Been a weird day. I'm gonna pass out soon.

When I was a kid, I regularly lost reading privileges for "having an attitude" and "acting out".

It wasn't as simple as being told not to read during other activities- one of the first times it happened, I remember being six years old, watching my stepfather pull fistfuls of books off my bookshelf and throw them to the floor in a heaping mess while I cried and asked him to stop.

It was weird. Every other adult I knew described me as exceptionally well-behaved, but at home, it was the opposite, and it was blamed on "learning bad habits from that shit you're reading".

Because I couldn't read at home, I spent all my free time at school in the library, reading with my friends.

When I grew up and moved away, I realized that my family life was toxic and abusive, and the "attitudes" I was being punished for were standing up for myself, standing up for my younger siblings, and resisting actual, real-life psychological abuse. Because I'd learned from what I'd read that my family wasn't normal, not like my parents said it was, and in my stories, the heroes were the people who spoke out when it was hard to.

It is insane to me that there are students right now who can't access books. It is insane that books are being outlawed. It is perverse that we are stealing away an entire generation's ability to contextualize their lives, to learn about the world around them, to develop critical thinking skills and express themselves and feel connected to the world or escape from it, whatever and whenever and however they need.

That is not how you raise a compassionate, thoughtful, powerful society.

That's how you process cattle.

It's fucking disgusting.

i randomly made this connection in my head aND NOW I CANT UNSEE IT

I, personally, like the fact that the only reason Zelda was able to turn back to a human was because Link was too clingy

I’ve seen a few posts pointing out how stampede vash lacks the anger that 98 and especially trimax vash has. Which is true.

And it is important. Because vash isn’t the too morally strong or good or kind to be angry or whatever. Vash has a lot of rage about a lot of things. he chooses to be kind despite it rather than not being angry at all.

His sheer determination to not give into anger and choosing kindness over and over again is very important to who he is.

(personally I think that while tristamp vash went through a lot already too, he simply has not quite reached that point)

What I haven’t really seen are post pointing out that stampede vash, unlike 98 and trimax vash, does not cry.

Vash cries a lot. Some of it is for the comedy and because he is dramatic like that and also he isn’t above trying to get pity that way (with little success lol).

But he also cries a lot just… because. I don’t know how to explain it.

Like vash has no shame or inhibition to cry when that’s what he feels. Not gonna lie, I know trimax mostly from spoilers so far (shame on me) but especially in 98 vash cries very freely. He cries when he thinks he will have to watch that ex-mob boss or whatever being shot. Cries after killing, cries after monev kills all these people and he wants to shot him but wont. And so so many more.

Like that time he just suddenly drops his donuts and cries in the middle of the street.

Vash is friendly and sociable on a surface level but he has cut himself off from so much. Keeps so many things on the inside. Crying seems the one thing he doesn’t hold back on. Maybe his only genuine outlet for the pain.

Vash hides his scars, his pain and much more but he never hides his tears.

Vash, in 98 even says ‘is there something wrong with that?’ when the kids note that he is crying despite being an adult.

In contrast to that, stampede vash never really cries. He even states that he doesn’t deserve to.

We see him shed tears just once, at the very end when it becomes clear to him that he can’t save nai and that his brother and him have grown so far apart that he barely recognizes him anymore. He sheds silent tears for nai, for them, at what he certainly believed to be the very end.

Stampede vash is not only a lot more timid than his counterpart but seems overall more repressed and and emotionally dulled/exhausted

thinking about how rdr2 is about redemption yes, but also about loyalty to what matters, love of family, and the consequences of both. arthur loved dutch, loved him enough to follow him to hell and back, but not enough to remain blindly loyal when dutch betrayed him and john. he put his love of his brother above the love of his father, because his father taught him well, taught him the importance of family. if not for dutch and hosea raising arthur to believe in the importance of loyalty to what's right, if they had just raised arthur as a mindless outlaw, if they hadn't instilled in him the meaing of family, he likely wouldn't have cared about john enough to betray the man who saved him. for example, bill and javier weren't raised by dutch and hosea like arthur was, but they were loyal to him all the same. they weren't treated like dutch's children like john and arthur were. because the values of family and of right and wrong weren't instilled in them alongside the value of loyalty, they sided with dutch despite his fall from grace and remained blindly devoted to a man who no longer deserved it. but because dutch and hosea taught arthur and john the importance of thinking for themselves and choosing what was truly right as well as the importance of family, they realized that dutch was going down the wrong path and causing senseless deaths with his recklessness, and arthur and john decided they had to leave. arthur knew he was never going to get out, but he at least wanted his little brother to have a semblance of a life away from the gang. he wanted him to have a chance because he loved him, because they were raised together, and because they were raised as a family. dutch had a huge hand in his sons betraying him, not only because he drove them away and betrayed them himself, but because he and hosea raised them right!!

some daan marcoh doodles around some dialogue bits I hit in game haha - gave me some thoughts on how one could think of daan if you only bumped into him at certain points? I don't remember the lines exactly but there were a few like this? 'Are you moving on? I guess we'll split ways here.' 'Someone has figure out how to treat these people...'

'You were very heroic stepping in there.' 'In the dark, your thoughts can really get to you out here...' 'Am... I... still a good man? Or...'

sasuke being painted as The possessive one of the relationship when that’s not shown in canon and people mostly use panels out of context (i saw “my one and only” or “i know your heart and you mine” being used to prove him being possessive which is ???) but somehow naruto that actually has moments he shows to be possessive are not counted. but like even without them, if you analyzed their relationship you would realize it does make the most sense for naruto to be like that unlike sasuke. because naruto has abandonment issues already with sasuke, sasuke did left him and cut him off once and left naruto really traumatized (even if it’s not sasuke’s fault, it’s still one of the biggest sources of naruto’s pain) so him being scared sasuke could leave him again and the urge to keep him makes complete sense. on the other hand, sasuke has never felt that loss, naruto has constantly chased and picked him over everyone including his own goals over and over. and his fears about love turning into grief if he lost naruto are quite literally shattered by naruto himself in vote2.

throws up my hands in mock resignation but also a hint of frustration Okay Valentino is a cool villain I guess

He's like. Genuinely unsettling. Wish the show struck a better balance with his character sometimes (like sometimes when he's onscreen I have to skip over because I feel queasy and sometimes he's so unsubtle he feels more like a prop than a guy who's going to be a Huge Deal in s2)

One of the most gratifying things about getting older is being secure in both my American and Iraqi identities. Like I used to think that I had to compromise one for the other, or that being half of each would always make me “diluted,” but I’ve never been more comfortable in my Arabness while simultaneously not caring for the western gaze & just making peace with what it means to be Iraqi American. Like I feel so lucky for my Iraqi heritage every day and I know that’s sadly not a feeling all Arabs experience……. But I cannot imagine being anything else and nor would I ever want to be

Been meaning to post about this AU I made like 2 days ago so here it goes-

MIND SHATTER

A radiostatic AU (kinda?)

This is basically just me writing down what the basics of the AU is, some things still aren’t fully solid? Ya

After an incident that included some of Vox’s screen being shattered/cracked; Alastor hasn’t heard much from him and you think he would be glad, which he is..except for when he hears literally nothing from the vees or anyone, no new VoxTek advancements, no nothing and all of a sudden he becomes rather concerned.

Alastor goes out trying to search for Vox, he finds him, his unconscious body lying in a nearby alleyway, he’s powered off. Which is somewhat odd to Alastor. Despite him not exactly caring, he decides to take Vox into his part of the hotel (the radio tower) and goes to try and turn him on. Suddenly, Vox turns on, Alastor is about to throw him out but something about him seems..odd.

He doesn’t recognize Alastor, or where he is, doesn’t recognize any names that Alastor mentions towards him, Vox seems more undisturbed by Alastor than anything, finding his apperance and everything weird, he doesn’t even seem to acknowledge the TV head, trying to do things with his head that he can’t exactly do because he doesn’t have a human head.

Alastor eventually peices together that Vox’s memory has been wiped, being reverted to basically a blank slate or what he was like more or less when he was human. So, what does Alastor do?

WELCOME TO THE MIND SHATTER AU! An AU I literally made based on a sentence a character said in something I was watching

This is basically Vox’s memory completely wiped, being sent back to how he was when he was alive and Alastor having to navigate around that while also trying to keep Vox safe because it turns out he kinda cares or something.

Im still Building this AU but if you would like to hear more about it, please let me know<3

3l!grian is frequently depicted as a tragic figure and sometimes i wonder if we even watched the same series

I know it's not exactly groundbreaking or anything but man. Mothwing's Secret!Hawkfrost is literally so fucking interesting to me and I love it. I will take this Hawkfrost over his other incarnations in a heartbeat. I don't care if he's being "woobified" or whatever here, him being a guy who was ultra paranoid because he was treated as lesser for not being clanborn and that leaves him vulnerable to manipulation and ends up twisting him into a terrible person and ruining his relationship with the one cat he could unconditionally confide in is so much more interesting than him being a generic "evil twin" that is evil just cause and who is mean to his sister cause that's what evil people do. Idk I very much prefer MWS having Hawkfrost seem desperate and almost guilty for faking the moth wing sign, because a moon had passed and his sister was hanging on a branch and he was genuinely terrified they'd both get kicked out, and then confessing to her cause she was so elated and living on a lie and he couldn't not let her know the truth, vs Hawkfrost evilly smiling and laughing when he tells Mothwing he faked the sign and being like "lol LOSER you thought StarClan existed and liked you lmao cringe I only did this for The Power ha ha fuck you"

If you go with the theory that Dazai came from a super rich family and changed his identity once he was no longer with them, what if Bruce had met Dazai before he was Dazai?

Lol the whole "rich old-money Tsushima family" theory is very beloved to me, though im not sure how true it will end up. I have this inkling that Dazai's backstory is Not as dramatic as other's characters, but also at the same time!

Theory that Dazai was a rich kid with his parents having been tied in some way to the mafia (just like the Wayne family!) and then they suddenly die and at somepoint he is put under the care of Mori who's a trusted personal doctor of the family (and runs an underground clinic JUST like Leslie Thompkins, the Wayne's trusted doctor who runs an underground clinic on Park Row), and gosh thinking abt this potential backstory, dont you think about how if Alfred wasn't around, and Leslie was more of a control freak, she and kid Bruce would have marched up to Carmine Falcone's bedroom, slit his throat, and taken over the biggest organized crime family in Gotham. Oh. That's a cool batman au wait.

Ahh well anyways. Bruce meeting kid Dazai sometime during his misc. time going around the world and learning different fighting techniques and kid Daz or Shuuji or whatever being the. troubled. kid he is gets absolutley facinated by Bruce's quest for justice or whatever.

What light through yonder window breaks?

I am a Moth, and Juliet

✨ is the Lämp ✨