max verstappen watching daniel ricciardo's new episode of no brakes on stream | inspired by x x x

Severus 🐍

Aside from Harry and Hermione, he is arguably the next character whose pov I read about the most (gen or ship wise). Can't help that he's too interesting of a character for me to ignore when written right.

Ryne and Gaia are like. Such good parallels and foils to each other it makes me just a little insane.

Like Ryne is sweet and caring and she always wants to help others and make them feel better even to the detriment of herself because she has seen and known suffering and doesn't want others to have to live like that too. If she can make someones life better, even if just a little bit, then she will. But she also puts everyone elses well-being and feelings so far above her own that she often ends up trying to help in a way that doesn't actually solve anything because it still ends up with someone hurt (such as trying to properly fuse with Minfilia knowing it might end up with herself disappearing). She's not a doormat, but she does have some people-pleasing tendencies.

Gaia, however, is the exact opposite. She's prickly and sarcastic and thinks of herself and her needs first and foremost, everyone else is secondary. It's not that she's cold or uncaring, she doesn't ignore people's problems, she just doesn't see them as her business most of the time (A product of being raised in Eulemore most likely). She doesn't consider the long-term outcome of what she does or says, she lives solely in the present and the future is a problem for when it happens.

These opposite traits also play into each other. Ryne inspires Gaia to care more about others and Gaia inspires Ryne to prioritize herself more. Gaia makes Ryne live more on the moment without thinking solely of what the future will bring, and Ryne makes Gaia think more on what her life will be going forward and to actually consider what she does and says and how that affects things. They feed into each others good traits (Ryne's caring nature and Gaia's sense of self) while also helping them deal with the bad traits (Ryne's people-pleasing and Gaia's aloofness).

Their pasts are good paralells too. Ryne was isolated and lonely until Thancred took her away but even then, he was distant and emotionally neglectful, so she ended up lonely in an entirely different way. Gaia had a family and caretakers that she wasn't particularly close to, but after the 'Fairy' started talking to her they got even further away until she couldn't even remember them, and the 'Fairy' was the closest thing she had to a friend even though it was what isolated her to begin with. Ryne had constant companionship but no support, and Gaia had 'support' but no companionship.

Even just. Regarding the whole identities thing they are just. Perfect. Ryne has lived with Minfilia's shadow on her shoulder her entire life and never got to learn who she actually is. She thought that she had to become Minfilia for her life to be worth anything, that it's the only way her existance is justified. The person closest to both her and Minfilia(Thancred) indicated(in her mind at least) that he wanted Minfilia to be here in Ryne's stead(which wasn't really the case but she didn't know that). The only way to get her out of that shadow was to remove her from the identity of Minfilia, hence why her new name is so important(as well as the hair and eyes being her natural colors instead of Minfilia's all too recognizable ones).

But Gaia didn't even know about Mitron or Loghrif until Eden. She had the 'Fairy', but to her it was just some voice in her head which was nice enough to her. To her, Loghrif is just some lady Mitron loved, she has no real connection to her. She has a connection to Mitron, both as the 'Fairy' and as remnant feelings from Loghrif, but none to Loghrif herself(aside from the obvious reincarnation stuff). Gaia has always been her name. It may have been Loghrif's originally, but she is so far removed from that identity that even for all of Mitron's effort to 'return' her to Loghrif, it'd never work. Loghrif is Gaia, but Gaia is not Loghrif. Simple as that.

Eden's story works so well because Ryne and Gaia are opposites in that specific way that compliments each other, rather than pits them against each other.

not to like wax poetic about the literary nuances of Black Fucking Butler but i feel i need to point out how insanely campy it is. oh okay cool the butler is throwing butter knives at people with guns and winning. we're battling undertaker's zombie army by starting a boy band (we actually got the idea from the ZOMBIES' boy band). theres a curry making competition and its so important it needs an entire volume and a continuing motif dedicated to it. the Grim Reaper Death Gods are all cornballs with gardening sheers. the contradiction. the unintended irony.

i think the manga is like. toeing the line of camp. like its silly yet takes itself so seriously but its not too silly. my immersion is not broken by the silliness. but the anime is uncharted levels of camp. what the Hell was going on with pluto. you're gonna look me in the eye and tell me the phantomhives own a fifty foot dog thing and no one has noticed. simply one hell of a deer. ice skating. theres opium in funtom candy. the queen of england is maybe a little girl. speaking of which, the city of london just burned down. yeah the whole thing. the fifty foot dog was there too.

it's so ridiculously out of left field and the fact that none of the characters seem to notice or care feels like being gaslit. camp so visceral it's causing psychic damage. i am constantly begging the narrative to break character just once and acknowledge its silliness but doing so would negate the lack of awareness that makes it camp. its dated and timeless. an absolute milestone in camp history.

me and my partner sit in my living room at 2am having such deep conversations about the themes and motifs and parallels of kuuga and then i log on to tumblr and the extent of what i can articulate in a text post is 'wahh!!! i love kuuga!!! godai and ichijou should make out sloppy style'

hold on i need to get a thought and emotions out. so with Welcome Home, there seems to be a before and an after. obviously, we're in the after. the website is the after. and if it turns out that the story we see, the one where shit hits the fan and the show is practically erased, then... that already happened. whatever horrors we see, we'll know that there is no saving them. there is no happy ending - it happened, and it's tragic. the show is doomed to end and be scrubbed away. if any of the characters are revealed to be dead/gone by the website, then when/if we see them at an earlier point, we'll Know

and there's a special kind of dread and horror in that for us, the audience.

i am still not over the fact arlecchino is referred to as "father" by the house of the hearth kids btw. the gender of it all

if i were a better writer, i would be working DAMN HARD to persuade people to ship kubosai🙄

So I finally found a way to watch tristamp in English dub (I only ever watched the series in Japanese). I haven’t done any deeper thoughts and analysis, and I’m only halfway through the series but here’s my impression so far:

- I love English dub Vash, especially his gibberish noises, such a chaotic dumbass (affectionate), and although some of his jokes and mannerism didn’t translate as well as I hoped, they did a very good job. They deserved two dozen donuts. (although if you hold me at gunpoint and ask me to choose English or Japanese Vash I will choose the Japanese version with a thin margin because I have personal bias towards Matsuoka Yoshitsugu [he’s from where I live lol, and I’m a big fan])

- I’m also in love with how they play Legato and Roberto, especially Legato, I was surprised by the lack of the feeling out of place (Is that the right word? sorry my brain suddenly stopped working in English) that you usually have when you hear a show dubbed in another language you’re not used to hearing. So smooth. And they nailed the drunkle speech with Roberto.

- I honestly was disappointed with the lack of accent in Wolfwood’s speech (maybe I just didn’t hear it correctly? Idk) because he speaks in heavy Kansai dialect in Japanese, even when he was a child (also casting Hosoya Yoshimasa really emphasized the accent). A huge missed opportunity on the English dub, in my opinion. I was expecting Wolfwood with a heavy Southern accent or something. And on that note they also missed the chance to add some dialect for the worm hunters on episode 4.

- English dub Meryl feels mature and a lot more pulled together to me compared to the Japanese version, which sounds very pristine and innocent until she starts learning about the world. It makes her a little… out of place for me who’s used to Meryl speaking in a very polite formal Japanese to everyone (even when she’s yelling in rage or when she’s cursing people). I think it suits Meryl from ‘98 anime more than tristamp Meryl. Probably because you can’t really translate her distinct way of speaking accurately, it’s not anyone’s fault, just a matter of different language. But I guess I like the Japanese version better for Meryl. I just love the way she speaks, shame there’s no English equivalent to her speech style.

- I don’t like English dub Nai. I’m 100% going with the Japanese version in this. Not the performance, though, I know translations are really hard and I do think the English VA did a great job, but as someone who’s used to how Nai speak in Japanese, the dub just… didn’t feel right. In Japanese Nai speaks in a relatively rougher manner compared to Vash (in how he chooses his words, also the subtle but different way he talks to humans and to Vash) and it didn’t show as much in the English dub. And his pretentious speech that sounds like some people from the church near my house doesn’t get carried to the English dub, I guess. In English he just sounds like a scary villain to me, while in Japanese I can feel his emotions and (warped) love towards Vash just from his words. I saw someone pointing out that Nai refers to the dependent plants with feminine pronouns, and it’s even more prominent and emphasized in the Japanese version. They’re not wrong. Maybe in English it can come across as a bit misogynistic(?), I don’t know, but I like how he does this in Japanese, because to me it feels like he’s always trying to refer to them as “persons” and not “things”, although his treatment towards them is contradictory.

This ended up longer than I expected but overall I enjoyed the English dub and I love analyzing different languages. I wanna know how it feels for people who know absolutely zero Japanese watching the series in English dub and in Japanese with English subtitles. I know that there were differences in the subtitles and the dub but for me I can’t compare English sub and dub because I’d just go with my Japanese interpretation if I watch the subbed version (or I’d rather just ditch the subtitle altogether because sometimes it’s making my brain confused when I speak both languages).

Also to people who write Trigun fanfics in English, where do you base the character speech from? I don’t know how to translate Japanese dialects, so Wolfwood, for example, is very difficult for me to write in English.

Hey so. Missile as Ray is more deeply tied to the metanarrative than any other character and that prologue just proved it to me!

Missile took the form of the desk lamp that first time around in the junkyard because Sissel had been in the desk lamp first. But there’s more significance to it than that!

Missile is known as Ray, "as in ray of light in the darkness". And the game opens with a series of spotlights: the first one on Lynne, the second on Jeego, and the third one on Yomiel and Sissel.

There is a spotlight for Ray, but Ray is just as much spotlit as he is the spot-lighter, as we see him illuminate Yomiel's body after it's kicked down the stairs.

Missile is much more deeply connected to the "deception" of the 2D screen cutout that the player is shown; his power relies on the shape of objects as perceived by us, not as they truly are. He's more intrinsically tied to the story as we (the player) sees it, despite not being a player character. Why is this? It's because Missile is the one that has made our story a story.

And this narration just shows it. The curtain has risen; it's up to him now.

man i don't know if i could write a fic that does it justice but i'm thinking about sazed's relationship with gender

because like. he's a eunuch and sterilized which inherently gives him a different relationship with masculinity, just by virtue of his different sex characteristics. plus that's linked to his feruchemical abilities which is just. mmm that's gotta impact his relationship with his body/mind.

plus you cannot tell me that terrismen don't have some kind of racialized experience of gender under the lord ruler. there's no way

anyway i don't know where i'm going with this i'm just thinking

thinking about kanae and her relationship with her parents and akio and his relationship with her parents and just like…. ideas about patriarchs and fathers and family in utena. and incest obviously. you know there’s something so horrifying about kanae’s situation, beyond the obvious fact that she’s not yet graduated high school and she’s being married off to a child predator who is using their relationship to levy more power over more children. and her mum. and the fact that we don’t ever SEE her dad. fathers in utena have, shall we say, the worst track record in the book. i have so many things that i want to say about representations of Adult Men in rgu and specifically representations of fathers but it all circles back to their absence and imitation.

like, okay. i think the only (non-silhouetted, ie Actual Flesh) father we see is miki’s, and even then we don’t see his face. similarly we don’t see kanae’s mum’ face though she too is a Flesh Parent. don’t even get me started on how the only two visual representation of utena’s parents are their coffins and graves. also don’t get me started on that One shot from episode 10 that i use in all of my amvs of the silhouetted kiryuu parents because as you can probably tell from my heavy use of it in my amvs, i find it a deeply fascinating shot. swagever. all of this is to say, dads are not In The Flesh in utena.

im excluding the movie from this discussion bc whilst im a diehard aou lover and would never normally eclipse it from my analysis like this, the choices it makes in representing touga’s father break with rgu’s typical stylistic choices in a way that i honestly think is less effective. that whole sequence is incredibly visually rich in every other way and includes symbology that is some of the most compelling in all of rgu, imho, but it’s like. gahhh. i know it’s an active choice to represent him as Just A Guy, and you could argue ‘well akio’s Just A Guy’ but it’s. it just irritates me. i don’t think it’s meaningful in the way that utena likes to be meaningful. id argue that seeing his face doesn’t contribute anything, but idk maybe i just don’t like looking at his horrible face. it’s probably just that but also im right it’s a lacking stylistic choice

rambling side note aside, i get to my actual point that i technically already alluded to: akio. akio’s not a dad but akio is positioned as a (pseudo?)father figure to (checks notes) anthy, utena, kanae (hey remember she’s what started this post lol), touga, id throw nanami in, you could probably make a tangential argument for miki and kozue, ruka’s an interesting one, and mikage (maybe??). this is for a couple of reasons. he’s the (acting) chairman of the school that all the characters i just listed attend, he’s the guardian/caregiver for three or four of them, and, fundamentally, he guides and governs their lives to the best of his ability (not in the sense that he’s trying really hard to raise these kids, in the sense that he’s trying to control them. lol). BUT. crucially. he is an approximation of a father, an imitation of the patriarch, even and especially to anthy.

why does this matter? well, funnily(?) enough it circles back to why i dislike aou’s choice to portray touga’s father as A Guy. the powerful men in ohtori— and when i say ‘powerful’ here, i specifically mean men who are not marginalised, men who are not racialised, men who come from money and have never had to reach the top of the tower, rather always resided at its summit— are not seen by us. akio is the acting chairman, the acting father, the stand-in who stood up for something that is altogether worse than him, that made him who he is in such an insidious way. and i just think that’s really fucking interesting to think about wrt his status as a brown man, being racialised, being The Thing That We See when everything else— the inappropriate vice principal, miki’s piano teacher, mr ohtori, mr kiryuu (anime version), even off-hand dialogue from shadow girls about adult men in positions of power like mr judge (papa! daddy! god!!)— is obfuscated and implied. and i don’t want to suggest that that’s an intentional commentary on the racist mythologising of brown and black men as innately sexually violent, because. It’s Not. and utena massively drops the ball wrt race, but because of that lack of explicit, intentional commentary, it creates this strange dynamic between akio, the only racialised man in the show, and Every Other Guy. and that’s a very long-winded way of saying ‘maybe poisoning mr ohtori was a good thing actually’

Sylvia Legris is a plenty successful poet as is but I do feel that she should have more Tumblr cachet. Like. Locked Tomb girlies look at these bone verses

Details of Articulated Skeletons, c. 1510

Memento marrow. The treacherous thread of the unnamed. The flourish-stripped reunion of broken parts.

The polymathematician (the osteo-horoscopist) plumbs the anonymous bones, the forlorn unspoken-for. Lead white, bianco di piombo, the poisonous orbit. An algebraic

of discrete desecration. Cancellous bone, cortical bone, an innominately rising hip bone. The acrimonious split of the acromion from the scapular spine. Explode the view . . .

Exploit the post-medieval zodiac. A moon-distending thorax; the gibbosity of the humeral head. The anteriorly tilting ascent of the pelvic girdle. False false ribs and the acute

angle of descent of rib one and rib two. Memento mori. Woe betide the Renaissance bonesetter. Bone-beset.

After grilling my biology teacher about effects of cyanide (and more!) poisoning and the functioning of red blood cells as oxygen carriers, I have basic dot point on my massive essay regarding how mana, pips and wisps work in my wizard101 au. My brain is so full of thoughts, and my bio teacher may have me on a watch list/hj

i am as we know drawn magnetically to repressed insular characters who wld rather die than articulate their feelings aloud to another person. however i am also a repressed insular bastard who has been lovingly taught by my partners how to articulate my feelings aloud to other people. so i do love when that happens, also. what do you mean a conversation turning into an hour-long incredibly draining therapy session is a weird and off-putting story beat. that is relatable. that feels like home

woe! first art post since a month ago be upon ye! take my gay bugs

[Start ID of the first image. A digital drawing of the five bugs forming Team Taranoake, drawn without anthropomorphized biology, short clips of text describing each one's name, pronouns, species, and size. The background is a solid-color pale orange, with the rest of the drawing being similarly flat-colored and golden-toned. The first shows Kritto, an azure damselfly, who stands on two legs with short stilts to counter the length of xer abdomen. She's light teal with black stripes, holding a brown scroll in one claw, the other pair of arms tucked between her two backpacks behind xer. Next is Lidii, a worker of the ant species Myrmecocystus mexicanus, yellow and orange. She's rambling about something excitedly, just barely propping up the thick wooden weapon beside her. Third is Rantan, an ox beetle, brown with yellow fur. He subjects himself to whatever Lidii's talking about, sitting with all six limbs on the ground and a mildly tired expression, resting their head on one claw. Gorge, a light purple coquina clam, is settled beneath two of Rantan's legs, his shell decorated with small notes and scribbles from work as an archivist. Last is the sea slug Ceras, a single-stalk aeolis, pink with bright stripes of yellow and white along their cerata. She's drawn further away from the rest, his head turned back towards the other four bugs. Like Kritto, they're marked as an honorary member of the team, lacking the seaglass bracelets shared by the three close-knit bugs from the center of the drawing. End ID.]

^ once again, these guys are from a universe I made with @froggoexists :]

[Start ID of the second image. A colored sketch of two humanized original characters, Ceras, a sea slug from the previous image, and Thorn, a Hollow Knight vessel. They're both drawn from the waist up, facing forward, close enough that Ceras's hand wraps around Thorn's shoulder. Ceras is shown as a young Black person, their cerata incorporated as long locs dyed pink, white and yellow, and piercings stud their ears and tongue. Thorn is paler-skinned, taller and thinner than Ceras, with pointed ears, and white hair styled at the top into two rows of spikes. Ceras is wearing a studded denim vest, thoroughly decorated with eclectic pins and patches, mostly of bands, bugs, games, and simple declarations of hope. Thorn wears instead a black leather jacket, with long studs at the shoulders and smaller ones along the sides and center. One sleeve is torn off, as they don't have a right arm, and the other is cuffed to display the adaptive device making up half their left. Ceras is sticking their tongue out and smiling, one eye shut and the other turned to Thorn, stimming with their free hand. Thorn's looking back at them with a smile.

The background is simple, a pink horizontal wave. There's a bright, pale halo behind Ceras' head, one which resembles a spoked wheel or a sun, seeming to cast light upon the two of them. A line at the bottom of the image reads "part-god mute disabled they/she/he bug punk BESTIES", and at the top of the image there's a small doodle of their original forms sitting together contentedly. End ID]