tfw you realize that the stress and misery you're experiencing is due 100% to pressure that you are putting on your own self

so. Torchy

the gaang and “do they shoplift”

aang: yes, because he enjoys the fun little thrill of it.

katara: yes, because she enjoys “sticking it to the man” and considers it praxis.

sokka: not unless he’s truly desperate, because he knows that he’d get caught and given a life sentence will die in jail if he so much as takes a single apple.

toph: yes, because it’s fun and also praxis.

zuko: not unless you count that time that azula slipped a diamond necklace in his pocket and then pretended to have no idea why zuko would ever do such a horrible thing after he got in trouble for it.

suki: yeah of course. it’s literally fine and necessary to do.

azula: she is a law abiding citizen!! but also she steals red lipstick sometimes, just to feel something. she doesn’t even need it, since she already has 200 tubes of red lipstick at home. but what’s one more?

mai: yes, even though she obviously doesn’t need to, because she’s bored and loves a quiet rebellion.

ty lee: she doesn’t need to because she already gets things for free just by batting her big brown eyes at various men who offer to buy her everything her heart desires. she’s never paid for a single object in her life.

You guys arent rocking with the breaking bad?!?!?!?!?!?!??

the narrative significance of names in wolf 359 has this funny side effect where, like, it feels wrong to call the characters by their first names even when it's what 99% of people would call them in-universe. doug eiffel is in no way comparable to someone like, for example, fox "i even made my parents call me mulder" mulder; he's only eiffel to us because he's eiffel to the rest of the crew and that was just, like, the few most recent years of his life. he's always been doug. he's doug to his friends and to his ex and to his former coworkers at pizza hut and to like, i don't know, cashiers at 7-11 who recognize him, probably. he calls himself doug (and variations thereupon) regularly. but, because narratively first name moments between characters are reserved for when they really mean something emotionally, if i call him doug, i'm like, oh my god. that's so intimate. think of the implications.

yeah u can put "i hate jkr" and "fuck terfs" in ur tumblr bio but. can u listen + reflect when a trans woman criticizes hp fandom without immediately getting defensive.....

I was reading another entrapdak fic and suddenly "blah blah the alliance wont let us do anything" and i immediately stopped reading. Yknow it's possible to enjoy characters without villainising every other character, especially without making Entrapta's friends really nasty to her just because you want to make Hordak more sympathetic.

I want to ramble about Homelander in bed. 

Blah blah "Homelander is a sub!", "NO, he's a Daddy Dom!", "No, he's!" He's whatever you want to fap to, who the fuck cares

He's none of the above. I don't think any D/s dynamic roles encapsule Homelander, not even Switching. (It's not his scene, bondage is a waste of time, this collar look stupid, don't call me that, that's weird...)

He's simply not into sticking to any set kink dynamics. (The vibes are off, fam. He'd be the vanilla boy within the BDSM dungeon. Confused and bemused.)

He doesn't have some innate desire to give up control to someone constantly, or to lead someone with a firm or gentle hand. Switching, yeah but he doesn't care enough to begin with. He's too insecure and uncertain of what he is as a person to even understand slipping into a role in the bedroom. Too volatile and what he wants and needs switches depending on his mood and/or partner.

What he is, is a starving man and his partner is the feast.

Poor idiot doesn't even know how to do intimacy properly and has gotten all of his sexual education from someone grooming him, someone paired with him for publicity, and porn.

The dude is lost. What he in bed I feel like boils down to three specific things:

Sadistic - He's a bully, he's mean, he likes watching others suffer in some form or another. (Giving pain play, orgasm denial, edging, forced orgasm, overstimulation)

GGG - Good, game, giving. He'll try anything and be up for whatever as long as his partner is into it. The dude can't be harmed in conventional ways, what's he got to fear?

Attention whore - Craves positive attention in any form (wanting to please his partner, praise kink to the MAX, receiving worship play, demanding attention, bratting, pestering and teasing, topping from the bottom)

-and then how those three things manifest depends wholly on his partner.

With Madelyn Stillwell, he wanted to be her good boy. He craved her praise and affection and he was restrained because she wanted him to be. He's a brat, he's petulent. He's needy. He's picking a fight with a toddler. She's his Mommy Dommy. I suspect she denied and teased Homelander endlessly and he took whatever scraps she gave him because he was starving for it.

With Maeve, they would have been two equals that he was horrifically territorial of. She was his and he had no issues broadcasting that to the world while emotionally intimidating her, but never getting physical. No, she's a god just like him. You can't hurt gods so why would he try?

With Stormfront, she encouraged all of his bad behavior, so Homelander was reckless and hungry. Break shit and fuck like animals, push and pull and playing with their combined strength. They're primal and at war and it's fun.

Soyeah, Homelander is going to fill whatever role suits his partner best. He's going to pay attention to what gets his partner off because he wants that positive response from them. It can be a good thing, or it can lead to the most toxic relationship possible. The man is fucked so it can go sideways fast. You're gonna need a strong constitution, a steel spine, and willpower to survive Homelander at the start else you'll get steamrolled and dropped by the plot like Becca AUGH.

Is it the fear mingled with arousal that gets them all hot and bothered like I imagine poor Hughie would feel with Homelander? Fuck, he's going to exploit that. He's gonna make that twink jump in fright every chance he gets.

What about little Starlight getting a spine and trying to play his game? Yeah, he's going to push those buttons and show her how good he can actually be for her. The gnawing need for the praise from the girl next door would eat him alive.

With Butcher? Scorched earth, baby. They're going to destroy each other in the most toxic, hate-fuck filled fest. Just tearing chunks out of each other to show the other that they can still feel. Raw and painful.

Until Homelander actually figures out who he is without his powers, status, or fame? He's going to play whatever role his partner needs, be that god, perfect gentleman, monster, or sweet boy. Then again, he's all of that and then some at once. He'll want to devour his partner in one moment, consume them wholly and just taketakeTAKE and the next he wants the intimacy that comes with being inside them/them inside him and he's so so so soft and gentle and reverent when he strokes them, and then he's a bastard who wants to twist the knife and make them beg and cry and scream and just tell him what to do, he'd do anything just to know he's loved.

-and anyway, this man is broken and the perfect putty for anyone to mold sexually consciously or subconsciously.

Not a Dom, not a sub, or a switch, but a chameleon.

I know this is not what all of you followed me for but deal with it

Ragequit head bonk

any thoughts on how once again zelda was robbed of her agency because her "father figure" didn't listen to her? even if rauru was kinder to her than her father. and that she had sonia who was patient and loving for a little while before she died (just like her mother). i know rauru apologizes for his hubris but still, i wish we saw zelda be upset about it. and even if zelda was such a big part of the quest she still literally sacrificed her humanity once again because of someone else's mistake- because rauru literally didn't listen to the girl from the future that warned you that shit was going to go down. o know nintendo just loves putting zelda inside crystals and stones but i wish we got something better. even if it was her decision to become a dragon... did she have any other choice? it really just feels like they robbed her of agency again just like botw and the games before

i've been trying to figure out how to answer this one. because there are two ways i could analyze this plot point, either from a writer's perspective or an in-story perspective, but neither of those lead to me fully agreeing with your interpretation? I think there's definitely something to be said about zelda consistently being pushed aside in these games, but. well. ok let's get into it ig

from a writer's perspective, I do honestly have quite a bit of sympathy for the zelda devs as they attempt to navigate the modern political landscape with these games. The cyclical lore, though canonized relatively recently, holds them to a standard of consistency in their games in terms of certain key elements. one of those key elements is that there has to be a princess, and that princess must somehow be the main macguffin of the game. The player must chase her, and the end goal of the game must be to reunite the player and the princess. In 1986 this was an incredibly easy sell. women didn't need to be characters. players were content with saving a 2-dimensional princess whose only purpose was to tell them "good job!" at the end. but as society advances, that princess becomes a much more difficult character to write while adhering to the established overarching canon. (as a side note: i don't necessarily believe that the writers SHOULD be held to the standards of that canon. I think deviating from it in certain areas would be a good change of pace. but i also recognize that deviations from the formula are widely hated by the loz playerbase and that they're trying to make money off these games, so we're working under the established rule that the formula must be at least loosely adhered to.) Modern fans want a princess who is a person, who has agency and makes decisions and struggles in the same way the hero does. but modern fans ALSO want a game that follows the established rules of the canon. so we need a princess who is a real character but who can ALSO serve as a macguffin within the narrative, something that is inherently somewhat objectifying.

the two games that i think do the best job writing a princess with agency are skyward sword and botw (based on your ask, our opinions differ there lol. hear me out) in both games, we have a framing event which seperates zelda and link, but in both games, that separation was ZELDA'S CHOICE. skyward sword zelda runs away from link out of fear of hurting him. botw zelda chooses to return to the castle alone to allow link the time he needs to heal. sksw kinda fumbled later on by having ghirahim kidnap her anyway, but. i said BEST not PERFECT. botw zelda I think is the better example because, with the context of the memories, she's arguably MORE of a character than link is. we see her struggles, her breakdowns, her imperfection, specifically we see her struggle with her lack of agency within the context of the game itself. when she steps in front of link in the final memory, and when she chooses to return to the castle, those are some of the first choices we see her make almost completely free of outside influence; a RECLAMATION of her agency (within the narrative) after years of having it stripped from her. from an objective viewer's standpoint, this writing decision still means she is absent from 90% of the game and that she has little control over her actions for the duration of the player's journey. however I think this is just about the best they could have done to create a princess with agency and a real character arc while still keeping the macguffin formula intact--you're not really SAVING zelda in botw. SHE is the one that is saving YOU; when you wake up on the plateau with no memories, too weak to fight bokoblins, let alone calamity ganon. the reason you are allowed to train and heal in early-game botw is because SHE is in the castle holding ganon back, protecting YOU. When you enter the final fight, you're not rescuing zelda, you're relieving her of her duty. taking over the work she's been doing for the past hundred years. in the final hour, you both work in tandem to defeat ganon. while this isn't a PERFECT example of a female character with agency and narrative weight, i think it's a pretty good one, especially in the context of save-the-princess games like loz.

as for totk, you put a lot of emphasis on rauru not believing zelda and taking action immediately, which, again, from an objective standpoint, i understand. but even when we're writing characters with social implications in mind, those character's actions still need to... make sense. Rauru was a king ruling over what he believed to be a perfectly peaceful kingdom. zelda literally fell out of the sky, landed in front of him, claimed to be his long-lost granddaughter, and then told him that some random ruler of a fringe faction in the desert was going to murder him and he had to get the jump on it by killing him first. the ruler which this girl is trying to convince rauru to wage an unprompted war on has the power to disguise himself as other people. no one in their right mind would immediately take the girl at her word. war is not something any leader should jump into without proper research and consideration, and to rauru's credit, he DIDN'T ever outright dismiss zelda. he believed her when she said she was from the future, he allowed her to work with him and he took her warnings as seriously as he could without any further proof. but he could not wage an unprompted war on ganondorf. that's just genuinely not practical, especially for a king who values peace among his people as much as rauru seems to. as soon as ganondorf DID attack, giving rauru confirmation that zelda's accounts of the future were real, he began making preparations to confront him. remember that zelda didn't KNOW that rauru and sonia were going to be casualties of the war--she didn't make the connection between rauru's arm in the future and rauru the king until AFTER sonia's death, when rauru made the decision to attack ganondorf directly. I think the imprisoning war and the casualties of it were less an issue of zelda being denied agency and more an issue of no one, including zelda, having full context for the events as they were unfolding. if zelda had KNOWN that sonia and rauru were going to die from the beginning and was still unable to prevent it that would be a different issue, but she didn't. none of them did.

I think another thing worth pointing out with rauru and his death irt zelda is that rauru is clearly written specifically as a foil to rhoam. this is evident in how he treats both zelda and link, with a constant kindness and understanding which is clearly opposite to rhoam's dismissiveness and disappointment. consider rhoam's death and the circumstances surrounding it. He died because, in zelda's eyes, she was unable to do her duty; the one thing he constantly berated her for. Rhoam's death solidified zelda's belief that she was a failure, a belief which she KNEW rhoam held as well. his death was doubly traumatic to her because she knew he died believing it was her fault. Now contrast that to the circumstances surrounding rauru's death. Rauru CHOSE to die despite zelda's warnings, because he wanted zelda and his kingdom to live. rauru's death was not agency-stripping for zelda; in fact, it functioned almost as an admission that he believed her capable of continuing to live in his place. With him gone, the fate of the kingdom fell to her and the sages. he KNEW that he would die and still went into that battle confidently, trusting zelda to make the right decisions once he was gone. where rhoam believed zelda incapable of doing ANYTHING without link, rauru trusted zelda COMPLETELY with the fate of his kingdom. several details in totk confirm that when rauru died there was no plan for zelda to draconify, that all happened after rauru was gone. it was HER plan, the plan which rauru trusted her to come up with once he was gone. and I think it's also worth noting that zelda's sacrifice with the draconification parallels rauru's!! Rauru gives up his life trusting the sages and his people to be able to continue his work in his place. Zelda gives up her physical form trusting link and the sages in the future to be able to figure out what to do and find her. these games in general have this recurring theme but totk specifically is all about love and trust and reliance on others. zelda relies on link, link relies on zelda, they both rely on the champions and the sages and rauru and sonia and they all rely each other. reliance on others isn't lack of agency, it's a constant choice they make, and that choice is the thing which allows them to triumph.

The draconification itself is something i view similarly to zelda's sacrifice in botw--a choice she makes which, symbolically & within the confines of the narrative, is a demonstration of her reclaimed agency and places her at the center of the narrative, but which ALSO removes her from much of the player's experience and robs her of any overt presence or decisionmaking within the gameplay. again, I think this is a solution to the macguffin-with-agency dilemma, and it's probably one of the better solutions they could have come up with. Would I have liked to see a game where zelda is more present within the actual gameplay? yes, but I also understand that at this point the writers aren't quite willing to deviate that much from their formula. the alternative within the confines of this story would be to let zelda DIE in the past, removing her from gameplay ENTIRELY, which is an infinitely worse option in my opinion. draconification allowed her to be present, centered the narrative around her, and allowed the writers to reiterate the game's theme of trust and teamwork when she assists the player in the final battle, which i think was a REALLY great choice, narratively speaking.

In any case, I don't think it's right to say that zelda was completely robbed of her agency in botw and totk. Agency doesn't always mean that she's unburdened and constantly present, it means she's given the freedom to make her own choices and that her choices are realistically written with HER in mind, not just the male characters around her, and I think botw/totk do a pretty good job of writing her and her choices realistically and with nuance.

If you fuckers can’t write good Spideypool fanfics I might have to do it myself.

I just read the most recent comic, and I blitzed over here.

Is this secret other thing about how when going to the Feywild and back, you need to pass a wisdom check to see if you remember the trip? (You don't have to confirm or deny this, I just wanted to share my theory)

Also augh their faces in this one were such a gut punch! Incredible work once again! That little bit of mouth squiggle in the last panel make it look like they're in the beginning stages of 'trying not to cry, but that was almost a big upheaval for me'

Thank you for sharing!

quickly jotting that down in a little notebook and shoving it in my back pocket hoping you didn't see anything-

I love this theory, especially because I didn't know it was a thing!

Unfortunately, it's not that entrenched in actual Feywild lore. When they were younger, Croissant traded a memory to a hag in exchange for something. They assumed (and were assured) it wouldn't be anything too significant, but it ended up being the entire memory and concept of their childhood best friend. I keep waffling on whether or not I'll draw this, but if I decide not to, I'm sure I'll elaborate on it later.

Okay, listen guys. I get what you’re all saying with insisting that Bruce shouldn’t be written as an abusive parent. I get that you don’t want him to be abusive. I don’t want him to be either. But I keep seeing people argue that he can’t be abusive because he’s such an empathetic person. And I don’t necessarily disagree that he’s empathetic! But please understand that empathy and abuse are not mutually exclusive. A person can be perfectly capable of being kind sometimes and being abusive other times, and the kindness can even be completely genuine. A lot of people with abusive parents also have good memories with their parents. An abusive parent is rarely some sort of completely evil person. Most abusive parents do love their children to some extent. They might believe that what they’re doing is for the child’s benefit, or might not even realize that they are being abusive. Anyone can be abusive. And the idea that abusive parents only have the most horrible motivations for their actions tends to indirectly hurt the children of abusive parents, because their experiences get dismissed or ignored on the basis that “this person can’t be abusive, they’re so nice!” Bruce is perfectly capable of believing in redemption for the villains he faces, of treating victims with kindness and understanding, of fighting for Gotham citizens getting help and support to avoid a criminal lifestyle, and hurting his children. Please understand that “this person shows empathy” is not an argument against the possibility of abuse.

Alien Stage takes the bury your gays trope way too seriously, and somehow is still one of the most valid depictions of that trope I've ever seen. They also implied that aliens might be homophobic but that's a secondary issue

My spiderverse post for the day but I don’t see the point - in fact I think it’s counterintuitive to what the story is driving at - in twisting ourselves in knots arguing whether Miles is a definitive spiderman of his universe because he actually hits the canon checkboxes like his uncle dying etc and his universe hasn’t collapsed like. That’s still a validation operating by the parameters Miguel outlined, when the entire point is that those factors are meaningless to the identity of “spiderman” in isolation. What makes their hero mantle one of worth is the choice to always try save the little people, even when they don’t succeed, and becoming fixated on the loss and it’s supposed inevitability has put them all in a place of stagnation.

Even if Miles hadn’t had a single person die in his journey thus far he’d still be a worthy spiderman. <- a point literally crystallised in Pavitr.