yes "reclaim femininity" for yourself or whatever who cares (even if people online REALLY like acting as if feminine women are bullied for being gender conforming which is just not something that happens in real life) im just tired of the framing of being a tomboy as something you need to "get over" or some silly thing that all women grow out of like no actually socially-decided standards and stereotypes are not inherent to all women its fine to be gender nonconforming or butch or a tomboy in adulthood its not a rite of passage to start wearing makeup and dresses the second you turn 18 and its honestly insane that i even have to say this

originally had them together like this but was afraid of compression

the first shirt on younger blake is the album cover of circle thinking by i hate sex and the second is a shirt i found by googling "funny trout shirt"

just realized i forgot her fucking mole smh. this is the first time ive forgotten it which is surprising given how often i forget small markings... sorry blake... but yeah again i really do not care about people doing shit like "reclaiming my femininity i hated pink because i was an NLOG (i kind of object to the concept of NLOGS personally bc i think its misogynistic but you know) and im a feminine adult now" because its like ok thats you whatever. i just do not like it when people act like this is something ALL women go through. and that women who do not suddenly start conforming to gender expectations are just immature or they hate women and femininity or they hate beauty and have mental issues or whatever. like sorry that is hashtag ridiculous and i cannot stand it and ive seen many posts like it. "oh look i was a tomboy as a child but thank god i grew out of it just give girls a chance to grow out of it let them play around in their silly gender nonconformity (which is only acceptable because theyll stop eventually)" um actually its fine to not be feminine for the rest of your life being born female does not mean you have to be a certain way. you can do what ever you want forever

I did this after side order but I was inactive so… here ya go now 💥

all the rise boys get done dirty on characterization by fandom in different ways i think. (not ALL the time every fanwork etc etc these are just like, trends i tend to notice?) every fandom suffers from losing character nuance.

- leo i’ve talked about plenty on this blog, how some of his canon traits (genuine belief in his skill and cockiness, capacity for joy, his manipulativeness whether for good or ill) seem to get watered down or wiped off the board and supplemented with generic sad boy. his struggles with purpose and identity and not wanting to fail somehow morph into “he hates and completely holds no value for himself”

- donnie’s canon personality gets blurred out and largely replaced with whatever list of Neurodivergent Traits. and i think there’s such a fine line to walk between exploring a character that’s been word of god confirmed as on the spectrum and overwriting what’s canonically there. it’s a hard needle to thread. it also feels like a lot of his canon emotiveness gets left off the table for some reason. bc he does have his moments of flat/deadpan delivery, but a lot of the time he’s honestly very emotive. he has the passion of a theatre kid and the vindictiveness of... also a theatre kid. and the mind of a scientist.

- raph loses so much of his rowdy teen boy energy it’s kind of wild? like interpretations sand off that he’s also impulsive and can be reckless and dumb and LOVES fighting and roughhousing and isn’t the most eloquent person. suddenly there’s this pitch perfect soft boy big bro who would never hurt a fly and always says the exact right supportive thing and singlehandedly raised his 3 brothers (which simultaneously sands off all the nuance of splinter’s issues emotionally connecting with his sons and how that affected all of them). and like i LOVE raph, he’s so full of love and care and anxiety, he clearly has learned to put a lot of work into being aware of his strength and size. but there’s a difference you know?

- mikey is like. where raph gets overparentified by fanon, mikey gets over “family therapist”-ed IMO. the impulsiveness, the goofiness, the powerful emotions including a VERY powerful temper, the flat-out dumb teen boy choices... they get ignored. suddenly there’s this only very sweet and earnest boy who has read a hundred psychology books and runs group family therapy weekly or something. he is crying in his room bc leo and raph are arguing about something. which is so. he IS very sweet and can be very earnest and is full of love! he HAS come in with his opinions and unsolicited advice a couple of times and life coached for the greater good. but there’s a difference between what he does in canon and the role he gets in fanon.

definitely do not think about being called tons of masc terms by an f/o. if you’re comfortable with it of course, they make sure before doing so. maybe they start with calling you the petnames/nicknames they’d usually use for you, calling you handsome along with it (‘hey, handsome man’ or a ‘hi, my sweet, handsome boy.’) maybe you like being called pretty boy too, they’d definitely ask first. maybe they focus on the features they adore the most about you.

maybe you ask to be reassured with such words because you feel comforted by it and they don’t mind doing so, but in the end they really do think those sweet things that they mumble in your ear.

sudden yearning for time travelling teen jiang fengmian lands at lotus pier fic that winds up being about a perfectly nice kid having a varying series of "oh no. i don't like that. that's a lot" reactions.

cw// implied character death, double life nonsense

because you are love itself.

to be fair you have to have a very high iq to like strangerville (also young cahill and. some guy)

homest[ar/uck] posting. this was meant to be supplementary to the gerome comic as him 'explaining the joke' but i uhhhhhh forgot.

i'm not much for crossovers in the the traditional sense, but it IS one of my favorite character exploration exercises to just go like 'if x media existed in this universe, who would and would not be a fan of it?'. and these ones are pretty notorious and always very fun to mess with for that and so here we are

babygirl

i’ve always personally thought that shadow has a more specified skillset and sonic has more overall potential. they come up about equal most of the time but if sonic gets serious then he wins. shadow relies on more specific skills and aids like chaos manipulation and his skates to close the gap. he’s operating near the upper bounds of his potential at all times, there’s desperation and super forms and shit that’d let him be even stronger, but generally he’s just about as strong and as fast as he could possibly be. sonic however, sonic could get infinitely stronger with sheer force of will and time. i don’t think he’s holding back or anything, i just think he has no interest in the pursuit of perfection. sonic is exactly as powerful, as fast, as he wants or needs to be, plus some.

sky!!! 💙💙💙 I tried out a new coloring style here and tried to put less emphasis on line art, and I really liked how it turned out!!! :)

:-P

One thing I feel people almost always overlook about Javert is that:

The book’s narrator is usually harsh/sarcastic towards Javert, and that harshness is why his character has pathos. Javert is able to be sympathetic because Victor Hugo has basically no respect for his beliefs. Javert is so pitiable because Hugo mocks and drags him on basically every page he appears.

I’ve mentioned before that the message of Les Mis is (paraphrasing) that ACAB— Javert is the best police officer it is possible to be, and he is terrible, because the laws he enforces are terrible. His law & order ideology is terrible. Everything he believes is fundamentally wrong, and so deeply wrong that it deserves no respect.

Yes, Hugo acknowledges that Javert occasionally has a misguided kind of nobility— the nobility of holding yourself honestly to a set of bad rules, the nobility of following a terrible moral code even when it hurts you. But Hugo has no respect for Javert’s bigotry, or his bootlicking, or his deranged obsessive worship of law and order. Hugo portrays the way that Javert martyrs himself for his ideology as strangely honorable— but the ideology itself is mocked and condemned. Hugo thinks martyrdom is cool, but that Javert is martyring himself for a terrible cause.

In his most sympathetic moments, Javert’s worldview is portrayed as pitiable…. not a worldview that’s worthy of true total genuine respect, but a worldview that’s deeply pathetic in its wrongness.

Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who triumphs.

This is part of why those old 2012-era les mis fanfics always threw me off, if anyone remembers the fandom trends at the time. XD People used to write Valjean and pre-barricades Javert having political debates, as if the two of them could make arguments about law that were equally valid and worthy of respect, and pre-barricades Javert had a worthwhile set of beliefs that Valjean could learn from. But to me it’s personally kinda like, no XD. Nah. The whole thing about pre-barricades Javert is that he does not have any valid points to make. He has nothing resembling a point. He is “ignorant” and determined to stay that way because he literally believes that thinking is evil. He is a violent authoritarian whose worldview is just “mindless self-destructive bootlicking and bigotry.” I joked about it in a previous post but if we want a character who offers a genuinely meaningful counterpoint to Valjean’s philosophy, who could debate him on politics, and who could represent justice while Valjean represents mercy— that character is Enjolras, not Javert.

Valjean has a fascinating complicated relationship with law and politics and violence, but Javert is just a deeply pitiable brainwashed creature who martyrs himself for Wrong things.

Hugo pities Javert, but he does not treat Javert’s worldview --‘authority is always right, rigid social hierarchies must always be enforced, human life has no intrinsic value, the police must violently suppress any kind of crime or rebellion’— as something that deserves to be genuinely respected. It is not something that’s even worthy of debate. It is wrong, it is nonsense, it is an incoherent cruel self-contradicting ideology, and Javert only believes it because (to quote Hugo’s sarcastic narration) “thought was something to which he was unused.” (Or to be more charitable, Javert believes these terrible things because he was born inside a prison and has been brainwashed from birth into internalizing a cruel carceral view of the world.)

And I think Hugo generally does a good job of walking that tightrope — having pity for Javert without portraying Javert’s ideology as something worthy of genuine admiration. He sympathizes with how rigidly Javert holds himself to his own moral code, while condemning the moral code itself for being idiotic. He has empathy with Javert’s sincere self-destructive dedication to what he believes in, while pointing out the things he believes in are all stupid. He pities Javert’s martyrdom, while condemning the nonsense that Javert martyrs himself for.

One of my Top Ten Favorite Pathetic Javert Moments is this one, when Javert recognizes Marius’s body after the barricades:

A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought that he was to die; who had played the spy even in his agony, and who, with his elbows leaning on the first step of the sepulchre, had taken notes.

Because Javert martyrs himself so earnestly for this terrible cause! He “takes notes” even when he believes he’s going to die and the notes cannot possibly be of any use to anyone, simply because taking notes is the thing he has been ordered to do. He’s so self-destructively dedicated to performing these useless pointless tasks because he believes there is real ~dignity~ to his mindless bootlicking— when there isn’t.

That’s why Javert’s emotional breakdown and suicide hit so hard for me, in a way that it wouldn’t if the narration was forgiving towards his stupid belief system. The contrast between Javert’s sheer pathetic terror and the often harsh/sarcastic narration is just….wild. It makes Javert sympathetic without making his awful ideology seem good, reasonable, or valuable. (And while this is only adjacent to the point I’m making- the harsh narration in Derailed also emphasizes the way Javert has been trained to view his own thoughts/emotions with contempt.) Javert is deeply pitiable/sympathetic without his ideology being framed as correct. And the whole tragedy of his character comes from the fact that he is utterly entirely wrong.

If I were to summarize the pathos of Javert, I wouldn’t say “he’s sympathetic because he’s a noble anti-hero with good strong morals who makes some valuable points about the importance of law” or w/e. I’d say that you can feel sorry for him because he’s a wretched brainwashed creature who’s never done anything right even though he wants to, and is deeply ridiculously pathetic without ever realizing it.

As Hugo puts it: “without himself suspecting the fact, Javert (…) was to be pitied.”

Matilda: It’s been a while… Tristen: Yeah, it feels like forever-.. uh, what brings you here? Matilda: We’re taking a forced vacation. I’m sure you can figure out who did the forcing. Tristen: Ah… Matilda: Yeah. Tristen: I kinda figured you were mad at me. Matilda: Little bit. Tristen: I should’ve said goodbye or written sooner, I guess. Matilda: Little bit-.. but you were sorting your shit out, right? I get it.

[Tristen smiled contritely, avoiding Matilda’s gaze-.. out of sheer embarrassment or a severe lack of brain functionality, he wasn’t sure]

Tristen: Is that Pixie? Matilda: Yeah-.. bit bigger now, huh? Tristen: Aha, little bit. Matilda: Anyway, you’re clearly working, so… Tristen: Shit, yeah-.. I’ve got another job to get to after this but uh, you gonna be around tomorrow? Matilda: Yeah, we pretty much just got here. Tristen: Okay, uh.. meet me outside the pharmacy at ten? There’s only one in town n’ it’s on like every map-.. I don’t have my phone with me, so…

Matilda: Yeah, sure. Tristen: Okay-.. uh, yeah.. okay! Matilda: Bye, Triss. Tristen: Bye-.. see you tomorrow? Matilda: Yep. Tristen: Ten o’clock? Matilda: Uh-huh. Tristen: Okay.

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rest on...ᵗᶦᵈᵈʸ...

the annoying fandom post is so funny like. as someone who used to be active in like a lot more classical and big name fandoms. the shit that happens here is so much less annoying to me than any of that ever was........