#intrinsically choosing to be fucked up all the time for some reason
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I wrote all that stuff yesterday about being lonely and coping and then proceeded to get into an argument with my father over text in which he said I didn’t deserve his or my stepmom’s love & attention bc of something I can’t even remember that happened when I was severely mentally ill like 8 years ago so I’m like. Well. Emotionally crushed. Happy birthday to Rose tomorrow I guess
#How am I supposed to feel joy about being alive when the people who brought me into this world don't even treat me like a human being#And then my father still refuses to admit his role in the conflicts we've had#Or that his method of approaching emotional matters is abusive#I'm just like. sick to death of all of this...#sorry I swore to not like write about stuff as they happen anymore on this blog but this is so soul crushing to me to just have it like#admitted up front like this by my father. like okay awesome great Both my parents actively despise me for not being their Ideal Child#both my parents refusing to acknowledge the ways they've made me mentally ill and constructively work on it OR get me therapy#and then being upset when that has consequences. the lack of foresight with both of them is making me insane#If You Had Listened To Me. And Gotten Me In Therapy. Things Would've Been Better. Why Are You So Fucking Obstinate About That#note that my father doesn't even know I have DID because he doesn't believe we have severe mental illness at all he just thinks we're like#intrinsically choosing to be fucked up all the time for some reason#I just feel so sick to my stomach anymore like cool awesome both my parents admit they do not think I deserve love at all. Okay#Okay awesome we're in Rose is Inherently Undeserving of Love World. That's the world we live in#Cool great thanks I'll just live the Rest of my Life desperate to figure out how to be Deserving of Love. And devour myself in that Cycle#Awesome the fact that Rose was born is a Scourge on the World I guess because I am an Inherently Bad Person because I was Born. Great!#okay enough tag spamming fuck life i am going to go eat a turkey sandwich but ugh fuck. fuck everything fuck being alive
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could you do a peter request where reader is feeling insecure bc guys treat her like she’s disposable so she’s sulking to peter asking if she isn’t pretty/funny/whatever enough but then he tells her she’s the prettiest girl he’s ever seen, and they have angsty soft sex
ੈ✩ pairing: peter parker x reader
ੈ✩ warnings: smut (18+ only), angst,
ੈ✩ wc: 1.7k
the familiar tapping on your window comes as a mirage to you, but when the red-suited figure comes into view, your pulse is calmed only slightly when he brings you back to reality. burrowed in your blankets, you flash your best friend a half-hearted smile.
“hey, bug boy.”
“hey! i brought over those leftovers you wanted. also, mr. delmar gave me an extra brownie for you and i had to stop ned from eating it— hey, are you okay?”
“mhm.”
“you look like you’re crying,” peter furrows his brows, quick to discard his suit and pull over a sweatshirt of his that he’d left in the corner of your room as he makes his way over to your bed.
“‘m fine, pete,” you mumble. “gonna put on some pants any time, soon?
“y/n,” he emphasizes, a frown setting on his face. he touches your cheek carefully, almost timidly. peter parker has been your best friend since middle school, yet he still doesn’t know what your boundaries are in regards to touching. you’re always the one to initiate it, with your hands absentmindedly running through his brown locks during movies or unprompted attacks so that he’d give you piggyback rides. for some reason, his fingertips to your face makes him feel like he’s stepping over a line.
“hey. you gotta talk to me. you know i’m not gonna leave you alone until you do.”
you chuckle, tears spilling onto your cheeks as you smile and attempt to cover your face with the sleeves of your hoodie.
“it’s stupid. i don’t— i thought that i was just bad at, at like, socializing. and then i hit it off with that guy lucas and he ghosted me which is fine, it’s just. i don’t know what’s wrong with me, peter.”
“what? nothing’s wrong with you. boys are assholes, okay? this dude doesn’t deserve you. you— i didn’t know you were seeing anyone,” peter blinks rapidly, the last sentence coming out rushed and mumbly. somehow, the topic of you dating people never came to mind considering how the two of you were always attached at the hip. the mention of another boy’s name makes his stomach drop.
“i wasn’t— i’m certainly not now. it’s like, okay, i get laid for once, and then when i actually try to get close to someone they disappear. am i that fucking disposable?”
“you slept with him?”
“yes, peter, we’re all of age. some of us even have sex,” you snap at him. you regret it immediately when you see the look on his face. “i’m sorry. just— just forget it.”
you sigh and wipe your face, leaning your head away from him to stare your ceiling. you feel his body shift as he crawls into bed with you and you feel your heart leap.
“you are not disposable,” peter finally murmurs.
“i feel like something’s intrinsically wrong with me. always thought there was since i was born, maybe. like, maybe i can be abrasive or i’m not everyone’s type and maybe i’m even that fucking pretty, but jesus christ. it’s like i repel everyone i go near.”
“you couldn’t keep me away if you tried.”
when you turn your head, peter looks at you with the slightest tinge of pink on his cheekbones. his crooked nose quivers in the tiniest motion the way a rabbit would. you’ve always noticed when he did that but never thought to bring it up. his face scrunches up in a fit of worry when you don’t respond, so he chooses to stroke your scalp, which has your eyelids fluttering in response.
“thanks,” is all you can mutter at the moment, heart nearly pounding out of your chest from the sensation of your best friend touching you, even this chastely. you wonder if you’d go into cardiac arrest if he touched you anywhere else.
he mumbles something unintelligible into your hair and the words of tenderness get muffled.
“hm?” you muse.
“i think you’re the prettiest girl i’ve ever seen.”
“you do?” your voice nearly cracks.
he simply smiles at you in this sad, genuine way — not out of pity, but out of admiration and bittersweetness. like he knows that the moment those words came out of his mouth that whatever would happen between the two of you might crash and burn completely, but he was okay with being the one who got hurt.
your lips meet his like a sucker punch. he tastes like rain. there’s a sharp inhale in his throat, the curve of his throat tightening as he nestles his palm into your shoulder. you feel like an overflowing sink suddenly, and you think that maybe peter prying you open would be the cure to your ailment, but you know that maybe you’ve gone too far.
you pry yourself away from him like a knife out of your gut.
“i’m sorry. ‘m really… emotional, and that wasn’t fair and you were probably just trying to make me feel better—“ his hot mouth shuts you up with with dizzying piety, his kisses washing away the hurt that’s charring the creaky floorboards of your heart.
you don’t notice the tears fall because you feel too good. it feels better than any other time someone’s kissed you, because all those other times were devoid of passion completely. your bodies fuse together quickly like melting candle wax, legs intertwined.
he pulls away when he feels the wetness on your cheeks touching his.
“are you okay?” he whispers, his voice thread-bare.
“yeah. ‘m just happy,” you chuckle breathily.
“but if you think this might be a bad idea—“
“i don’t care, peter,” you kiss him again, desperately rocking your hips against his as you nearly knock teeth. you’re surprised by the whimper that comes out of you. it almost hurts how badly you want him. you gasp when you feel his teeth on your neck.
he pushes you back onto your plush mattress with his hands clasped in yours. both of your movements are clumsy, feverish, but both of you are determined to break open the other. you feel him rutting underneath you, his hardness grazing your bare thighs, and oh, the slightest wetness.
peter forgets that he’d forgotten to put on pants completely until his eyes widen at the feeling of your fingertips grazing his hips, sliding under the elastic of his calvin kleins. in response, he gently yanks at your shirt, prompting you to take it off and lay bare in front of him.
his tongue swirls around your hard nipple, sucking and biting until he releases with a pop just to kiss you down your stomach. peter’s chestnut eyes have gone dark ochre with calloused hands holding down your hips. when his mouth reaches the band of your panties, you stop him. he looks at you curiously.
“can i eat you out?”
“i want you to fuck me,” you whimper.
“i wanted to make you come first,” he pecks your hip.
“y’probably will,” you gasp, pulling on his hair to bring him back to you while his hard cock brushes along your core. “just want you really bad. now.”
“anything for you.”
he swallows a gulp in his throat before removing his briefs the same time you discard your underwear. two lonely souls bare in front of each other, vulnerable like you’re meeting for the first time, yet this is all too familiar. peter doesn’t want you to know that he’s had too many dreams with this exact setting, and he can’t in his right mind believe that it’s actually happening now.
you buck your hips eagerly as he hovers above you. he chuckles at your desperation, pressing a soft kiss to your temple before gliding his cock along the velvet of your slick cunt, then nudging inside of you.
the moment you feel him, you let out a lewd moan that has him falling apart. the sweetest sound he’s ever heard.
you whine louder as he pushes in and out of you slowly and he has to cover your mouth with his palm. your breath hitches in your throat as you mewl quietly, listening to the slow grunts and ragged moans falling out of his mouth.
“jesus christ,” he hisses. “you feel fucking amazing.”
despite the awkwardness, the sensation of him filling you up is too good to notice the gangling crossfire of limbs and mouths, experimental to the both of you considering this might as well serve as both of your first times. every lover that had made you feel disposable had now ceased to exist in your mind — there were no tears left to cry. there was only peter.
he tries something, pulls your body flush against his as he leans forward into the cruz of your thighs and lifts them just a bit higher. the tighter angle has the coil in your stomach ready to unravel at any moment.
“oh my god,” your mouth spills. your nails mark the length of peter’s back with carnal heedlessness.
“yeah, shit, yes—“ peter croaks into your collarbone. the sound of his voice so low and on edge turns you on to oblivion, and with the thickness of his cock hitting deeper into your cunt, your hypothesis is bound to come true.
when he thrusts into you faster, muscles tensed and hands pushing down on your stomach, your tears come back on impact.
“just like that, fuck,” you groan. “i think ‘m gonna…”
“let go for me, pretty,” he coaxes.
jolts of lightning seize through your body as your vision blurs. he kisses you again and you bite on his lip, sucking gently to prevent yourself from screaming out of pleasure.
it sends him over the edge, until he spills himself into you with hushed groans. you bask in the way you’re flooded with him, his smell and his breath and his skin. as you both emerge back to your shared consciousness, your bodies stay together swathed in warmth.
of all the desolation you’d felt in your life, peter is perhaps the one thing to clear the fog.
“i think you were made for me,” you whisper.
he lets out a breathy laugh, still recovering from his high. he takes your hands and kisses your knuckles. “i’m whatever you want me to be.”
#peter parker x you#peter parker x reader#peter parker x y/n#peter parker fanfiction#peter parker fluff#peter parker smut#peter parker angst#spiderman x you#spiderman smut#tom holland smut
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Use this ask as an excuse to infodump about something you haven't been asked about yet :3
Awww Match my friend you spoil me.
Alright! Anyone who likes my work probably knows that ive been posting a lot about my newest oc, a fairy named Shane from the Hatchetfield universe by Team Starkid.
Because hes an oc and i think Starkids fanbase is still pretty small obviously no one is ever gonna ask me about him. So ill just take this opportunity to talk about him and my headcanons for fairies and other creatures in hatchetfield!
Starting with the obvious. "What the fuck, theres no fairies in hatchetfield" cause yea, there isnt in canon. but I LIKE FAIRIES! So i decided to make it possible.
Basically- the lords in black are probably feeding off of humanity right? That being said i'm not sure why other realms aside from the black and white wouldn't form? we as humans believe in a lot of things! This belief allows for my personal headcanon of creatures in hatchetfield to form:
This is only the most basic chart- In all actuality the real chart would have a lot more circles to represent other realms then the black and white and the wilds connecting with earth.
Humans believe in eldritch creatures, low and behold- they exist. Humans believe in the fae, so they exist. These form other worlds all intrinsically connected to ours- from there the inhabitants can manipulate us into keeping them alive through worship, belief, ect. This is why humans tell folklore stories and make up things about eldritch deities. We made them- they're just keeping themselves alive.
Because of this- humans have also unfortunately split our world countless times into timelines as well- as that's a commonly talked about thing. From the outside this allows other worlds to pick and choose what timeline they enter or fuck with- and one of the many reasons why entering the feywilds is such a bad idea- because you can get spit out at the wrong time. This also might cause accidental duplication of self upon crossing back and forth between realms.
The wilds is ruled by it's own Lord much like The Lords in Black, but the Fey Wilds only have one. He's a massive egotistical douche- as its usually described in most texts about Oberon. He's also the one who stripped Shane of his wings and banished him from the wilds as he was deemed much to deadly to remain.
(Shane's extremely paranoid about danger and getting hurt- he fears death more then most and turns to violence when frightened- causing him to kill several fairies, humans, and hurting even lords in his lowest moments.)
Quickly being thrown out into earth from another plane means Shane exists in some timelines but not all and not even really that many.
His lord abandoning him in such a manner is what forces him to seek help from The Lords in Black- and the way he goes about this varies between timelines of course. In some he accidently courts them- in some he's simply their friend- or on occasion he's a follower of one of them. Due to how he enters hatchetfield you will always find him in an abandoned cabin in the woods surrounding hatchetfield over anywhere else.
#rnanimations#fan art#digital art#art#my art#fanart#starkid#hatchetfield#hatchetverse#hatchetfield oc#oc#rambling#infodump#asks and replies
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Question for G :)) how was your fanauthor workshop experience? I don't know if I should apply it sounds interesting but at the same time almost no reviews or whatsoever. Thank you!
well I ended up doing it a second time, so I'd say it was pretty damn good! I think the reason there are "no reviews" is mostly due to tumblr's format not really lending itself to that? @fanauthorworkshop isn't marketing itself as a product so much as a pedagogical (educational) extension of the existing fandom gift economy—an exchange where you both learn stuff and share/teach stuff!
this answer is mildly off-podcast-topic and it's gonna get super long and wordy, so it's under a cut lol you're welcome
my Fanauthor Workshop experience
personally, I found the FAW perfect for me. I was at the point in my fic writing where I was getting some lovely comments and glowing praise, but also wishing the world in general took fanfiction more seriously, as a craft to be practiced and discussed, something with both intrinsic and literary merit. @bettsfic's first episode as a guest on Fansplaining really resonated with me and kind of spoke to that desire (it's a must-listen for anyone on the fence about applying to the FAW!!)
but I had never studied creative writing at a university level, and barely knew what a crit letter was. I found the FAW was the perfect way to learn that sort of thing in a low-stress environment! I didn't struggle with feelings of burdensome obligation the way I had with schoolwork; rather I was excited to read everyone else's writing and see what it had to teach me. I also loved having an appropriate venue to air all my writing opinions, lol. I found I was so motivated that I managed to attend every FAW session even though it conflicted with family vacations two years in a row. I wrote crit letters from the lobby of a restaurant in a national park because it was the only place with wifi. I even Zoomed into one session from a random public library in Durango, where I managed to alarm everyone else in the irl vicinity with my enthusiastic discussion of fictional cannibalism (shoutout to the story we workshopped that day, it SLAPPED.)
personally, I approached the FAW with the very specific goal of Having Fun first and letting the writing stuff come second (ie, not putting too much pressure on myself when it came to choosing and polishing my own workshop pieces, and not worrying too much about how they were received.) I still ended up getting some AMAZING critiques and responses to my two (very different) pieces—I was deeply impressed by everyone's insights, how much they were able to pick up on, and how willing they were to meet me at my level. the other pieces we workshopped ranged all over the place in technical ability, from "giohvnsksbnf this writing is so good I'm gonna fucking eat glass" to "this person is clearly just starting out as a writer, but even if their prose has some technical mistakes, their story has Good Bones and their critiques and discussion observations have been spot on."
my big secondary goal was to Make Friends and there I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I now have SO many cool FAW mutuals, a few of which I have hung out with IRL and the rest of which I totally WOULD hang out with IRL if given the opportunity. they're all uniquely creative and clever people who I probably wouldn't have met otherwise, so that's kind of the biggest Win for me. it's so cool knowing I have all these people I could DM out of the blue and be like "hey, would you mind looking over this short story/beta-ing this fic chapter?" and end up with some great insights. there's also an FAW Discord where anyone can kind of bring fandom- and writing-related questions to the floor, as well as share recs and self-promote projects (or in my case, recruit podcast guests who I know have been pre-screened for both their chill lack of pearl-clutching and their basic fiction-analyzing skills, lol.)
I would recommend the Fanauthor Workshop if:
you're a self-taught writer who's done most of your learning in the fanfiction space and you're curious about how writing is actually taught in academic settings
alternatively, you're a writer from an academic background who chafes at some of the more restrictive rules in traditional workshops/you're tired of the irl Guy in Your MFA -types who refuse to or can't engage with your work on its level
you're ok with doing some "homework" (writing two crit letters per week) on the honor system
you're down to read original work in a wide variety of genres/read fic from fandoms you're not in (maybe even fandoms/pairings/characters you don't personally like)
you like what you read in @oficmag
you wish fanfiction was taken more seriously as a craft
your favorite trad-published writers all seem to be workshop alumni (eg: I swear half of my favorite writers are Clarion grads)
you have work you'd like to publish and/or submit someday but you're not sure if it's ready/not sure where to start
you follow writing advice blogs or send them asks
you wish people would leave "concrit" (constructive criticism) on your fics
you wish people would leave concrit on your fics but you're worried they might be too mean or not "get" your work
you wish people would analyze your work and give critique without letting their personal value judgments get in the way (and you're ready to do the same in turn)
you worry your work is too niche, kinky, queer, romance-focused, or "weird" for a traditional workshop (note: but it doesn't have to be any of these things. people also workshopped gen and the equivalent of coffee shop AUs!)
you'd like to hear perspectives that don't come from cishet dudes
you enjoy Class Participation and discussions (or maybe you're no longer a student and miss that kind of thing!)
you think @bettsfic seems like a good teacher (spoiler: she REALLY is)
you like the idea of a creative writing class with no grades or possibility of "failure"
you'd like to meet people you probably wouldn't meet in any other setting, and make some cool friends from other fandoms
if even a couple of these bullet points sound like you, you'd probably get a lot out of the FAW!! I hope the next session of FAW-ers have a blast. I'll be lurkin the Discord rooting for y'all
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okay so what if mew *was* goh's first pokemon somehow - it chooses to stick around him for reasons unknown after that first time they meet, maybe he doesn't necessarily catch it but it humors him and listens to his commands for the most part. i'm thinking so hard about what Being Chosen By Mew At Six Years Old would do to his ego
OH MY GOD WHAT I LOVE THIS!!! THIS CONCEPT IS LIVING RENT-FREE IN MY BRAIN NOW
((ok tangentially before i get into this i just want to say in the deep lost osa pokemon au i haven't actually worked on in forever, this is exactly what happens to poseidon LMAO mew is my chaos analog so enter: 12 year old boy and his mythical drama cat dealing psychic damage to everyone within a ten-mile radius of them. mew is such a little shit of a pokemon so like. theres that))
anyway. GOH.........actually, i do think obviously this would over-inflate his ego quite a bit. but at the same time, i think it's important to consider that like...goh's confidence is a projection. he's incredibly insecure, and all of that has to do with his lack of relationships. if he were chosen by mew at a young age - and mew being a little chaos-wreaking jokester, too - would probably only make things harder for him. i don't think his friendship with chloe would survive it and i think that would mess him up in a lot of ways because on a deep, very human level like. of course he cares about her more than he cares about mew. but on the psychological level of someone with such a deep Need to be Special, i don't think it's something he could turn away from.
so in like this weird, complicated way - i think he would resent mew a bit? like this is a lot of pressure put on him suddenly! sure, mew listens to him for the most part, but it's also an incredibly powerful pokemon that likes to play practical jokes and sometimes takes it too far. goh is a kid who can't seem to connect with people. in canon, he blames other people for leaving him, because they think they're better than him or whatever. but on a deeper level, i think he has some awareness that it's something about him (i say this because in his relationship with ash, their arguments really centre around things that ash does "wrong" that goh caused himself, or otherwise also did "wrong" - especially their last big argument, where he had this idea of leaving and he was upset with ash for saying it first. because ash doesn't get to leave him. it has to be on his terms - i really don't think he's upset at ash's decision simply because he's afraid of being abandoned. i think he's upset more because he's been feeling Complicated about his own choice but it's such an easy decision for ash to make. if that makes sense? and it's the same thing at the beginning of jn, with the ivysaur. he's angry at ash for not listening to him, he's annoyed because ash is ignoring the fact that pokemon need to be able to do things for themselves. he's angry about this because if a person can help pokemon, a group of creatures he identifies STRONGLY with in lieu of like, actual human relationships lmao, then that means people can also help Him, but they don't. and he justifies this as needing agency more than he needs help. in 90% of their conflicts, ash did literally nothing lmao. i think goh knows this intrinsically). in this case, i think it'd be a little more complicated? like...undeniably, mew is at fault for the fact that people don't talk to him. and it's not just thinking he's weird or anything - they'd probably be a bit afraid of him.
so what would he do? he'd rationalize it of course and make it into a "good" thing. i.e. to deal with feeling like everyone is fucking terrified of him and his crazy pink monstrosity, he'd tell himself they're jealous, or in awe, of him. jealous, especially, with chloe i think. it would be a huge disconnect between them. it makes zero sense. she doesn't even want a pokemon - why would she be jealous? i actually think they'd become...pretty bitter enemies, lmao. but at the same time, professor cerise would absolutely not be ok with goh just. secreting mew away. a) that's a child whose parents are notoriously Not Around Much and b) that's a mythical pokemon that has not been very studied at all, really. so i do think that he would try to establish a connection with goh because well...that's his daughter's best friend and he knows the reason she's acting like she hates him so much is really because she feels hurt and upset at the fact that he's not really being a good friend to her, and also like. it'd be very clear that the pressure of looking after a mythical pokemon is way too much for a kid to deal with. even one who is as well-researched and "prepared" as goh (spoiler: he is not really prepared at all LMAO, he just thinks he is).
so the situation is kind of like...chloe has this extra layer of Issue with her dad because he wants to help goh even though he was a huge jerk to her and cerise knows that, but at the same time goh is even more isolated than in canon. in fact, he's probably of the opinion he doesn't Need friends because he has mew. mew is his friend and that's all that matters. does mew protect him? honestly, maybe. he's got Big Feelings and mew is a psychic-type, so it probably reacts to them on some level. that's a good reason for his peers to fear him (is he allowed to have a pokemon at school? probably not - so that would be why he'd just stop showing up LMAO). on the other hand, i actually think his parents would worry about him less because they think he seems very happy AND he's got a playmate who hangs out with him all the time and seems to look after him. they are not involved enough in his life to see that it's cause significant rifts between him and other people his age, and since he's on email terms with professor cerise, they probably never even find out that he and chloe aren't friends anymore.
all in all - he would be a whole different flavour of insecure, with the added bonus of like...he achieved something so great, but he actually isn't happy about his achievement because in many ways, it's making him miserable. he doesn't want to blame mew, even though he knows mew is to blame. idk if it's possible for him to become more cynical, but he probably would somehow.
i doubt he'd have a fateful lugia encounted with ash à la canon, but they could still meet in similar circumstances. maybe when cerise opens his lab, research done on mew would be like...something he specifically mentions. since ash was invited by professor oak to check it out, he'd meet the trainer who "caught" mew - and they would absolutely get into it beacuse goh would be crazy protective of his role as mew's Person, but lets be real...mew would take a real shine to ash LMAO. in a way, they might actually have more in common, except ironically ash is like undeniably Chosen One MaterialTM and absolutely refuses to claim the title becaue he's content being Just Some Guy (but who is nonetheless epic in a pokemon battle), meanwhile goh has the chosen one complex without...really being much of a chosen one. he would have to realize that he doesn't Have to be special, and that he can have both a relationship with a pokemon like mew AND with people, but he's got to be like. more aware of the fact that mew doesn't listen to him out of genuine affection and respect - and that's something he has to work to earn from it, in order to be listened to by it. i cannot think of anyone more equipped to help him learn that particular lesson than ash and pikachu tbh!
anyway yeah this would change a lot of things - it's worth noting that meeting mew for the first time was what kickstarted his obsession, so if mew stuck by him from that moment on, his obsessing would be of a very different flavour. at the end of the day though...he's still an insecure obsessive know-it-all (AFFECTIONATE. EXTREMELY AFFECTIONATE) so he'd probably still hole himself up in his room for research just as much as before, lol
#answered#pokemon#goh#*meta#GENUINELY...IF I HAD MORE TIME...this is a canon au rewrite id be SO interested in writing i love this#thank you!!!#this was fun to think about lol#edit: coming back to say TIME BE DAMNED I’M WRITING THE REWRITE#progeny
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Had a really valuable conversation with a friend today about like. the difference between dying on every hill and deciding in yourself what hills you're genuinely prepared to die on.
It is not a pleasant or self-flattering reflection to make. There are causes that I think are incredibly, earth-shatteringly important, even things which have saved my life personally, like abortion rights, which I would have to admit I would struggle to choose to burn my life for.
But if you're willing to give everything for every righteous cause - to lay your entire life on the line and risk blowing your whole shit up - then there comes a point where it was never really about the cause itself as about your own martyr complex. cause there will always be opportunities to blow your life up, but to be part of a sustainable movement it's got to be strategic and it's got to be focused.
there are things worth getting arrested for. there are things worth losing everything for. there are things worth dying for. but if you're putting yourself at risk of that you have to know what you're getting into and you have to have made a positive decision that that's a price worth paying.
and personally I don't think its feasible to fully take on the weight of that decision without it just being an urge to self destruction for more than a very small number of causes per person.
for me, I think it's easy to say what those are. Palestine, trans rights, migrant rights, and the abusive benefits system. those are not the only causes that matter to me, or even necessarily the ones which matter most, but those are the only ones I can say, hand in heart, I think I could cope with losing everything if it moved those forwards.
and so I was wondering why those things. and both the hills to die on and the reasoning will be different for everyone, and the reason isn't that those are the only ones that matter, or the ones that matter intrinsically most. for me though I am thinking about it and I think it's like. I cannot burn my life down in the name of abortion rights or rape redress or accountability for abuse because like. those things already took my fucking life and everything I have to lose, I built up to spite those systems of violence.
things like Palestinian liberation, trans rights and migrants rights - I have seen some of the depth and breadth of that impact but i haven't lost anything to those struggles that I don't choose to lose. austerity and the abusive systems of poverty have impacted my life severely but fundamentally I've never been in them with no safety line.
it would feel counterproductive to burn my life down for the things that I've worked so hard to build my life up after. Someone like me having the chance to live well is part of the point of fighting abuse or unwanted pregnancy. but there are things that are just as important and just as destructive, and where me living well is complicity not rebellion. and that's part of why those are the hills I'm willing to die on I think.
like fundamentally what we were talking about was kind of that a lot of people think they're willing to lay down their life for every vital cause. but when the metal meets the meat, they haven't actually prepared for the possibility that might happen. it's easy to say you'd give your freedom for every cause that matters, but you can't die a thousand times over.
And that's ok! We can have each other's backs. We may agree on all our political outline but have a different couple of hills we're willing to die on. I can't give everything for abortion but my friend can. He can't give everything for male survivors of rape but his friend can. His friend can't give everything for trans rights but I can. You know? I think it's better to acknowledge what we can and can't bring ourselves to risk sacrificing than it is to pretend we're infinitely capable of sacrifice, even if we want to be and even if we feel like we should be.
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i remember seeing your post about why bcs is better than breaking bad, with this last episode, how do you think it stands as an antithesis of breaking bad?
it's become even more obvious this season that better call saul is not at all the antithesis of breaking bad, even though it is the antithesis of the kind of antihero story breaking bad exemplified. both shows are about moral agency in the wild west. they assert choice as identity (you are what you choose to do) and ask whether those choices redefine you or just reveal who you are intrinsically. they're both about men who become the architects of their own destruction and about how one person's actions can trap others.
I think better call saul is doing it in a much sadder and richer way. jimmy is acting out of deflected love, in a system that gives him fewer options to succeed without bending the rules. walt is handed an out early on from his wealthy ex-partners, but he doesn't take it because of his pride. he does what he does for entirely selfish reasons: money, power, ego, control. I've seen some pushback against walt hate on the premise that it ignores the humanity in the writing or whatever, so let me be clear: walt sucks because he's written like a human being. he's terrible to his son and only dotes on him when he wants to feel like a big provider. he ignores and lies to his pregnant wife. his students don't like him. he thinks he cares about jesse, but he's manipulating him, and he's at his most affectionate when he has the most control over him. that's not real care. I do think in the later seasons it sometimes borders on ridiculous how loathsome walt can be, and he's not the best character on breaking bad (jesse, skyler, mike, and hank are all more interesting. marie and gus are cooler). but the writers took care to root the worst things about him in personality traits that clearly predated his little meth empire. this is not a good guy we caught at a bad time. this is a small man who's masked his bitterness in socially acceptable ways for years.
in better call saul the chain reaction is more tangled. jimmy takes the opportunities that he's given to change, and then he tanks them, and his self-sabotage is both a fatal flaw and a response to legitimate structural problems in the legal system. (the rules are harder to justify when those rules are designed to maintain a status quo that makes upward mobility so hard, makes forgiveness so hard. think of jimmy's speech in "winner": one teenage shoplifting incident will follow you forever. they are never, ever letting you in. he got a whole law degree, but it was from an online university, so should it count?) he's much more shaped by other people than walt is ("people tell me how they see me"). better call saul builds on the big ideas in breaking bad but really commits to making the world around the fucked-up guy fucked up too, and it makes the tragedy so much deeper. because ultimately it's still a story about personal responsibility, just as breaking bad is. even when you have no good options, you still have to live with your choices.
being a prequel pushes better call saul to be smarter (which is what I was saying in the post you mentioned). it makes the characters more reflective. shoutout to the new yorker article that pointed out what it does to the show that the actors look older, as if the characters are trapped reliving their pasts without the power to change them. jimmy believes his fate is sealed, and as a result we get to watch him seal it. it's agonizing. that's where better call saul diverges from the breaking bad antihero formula: there's no (lasting) thrill in watching him make bad choices because we know what they'll do to him in the long run. but rebuking the walter white problem doesn't make better call saul breaking bad's opposite; it just makes it a more fulfilling version of the same story.
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You know what's been driving me up the wall every time I catch a wiff of anti nonsense recently, the insistence that ace people never have sex and shipping a character that is ace(either just the person's head cannon or the rare time where it's actually cannon) is acephobic. What is it going to take to get it through these peoples heads that ace people can have and enjoy sex. Just because we don't have sexual attraction to people or experience sexual attraction in ways that are outside of the norm doesn't mean we all want nothing to do with sex, yes some ace people want nothing to do with sex and that's perfectly okay you do you but some of us do want to have sex for whatever reasons we choose. ALSO stop implying that everyone who's ace is also aro(I am but that's beside the point) let the people who are ace but experience romantic attraction live for fuck sake they exist and they walk among us it's not that hard to figure out that romantic attraction and sexual attraction are not intrinsically linked and peoples experiences of either are both deeply personal and extremely individualistic. This is all without even touching the fact that ace and aro can be umbrella terms and the people who use those labels don't necessarily not experience sexual or romantic attraction at all and may just experience it under a specific set of circumstances (hi me again) and saying that anyone who uses the label doesn't experience that kind of attraction at all is extremely alienating to a very large chunk of the ace and aro communities.
👆👆👆👆
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ok ok so if you like relating characters to classical myths…… what parallels do you think jet star makes?
ooooh okay, so, this was actually pretty hard to answer! theres a lot of characters where the parallels just jump out at me immediately and make so much sense in my brain and jts all just like. perfect (like party and icarus for example) but like, with jet ive never really given him much thought in relation to myths like this. i think bc hes already so intrinsically linked with the stars and the sky in my brain, i sort of see that connection as sort of the ultimate like. motif within his character. i never really related him to any other stories or anything like that bc hes always just been the sky and the stars to me
HOWEVER upon thinking about him with the specific context of classical muths in the mond, i have developed some Thoughts about... orpheus and eurydice. i know, i know, not really what i expected either but just hear me out okay
the story of orpheus and eurydice has always been one of my favorites; im a sucker for a good tragic love story yk? and ive always thought of jet star's character as, first and foremost, someone just filled with the most pure and genuine love for the world and everything around him. he falls in love with the stars and the sky as a kid because of stories his mother tells him, or because its the one constant in his ever changing life, or just bc he sees it as natures way of painting, of making art. he loves his crew in a similar way, where he sees them all as these sort of beautiful works, like these fucking blessings in his life that he never thought hed really get to have
he loves party and ghoul and kobra and the girl, and he loves his home, the desert, and the color and life that it brings. and so hes willinv to fight for them a till the ends of the earth, to hell and back
orpheus fails in his quest to get eurydice back, but i think the reason for exactly why is up to interpretation. maybe he doesn't trust that the deal he made was real, that she was ever behind him to begin with. maybe he turns around out of fear thats shes lost, or thats shes given up, or because shes begging him to look at her and he cant explain why he cant. wether or not jet star ultimately fails in his goals of saving his home and his family are also up gor debate, but i feel like no matter what he would consider himself to be a failure because he couldn't save everyone. i think he goes into bli's headquarters to pull his little girl out from hell, and hes so so sure that even if he doesnt make it, everyone else or at least someone else will along with the girl. he is going to save them all because thats what he does, he saves the ones he loves, he protects them and he goes down fighting.
and maybe as hes running towards desert with the girl and he chances a look back, thats when it fully hits them that no ones behind him like he thought theyd be. he failed and hes alone and suddenly hes eurydice falling behind the girl who trusts him to follow, and maybe hes icarus in a way, too, different from how party is because he chooses to fall instead
idk these were just my initial thoughts. just a whole lotta word vomit bc its like 1 a.m. and this is the first time ive ever really thought abt this in depth lol i might wake up tomorrow and completely disagree with all of this and write a response abt my ACTUAL answer to ur question (either way i will probably talk more abt jet and myths later bc i can im gonna be thinking abt this A LOT and im gonna have more to say later)
but yeah enjoy my thought process bc i was basically writing this down as shit came to me lmao
#asks#theres probably like a TON of super obviously parallels that im missing rn bc im Tired + when i think if them i swear ill yell abt it here#but for now this is what ur getting. i just took my first thought and kinda ran with it but i think it sort of fits. in a way?#if i articulate it right??#danger days: the true lives of the fabulous killjoys#danger days#jet star#ddttlotfk
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Y’know, I think we’ve done a special sort of magic the way we talk about cringe culture, and it’s a magic that we should probably stop.
We say with one side of our face that cringe culture is dead, and that people should enjoy what they enjoy, and that making fun of people for their interests is actually kinda fucked up. And then, with the other side of our face, we say that some interests are actually bad, and we justify our condemnations with whatever we need to in order to wash our hands of any implications that what we’re doing is somehow wrong or in any way disproportionate. In this way, we are not unlike the elementary school bully, picking on the weird kid who doesn’t fit in. And when later in life the weird kid becomes a socially isolated adult, susceptible to fringe political beliefs and never properly socialized with peers to intrinsically understand things like boundaries and contemporary morality and compassion, we claim “this person didn’t get bullied enough” or “the way this person turned out retroactively justifies the bullying they received.” This is, to me, a completely heartless thing to say and do, as well as a fundamentally broken worldview to hold, as it implies that it falls to the individual to, in isolation and with no assistance from a society, become an ideal citizen.
So how does this relate to cringe culture? Well, I would be lying if I told you that there are no people whose interests irk me. People who are just a little too into kpop and threaten critics with violence, fans of Harry Potter who have been told countless times of the antisemitism in the text and transphobia of the author, followers of certain streamers and gaming youtubers who are willing to excuse the mountains of instances of racism and sexism due to their charismatic presences; the worldwide web is full of people whom I would prefer not to interact with as a result of their interests and hobbies. But am I right to judge them for it?
To some extent, yes. It is both my right and my obligation to shape my online experience. If I don’t want to see Harry Potter content, it is my responsibility to avoid it by blacklisting tags or ignoring what I come across and refusing to engage with it. And I can certainly hold my opinions about these people and voice them to those who are interested, like saying that I am hurt that Harry Potter fans demonstrably care more about their fictional wizard than they do about their nonfictional queer siblings when they choose to engage with a work of fiction that the author actively uses the support of to justify her horrendous political actions.
But to some extent, no. I often see people say things like “Harry Potter fans never progressed past elementary school and can’t handle reading other books,” or “Harry Potter fans are so annoying about the thing they like.” And that is both extremely shallow for a condemnation of the work and completely disregards any actual reasons to dislike it. And even with the most legitimate of reasons, castigating and condemning strangers on the internet for liking a thing will only serve to either reject the society which so clearly despises them for the things they love or reject the idea of loving anything at all out of fear of rejection by the society they want to remain a part of.
This is a rambling mess. I won’t deny that. And my refusal to proofread anything that I do means the point of this may be somewhat muddled by how easily distracted I am. What I’m trying to say is either for practical reasons or out of basic compassion for your fellow human beings, we should restrict our criticisms of each others’ interests to the actual problems we have with them, rather than making personal attacks about the people who enjoy the thing, and we should refrain from being unnecessarily venomous when we do so.
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Because I think this needs repeating every so often and I’m too lazy to search for my own post:
Radfem is not the same as terf (terf is a subset of radfem, all terfs are radfems but not all radfems are terfs) but radfems still have shitty ideologies whether they’re trans exclusive or not.
Radfems are feminists who looked at the concept of bodily autonomy and decided it meant nothing to them. They think that sex work is not a labor issue and that sex workers should be “rescued” and never actually listened to or allowed to lead their own movements. They appear to not understand that some people can enjoy sexual things that other people find unpleasant, and as such they are opposed to kink and see all kink as intrinsically abusive. (They also tend to ignore kink that isn’t male top/female bottom, and they also ignore when female bottoms actively desire and seek out kink.) They are against porn — not in the sense of “the porn industry can be exploitative so this is a labor issue” but in the sense of “visual images of sex are intrinsically harmful to women.” They talk a lot about sexual assault and abuse, but exclusively in a male perpetrator/female victim way — never about abusive girlfriends/wives, or mothers, or teachers or nurses or female therapists or female caregivers of disabled people.
And radfems have a different definition of lesbian than anyone else. Literally. They define lesbian in terms of choices and relationships rather than in terms of orientation. And they think everyone else should use that definition. Which distorts their understanding of bisexuals, asexuals, people who prefer “queer” as a label, and people who fight for the entire acronym rather than just women who prioritize relationships with other women. Even radfems who aren’t super weird about trans women or who are themselves trans.
Many radfems are also weird about trans people in that they think that if a trans woman lived say 20 years as a guy and 20 years as a woman only those first 20 years matter, and that if a trans woman demanded she be treated as a girl at age 5 and socially transitioned at that age and never looked back and has literally never once in her life been treated as a cis man, her agab still matters more than nearly the entirety of her life experience. Which is fucking weird. And there are reasons terfs get singled out as unusually harmful to the community (ie, it’s not just wonky beliefs, it’s also active harm, from online bullying and doxxing to physical assault to lobbying for anti trans legislation) but uh, yeah, non-terf radfems also have incredibly shitty and harmful politics.
Anyways, non-terf radfem beliefs aren’t very coherent because the idea of transness being real hinges on the idea of bodily autonomy and the idea of consent, which terfs don’t believe in (see: fighting to crack down on sex work as being uniquely harmful to workers as opposed to, you know, people choosing which option under capitalism seems least bad to them at the time, see: frequently viewing all heterosexual sex as being fundamentally rape, see: viewing kink as being the same as abuse) and yeah, radfem beliefs are still incredibly fucked up and harmful even when they’re not explicitly transphobic.
Also, while in terms of word origins “radical feminism” comes from “radical” and “feminism”, of course, and at least some radfems are in fact conversant with Marxism, there are many strains of feminism and “radical feminism” is in many ways quite reactionary/fascist-istic, dunno if you want to blame that on horseshoe theory or having a movement dominated by upper middle class white people or what, but radical feminism isn’t the only or most coherent place to land if you want to have feminism inform your leftism or radical politics inform your feminism. Of course most feminism isn’t “radical” as such, it’s liberal to progressive, but … yeah, lots of us don’t think gender essentialism is particularly “radical”. Anyways, you can look into bodily autonomy (a perfectly cromulent radical concept) and sex positive feminism and intersectional feminism (which again usually isn’t radical as such but can cover a wide swath of “how do we feel about capitalism/heirachy/the state” positions.)
#hey guess what#I haven’t had terfs trying to argue me into their beliefs since I put up a leather flag on my blog#let’s see if that’s terf repellent or if I still get terf evangelizers#frankly most of the feminism I’ve been exposed to isn’t really radical as such so that’s the main weak spot in my argument#but god damn there’s nothing radical about gender essentialism#and there’s nothing radical about trying to control other people’s life decisions#tbf most of what I’ve read about anything isn’t radical
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I think I just realised what it is I dislike about dogs.
And it's not the creature itself. Dogs themselves are great! There's something very wholesome and joyful about saying hi to a dog and giving it a good pat and telling it what a good dog it is. I don't even mind spending an hour or three with a dog, I just wouldn't want the commitment of owning one (and for all their good qualities, cats beat them on every count that matters to me).
But no, what really disturbs me about dogs is the intensity with which people like them.
I know exactly what you're thinking when you first read that, and you're wrong. I'm AuDHD. I have both special interests and hyperfixations. Most of my friends are confirmed to have at least *either* autism or ADHD, and the ones who don't at least have clear traits of the other are the exception, not the rule. I have literally one friend who is neurotypical. We think. (You can never be 100% certain.) In life I am SURROUNDED by special interests and hyperfixations at various degrees of repression and masking.
One (1) of my friends is into dogs, insofar as he is a Dog Person who, at any given time, Has A Dog. His dog may or may not be one of his special interests, but he's super chill about it (some of his other special interests, he's not nearly so Chill about, and we love him for it).
Neurotypicals, on the other hand ...
There are very few things that neurotypicals get intense about, but the WAY they get intense about things is disturbing to me. It's never individual -- it always has to be Group-Approved and Socially-Affirming. And once it is, they start getting weirdly Superior about the value of the thing they like and how it's just a sign that you're a better person than someone who chooses differently. They learn to be subtle about it, but it's always there.
"Dog culture" has all of those things baked in. Cat people are like "dogs are fine, I just like cats more". Even when Dog Culture isn't outright saying "cats are HORRIBLE and one killed my niece!!", they'll still loudly say things like "cat people are introverted (derogatory)" and "cats are stuck up" (because having boundaries and sensory needs is about ego and hierarchy, apparently). But dogs are SO PURE, apparently, and if you ever dare say "actually I was scared of dogs as a kid", that's treated as a red flag.
(I'm not scared of them *now*, but I survived past the age of 4 because I got lucky. Ever heard of a cat - even a horribly abused cat with the world's worst owner - killing a person?)
You know who else is all about intense group affirmation, us-and-them-ism, and a complete lack of boundaries?
Cults. Those things feature heavily in cults.
Allistic people aren't known for Liking Things Intensely or very specifically. But just as it's possible for AuDHDers to have interests that aren't Special Interests(tm) or Hyperfixations(tm), there's this weird, allistic mirror of Special Interests. And the way allistics do Liking Things Intensely, ultimately, creeps me the fuck out in a unique way that the cringiest expressions of a special interest never could. It always has. And it's taken me literal decades to articulate this because the assumptions are so baked-in.
The assumptions that dogs are *better*, that cats are standoffish and uncaring, and that it's always NDs who are intense and weird.
Special interests and hyperfixations aren't immune to any of this, but for some reason it's *intrinsic* to allistic culture.
When autistic or ADHD people like things, we might get psyched - we might get fully into the halo-effect and into the virtues and importance of our Thing - but even when those interests are social, they still become defined by individual expression and unique positions, because the point of a special interest is not affirmation or cohesion. When neurotypicals Really Like Things, they form cults.
And they're always really cringe about it.
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"izzy wants to control blackbeard" is such a shallow reading of the text when like. half the time when we see them together izzy is literally trying to gently coax ed into doing his job
izzy DOESN'T want to control ed. he's BEEN the one making pretty much all the decisions, seemingly for some time, perhaps even years, as ed has declined and become more erratic
he doesn't want to control ed, but like. he doesn't want stede to control Ed either - he thinks that Stede will get Ed and everyone else killed
what Izzy wants is basically for Ed to not be mentally ill and to be in charge again, he wants Ed to have his own internal motivation that's also roughly connected to common sense and self-preservation - he misses the Ed to whom those things were intrinsic (or at least, thats how Izzy remembers it)
i don't think izzy is a good person, and he's absolutely jealous, possessive, cold, and nasty, but like. he isn't actually that cunning or intelligent. he's not creative like Ed is.
like, do all the people who despise Izzy not see how and why Ed keeps Izzy so close? why he trusts him so entirely even when Izzy is being a massive bitch?
when he pats Izzy on the lower back and says "need you here", that's not just some shallow, meaningless line, and it's not a manipulation either
when izzy snaps and resigns, Ed's SURPRISED
like. from Ed's perspective, Izzy is this unshakably loyal pillar in his life. Izzy comes to him and doesn't try to order him about, but suggests stuff kind of desperately until Ed says "fine" and they do something
for years, Izzy has acted as Edward's executive function, an external motivator - he still gets Ed to choose and make decisions wherever possible, but he needles and pushes at Ed to make the decisions in the first place, because otherwise Ed would just obsess over some little thing, or sink into one of his depressions
like. Izzy brings him his tea. Izzy. Look at Izzy. look what a dick he is. is that a man you imagine making tea for you and gently handing you the cup? setting the cup by your bedside and saying, "Edward, come on, it's been three days. just walk out on the deck and you'll feel better."
izzy couldn't survive without Ed, I don't think. he's unlikeable, he's a bitch, I think he makes a great boatswain or quartermaster, and he cares about a ship being in good repair, he actually cares if they lose crew (unlike Ed), he's efficient
but Ed wouldn't have survived as long as he has without Izzy. not because Ed isn't a genius, not because Ed isn't smart or intelligent, but because Ed is fundamentally disabled by the immensity of his mental illness
like, Ed and Izzy have this codependent fuck-up going on where Ed is a creative genius who's constantly depressed and wants to die, whether it's because he's bipolar, ADHD, just prone to depressions, whatever
Izzy has rage issues, but imo like. he's so obsessive, he's so incapable of remaining calm, and I think he's probably got some kind of anxiety issues on top of his evident self-loathing and masochism
and so they rely on each other. Izzy coaxes Ed out of bed while also bullshitting to everyone how well Blackbeard is doing, safeguarding his reputation - and Ed keeps Izzy on because Izzy is the only man he can trust to be a complete mess in front of and not risk his life...
until Stede. until Stede's crew. until Stede says, actually, its okay to not be okay sometimes. thats alright, isn't it? we all have bad days. I've had millions of bad days. but together, I think we can have some nice ones. shall we?
and they do.
and Ed is suddenly loved and supported by a huge group of people who see that he's messy and sad and dramatic and don't make a big deal of it but also don't make him hide it, they SUPPORT him very casually and easily, and also, there's ofc Stede
whereas Izzy spirals. because everyone's treating him like he's the way he is for no reason, but also like, acting as if he does what he does to hurt Ed, when from his POV like... he's been keeping Ed alive, and now Ed is throwing him away for these nice shiny people who are encouraging him to be weak and who will get him killed
this is why Izzy being in the wrong genre is such a thing, bc like. he cannot see this as anything but dangerous to all of them, but especially Ed
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Like, to follow up on that Insufferable DS9 People joke...I want to stress that I don’t personally endorse picking on New Trek series. Picard and Discovery and Lower Decks have all engaged me in different ways and pushed Trek in interesting directions (even if I found some of those directions infuriating) and I’m certainly going to keep consuming whatever narrative vegetarian mycoprotein Paramount throws fans like me.
But what I will say is that, for me, DS9 gets me in ways hardly any other tv series has. When we started watching it last year, amid all the cynical politicization of the pandemic and the police violence and...all that...I really wasn’t in a place to put my faith in institutions. So I appreciated DS9′s willingness to point out the ragged edges of the Federation, the ways its utopian rhetoric falls short. But DS9′s critical attitude toward institutions is coupled with a deep optimism about people. And this is why it’s become so important to me. The main cast is made up of people who fundamentally don’t want to harm other people, despite having to face the reality that some people do want to harm other people and that some power structures make it possible for those few people to do a whole lot of harm. Even Quark, who claims that every social relationship is an opportunity for exploitation, often ends up behaving in altruistic ways: he helps save the whole crew in Starship Down, he sets the resistance free during the occupation of DS9...And then you have someone like Kira, who in a lesser show might have been either forced to repudiate her terrorist past or, in a kind of Whedonesque twist, whittled down into a Badass Action Girl(TM), but who, in DS9, doesn’t have to do that. Doesn’t have to be that. She hurt people, yes, because that was the only possible response to an intrinsically violent colonial system, but she’s refused to make that capacity for violence part of who she is. Every time someone tries to get her to wax poetic about war (Thomas Riker, Dukat in ‘Return to Grace’, even--kind of--Jadzia, in ‘Blood Oath’) she’s emphatic: killing people kills part of yourself, even if, sometimes, that’s the only choice you have.
Anyway, I think it’s really unusual how DS9 manages to balance the individual and the systemic that way--to acknowledge that everyone has the capacity for harm, but that both intentions and power relations have a meaningful impact on the nature and extent of that harm. It allows the captain to collude in a murder in order to save the Alpha Quadrant, but never suggests that this one act makes him the equivalent of Gul Dukat. It acknowledges the neocolonial attitude of the Federation and yet never draws a false equivalency between the Federation and the Cardassian Occupation. It lets the good guys fuck up profoundly and still never dilutes the idea that there is not, in fact, Zero Difference Between Good and Bad Things.
IDK. When we started watching DS9 last year I was slipping into a place where I couldn’t imagine any kind of future, and while obviously it wasn’t the main reason I decided to stick around--Em is that reason, always and forever that reason--it did give me something else to hold onto. A philosophical touchstone, sort of. The Federation will always be a work in progress, was what DS9 told me, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting for. And if you choose to fight--DS9 told me--there’ll be a whole lot of people fighting alongside you.
#how star trek changed my life an essay in about a million posts#kira nerys#(let's be real this is mostly about kira nerys)#Les Damnés de la Galaxie#insufferable ds9 people#ds9#long post#sorry
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👀 PLease tell us your thoughts about the Jedi babies re-growing up among different cultural contexts.
Oh fuck okay
Context: original post, chrono
The specific post this ask is referencing: here
Summary of the AU: Disaster lineage got tossed back in time. Anakin stayed 21-ish, but Obi-Wan and Ahsoka got deaged, took new names for time-travel reasons (Ylliben and Sokanth, or Ben and Soka), are now staying with the True Mandalorians under Jaster Mereel because the Force said to, go back to the Temple after about a decade. They grabbed Shmi about three months after arriving.
So as far as the cultural background goes, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka had similar upbringings. She spent a few years on Shili first, but both spent the majority of their childhoods up to age 13/14 being raised in the creche. So that's the basis that they would default to, in a vacuum.
Nobody is raised in a vacuum.
Along with the Jedi cultural background, they're being raised by Tatooine natives in a Mandalorian environment.
Shmi and Anakin are both former slaves who have desert survival baked into their bones. The longer Anakin spends around her, the more his accent slips, the more he talks about old folktales, the more he uses idioms that don't exist on a cityplanet like Coruscant. All the things that he tamped down to be a Jedi come floating back to the surface, and Shmi's never known anything else. Anakin's knowledge of slave customs make her feel more comfortable, which in turn makes him feel better, and so on.
Mandalore is just... the culture they're living in. You don't grow up in a new culture with a new language without picking up on it personally. (Source: I moved to the US when I was a little under two years old.)
I think the thing I'm going to focus on as an example is the way each of these cultures approaches family, and then maybe how they approach the keeping of peace/what peace means.
Jedi: Where you come from means little, only the legacy you leave behind in your students.
Mandalore: You protect your clan and your children; adoption is a major cultural value, if not actually practiced consistently.
Tatooine: You can lose your family at any time, so you value what you have in all its forms. You don’t forget where and who you came from, to family of blood and family of choice alike. You cling to your memories and what little you still have of them, to what your master cannot take away.
These are all valid ways to approach family, and each of these approaches can have significant meaning to different people. But they do all, to a certain degree, conflict with one another, despite all three being fairly communal cultures.
The Jedi have a culture, one that’s built on a shared ability and religion over thousands of years. It’s not just an organization, but a continuous community with legends and traditions and art and records. But it’s one that is built on new blood coming in from the outside, volunteers who join because the religion speaks to them (near literally, given the nature of Force Sensitivity), given up by families who couldn’t or wouldn’t teach them in a way that let their talents flourish instead of pushing it all down.
For the Jedi, a culture built on people coming together due to something they have in common intrinsically that their families of blood do not, it makes sense to put emphasis on letting go of that past when they can, and to place importance on teaching lineages. It’s not just the official master-padawan pairs, either, but that’s the most obvious and easily paralleled element. Moreover, a lot of the Jedi culture is about gaining knowledge, so obviously spreading it is good, and also on supporting the galaxy to make it a better place; to view the Jedi order as a heavily communal culture would make sense, since their values are all about selfless betterment of the universe, which on a larger scale is about the galactic conflicts, but on a smaller scale is about supporting their own community, the children and the ill and elderly.
So that is the specific culture that Obi-Wan and Ahsoka grew up in, one that holds blood family as relevant but not particularly crucial to one’s identity, but is structured so people leave behind legacies through education in a manner that often becomes adoptive family (depending on your definition, I guess). Jedi are encouraged to connect to their home cultures, if not their families, with practices like the coming of age hunt for Togruta leading to the young Jedi taking a trip out to Shili to engage in that cultural milestone. This can also be viewed as a way for the Jedi to maintain personal connections to the wider universe, a (not entirely successful, but certainly attempted) way of keeping them from becoming too isolated and insular from the universe at large, and losing touch from what the galaxy actually needs of them.
They’re now growing up with two cultures that do place emphasis on blood and found family.
Mandalore, as presented in The Mandalorian, has their traditional values set as being heavily associated with their armor, battle skills, and childcare. While that’s clearly a set of values that aren’t actually followed by everyone with full sincerity, we can assume that these stated cultural values do have at least some impact on the way the society is structured, since we do see more traditional characters (Jaster, Din) adopt orphaned children and then have the Mandalorian elements of their immediate circles support that claim.
(We’ll ignore Jango and the whole clone army thing because the amount of Sith influence is up for debate and also holy trauma, Batman.)
However, we also see that a lot of Mandalorian culture is built on their family histories. On the New Mandalorian side, we see emphasis placed on the fact that Satine is House Kryze and that she’s a duchess. Her bloodline is relevant, though not the most important thing about her. On the Death Watch side, we have Pre and Tor placing emphasis on the fact that they’re Clan Vizsla, descended from Tarre, that this is important to why they deserve what the darksaber represents, this is part of why they not only deserve to lead, but should for the good of Mandalore.
Bo-Katan’s armor is a family heirloom. Boba’s armor was Jango’s, but before being Jango’s, it was Jaster’s. Armor is important enough to pass to family, but the family can be adopted. This all tracks.
The resol’nare specifies loyalty and care for the clan/tribe among the six tenets.
These two elements seem relatively well-balanced: the importance of adoption and the importance of family as a larger unit on the level of a house or clan.
And then you have Tatooine, which also balances blood and adoption, but for entirely different reasons, that being this: it can always be taken from you.
For all that a Mandalorian could historically expect their family to die in battle, and a Jedi could expect to lose their master the same way if things went poorly, those were usually choices. A Mandalorian was raised to walk into battle, and then they could make that choice to do so. It wasn’t often much of a choice, but they could feasibly turn their back and choose to be a farmer or a doctor or something, and support the people who went out to do battle instead of being the one on the field themselves. A Jedi could choose to be a healer or an archivist or join one of the Corps.
A slave does not get that choice. A slave can be killed or sold on a whim from their master. It’s not a one-time trauma, but an ever-present fear. Your parent, your child, your sibling, your spouse, all of them can be separated from you at any time. You can always lose them, and you have no choice but to grin and bear it, or try to run and die before you reach freedom.
In a context like that, I imagine Tatooine places a very heavy emphasis on family, both of blood and of choice, and on treasuring what you have while you have it. A person is always aware that they can lose whoever they have in their life, and so they make the most of their times together, have clear and consistent ways of expressing that love (I imagine primarily direct verbal confirmations and physical contact, practical gifts like water and fruit). Childcare is important, elders are venerated. Those who survived that far have valuable wisdom, and the children are to be given what happiness they can have before reality wipes that ability from them.
The family ‘networks’ among Tatooine slaves are smaller and tighter knit. There’s less trust for outsiders, but once you’re in, you’re in until you are taken away. Still, families are torn apart regularly, and often can’t contact each other after being separated if they’re sold far enough away, so families stay small because they’re always being broken up. Unlike Mandalore’s tribe/clan system, or the Jedi’s wide, loosely-structured community, Tatooine’s slaves form smaller groups that cling for as long as they can, and try to support each other. (There are selfish ones, of course, especially the newbies, but... well. Most try.)
Tatooine is also much more likely to assign a familial role (e.g. referring to an elder as ‘grandmother’). It’s not uncommon in the others (multiple Jedi refer to their masters as a parent or sibling, like Anakin’s “you’re like a father to me” line), but it’s not as baked-in that such a role should be given.
So on a structural level, we have two people from a community culture with little emphasis on blood family or formal familial roles are now being raised in a community that has them asking “what can you do for the people around you first, and then the wider world?” by people who tell them “your family, blood and found, is the most important thing you have; never let anyone take more from you than they possibly can.”
And that shit has an effect.
For all that Sokanth and Ylliben were once raised with a knowledge that their duty, their goal, was to better the galaxy as a whole, they are now being told that the community that raises them asks their loyalty back, because societies are built on support networks, and if you support the tribe, it will support you. There are parallels to that kind of thinking among Jedi, because it is basic social theory, but it’s not presented as the same kind of cultural value. It’s not given as something to strive for, just a basic fact.
This, for instance, means that once they’re back at the Temple, they have a tendency towards suggesting study groups and other ways of supporting people in their immediate circle, often structured in very unfamiliar ways. Again, this isn’t uncommon among Jedi, but it’s not done in the same way, or with the same emphasis. The Jedi also often approach problem-solving in a different order, so the step of “meditate on it and you may find your solution” often comes before “gather information from people who know more about it than you do,” while Ben and Soka have by this point learned to do it the other way around, because that’s what the Mandalorian system taught them: rely on your family first.
Meanwhile, the Tatooine element of their upbringing has them being much more willing to just... casually refer to ‘my dad’ and ‘my sister’ and so on. They use those words. It’s not just “my master is like a father to me,” but “this is my father.” They don’t hesitate to talk about the family they had and still have in Mandalorian space. None of the Jedi begrudge them it, really, but it’s always a shock to hear for the first time, and between the Tatooine refusal to pretend the connection is gone and the Mandalorian tendency to err on the side of roughhousing as affection, they’re just... odd. It’s not like none of the other Jedi know family outside the Order--some of the old books had Obi-Wan visiting his brother on Stewjon once in a while--or like none of the active Jedi are loud or boisterous, but the specific manner in which Soka and Ben interact with the Order, especially when their dad is around, is very weird.
More Soka than Ben, really, but that’s mostly just because Ben’s a very quiet person until he gets a little older, so it’s harder to notice on him.
Point is, while they still hold to their duty to the wider galaxy and will continue to keep that duty above almost anything else in their lives, the way they talk and act about the subject of family, especially in private, is heavily influenced by their new cultures.
This is already very long but I promised I’d talk about peace so let’s go:
The Jedi seek peace as an absence of war and conflict in the portion of the galaxy under their purview, in hopes that they will prevent as much suffering and death as they can.
The Mandalorians are varied, but Jaster Mereel’s group (which is the community the Skywalkers are with) is likely to view peace as unrealistic to achieve in the long term. They do not seek war, but they know the world they live in, and are prepared to protect against violence as their first resort. They always expect an attack, even if they don’t seek it.
The Slaves of Tatooine view peace as the calm in a storm. It is the status quo. Nobody has escaped tonight, for the guards aren’t searching, but neither is anyone dead. The Master you have is in a good enough mood to not sell you, to not kill you, to not beat you. Peace as an absence of suffering is impossible, so you seek for your master to be peaceful, that is to say: not raging at you.
The scope of each of these narrows significantly. From the known galaxy, to the wars that meet Mandalorian space, to the household one serves.
A community like the Jedi can choose to address peace as something to be sought on a large scale as an absence of war. They primarily function within the borders of the Republic, which has its problems but is largely structured to prevent such things from occurring until the Sith interfere. The Jedi have a structure that allows them to address peace as an ideal to be sought, at least within the borders of the territory they serve.
Mandalore, meanwhile, has been at war on and off for... ever. When they are not at war with themselves, they’re at war with someone else. ‘Peace’ is just the time between wars, and they know that if they do not attack first, they will be forced to defend. Jaster Mereel was known as the Reformer, and part of that was that instituting a code of honor, one that was intended to prevent Mandalorian warriors from acting as raiders and brigands, but rather acting as honorable hired soldiers, or taking roles such as the Journeyman Protectors. Given that, I imagine that he views war as something inevitable, but also something that can be mitigated.
War doesn’t touch Tatooine.
Oh, it might raise taxes and import rates. It might prevent visitors who come for the races. It can do a lot of things.
But to a slave, these are nothing. The only thing war does is affect the master, the person who chooses when their slaves get water, when they get beaten, when they are no longer useful enough to keep around or keep alive.
The peace of a slave’s live is dictated by how much abuse they are subjected to by the person who owns them.
What this means for Soka and Ben is... well, they are viewed as war-hungry by the people who don’t know them very well. They have armor. They focus on fighting, both with and without their sabers. They know tactics better than most masters. They claim that war is coming, and don’t seem too sad about it.
(It is a fact to them. War will come. All they can do is meet it. They’ve already done their mourning once.)
They also... well, Shmi tells them things in hidden corners. How to duck their head to hide the hate or fear in their eyes. How to watch for the anger in the tendons of a hand. The laugh of someone who enjoys the pain they’ve caused, not just the adrenaline of a fight. She is free, and so are they, but she has not forgotten how to hide in the shadows until the master’s ire has turned elsewhere. How to be small and quiet and unseen until the danger passes.
A Jedi’s first resort is words. Their second is their saber. But the Jeedai hold their heads high, and the Mandalorians do the same.
“You rely on the Force, and you have your pride,” she tells them, her hands on their own. “But there will come a time when you will not be able to remind people that you are free. You will not be able to say that you are a person, that you deserve the respect of a living sentient. Perhaps it will be a politician who treats everyone like that. Perhaps you will be captured by an enemy. Perhaps you will be undercover. You will not be able to fight, with words or with weapons, and you will have to know how to survive.”
Tatooine does not have peace. Tatooine only has survival.
And while Jedi fight for the survival and peace of the universe, they are refined and composed. Mando’ade fight like warriors of old, and Tatooine slaves fight like cornered, rabid anooba.
The galaxy comes first, but when the chips are down and the Sith come out to play, Soka and Ben do not need refinement, because they know how to toss aside their pride and live.
#Tatooine#Mandalore#Jedi#culture clash#star wars#the clone wars#Anakin Skywalker#Shmi Skywalker#Ahsoka Tano#Obi Wan Kenobi#Jaster Mereel#family#war#Phoenix Posts#Anakin and the Jedi Babies#Phoenix Answers Asks#I have no idea how accurate this is but it's what I'm working with
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Alright let’s talk GVK spoilers!!!
My reactions as best I can remember them!
- love how Kong is humanized from the very first scene, like every time he shows up he’s humanized so much more than other titans are. If that was at the expense of other titans being made likable I wouldn’t enjoy it so much, but like, Godzilla is made pretty lovable over the course of Monsterverse, Mothra is too, and all the titans featured for long are given recognizable emotions that let us see them as more intelligent and feeling than “just” animals; so all of them are made understandable/likable/sympathetic. But of them all, Kong is the only one really humanized. Which makes sense, because like, big monkey! Basically our distant cousin!
- And they kept playing, like, normal songs for him, which cracked me up.
- I really appreciated how you could SEE the titans in this movie. After all the weather effects to hide the titans in KOTM, there was such a clear difference in this one from the very start. Kong in the daylight! Godzilla makes his first attack at night, and even then you can see him much more clearly than you can for most of KOTM! Nice!
- after the Iwi were portrayed as silent stoic witnesses in Skull Island, I really appreciated that they took an Iwi character, made her a main character, and gave her dialogue and a real role to play in the story while also keeping her deaf/mute. I think that was a good way to improve on the way that the Iwi got got sidelined in the last movie while still maintaining the worldbuilding!
- I didn’t appreciate so much that, y’know, they murdered the rest of her people off-screen in order to do it. Couldn’t they have gone “her parents died so she got adopted by a Monarch agent that was close to her family, but like, the rest of her tribe is fine”? Or at the very least “their island got fucked up so they had to be evacuated but like they’re settling in somewhere else”? “They’re living under this island dome with Kong and they know what’s up and Monarch’s keeping them in the loop and they decided they’re chill with their new dome home, but this one girl likes to go on adventures with Monarch”? Something? Did we have to kill them all off? Y’all make up an entire fictional indigenous culture and then murder them off-screen when you don’t need them? Just let them live.
- a few minutes in I was like “hold on, we’ve got two characters that speak sign language, we’ve got a giant gorilla, gorillas learn sign language, is there any reason they can’t teach Kong?” and then later I was like “OOOOOH!!” Humans and titans learning how to communicate with each other has been one of my favorite themes to explore in Monsterverse fanfic so I was absolutely tickled to see it getting explored in canon, too.
- That said I think it’s hilarious that the girl managed to teach Kong to sign without, like... anybody seeing. Kong’s hands are above the tree line and there are cameras everywhere, how did NOBODY with Monarch see him signing.
- Bernie’s weaponized being an annoying coworker to such a degree it can only be called an art, and I really appreciated it.
- Godzilla’s extra chonky in this movie and I dig it. Roomie noted he was extra crocodilian and I dig that too.
- “There’s been no confirmed titan sightings in three years” I don’t buy that for a minute. They’re BIG. Rodan NESTS IN VOLCANOES. They found a MOTHRA EGG. Humans have A SCARILY WELL-FUNDED ORGANIZATION DEDICATED SOLELY TO FOLLOWING TITANS AROUND. Like, most of the lore in GVK that I don’t personally like, I can be like “eh... I can tweak it just a little bit with headcanons to make it work for me...” but NO confirmed titan sightings? You expect me to believe ALL of them moved underground when we’d previously seen them all prefer to live above ground? You expect me to believe that now that they’re all AWAKE, they learned how to HIDE?? Uh-uh. And at the end of KOTM there was stuff in the credits about using titan droppings as biofuel, obviously they’re still walking around up top! Can’t take that from me. Nope.
- Who the FUCK is Ren Serizawa and how is he related to Ishiro Serizawa? IS he related? Maybe they just dropped the surname as another “yeah this is a Godzilla movie for Godzilla fans” easter egg but I have a hard time believing that he can’t be somehow related to the other character with the Very Important Last Name who was so important in the last two Godzilla movies. If he is related I’m sure it’s been explained in a tie-in comic or the novelization or something, I’ll look it up later.
- I had to look up how much weight huge battleships can carry while writing a KOTM fic where Ghidorah hitches a ride on one, and y’all, I had to pull weird gravity-negating magic to get him to ride on that boat. Godzilla and Kong woulda sunk that boat like a rock. All I could think during that scene is “this wouldn’t work and I know that because I DID THE RESEARCH and I wasn’t even getting PAID.” I’ll choose to believe that Monarch gets special heavy duty ships designed to carry titans but nobody mentioned it because it wasn’t relevant to Kong’s journey.
- The bit where they could see where Godzilla was swimming because he’d got half a ship hooked to him that was bobbing around on the surface, didn’t Jaws do something like that with a buoy? It’s been ages since I’ve seen Jaws. Anyway good reference.
- Insert “they’re gonna need a bigger boat” joke
- I LOVED the part where they shut down all the ships to get Godzilla to leave. Both because, one, it’s a spectacular callback to KOTM’s “turn off all the guns so he knows we’re not a threat” that makes it seem like now that’s just what Monarch knows what to do to get G to chill out, and two... we know that Godzilla backs off either when he’s killed his enemy or when his enemy has yielded to him. At the end of KOTM—and the end of GVK—the act of yielding is presented as very ceremonial and uniform across species: everyone lowers anything they’ve got that could be dangerous (claws, fangs, beaks, axes) and bows to show Godzilla they’re not gonna fight. Battleships, obviously, can’t bow, but even without being inducted into whatever secret titan cultural intricacies might be going on, humans have figured out their own way to “bow” to Godzilla: cut all the power, so their ships can’t move and can’t use weapons. I know the movie presented it as “playing dead,” but c’mon, if Godzilla could hear MechaG power up from halfway around the planet then he could hear that Kong’s heart was still beating, and he’s been around enough boats to know humans can turn them off and on when they want. The humans bowed to Godzilla. He accepted that they yielded and left.
- Mark Russell looked like such a dad in this movie, like he’s retired 100% from being a rugged action hero and now he’s just Pure Dad. I like him better when he’s a dad, it’s a good development for him. He got like 3 lines and I’m like “I appreciate this character development.”
- Despite all my qualms about how conspiracy theories and extremist groups are handled in Monsterverse (and WHICH conspiracy theories they decide to reference), I really love Madison and Bernie’s dynamic. The adult man who’s the excitable wide-eyed believer in every BS conspiracy you can possibly imagine; and then the serious, severe Teenage Girl On A Mission who’s hypercompetent because she was raised for five years by a friggin doomsday cult militia; and despite having wildly different personalities they’re just, in total agreement about everything. Handled just a BIT differently (like, leaving out the more gross IRL conspiracies) they would be a wildly fun comedic duo—especially with Josh the Only Sane Man coming along as the hapless sidekick. And they all play off of each other so well! Both in a comedic sense, and in more serious moments—when Bernie talked about his wife, there was a real moment of empathy between him and Madison with very little said. I’d watch an entire movie just about the three of them. I’d watch a TV show.
- On the one hand I wasn’t too much of a fan of KOTM’s “all titans... are inherently In Tune With Nature... nature has a Balance, because that’s a Real Thing and not an anthropocentric concept to describe how we like nature to act, and they automatically restore it... because they’re like, some kinda borderline divinities or something... we should probably be worshipping them...” thing; but, now that it was totally absent in GVK, I sorta miss it. Like I feel like there needs to be a balance, a few humans who are like “i lowkey worship these dudes?” and a few others who are like “they’re cool but like, that’s a lil extreme” and that neither side be presented as Right in how they regard titans’ relationship with nature.
- “All titans come from THE HOLLOW EARTH” nah I don’t buy that it’s silly. Basically, what I object to is the idea that all titans have some sort of intrinsic similarity (they all come from the same hitherto-unknown location; they all are part of the same pack that has the same alpha; they all are fueled/fed by the same energy source; etc) rather than letting them be SEPARATE species whose only unifying traits are “they’re all big enough to fuck everything up everywhere they go” and “they’re big enough that the typically-insurmountable barriers between different biomes (mountain ranges, valleys, long distances with terrible weather) aren’t insurmountable for them, so even if they’re specialized in different environments they still all have to deal with each other pretty often.” I’ll make some exceptions for convergent evolution (i.e., claiming multiple titans developed similar traits that are relatively easy to spontaneously evolve and a prerequisite for a creature to survive at such a large size). But I can’t buy “this big gorilla has more biologically in common with this big crocodile-iguana than he does with, say, gorillas,” or most of the other “all these titans have THIS IN COMMON” claims that Monsterverse makes, including “everyone’s from hollow earth.” So I’m tossing that out the window and substituting my own headcanons. Some might’ve evolved there but some evolved on the surface. Maybe a majority of them like ducking in and out of the hollow earth like some kind of titan shortcut system. Kong’s species, I can buy, IS native to hollow earth, considering that they built a whole-ass society down there with tools and architecture.
- I’m SO curious about the little underground Kong home, the Godzilla motif in the floor, and the axe that appeared to be made with a Godzilla scute. What’s the story there??? We know Godzilla’s species and Kong’s species are ancient rivals. Is it because Kong’s species hunted Godzilla’s to steal their scutes to make weapons, seeing them as a valuable resource the way, like, early humans considered woolly mammoths a valuable resource—thus making that Godzilla on the floor equivalent to cave art of mammoths made by people who hunted them—until the Godzillas got pissed and started fighting back en masse? Or were Godzillas and Kongs already enemies when Kongs decided to start making weapons out of their corpses? Did they use to be allies, fighting together, with Godzillas voluntarily offering shed scutes and/or bones of their deceased members to Kongs, and that place used to be a shared home until they started fighting?
- What about that power source, is it something that was already there that both Kongs and Godzillas started to deliberately harvest for technology/atomic breath? Or did Godzillas automatically channel that stuff and Kongs exploited/borrowed/traded with Godzillas to utilize it too? Or is the power from Godzillas who collaboratively poured a bunch of power into the place thus that Kongs were able to use it too? I doubt Godzilla’s species CREATED all that weird energy but the question remains of whether, like, they channel it FROM underground, or naturally produce the same thing in their own bodies, or what.
- Godzilla using his atomic breath to dig a hole STRAIGHT TO KONG just to KICK HIS ASS is hilarious. How lucky that Hong Kong just HAPPENS to be straight over Kong’s house! Were all the tunnels to the hollow earth made by pissed off Godzillas who wanted to kick monkey ass??
- I loved the aesthetic of the battle scene in Hong Kong, with the brightly colored neon building outlines, VERY cool look. The choreography of the battle scene was great too, especially
- we literally broke into applause when Kong shoved the axe handle in Godzilla’s mouth. Love it, perfect callback, that was the ONE thing from the original King Kong Vs Godzilla I was hoping to see referenced and there it was.
- You could really see a difference in how Kong and Godzilla fought—Kong doing a better job at using tools and the environment, Godzilla fighting more like a reptile. They seemed to emphasize Godzilla’s more animalistic behaviors in this movie to accomplish that contrast—he was down on all fours and moving like a crocodile more often, he was clawing at Kong’s chest—but even though it seemed a bit different of a combat technique it also didn’t seem out of place compared to how he fought in prior movies. And we’ve already seen that if Godzilla’s involved in a fight and one of the combatants knows how to use the environment, it’s typically not gonna be Godzilla. (See: Ghidorah using the reflection in a building’s windows to see what’s behind him, and recognizing a nearby power source and biting it to juice himself up.)
- So many of Godzilla’s enemies seem to have specialized in negating his atomic breath in order to combat him! The MUTOs directly suppress his ability to use it—and it makes sense that that’s an inborn ability they have, since they evolved to use Godzilla’s species as prey. Kong has a weapon that both acts as a shield to absorb the breath and turn it back against Godzilla’s species—they didn’t evolve to counter Godzilla, but they developed tools once a rivalry happened. Ghidorah’s the exception—which makes sense, since he came from space—but even at that we see him using tactics specifically to take into account Godzilla’s most powerful weapon (such as keeping one head on lookout for when he starts glowing so that they know when they need to dodge).
- LOVED the reveal that MechaG was based off of Ghidorah’s brain, it has vibes of both the Kiryu Saga and the way that Heisei MechaG is based off of Mecha-King Ghidorah. Not the most surprising plot twist, since we’d theorized that they might use San to make MechaG, but I wasn’t 100% sure they were gonna go with it until they finally did. Even when I was going “huh, the mecha pilot’s chamber looks weirdly organic” I didn’t make the connection to WHY until the reveal, lol.
- “Ghidorah’s necks are so long that the heads have to communicate with each other telepathically” that’s COMPLETELY WILD but I love it, it follows very well from their prior portrayal as telepathic empaths in Heisei, it lines up with their emphasis on electricity (because BRAINWAVES AND ELECTRICITY, hey ho movie monster pseudo science!), and it very much compliments my own private headcanon that they’ve got some psychic/mind control abilities.
- The movie ended with both “Godzilla won, technically” but also “since they teamed up as equals, the ending doesn’t FEEL like ‘Godzilla wins, Kong loses’ but rather ‘they both won against a common foe’” and since I’m on both Team Godzilla and Team They Should Be Friends, I’m happy with this outcome. Plus since the last time they fought, the Japanese movie company graciously let the American monster win, so it’s only polite that the American movie company graciously let the Japanese monster win.
- There were just a few too many humans in this movie. I was intrigued by Ren but we didn’t get much out of him, but like I guess somebody had to be in the pilot’s seat other than the Apex CEO. Didn’t care for the author of the hollow earth book, I feel like his role was superfluous. Didn’t need the Apex CEO’s daughter there at all, coulda done without her. How about this, combine all three roles. Instead of having a whole-ass author who knows about the hollow earth, just casually reference that Rick from KOTM wrote a book about it since he was the expert, and (since he wasn’t in this movie) say that he tragically died going to explore the hollow earth himself, and that way we’ve got the book with the “titans are from there” theory AND an excuse to share the “humans die when they go underground” info. Now, have Ren be working for Apex as a pilot for Mechagodzilla, but have him be MechaG’s pilot because he’s also a good pilot in general, and can fly those HEAV things. Have Apex send him to Monarch to be like “hey, you guys trust me right, since I’m Ishiro Serizawa’s relative? We at Apex have heard all about your failed hollow earth expedition, and due to Ishiro I’ve got some past ties to Monarch so I’ve got high clearance with y’all, so I could bring over this useful Apex tech that’d let you go underground and use what I know about hollow earth from my past time at Monarch to help guide things.” Once they’ve got the little chunk of energy stuff and go topside, he hustles it straight to Apex and straps into his seat to run MechaG. Bam, you’ve combined “person who knows enough about hollow earth to help the expedition,” “person who represents Apex’s interests and gets the energy,” and “person who pilots MechaG” into one character, in a way that takes three flat/underdeveloped characters and turns them into a single interesting character with a lot going on and some intriguing ties to the rest of the cast.
I think that’s everything?? Hoo.
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