn't like it. "Doesn't matter. Still holds true."

"You saved the universe," she stressed. Does that count for nothing in his mind?

"At too great a cost," he rebutted morosely.

She descended the stairs to level her eyes with his. Maybe he would be able to glimpse the truth through her point of view. "You had no choice."

The Doctor held her gaze for a few seconds, then tore himself away. "I chose to ignore them: the children I sacrificed in the name of peace. I made their deaths unimportant; turned them into collateral."

"I don't believe that." Rose was vehement in her denial, though her voice was soft. "Not for a minute."

"I never counted. I didn't want to know." Collecting himself with a shredded breath, he continued in a stronger voice: "I'm no better than the refuse who planned and executed the attack outside. I'm worse."

"No, you're - "

He cut her off with a frustrated growl: "How thick are you? The reality of what I did is staring you in the face, yet you still deny it!"

Rose did her best to hide the stricken look that flashed red on both cheeks - his hurtful words stemmed from self-hatred, not from her refusal to see him in the monstrous light he was attempting to cast upon himself. Even so, she couldn't bounce back from his comment rapidly enough, and he slunk further away from her, deflated from his hasty insult, yet stoically unapologetic. His silence suggested she keep her distance.

But Rose would not surrender to his glowers and contempt. She was going to prove to the Doctor that, regardless of his past decisions, he was still the savior of worlds and the peoples' champion. He was the hero of children's stories, not the villain.

She approached him with caution and spoke to him as though talking to a wounded soldier. Her tone was firm, yet understanding. "You're wrong, Doctor," she told him, watching him closely. "You know how many children were on Gallifrey that day."

"I don't," he insisted.

She bristled over his continued denial. "Stop lying."

He did that at times: lied. It was what he did to hide a painful truth or to protect others from learning information that would put them in danger. But, in this case, he wasn't only lying to her; he was deceiving himself.

"Rose, I -"

It was her turn to cut him off. There wasn't any stopping her now. "The number is in your head, Doctor. You're not the sort to make decisions without understanding the consequences. You wouldn't have ended the Time War the way you did unless you knew what it would cost."

He braced himself against the stem supporting the console platform and shut his eyes over her words. For a long moment he remained silent. The only sign of his struggle to rein in the pain and anguish seeping from him was a long tendon stretched taut along the column of his throat. When he finally spoke, his words were drenched in the cold sweat of self-disgust.

"They had faces," he began, his voice heated, yet his tone icy. "They had hopes and dreams and disappointments. They had lives to look forward to, and I stole them. I stole them all from existence."

"And you saved the rest of us," she pointed out once again, steadfast in her belief. "Without you, endless species across the universe would have been exterminated or never had the chance to begin. Think about it: without you, I wouldn't exist. Mum. Mickey. None of us. We're here because of you."

"That doesn't excuse my ignorance."

"Or your bullheadedness," Rose mumbled, adding, "Maybe you pushed the tally from your thoughts to cope with what happened, but when you chose to save the universe, you knew that number. And, somewhere in that brilliant mind of yours, you still do."

Rose held his gaze, challenging him to argue with her again. Eventually - after much huffing and frowning - he gave into her will.

He closed his eyes and laid two fingers against his left temple. It looked as though he was trying to concentrate on a memory - one buried deep in the catacombs of his mind, where he'd tried to keep it hidden, but it lurked about, waiting for the chance to resurface. His breathing became labored over the task, but Rose stayed absolutely still, her eyes never blinking.

Finally, a number: "Two. . .point four seven bil-billion."

Staggered by the figure, she could only nod at first. She'd expected a high number, but she never imagined it would equate to over a third of the Earth's total population by comparison. "Say that again?"

He swallowed the lump in his throat and locked his gaze on hers again. "Two point four seven billion," he repeated without stumbling. "That's how many children were on Gallifrey the day I set it ablaze."

Motionless - her mind trying to digest the magnitude of the what he'd done to end the Time War - she didn't know what to say. What could she say?

The Doctor crossed the lower deck to the stairs, sinking down under a weary weight that would never be fully lifted from his shoulders. He threaded his fingers through the hopeless disarray of hair standing in all directions and reiterated his exhausted point: "I'm no better than the men responsible for this bombing. Do you see that now?"

The sheer amount of lives lost was tragic, yet the fact that the Doctor had acted alone and was the sole survivor of his race was even more heartbreaking. Rose decided to refocus her energies to helping him move on from the mental rut into which he'd fallen. She lowered herself down next to him and released a small sigh.

"Maybe not," she allowed, though her tone lacked the barest hint of conviction. "But, what you did doesn't change the way I see you, Doctor."

Rose felt his body shift, turning toward her. Before he could start in again on how he was a child murderer, she shot him a sharp look through her lashes and said, "I can forgive you."

The honest statement appeared to derail his formulating speech. His mouth hung slightly ajar. Rose took the opportunity to give him what she thought he really needed. Snaking first one arm across the broad span of his back, then wrapping the other around his front, she tugged until they were pressed together. From where her head rested awkwardly against his chest - given their side-by-side position on the stairs - she could feel his shock slowly release and dissipate.

For a few moments all Rose could hear was the drumming of his hearts. The Doctor didn't move, but Rose was not discouraged by his unresponsiveness. It made her hold on to him even tighter. She wouldn't let go until he pulled away. Her mother - though not the most openly affectionate parental figure - had once imparted some solid wisdom: when you hug somebody you love, you should never be the first to let go.

So, Rose clung to the Doctor with all the strength she had.

"I do forgive you, Doctor," she whispered underneath his chin, "but only if you promise to never forget the children of Gallifrey."

His hands inched up her back until they were cupping her shoulder blades. Then he squeezed, and Rose felt like crying all over again with relief. She'd finally gotten through to him.

"I promise," he vowed softly, embracing her a few moments longer. When he pulled back, he did not disengage entirely. His hands gripped her forearms, thumbs rubbing circles into the fabric of her jacket. He looked at her with shining eyes. "What do I do now, Rose? How do I live with myself?"

Much to her surprise, the words rolled off her tongue as easily as if they were ingrained in her DNA. "S'pose you have to do what the rest of us do: carry on. Day after day, year after year. You carry on and keep living. And remember, Doctor."

His response was a slight nod and a quiet admission. "You're too good to me."

Then, in another heartbeat, he jumped to his feet and started scaling the stairs back to the main console two at a time, a smile lighting up his whole face.

It was a most bizarre, drastic mood shift, even for the Doctor. Rose struggled to change gears in order to keep pace with him. Eventually, she chased him up the stairs and stood on the opposite side of the TARDIS console. He glanced up from the switchboard and smiled a genuine smile that caught Rose off guard more than anything else. If he intended to disregard the last half hour and return to his normal, wonderful self, she supposed it was best to follow his lead.

Sometimes it was almost too easy to slip back into the happy, adventure-awaits-mindset with him.

"Of course I'm too good for you. Which is why you won't say 'no' when I ask you for a favor," she added with a characteristic cheeky grin.

"Anything. Name it. Just so long as it's not -"

Rose raised one of her dark eyebrows, as if to ask, Didn't you just say anything? Her mind was already set on what she wanted, and she had a feeling that the Doctor knew what it was as well.

It must have been an expression he was used to, because he exclaimed, "Must we? We just dropped in on her!"

"Weeks ago!" Rose countered in mock exasperation. "I need clean clothes. All these spare rooms and no place for laundry. How do you expect a girl to get by like that?"

He gave in with a dramatic sigh. "Fine. But I'm not staying for supper." After a moment of typing coordinates and time-ordinates into the TARDIS, he added in a more solemn voice that gave her more comfort than the phony exchange about going to see her mum: "I'm so sorry, Rose. I never wanted you to see this."

She wasn't sure if, by 'this,' he meant the carnage outside, or his ensuing meltdown. Either way, she had seen. "I'm glad I was here," she told him in the same soft, reverent tone. "You shouldn't be alone to face a day like today."

His answering smile was appreciative, yet sad - real. Now she began to wonder if all his previous smirks and laughter weren't just covering up the guilt and hurt he'd suffered all these years. Rose longed to hug him again, but there wasn't time.

"I don't know what I'll do without you, Rose Tyler."

His mumbled words were almost lost in the open space between them, but it never failed to register with her that the Doctor avoided responding to her sentiments of being his companion forever.

"Well," she corrected gently, "you'll never have to find out."

A brief flash of something - a stinging look that branded her as human and perishable - glimmered in his eyes, but it was quickly replaced with his usual mischievous grin. With a flip of a yellow switch, the TARDIS jerked to life and began her materialization cycle. They both gripped the edges of the main counsel as the Doctor called out, "Jackie Tyler, here we come!"

#dw fic #ten x rose fic #ten x rose #doctor who fic

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agl03 · 7 years

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Season 4 Finale Predictions

Wow! Are we really here already? As I did last season I’ll do my finale predictions as well as items we might see carry on into Season 5. I don’t think I’m going to do as good as I did last season but here we go!

I’ll go under the thing because it got long. I’m going dark at 4 pm MST so any asks I don’t get too before then will have to wait until tomorrow.

I’ll see you all on the other side!

Framework

Will be in absolute chaos as there is a struggle for power

Someone in Shield is likely the one that finds Elena and gets her to Mack (Burrows perhaps).

Not sure how they will get out now that Daisy is gone to open the lava pool, perhaps Radcliffe builds something or a new backdoor is developed by the team (Fitzsimmons).

Elena will not be able to wake Mack up if he’s not already.

Mack might be aware enough thanks to the others leaving.

Mack still won’t leave Hope

Radcliffe will try to convince him/help get him out.

The Framework can’t be continued as it is...at most it’s continued in a smaller version for Radcliffe.

The Framework world could literally end, something happens from within that destroys it.

Mackelena

Their relationship will not survive the episode...sorry guys.

Elena will have to force the issue with Mack and make him leave Hope in order to save his life, even if he doesn’t want too.

Mack will be devastated at the loss of Hope.

Talbot thinks Elena attacked his men

Radcliffe

I can still see him sacrificing himself in some way to help get a victory in the Framework and/or the real world.

He gives the message from Fitz’s father to Mack or Elena to pass along to him.

If he ‘survives’ it will be in a smaller more contained version of the Framework.

In things I want to happen but don’t think we’ll have time for....Radcliffe and Fitz to have one last discussion. Radcliffe is able to apologize to Fitz. He was all the son he ever wanted. And what happened wasn’t his fault.

Philinda has a good moment

Lots of that banter we saw in 21 but they will also steal a moment in the chaos to have a real heart to heart about what happened while she was kidnapped. AKA talk about the kiss.

Some fabulous fight scenes coming our way.

The Will They Won’t They won’t be resolved...if anything might be more confusing than before.

I’m 50/50 if we get a kiss.

Possible they take off together at the end of the season.

Coulson

Will have his hands full with Talbot

Talbot may be a target of the Daisy fleet

Going to be in full on leader mode again

I mentioned cool fight scenes right?

High up there for who has the Secret (come on Brotherhood of Shield)

Going to see a new feature on his hand.

May

Gets some serious payback for being kidnapped all season

Will continue to play catch up with everything she missed

She gets some fantastic fight scenes.

Daisy

Will also be coming into her own as leader

Will have a nice moment with Fitz in helping him heal. Watching for Callbacks to “your just different now” and her being able to relate due to being hived. “Don’t make the same mistakes I did” or “THIS is not how your story ends”.

Epic team up with Robbie

Epic fight scenes (I mentioned those right)

High up there for having the “secret’

Major plot twist coming with her

I can see her having to make some sort of sacrifice

Comes face to face with some of her own demons/ghosts

Robbie

Will be changed by his time with the other guy in Hell Dimension

The Rider is after AIDA and the Darkhold

If AIDA dies, he does it

His arc will get closure either setting up a spin off or where he goes in the future....I don’t think we see him in Season 5.

IE the Rider still has more scores to settle so he can’t stay

Mace

Part of AIDA/Superior’s plan is to reveal he wasn’t really Inhuman and undermine Shield.

Daisy is being framed for his death

I’m hoping we get a quiet moment where he his honored as a hero but am not holding my breath.

Fitzsimmons

Won’t be all sunshine and rainbows but it won’t be doom and gloom either.

They will try to fake us out but will end the season still together

“You are EVERYTHING to me”

I can still see them either taking a step back or going away together to heal.

Restarting the academy is still on my radar depending on how things shake out.

We will get a moment in the chaos where they are able to discuss their future. Marriage and even babies may come up.

Engagement and pre engagement are still on the table.

Wedding/marriage would only happen with a good time jump.

If IF we get a baby bomb with them I think a time jump would have to be in the mix.

AIDA is going to threaten them both at some point.

Will figure something out that helps stop the baddies

Bonus points if its

A throw back to the Night Night gun and they modify the dendrotoxin.

Gravitonium

The use Radcliffe’s Inhuman cure or Lincoln’s vaccine to depower AIDA.

Something super low tech.

Will be separated from the main group for most of the episode.

Jemma

Will be very protective of Fitz.

Won’t let Fitz push her away

In things I want but don’t know if we’ll get is Jemma having a verbal showdown with AIDA.

Fitz

We will continue to see him struggle with what he was forced to do in the Framework.

I believe he will get some closure at some point that someone will confirm the degree of AIDA’s manipulations on him.

AIDA will get at him...not sure if she takes, tries to take or just wants to scare him again.

Will try to offer himself up as bait to trap AIDA

Will try to sacrifice himself to AIDA to spare the others, especially Jemma.

Will find a bit of his fire again before the episode is done.

Part of the solution he and Jemma find will turn something against the baddies, either the Framework or LMD’s

AIDA

REALLY steps is up a notch.

Will make that kid losing his/her crap in Target for not getting candy look like a walk in the park.

Will be taking steps to make the Framework world a reality in the Real world.

Using what is left of the Daisy Fleet to make a Cambridge Incident.

Is indeed made from something from the Darkhold, may even be Chthon or another demon

Wants to be in control again

I am 50/50 if she still wants Fitz or now wants him to suffer

If she dies its at Ghost Rider’s hand or the something from the Darkhold destroys her.

I do think there is a small chance she makes it through the season finale.

Powers she may have:

Gordon’s

Lincolns’s

Vijay’s

Something that can control the dead

Poison/toxicity

Lash’s

Hellfire’s

Alisha’s

Whoever the writers wanted for the story

Superior

Also really steps it up a notch

They are going to need to take out his head to take out the bots for good

Has something awful up his sleeve with the Darkhold, possibly a weapon

I can see the head making it through

His backer/partner will be revealed (yeap still don’t think he was working alone)

Possible Deaths

AIDA

Superior

Radcliffe

Robbie or the RIder

Daisy (won’t stick)

IF its anyone on the team its Mack or Elena

Lots of Minions

Davis for realsies this time

Misc Predictions

Shield as we know it will be no more...again

Helicarrier returns

Brotherhood of Shield

After coming together for the first time all season in the finale the team will be more scattered than ever in the aftermath

Baddies on my Radar for season 5 include AIM, Council of 9, Scientist Supreme, and Higher Evolutionary

We haven’t seen the last of Papa Fitz

Watching for a time, world, or dimension jump

Might not be done with Surprise returns

Chthon is still in the mix for me

The Darkhold will be destroyed, at a price

Remember that thing from Season 1 oh look its back

My out there Ward return theory

Cryptic Teases:

• There’s a room with a view: Helicarrier, cell, lair, or think happy thoughts Perthshire. • There’s a bridge to nowhere: Guess portal or dimension thing OR its the new way out of the Framework. • There’s a toast: Philinda get their bottle of Haig, Toasting the team splitting up. Honoring Mace. • Does anyone want pie? I’m just going to give that line to Coulson. No matter the context, Coulson....MAYBE Talbot. But thinking Coulson. • Burrows is still looking for bars. If Burrows dies looking for bars again not funny but also think he’ll find Elena.

We will laugh, cry, and be left screaming.

#aos spoilers #finale countdown #probably missed something but there are so many metas out there at this point #see you all on the other side

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