stupid question… and a little personal. If you don't want to, you don't have to answer. Since my teens I've always had some sort of dark circles under my eyes, probably because of genetics. I remembered that you had spoken in a very old Twitter post about this and the beauty industry. How did you manage not to bother with your dark circles anymore? I've never really cared about my dark circles, but for some reason I've been pretty anxious about them lately.

I don't think that's a stupid question. Long reply bc Idk how to keep it to three sentences or less.

Hmmm I understand. The truth is, I just resolved to like them and appreciate them. I did that with my nose, my hair, and skin tone as well (my undertone is olive and tans brown, esp as a kid, which I was made fun of for believe it or not lol). I looked at the media and had to acknowledge it for what it was-selective standards and photoshopped models. It represents a fraction of what the world has to offer in terms of appearance and puts the same few beauty standards on a pedestal, and even those few things are photoshopped to hell to match more similarly (literally not an exaggeration). Another thing I did that helped a lot as a kid was that I would ALWAYS draw myself as accurately as I could and include features that I didn't necessarily like at the time and somehow doing that really made me feel like I was uniquely me- because I am. Things like my eye circles or my prominent nose are parts of me that separate me from the next person, who have their own features too. I'm not saying I'm more unique than the next person, I mean to say that it's very nice to look like yourself. You're the only you, as corny as that sounds lol Drawing myself was sort of an exercise in self love (sounds dumb) and it did help me to develop confidence and appreciate myself. I know that its hard bc a lot of people are easily persuaded into thinking that these beauty standards are factual. Those are the same people who hated freckles bc media said they were ugly, but as soon as they were trendy those same people started to give themselves semi-permanent freckles lol SO I MEAN, I wouldn't worry much about THOSE people. There are a lot of them, but for me, I've never gravitated towards them so what they think doesn't bother me much. In school, being picked on sucked but I didnt LIKE those people picking on me so that helped me stop caring about their opinions too. For me, it came down to acknowledging that my features dont need to be represented to be attractive or cool and I don't need anyone's approval to exist. I found ways to appreciate my features and grow to love them. + If anyone picks on you etc, its helpful to remember that those people have two brain cells max and that's their struggle. Wow this is long and maybe unhelpful idk??????????? I have so much more to say about beauty standards from various periods in human existence (like how small lips and small dicks were considered beautiful) or about how they vary around the world (In japan, its cute to have puffy eyes and girls do their make up to give themselves that appearance) etc Not to mention I could pop off about the tiktok trend where people LITERALLY USED MAKEUP to give themselves dark under eye circles lol But it's not relevant I suppose. TL;DR You're good how you are, fuck the rest :~)

i think simon does end up physically back to where he started, mostly because i really want to explore the idea of simon emotionally hurting himself by trying to draw a line between himself and ice king. because the thing is that even if hes physically back to normal, he still is mentally afflicted by the remains of magic insanity and all the memories of those 900 years. hes extremely forgetful. he loses his temper more easily than before, or will start crying for reasons beyond his understanding. his physical coordination isnt as good as it was before. he feels godawful when magic queen puts the daily checklist back on the wall, because hes normal now, why cant he just remember to eat every morning? why is he getting lost 2 blocks away from his own home? why is he losing his temper over incredibly mild things?

its about the internalized hatred for himself. cutting a piece of his own identity away because hes not as well as he once was. he was ice king for longer than he was simon, but he doesnt want to acknowledge that it is part of his history and identity. itd be easier if ice king was a stranger who took control of his body for a while.

and he really needs to come to terms with the fact that he IS ice king, ice king IS him, just a different phase of his life, because pushing that fact away is only hindering his recovery.

i haven't played minecraft in years, but with the armadillo winning the vote, i think about how wolves don't really have much going on in terms of their utility. like anytime i tame a wolf, i end up just kinda keeping them sitting at home.

i think if mojang really does feel like wolves are deserving of armour, with the addition of armadillos, they really need to update wolves to be more useful as companion mobs, because personally... i never feel the urge to bring a wolf with me when im going out to do things, especially if it involves combat.

like, what do dogs do best? fetching stuff and digging, right? like i wish that i could just mill about with a wolf and they track a scent or something and start digging into the dirt and then proceed to bring you that item. like it could range from rarely digging up iron nuggets to digging up vegetables or whatever, yknow. combine the fetching stuff with combat and you wouldn't have to manually pick up stray arrows or items from mobs your wolf kills.

the only other thing i wish you could do with wolves is automate their health in some way, like give more utility to the bowl item so you can place it down for them to eat from so you don't have to constantly manage their health by looking at their tail. just minor quality of life stuff i guess.

idk, that's just my thoughts. i do like wolves in minecraft, they just feel rather lacking with the way some new mobs have so much going on, like the sniffer and allay and so on.

Hiya, thanks for indulging me in my little hyper fixation!

（╹◡╹）♡

I have more questions if you’re interested in sharing!

Is there any connection between the real Port if Yokohama and the irl authors? Did Asagiri choose Yokohama for a specific reason or something like that?

Do the authors in a specific organisation get chosen for their irl relationships or was it randomized?

How do the literary texts have connections with manifestation of the ability in universe? (Some are obvious others not so much eg. For the Tainted Sorrow = gravity???????)

Sorry for the long ask. I hope you have a nice day! :D

I've hesitated to answer this ask because I wanted to be thorough and give each question due consideration. Further, the latter two questions rely a lot on my individual interpretation and I can't offer very much objectivity. But, I think I might be overthinking it, so below, please find attempts at answering each in turn.

The Port of Yokohama

The characters in Bungo Stray Dogs are named after and inspired by authors from modern Japanese literature. The "modern" era of Japan is generally (albeit not necessarily appropriately) measured as beginning during the Meiji Restoration, during which Japan restored centralized Imperial rule, ended a centuries-long seclusion by opening its borders to the West, and rapidly industrialized. For reference, Britain's Industrial Revolution spanned eighty years, from 1760 to 1840. By contrast, Japan industrialized within, roughly, forty years.

Japan reluctantly opened to the West under duress; Commodore Perry arrived in Japan with a squadron of armed warships, a white flag, and a letter with a list of demands from US President Fillmore. A year later, Japan signed the disadvantageous and exploitive Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States (日米修好通商条約, Nichibei Shūkō Tsūshō Jōyaku), which opened the ports of Kanagawa and four other Japanese cities to trade and granted extraterritoriality to foreigners, among other trading stipulations. 

However, Kanagawa was very close to a strategic highway that linked Edo to Kyoto and Osaka, and the then-government of Japan did not relish granting foreigners so much access to Japan's interior. So, instead, the sleepy fishing village of Yokohama was outfitted with all the facilities and accoutrements of a bustling port town (including state-sponsored brothels), and the Port of Yokohama opened to foreign trade on June 2, 1859.

Thus, Yokohama is representative of Japan's opening to the West, including Western literature. Short stories and novels as the mediums we know them were Western imports to Japan, and Western literature shaped, inspired, and became subject to cross-cultural examination by Japanese authors.

This included Russian literature: Kameyama Ikuo, a Japanese scholar of Russian literature, described Fyodor Dostovesky's enduring popularity in Japan as follows:

In Japan, there were two Dostoevsky booms during the Meiji period [1868-1912], and The Brothers Karamazov being translated into Japanese for the first time in 1917 triggered a third. After that, critics like Kobayashi Hideo led fourth and fifth waves of popularity before and after World War II, and then Ōe Kenzaburō led the sixth wave around 1968, right when the student protests were at their height. Today we might say we’re in the middle of a seventh, with Murakami Haruki writing about how he was influenced by The Brothers Karamazov.

I've oversimplified Yokohama's role in Japan's modern engagement with the West substantially for the sake of brevity, but in short, yes, Kafka Asagiri chose the Port of Yokohama for a reason. Yokohama was, for a time, Japan's most influential, culturally relevant international metropolis, before becoming eclipsed by Tokyo in more recent history.

The Organizations

There aren't bright-line rules to explain why each character is in each organization, although it isn't randomized either.

Attempts to delineate between the organizations based on the irl!authors' philosophies, legacies, literary genres, degrees of acceptance or rejection of Western influence, etc., are inaccurate oversimplifications at best. (At worst, they're orientalist and, in some cases, conflate fascist ideology with literary aesthetics -- or literary aesthetics with violence; I've seen both, oddly enough.)

That said, the namesakes' irl relationships and literary impacts are sources of inspiration for the relationships in bsd, including between and among the various organizations. For example, Jouno, Tetchou, and Fukuchi were all among Japan's first Western-style newspaper editors. Kouyou and Mori were in the same literary circles and collaborated on influential publications; such as the magazine in which they penned anonymous reviews of works by emerging authors that made or broke careers, and which established modern literary criticism in Japan. Akutagawa is such an enduring and intimidating titan in Japanese literature; the sharpness of his prose and his ability to gut me like a fish suit bsd!Akutagawa's theatric and violent role within the Port Mafia.

But, Mori Ogai and Yosano Akiko were dear friends, Chuuya Nakahara idolized Kenji Miyazaki, and modern Japanese authors weren't mafiosos, private detectives, military police, or surreptitious intelligence officers. I'd warn against (i) cramming bsd's characters into oversimplified archetypes or literary devices and (ii) overinflating the importance of or reading any certainty into the patterns and reflections of the irl!authors. bsd makes dynamic and creative use of its source material to tell a story that's very much its own.

The source material absolutely adds depth, commentary, and intention to Kafka Asagiri's storytelling, but only if read within the context and framework of the story being told.

For an example of why strict dichotomies and oversimplified metanalysis don't work for comparing the various organizations, I wrote a post explaining why it's inaccurate to compare the Port Mafia and the Agency using an East vs. West framework here.

The Abilities

Yes, the literary texts inspire how the corresponding abilities manifest in-universe. At least, I think so, based on my own interpretations. For example, I see the green light across the bay from The Great Gatsby in the Great Fitzgerald and a throughline between Fyodor's bloody ability and the symbolic eucharist in Crime and Punishment.

I speculate about Fyodor's ability manifesting as imagery from Crime and Punishment here.

I mention the potential relationship between irl!Akutagawa's literary voice and bsd!Akutagawa's ability here.

I also share some thoughts on Dazai and the manifestation of No Longer Human based on narration from No Longer Human here.

For the Tainted Sorrow, in particular, is a poem about grief, which characterized much of Chuuya Nakahara's brief life. I've always experienced grief in intense fluctuations of weight -- sometimes heavy and immobilizing, sometimes untethering and billowing, often compulsive and consuming. It has an immense gravity.

I've always thought that bsd!Chuuya's manipulation of gravity emblemized his intense and layered relationship with grief -- for irl!Chuuya, his brother, his parents' brutal expectations, his lover, his friends, his son; for bsd!Chuuya, the Sheep, the Flags, the yet-named seven taken by Shibusawa's fog. But where irl!Chuuya was seemingly crushed by the gravity of what he lost, bsd!Chuuya defiantly persists with a rougish levity, his grief galvanizing his ferocious love for others and his desire to live for and in service of their memories.

To roughly quote bsd!Chuuya's character song, "I will manipulate even the weight of this cut-short life."

But, that's only my interpretation; take it with a grain of salt. Or with the weight of several pounds of salt. The extent to which it compels you is yours to decide.

Also I am VINDICATED that literally all bosses and p.e.s at my new job has said to me "wow you're good at this. This is the fastest anyone has picked this up. You'll advance fast if you actually stay here" Because I can spot design flaws that take like idk engineering sense? I just know what kinds of things are important in design.

So vindicated that I'm a good engineer. Vindicated that I held that company together. They can keep it going (because I set them up to be able to do that) but there is nothing to hold them together. I told the principals that what they'll lose with me is someone to make sure all the parts of the business work together and someone who can make holistic solutions, and that's what they're seeing.

The implication was always that I wasnt a talented engineer. That's what they thought from literally week two (which I know from sources). I wonder what about me made them think in two weeks I was bad at engineering 🤔 I wonder what about me made them think that when I was still learning things like who our customers were and being introduced to people 🤔 literally before I ever took on an engineering project 🤔 not sure! A mystery!

As I was saying in the 'think of things no one has thought of' business class: I have come up with industry standard systems. Is it small? Yes. But it was 100% my design with no co-designers.

also for people not aware: i've been writing miranda and the merkingdom and working on my own lore for them since the first game initially released in 2018. it has very little to do with canon and is entirely its own beast compared to canon, and any comparisons you can make between them i'm Very Mad About. i will not attempt to correct my lore to account for canon either, i don't care what they release or say about miranda or the merkingdom and you can't make me.

truly the appeal of TwiYor is not just being a fake dating scenario ramped up to marriage, but also because they're effectively strangers, you get the appeal of an arranged marriage trope (strangers forced to share a space and slowly learn to love each other for real and not out of expectation) without the baggage of. arranged marriages.

/obey me! vent/

What's TF?

"TF" is the short for Transformation

It also Stands for Transformers Fandom and other stuffs, but I mostly use it as a short for Transformation

"TF" (as transformations) could also have a connotation for adult content btw (since it's also a short for Transformation fetish) so if You look around for it You might find adult content. Saying this just to let you know that could happen, if youre a minor You should be careful

But as I said, most of the stuffs I do here is sfw if not cropped anyways

just found your blog and I LOVE finding someone who understands and enjoys discussing riverdale for what it is, and who analyses it from a similar pov as I do(rare). I found your description from a previous post fascinating “jason is not a person or even really a character; he is a myth, an amalgamation of conflicting testimonies, a memory and therefore a mirror.” I’ve always seen jason as a symbol of sorts, rvd’s inciting incident, the uncovering of its shadows. I’m curious about your take on jason as a myth, the meaning of him and his death. essentially I find your take/description a lot more thoughtful than mine, and would love you to expand on it?! (sorry if you’ve answered this before, and I would love a link to that post!).

ty! i dont think ive talked about jason much on this blog but the jason tag from my liveblog might be of interest! i can say some more about him by way of summarizing my basic thoughts, under a cut because it got long lol

re: the description of jason you quote, everything about my reading of him stems from the fact that he is dead before the story begins. the show, whether intentionally or not, supports this reading by rarely flashing back to jason. in the few short flashbacks we do get, it's always because someone else is narrating their version of events leading up to his murder. in those scenes, he rarely acts, he does not emote; he never speaks, even when people are asking him a direct question, as cheryl does at sweetwater river: "are you afraid?" (i will say in fairness that this is consistent with how riverdale tends to approach flashbacks overall; usually the people in the scene don't talk because someone else is narrating. HOWEVER imo it does really stand out in jason's portrayal in particular.) all of this makes it hard for the viewer to get any information about jason for themselves, because our usual technologies of omniscience don't seem to apply when it comes to jason; the very format of the story prevents us from being able to meaningfully access him in the time before his death.

because of this lack, all we have to go on are the words of those who knew him, which may or may not be truthful and which produce a conflicting portrait of the person he was before he died. according to polly, he was a saint; according to alice and hal, he was the devil incarnate. we're told he would never hurt polly only to be shown that he cited her as a sexual conquest; we're told he was a model of perfect behavior only to discover he dealt drugs. these reversals are reversed; the drug deal which at first is cited as evidence of his dangerous character is later framed as the last resort of a boy attempting to escape his controlling parents. ultimately everyone has something different to say about jason, such that their testimony tells us more about them than about jason himself. that's what i meant by jason as mirror; people look at him and see what they want to see. they use his story for their own ends, to push their own agendas and ideas about what kind of town riverdale is and what kinds of people live in it.

this leads us to jason as myth; jason's murder ruptures the previously dominant collective myth about riverdale, namely that it was an innocent and picturesque small town. of course there were people whose experiences proved this to be false even before jason was killed, but by and large the governing structures in riverdale managed to marginalize and suppress those perspectives in order to preserve the idea that riverdale was fundamentally and essentially a happy, good, and safe place to live. after jason's death, the town as a whole has to find a new story to tell about itself; they have to find a way to incorporate this atrocity into their collective history and also retain the ability to go on living in riverdale. in trying to fix the events of jason's death in place, in order to find or create a story about what happened that everyone can agree on, the town is scrambling to recuperate its own image, to stabilize its identity.

the story that emerges from this struggle is that jason's death corrupted riverdale. this allows the town to preserve untarnished the image of innocent, wholesome pre-s1 riverdale that it held so dearly and allows the residents to sustain the hope that there might be some way to return riverdale to that innocent state, if only they can figure out how. after all, if riverdale WAS truly innocent at one point, even if it's innocent no longer, than surely it can be so again. some residents earnestly believe this to be true; some are more jaded about riverdale's redemptive potential and simply use this narrative as a means to their own ends (see hal terrorizing betty via the ostensible project of cleansing the town of sinners & hiram and hermione consolidating power while framing it as a return to a safer riverdale).

however, whether sincere or not, none of these efforts have anything to do with jason as a person; none of it is about honoring his memory or remembering his life. for the town's purposes, he is nothing more than the crisis of collective identity and reckoning sparked by his death. as ive already said, this is repeatedly reinforced by cinematic choices made throughout the show, by the fact that we arrive after jason is gone and are never allowed to meet him or hear his account of the story. even when he furnishes the clue that solves his own murder, via a zip drive discovered in his letterman jacket, he does so through a video that proves to be a clip in which jason never speaks and is positioned so that he faced away from the camera. his only movement is the result of clifford's shot, his head falling forward onto his chest. his own accusal of his murderer is wordless, motionless, and does not give us access to any interiority; it does not help us to know him better. ultimately, we can make no judgements about his character, because there is no character to speak of. within the context of the show, he is what others say about him and do to him, and nothing more.

I'm so tired of "he would not fucking say that" I'm so tired of blahblah therapy speech I'm so tired of "they wouldn't have communication skills that good" I'm so tired of endless debates on whether it's ok to let your characters tell each other I love you. and man yeah I get it there's ooc fic out there and I understand every one of those complaints individually and no two people's opinions on what is in character will ever align or we'd all be writing the same fics verbatim but I am so tired. of pretending the only imaginative and worthwhile way to write a character is to withhold from them the ability to express any emotion or affection or kindness because don't you know that nice is boring, and either you're writing the character wrong or you're into the wrong character, I'm tired of having to question character motives every time you write them doing or saying something nice but the moment you write them being assholes you are under no obligation to justify it I am tired

Roger Delgado practices diplomacy as the unnamed ambassador of an equally unspecified Central American Republic, in Man in a Suitcase: Burden of Proof (1.15, ITC, 1968)

hello upper middle class northern usamerican tumblr user. i want to play a game. you will notice that you are in a super america convenience store in rural kentucky - you have three minutes to purchase a snack and drink of your choice and make normal small talk with the cashier. however, if you use the word "cryptid" or generally make reference to appalachia and its inhabitants as "wild", uncivilized, or lacking restraint around alcoholic beverages during your time here, i will personally tie you to the chassis of a four wheeler and tip it into the river. live or die. make your choice

picking a course makes me want to cry and throw up so bad

I've seen other mutuals getting flak and even I got flak from it on some old blogs but I guess just a general disclaimer (even though this is in my rules)

I LIKE WRITING DARK SUBJECTS

I will of course tag them and keep in mind I never glorify any of them. Abuse, violence, self harm, and various other not so nice stuff is never romantizied, treated as a good thing, etc, etc. Personally I don't see the point of putting in things like that if you're not going to put them in a negative light but that's discussion for another day

And no, there's no fandom truly safe from me putting my own spin on certain characters no matter how dark it may be.

Keep in mind, you're welcome to not participate, not like it, or dodge certain dark materials. I will be as accommodating as I can, I will tag almost anything as long as you properly reach out and talk to me. But for the love of God, no not shame people online for just writing dark topics. If you take issue with it and we're mutuals, talk to me. If we're not mutuals you can always block me and move on. We're all adults, please act like it.