Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girl found dead in a hidden room.

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on the point of including black people in the show (or any period show), a lot of the outrage can sometimes come across as performative to me. it's one thing to feel upset about how little screentime black characters get compared to white characters (a valid criticism, believe me, I Know! give me an hour and i could talk your ear off about how this constantly annoys me as a black person who's damned to enjoy period pieces), but it's another to Only get upset while not actually creating content for said black characters, Especially when fandom (not just hbo war, but in general) is famous for taking Extremely minor characters and creating entire worlds with them, to the point where you wouldn't know they're minor characters at all until you check out the source yourself. richard macon, alexander jefferson, and robert daniels each have only 20 or less posts about them (at the time of publishing this post). in my own fandom experience (within fandoms both big and small and old and new, whatever), i've seen more content (posts, art pieces, analyses, fics, etc) made for minor white characters in less than a mere week's time (it's not a competiton lol i'm just giving a perspective here). so idk. obviously, there's nothing anyone here can do about a show that's already been filmed and released. we got what we got. thas it. at least in the great wide world of fandom, you can actually do something about it, turning the big into small. there's precedent for that. otherwise it just feels like complaining for the sake of complaining

One of the biggest things that makes me see Leo as trans is absolutely the size of his carapace in comparison to his brothers’.

And I’m not talking about height! I’m specifically looking at his shell here, because when you compare him to the others, particularly Donnie who is nearly the same height as Leo, it’s very clear that Leo’s carapace is much longer in proportion to the rest of his body.

Like - standing side by side, even though Donnie is shorter his carapace ends noticeably higher up than Leo’s does. And I like this not only because it really helps push the idea that Leo could very likely be trans (or intersex!), but it’s also just a fun design difference between them.

(It also lends way to future scenarios of Donnie eventually getting taller than Leo, but sitting down still has Leo being the taller one haha.)

"no politics" rule is shorthand for "this space is not safe for POC"

Currently in Mexico, being the only person in my family that knows any Spanish is a huge flex but at the same time they don’t expect my gringo ass to be speaking Spanish so they just assume they’re mishearing me in English and immediately look to the translator

a white english anti-war socialist wins a seat in parliament and the next day the hindi PM says that this is an alarming sign of rising rabid-antisemitism, far-right politics, and islamic fundamentalism.

??? what

If a native person tells you not to do or use something because it misues or mocks something from their culture, even if you personally didn't think it did or that the thing in question "isn't actually that special", your first instinct should be to listen to them and not try to "prove them wrong" (especially if it's something as small and simple as 'don't put feathers behind the cat's ears' like why are you choosing this hill to die on, are you okay? Do you like yourself very much?).

a love suicide ~the theme of rule of rose~ by yutaka minobe does not need to go as fucking hard as it does. like sir you do realize this is a game about weird little girls beating each other up right

gonna indulge my inner ed here and split a hair real fine, but because i have somehow never talked about this: why the semantic difference between ‘stede burned that ship down’ and ‘stede said a lot of entirely true but very uncomfortable to acknowledge stuff, and doing that led to a bunch of new money assholes losing their absolute shit on main and burning their own ship down’ is pulling so fucking much thematic weight it kills me. 

i’ve said it that first way before jokingly and i will say it again, but the other is actually a lot more accurate. 

because what’s the actual sequence of events? not just the consequences, but the context.

- stede asks if they want to play a game in a way they could avoid by not being insecure little noveau riche babies; they take the bait much in the manner of fish stuck in the proverbial about to be bullet-riddled barrel

- stede says a bunch of true stuff about these people, things they are ashamed of and lie about but are 100% accurate. not insults! just facts.

- they delight in the first few chances to shame each other, but as stede keeps going and the secrets expose them all to the truths they all sort of already knew but balanced their social circles on not openly acknowledging, they go absolutely hog fuckin wild, fight in the parking lot of the shittiest bar i ever worked at style.  

- while they go apeshit and attack each other and burn things, stede (and everybody else in this scene we actually like) stands back and goes ‘...wow, these people are really doing this??? really??? fuckin’... wow. oh shit, are they gonna kill each other for real? and they say we’re uncivilized.’

so stede’s not insulting these people, and even better: he’s not being passive aggressive. 

he is, in fact, being the exact opposite of passive aggressive. he’s being honest. and it’s not that ‘oh, i’m just brutally honest so you have to let me get away with out of pocket shit’ crap people pull when they’re looking to be cruel but don’t want to admit it.

that one dude IS embezzling! those two siblings ARE going full dime store lannister! that one dude DID have a child out of wedlock with that other chick!

(i love the inclusion of that one in particular, and how it’s markedly different than what comes after: because i think p solidly that’s the only one where i’m like, hey: as long as everybody involved was chill, who cares? that’s as morally neutral as having a baby with someone you are married to: the context is where the ballgame lies, on that one. 

but these people care. they really, REALLY care. and they care because society has told them they have to care, if they don’t want to end up shamed by said society for it.

outside some select exceptions that mostly come down to ‘ahahahaha capitalism can go fuck itself, the phrase cost of living is far more obscene than most of the words you can’t say on broadcast tv’, i would agree the other truths stede reveals are baseline Not Great. however: fucking somebody you’re not married to only matters if the people involved decide it does, there’s no general moral absolute there. 

like, look. this is why i find debates about if humans are ‘meant’ for monogamy or polyamory tedious and wrongheaded at the same time. are we meant to be on sailboats, or eat cheese? who fuckin’ knows, and who fucking cares. those are all questions that cannot be answered on any practical or universal level. 

we are MEANT to make our own choices, and do what works best for us. the presumption that monogamy is moral or natural versus just... sometimes easier to navigate, because good communication is key to a healthy relationship and the more people there are, the more communicating must be done, is stupid. god knows plenty of monogamous couples cannot communicate for shit. there’s no right way or silver bullet there, and given the lucius and pete of it all, ofmd obviously knows that.

g o d i love this show.)

anyway, tangent over: nothing stede says is not just the simple, unvarnished truth. 

if these people weren’t ashamed of themselves and so afraid of the truth it drives them to freak the fuck out and vomit on each other mid-fight and then burn their own fucking ship down, none of this would be happening. literally none of it! 

they react to the truth like stede does set the ship on fire: but that’s all them. they set their own ship on fire. stede doesn’t do anything but hold a mirror up to their faces and i don’t think there’s an argument here that he shouldn’t have said that stuff, unless you think society should run on people never telling each other the truth if it would be uncomfortable, lest we run wild in the streets and literally burn everything down.

which is a fun little thematic wink/echo: stede breaks their world there, and he does it by working with his actual natural allies and in particular, by listening to frenchie and then going to ask abshir for his help, because he knows things stede doesn’t and stede literally cannot pull this off without him. so stede shows solidarity, and having recently realized this dynamic is a thing he’s gonna have to be aware of and start pushing against if he genuinely cares about ed, actively and purposefully uses the social privilege looking the way he looks, and having the money he has granted him. 

but what he does with it makes all the difference. because having realized these people will listen to him in a way they will not listen to ed, he takes that assumed right to hold the floor and he uses it to burn the motherfuckin system of agreed-upon dishonesty calling itself politeness down. the system, not the ship.

(there’s a read on ‘these are my people’ that’s a lot sadder/less positive, and i think that’s in the mix too, but for this part of stede’s development i love what it also means about how he’s realized the world looks at ed and makes some assumptions they will never, ever make about stede or the other rich white people in that ship.)

so tldr: stede doesn’t actually burn the ship down, not outside the broadest ‘this was what happened next’ terms. 

the rich assholes burn their own ship down, because they literally cannot handle the basic truths about themselves being spoken aloud, and that context makes a whooooole lotta difference.

i mean... this SHOW. what the fuck? i just wanna talk to these writers. 

If Ulysses has a million haters, then I'm one of them. If Ulysses has one hater, then I'm THAT ONE. If Ulysses has no haters, that means I'm dead. If the world is with Ulysses than I’m against the world.

your designs are positively gorgeous! i love that you defer to vibes over canon description! any chance we could see moth flight in your style? <3

Moth Flight

speaking of chuuoku/bat comparisons!!!! otome and kuukou have very similar takes on fashion where they combine traditional clothing with something more modern!!!!!!

both grew up in traditional households and want to subvert their traditions, so for both it may be a symbol of that

There's this huge server I'm in just for some Roblox game updates and the mod team there are the most boring people ever. I understand restricting reactions as people can make explicit ummm ones that are not appropriate for a. Roblox Discord server. BUT THE MODS ARE SUCK KILLJOYS only people who have like level 50 in there can react to things and when they have. Fun. On announcement posts which everyone can read and see easily they're like "Reactions are a privilege not a right 🤓 Don't abuse this luxury" and it's like are you kidding me. No one is fun here. Also they banned the word midget

tfw u kinda wanna make a post about how frustrating it is to try to find racial identity and the pressure of not really having a good answer to "what are you?" because 75% of your ethnicity is stuff that is sometimes considered white or sometimes considered something else or sometimes considered its own race and you've got pale skin and only speak english but you've been discriminated against for your cultural values and facial features but only some of the time in some places and you demonstrably have white privilege in most contexts but not all the time and how much white privilege equals whiteness and on the other hand isn't that awfully similar the concept of racial dilution which is just pc genocide anyway and if you self determine as white is that the right thing to do or is it just assimilation but if you self determine as not white is that respecting and claiming your heritage or is it appropriation/brownface and also what do you do if you self determine one way and then get treated the other way and you know based on the reality that race is socially constructed it can be true that the same person can sometimes be white and sometimes be not white but if you actually say that out loud to people they think you're trying to be a snowflake for woke points based on a technicality-

but also u don't wanna post about that because. if you actually say that out loud to people,