I don't know how to articulate my thoughts on it consicely (as usual, hence why I rarely ever write posts here anymore), but ever since this week's dunmesh ep I can't stop thinking about That scene between toshiro and laios and how it's been talked about as a piece of representation of the neurodivergent struggle.

I've seen those panels countless times before the anime got to it, and I can't understate how Real of a thing it is that we're seeing through laios- that pain and frustration that comes from having the rug pulled under you in being told that been getting it Wrong the whole time and nobody's bothered to point out the donkey tail pinned on your ass.

but I think that's only the first half of the statement, and the way people talk (and don't talk) about toshiro does the moment a disservice.

seeing how people talk about it before getting to the scene itself, it ended up catching me off-guard how much of a Person toshiro is. he's always talked about as the strawman or the figure representing neurotypical society- the one that others us.

I see where it's all coming from, he's not a likeable character to most of the fandom for reasons I won't hold anyone against, but again- he's an important part of the picture that dunmesh paints of the nd struggle.

I find it absurd to portray toshiro as a representation of the 'average'. being both of royalty and of a culture that has instilled upon him his own values and expectations when it comes to socialization. it's why the inclusion of his retainers (especially maizuru) was a brilliant story decision; alongside laios', we get to see HIS social ineptitudes and how central they are to HIS character.

like. a major point of grievance many of the audience has with toshiro is his rose-tinted 'romance' with obviously-uninterested falin. I get it, especially if you've experienced that type of engagement with an unwanted pursuer. but dear lord if that doesn't perfectly parallel him with laios as a fellow Socially Inept Man.

it hit me as much as laios hit me when he said he envied our boy's sincerity. because that's a true and often less talked about part of the neurodivergent struggle(tm)- the difficulty to express your feelings. just like the other end of the spectrum, it hurts yourself as much as it hurts others.

as someone whose brain problems often manifest as social anxiety and feeling like i'm either unable to or unworthy of expressing how I feel, I envy laios too.

tl;dr- there are two characters present in that scene in episode 17.

I hate when people just water down like falin as like a “female version” of laios. Like they’re similar but not the same. Like i feel like it’s such a disservice to her character lowkey. It’s like characters can’t exist without their interactions with laios or laios in general. They both have autism but their traits manifested in two different. They can both be calm and gentle but laios is more direct and extroverted compared to falin.

It’s very true that they’re treated differently when they both have autistic traits and are seen as differently. Which is ironic since they both ARE similar. However i hate that people say she’s just a female version of her brother or like act like she’s toshiro/shuro’a manic pixie dream girl. Like why can’t she exist by herself without her relationship with men/being compared to her male brother.

It IS weird how he dislikes laios and not falin when they’re both autistic. However he relates more to falin which is why he liked her more. They’re both more reserved and aren’t open about their feelings. Also they share the same interest of bugs which is another reason why he liked her. The anime didn’t really do well showing that which sucks.

I completely understand what people mean but at the same time I feel like calling them the exact same person isn’t true. Especially when the way they interact with characters say so much different.

MHA CH 421 rambles

Ok so this was a chapter ok. Iam personally not a fan of what happend here but you do you.

I hated AFO's little monologue. introspection thingy and to be honest sukuna does it better. Look Iam critical of both jjk and MHA as they fail in their own aspects on certain things but dam I couldn't care less for AFO and his monologue I seriously couldn't. Yoichi as already dead and if AFO's goal was to be a supervillain from a comic and to reunite with yoichi then why not just idk get the doctor to do it for him or just die to reunite with AFO 🤷‍♀️. His whole thing about tragedy making people stronger or him not feeling anything didn't even hit well because his development sucks and him coming back feels repetitive anyway

Sero getting to respond to the things about tragedy felt so underwhelming I didn't like it. Sero throughout the whole and entire series lacked any screentime and development for him to be getting a big moment that should be given to another character feels like a horrible move. We seriously don't know of anything that has affected sero aka hurt him directly in the manga (aka something just him) so it all feels underwhelming and disappointing. Unironically, I feel like sero should of been one of those characters who left the story or just stayed as a minor character because hori is trying to develop and give him importance way too late into the story.

Where is inko?!?!?! So we see everyone heck we see the civilians, gran Torino, Kota and Eri all comment and hope for izuku to do something but inko his own mother isn't present. Now this probably means something bad is happening or will happen to inko but if nothing happens and she isn't present then dam classic neglectful inko strikes again ig or if they make it a gag that she fainted out of stress i will just hate it even more

I hate that this is something out of the endgame and if hori was trying to be like gege by making everyone join it felt rubbish. Iam not a fan and I mean it I HATE the whole everyone joining in to fight AFO together type thing and I just do. To me it's Izuku's time to shine and people take down villains and do their jobs in other areas at this point everyone is doing more damage to AFO than Izuku who hasn't even landed a hit on izuku. Also why is it that character like Todorokis who have had their big moments here?!?!? It seems like this is a fight where hori is trying to make everyone have a moment before Izuku lands the final hit which doesn't sit right with me. Like there are characters here who have already had their moments like jirou, camie, yuuga, asui, mina and way more but they're here to ... Assist in the fight have another big moment and make AFO more of a potato character then a proper scary villain

present mic is back which I love. One of the good things is that present mic is alive, it's good to have confirmation of that

Even though I think erasers writing is heavily flawed at least someone is holding Izuku. At least izuku is getting something , some comfort out here at least someone is holding him but dam this seems like a disservice all of this seems like a disservice to izuku. Like I wonder do the civilians feel guilty does anyone feel sad or guilty for having this 16 year old child fight something way bigger than him in the name of peace and other peoples safety?

I think the whole thing with Izuku getting that guy's shirt is rubbish and underwhelming. It just doesn't sit right with me, that guy's shirt would of probably been dirty as hell considering it's the only thing we have seen him wearing. Like @mikeellee told me it would of been more impactful if the shirt was given to izuku and that guy had a healing quirk or helped izuku more directly. Now I get that this is supposed to make the guy more likable and show that he ahs developed which we can see and dam hori can actually give some decent development when he wants to but it all falls flat and doesn't do much for me. Also I have seen someone say that izuku wearing this shirt and it covering his upper half is showing how he is losing his ability to be a hero and dam that breaks me.

I can't with the Izuku running to the battlefield and the parallels kill me (we haven't really developed/moved on from chapter one considering the story just loops around itself). Izuku running towards danger quirkless thinking that it's his job because people who were supposed to help and protect him failed. Izuku now quirkless with only the tiny and fading embers of OFA thinning trying to defeat OFA with the damage of kudos quirk still effecting him. All of this to protect others to help them something he never got during the past. This fight will probably parallel all might but all of this happening and I feel nothing all of it falls flat and I feel bad for izuku that's it.

It was a chapter and considering how I hated previous writing decisions I was also gonna hate on the developed/expanded writing decisions either way

actually I love this panel and kusakabe's explanation makes sense. one of the things I like about yuuji is that he’s not a prodigy (thank god we had enough of those… my condolences to megumi) yuuji is a hard worker and also an incredibly determined individual. however, I don’t think that sukuna being a huge factor in yuuji’s tremendous growth is a disservice to his character or a way to undermine his hard work. that’s just consequence of having to share one’s body with another individual. the thing is that BOTH yuuji and sukuna are essential to each other’s growth. in yuuji’s case it’s his tremendous growth as a sorcerer due to sukuna performing high level jujutsu in his body. it’s like a having your dance teacher show you how to perform this complicated choreography in an one-on-one session but better cause the teacher can just posses your body, perform the choreography a couple of times and basically teach your body the dance moves cause of muscles memory. yuuji quickly learns how to understand curse energy because the guy who lived inside him understands it and uses it like no one else (it’s a great advantage and basically a huge cheat code so honestly good for him. Im all for yuuji using sukuna’s knowledge and skills to his advantage!!!).

also yuuji looks so peeved after hearing that sukuna did contribute to his growth as a sorcerer lmaooo how cute

when it comes to sukuna we already know that yuuji had a huge impact on his beliefs and worldview on life. yuuji basically shakened sukuna’s ideology due to them having to coexist in one body. sukuna had no other choice but to experience everything with him. he got a front row seat in yuuji’s life and had to witness things he normally would have ignored cause yknow… he just doesn’t care.

they’re both rubbing off on each other whether they like it or not. and they clearly DONT lmao. (Im loving it)

Every description about Nico (especially the canon ones) describing him as “cold” can personally fight me. Nico is jaded, yes, and often closed-off and sometimes stand-offish and defensive but he is not "cold”. He cares SO SO SO MUCH about EVERYONE. He loves and cares with his entire heart constantly and that is a core part of his character. He doesn’t often make public shows of his affection but he takes care to be kind when it matters and doesn’t hide that he does care (usually, the only exception really being him being in the closet, but even then he only hid his crush specifically and not the fact that Percy is important to him). He fine with hugging his friends in front of a crowd and will sit with strangers at a campfire just so they’re not alone. I mean, heck, he’s an extrovert! We know this! He actively seeks out people and gets lonely very quickly and easily! If he can’t talk to living people he will chat with the dead! That’s how much he thrives on being social!

The only time Nico has ever been actively “cold” was the couple of months between TTC and BoTL when he was actively mourning Bianca. Nico is not “cold.” He loves so much and he does show it, just in his own way.

Ngl, I usually get disinterested in romantic fanfics/fancomics/etc... after the two main characters get together because to me the fun is all the shenanigans that come before that point... Ask-spiderpool is one of the only exceptions I've found because everything after is still so interesting !! The drama ! The miscommunications ! These boys still have a long way to go and the plot is still alive and well and I am here for it <3 You just make them so interesting. They have so many issues. I love them

GOD they have so many issues...

i think i see so often this sentiment that like, once the couple gets together that's it, and they're healed. they're sorted – i don't think humans operate that way - and god, characters like wade and peter? dear god. these guys????????????????

these guys...

I'm so glad to see more people talking about just how disturbing Yuno's situation actually is and how maybe it did fuck up her 18 year old psyche to have middle aged men sleep with her

I'll never get over the literally thousands of readers that read ACOSF and concluded that yes actually Nesta is in the wrong here ☺️☺️☺️

You played the golden deer route!! (I think?) What's been your thoughts so far just like in general but also in comparison to blue lions? Claude and the golden deer are just so fun!!

I have not finished yet! Yes I am like 5/6ths done with the Golden Deer fic. I did something that I really shouldn't do, which is like consume 1/4th of the media and go "okay I could make a fanfic out of this" and then write a long-ass fic just based off initial impressions (this is how Theater of the Absurd happened - if you're wondering why everybody was so drastically out of character, that's why). I'm still only mostly done with the Academy phase, so no spoilers!

Thoughts so far? Claude is so funny. I am genuinely so, so fascinated by him. He's one of those characters who clearly has an entire existence and situation and insanity and you're just barely privy to the surface of it. Our C support is me walking into his room (why did I do that?) as he concocts poisons. He's a mad scientist. He wants to dissect his friends like they're insects. He's incredibly self-absorbed. He's convinced he's the smartest person in the room. He's on his gap year and he's taking a vacation with the white people and the country he leads is not his biggest priority. He wakes up in the morning, looks at himself in the mirror, and says "I'm a SCHEMER I'm a TRICKSTER I'm IMPENETRABLE I'm NOT LONELY". He has a biracial narrative and it's left him with a superiority complex because the alternative is to always be inferior. He'd be a better leader if he cared more.

I love Hilda also. She's so cunning but so kind, and her competence is underlined by her severe self-esteem issues. I haven't really connected with most of the Golden Deer - their ensemble narrative is not NEARLY as strong as the Blue Lions or Ashen Wolves. They aren't all part of the same story, I feel like. I'm still working on their supports (which are mostly C and some B right now...I kinda substituted most of them on the battlefield for the AW...sorry I have faves). Most of them are either a little annoying or uninteresting...Lysithea baby girl...Lorenz is actually deeply Felix coded in that he's kinda the sanest. He cares about all of the actually important things that nobody else cares about when they really should, and a lot of unimportant things,

I didn't expect this to happen, but Claude as your BFF actually deeply underscores how 1) Dimitri is insanely in love with you, and 2) Dimitri's bugfuck. Claude's so normal about everything. Makes me go "Wow Dimitri was normal about fucking nothing".

I'm looking forward to the War Phase and seeing how things change. These kids are fucking disasters in their lives and to each other, which mirrors their disaster country. Right now Claude's the most fascinating aspect to me. I'm not plugged into the fandom, but from what I can see his complexity and depth is kind of slept on - he has a comic relief role in dynamics, but I can already tell it's pretty constructed. Writing him as a jokester is like writing Dimitri as a preppy, perfect, adorably awkward nerd. Yes, that is a major part of how they present themselves to the public. I can't entirely call it a lie. But if you think that those performances are genuine, then you're buying what they're selling. Claude, Dimitri, and Edelgard are liars, and if you stay surface level in your depiction you're scrubbing out what makes them good characters. Also, especially in Dima's case, The Point

One thing that kind-of annoys me about the Jojo fandom is there is this tendency to portray Giorno as more noble than he actually was. He was fine with deal drugs to adults, it was dealing drugs to kids specifically that he did not like. He had no issues killing people and wanted to be a mob boss. I like Giorno but a paragon of nobility he was not, and I think it is a disservice to the character to water down his less-then-positive traits.

yeah, there’s a lot of truth to that. i think part of the reason why that is is because lots of fan works of golden wind are significantly lighter and softer than canon. there’s nothing wrong with that, especially given how much darker it comes off in comparison to diamond is unbreakable, but as a result a lot of the main character’s negative traits tend to get sanded down, ie, narancia’s more violently destructive outbursts, abbachio serving as an enforcer for a corrupt institution via both the police and the mob with hints that he might be outright bigoted towards giorno because of his ancestry, and yes, giorno’s less than noble traits. a lot of this tends to bleed into how fans view the characters overall, but honestly it’s not nearly as bad as some other fandom mischaracterizations i’ve seen

it’s definitely a disservice to giorno to downplay his more unsavory traits, though. he joined the mob at fifteen and probably thought he was gonna have to work his way up the ladder for years even though they did things like dealing drugs to kids that he explicitly didn’t like. he’s quite an ends-justify-the-means guy, particularly in the long run, though part of what makes him interesting as a character is how those means are always done in service to an ideal. giorno’s proactive approach to most things and how he inspires others through his ideology shapes a lot of the narrative of golden wind, so entirely discounting that would be a mistake, but he’s definitely got quite a bit of the brando family ruthlessness in him that he knows how to use quite well (it’s also possible that fans conflate his character with bruno’s a lot, since bruno is the one who hates drugs the most and who we see more of being openly conflicted about his job as a mob enforcer)

This is literally one of my favorite moments for both Harry Kim and B’Elanna characterization. I think a lot of people forget how soft hearted and altruistic B’Elanna specifically can be while Harry, of course a friendly and sweet individual, devotes himself most often to the mission, his friends and Starfleet’s ideals. Harry’s been shown to be much more down-to-earth and less fantastical in his thinking than either Tom or B’Elanna. The only time he gets in major trouble with Janeway and breaks protocol is because he wants to be with a woman. This is distinctly different to me than Tom’s (attempting to save an alien world) and B’Elanna’s (giving a robot race the ability to reproduce) transgressions. His other biggest infraction is begin a mutiny which he does in order to save Janeway & Chakotay. He doesn’t get in trouble for this which is why I put it last but again it seems different from Tom or B’Elanna to me because it’s For The Ship it’s For The Captain it’s a crime which displays his loyalty to Janeway instead of one which demonstrates him going against her ideologically (as shown by the lack of punishment). In that way I think B’Elanna and Harry balance each other well. B’Elanna is a person who seems very nervous and defensive when in conversation with others, who thinks of herself as a person who is ‘bad’ and doesn’t believe in herself much. Meanwhile Harry seems to be at ease with most anyone he speaks to, attempting to befriend even Seven of Nine right away. He’s confident in himself and his abilities and out of everyone (yes even Tom who seems most often to just become frustrated) would be the one to push B’Elanna and break through her defenses. That’s to say it makes perfect sense that B’Elanna would be absolutely enamored by this person who views her as inspiring, would be struck by that while Harry views it as just a weird question. 

the most important zane character trait to me isn’t that he’s a robot, but that he, fundamentally, is new to it. he’s bad at being a robot. he’s constantly finding out new things about himself and what he can do and excitedly showing them off to his friends like a kid with a new toy. he spent the most important part of his life (in his opinion, bc it’s when he met his friends and started pursuing being a protector) not understanding anything about himself and now he’s constantly discovering something new and it’s so important to me that he’s not reduced to just “the robot guy”. pixal is the one who being a robot comes naturally to, zane is the one who is permanently stuck between human and artificial and at this point is thriving there

Stepped outside my bsd circle and i’m reminded why i forever stopped listening to ppl in hs whenever they told me to leave my comfort circle and push my boundaries smhh :|

Another sxf vs bd fandom war in Twitter 🙄 Worse, it seems like a lot of sxf fans and bd fans can't stop being homophobic or misogynistic in their takes. Seriously, just rest this shit already and enjoy both shows.

The tendency of Tintin fandom to treat Tinchang as the holy, pure ship and Haddotin as the unholy, dirty one needs to be studied I swear

.