The manga industry, especially JUMP, needs to hurry up and do away with weekly scheduling for mangaka. There needs to better regulations put into place for their health and safety because this is pitiful. Two weeks - monthly updates should’ve already been the standard for the manga industry at this point. These money grabbers will only continue to put the lives of these artists at stake for the sake of capitalism unless some serious changes are implemented.

the whole guilt-tripping language in posts about important topics paired with how I'm still getting bitches in my notes talking about why it's actually good to tell "bad" people to kill themselves continues to prove to me that a lot of people have absolutely no concept of social justice or activism outside of assuming the worst of and then viciously attacking strangers on the internet

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

I love that everyone in TMA is just. Unremarkable. Jon isnt a heroic character; he's self-loathing and depressed and he exhibits the same self-pity as I do when I'm self-loathing and depressed. He doesn't stand out for his strength of will or quick-thinking or virtue. He's a good person but he stops trying to stay human when it gets uncomfortable. He's everything that a regular person is when theyre trapped in a horrible situation and it's ugly and insufferable and Real.

fuck you ageism fuck you life ending at 30 fuck you makeup industry forcing us to feel bad about a natural process fuck you hustle culture fuck you instagram fuck you youtube fuck you glorification and deification of youth fuck you who make people feel bad for not having "achieved anything" in their 20s fuck you people who peaked in high school and try to drag everybody down by insisting it's all downhill after 19

danyal al ghul memes because i don't think i've done those yet for this au.

(the jason one is in reference to the fanon headcanon/au that Jason and Damian potentially knew each other and interacted while jason was in the league. I've thought about it before in context of this au, but haven't thought about it enough to feel inspired or motivated to make a post exploring the idea)

(diablito means, as you can guess, 'little devil'. while i'm neutral to latino jason, i think the nickname is cute as fuck and was danny's main nickname from Jason. i don't wanna touch that timeline so im not gonna decide how old they were when Jason was there.)

Skulker: i am the ghost zone's greatest hunter! i capture and hunt creatures both rare and dangerous. Danyal: a poacher?? you're a poacher?? you poach animals??Skulker:...i sense i've made a mistake of some kind.

anyways that was the day that Skulker cemented himself as Danny's no.1 opp, and still remains there to this day even if he and Vlad are both viciously fighting for second. Out of everyone in the the AP rogues gallery, Skulker will be the first to be thrown under the bus in terms of 'o shit here comes phantom fucking RUN'.

Begging, begging, begging people to stop associating aging and femininity in men/masculine people as Wrong and Predatory. Femininity has no age limit.

To any feminine man, masculine person, or really, anybody who needs to hear this: Your femininity deserves to be recognized and celebrated. Aging is a natural and unique part of life, and you don't have to sacrifice your femininity for fear of being "too old" to be accepted or seen as charming. You are already charming.

There is no limit to being who you are. No matter what you're told, you still deserve to completely claim yourself.

Looking at the Saw wiki’s page for Jigsaw’s victims gives such major whiplash because the reason for being tested will be like:

killed someone

corrupt cop

abused partner

racist

And then you’ll see shit like:

was a defense attorney and defended people

tried to catch a serial killer

was abused by partner

cared about friends too much

And my personal favorite

unknowingly married a guy who lied about some stuff

Drabble but I had to make it pretty :3

Eren is pretty nosy. When he visited your dorm for the first time, he went through everything in your room, shamelessly. You were lying half naked waiting for him, meanwhile this dude was smelling your perfumes.

“‘Hmm, what’s this? ‘Who’s this in the picture with you?”

“His name is Dave, he was my prom date.” you tell him, growing irritated.

“He’s ugly.” He puts the photo facing down and joins you on bed but sits down instead of pushing your head into the mattress fucking you raw. “are your sheets linen? Is that what you prefer?”

You stare wordlessly, this was not how you expected the infamous collage star to to act when invited into your dorm. You usually meet at his place because he insists to always pick you up and have you spend the night at his. So when you asked him if he wanted to come to your place you instead, you could swear you saw his eyes sparkle.

You put your feet on each side of his shoulders which gets him to glance down in between your legs. “Wow, you want to fuck me so bad.” he tilts his head to the side as if to get a better look.

He’s on his knees, hovering over you as you’re lying down with your legs open “Keep talking like that and I’ll find somebody else to fuck me.”

He raises an eyebrow, “keep saying stuff like that and you’re gonna get punished.”

“By who?” you clench your thighs.

His eyes track the dirty motion of your hips and licks his lips as if to taste you. “only me. why, is there someone else on your mind?”

“I mean, dave did hit me up recently. he’s grown quite attractive.” you like being petty.

Not even a crack of a smile. “You know, when you say stuff like that, it makes me want to fuck you silly.” he delicately strokes your cheek.

Huffing out a breath, you’re about to tell him to go ahead but get interrupted by him tracing your lips with his fingers. “Your lips turn down at the edge,” he smiles, “you have the perfect pout.”

Your breath hitches in your throat, not really used to being treated like this. Eren keeps surprising you and yet you find ways to ignore it. But you have a feeling that he’s fully aware of your antics and is being patient with you.

“So?” you dart out your tongue around his finger. “want to see it wrapped around something other than your finger?”

He adjusts his boner and pushes your legs down around his waist. Gazing into your eyes, he calmly speaks. “you have no idea how much I crave you. every second of every day.”

Swallowing hard, you feel the tension in the room about to snap. He lowers his body and pushes your legs up, folding you in half with his body weight.

Face to face, Eren looks at your searchingly. He’s waiting for you to kiss him, he wants you to show him you want him. So your hands reach for his face, and you brush your lips against his. He sighs a breath of relief, as if he’s been holding it it this whole time, and kisses you back.

Feeling content, he draws back and watches as you’re unable to open your eyes for a few moments afterwards. Eren smiles and releases your legs, then viciously hugs you and starts rocking you back and forth.

“You’re so cute.” he squishes you.

“stop, I’ll cut your teddy bear the next time I’m over Eren I swear.” you threathen harmlessly. He gasps, “first of all, Eldy is not a teddybear he’s my son.” he jokes back. Laughing at his antics, you realize you’ve gotten further involved with him than you might’ve realized.

The inside jokes, he kissing and unnecessary cuddling. As if noticing you’re drifting away, he puts you on his lap and grabs your laptop. “Let’s watch a something.” he strokes your thighs.

“Dibs” you both say on the same time. Turning to face him, you yell “supernatural” again, at the same time.

He stares intensely, “oh baby, you were so made for me.” he draws out enthusiastically. “Yeah yeah, just put it on.” you turn your face back to hide your blush.

Your bodies are tangled together, he holds you as if you complete him. Legs in between yours, arm around your torso, you’re surrounded by him. “Eren, did something happen?”

You can tell this makes him happy. “you care about me.” he smiles cheekily and kisses your cheek. So that’s the reasons he just wants to hold you.

“So, what’s wrong?” you forcefully let out. It feels a bit uncomfortable but you can tell he’s not uncomfortable at all. “Don’t worry about it, just let me hold you.”

“Fine.” you don’t know why you make it sound like you’re irritated, you’re not. But Eren doesn’t say anything, you have a feeling he’s learning how you work and actually understands you. Either way, you let him hold you.

Disney, releasing Wish: "so it's all about legacy--the new generation surpassing the old, overcoming the evils perpetuated by them, relinquishing singular power... and there's an old man in a tower, uh... animal sidekick, i guess..., ah... magic...?

Miyazaki, just out of frame, sledgehammer raised:

I have something that my brain is like "Hey, this is an Ask!" So let's do this! Did Greygold ever encounter Ansur? How would they respond to him making his very (very) messy breakup their problem? Especially with most of the pre-fight being Ansur and Emps using the inside of their head to bicker like an old (very bitterly divorced) married couple.

Hell yeah they did! Had this Ansur of a question (hweh) pre-prepared~

And bonus:

Greygold had one million questions for the Emperor.

Now Greygold has two million!

he is so fucking autistic

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

yuuta exhibits such previously abandoned, recently adopted dog behavior. incredibly anxious all the time, even though nobody’s out to get him or leave him behind. waits for you to return home or from school or from work excitedly, just to see you when you walk through the door. follows you around senselessly, hovering in your space just for the sake of companionship. initiates affection in prodding ways—starts off next to you, then a hand on your thigh, then deems it safe to lay all the way down, then slowly pushes his head into your lap. gets up whenever you need to get up, and resumes his position as soon as you’re ready. brings you gifts as a sign that he’s thinking of you, and maybe because he likes the affection it brings out in you, maybe because he likes the gentle affirming touches of a hand in his hair or a pinch to his cheek. rests his head on your stomach or his chin on your shoulder when he’s sleepy, stays there, immobile, and will not move unless absolutely necessary. sometimes he gets surprised when he hears you calling for him, there’s a moment of disbelief as he thinks “me? really? you need me?” but it’s very quickly overshadowed by this compulsive need to show up, to please, to do anything for you, which is why he always answers when you call. he doesn’t realize that he has puppygod eyes, especially when he’s excited or confused, but he does and it’s incredible endearing. very reluctant to share your space or attention after a while, considers that to be sacred and he won’t risk being let go or lost again, so as a safety precaution, he keeps himself right by you, waits for you always. 

DOLL ANNOUNCEMENT: these dating questions are getting ridiculous! your life should NOT revolve around a man... if you find yourself devoting too much time to a man and his shenanigans, you have got to cut him loose. you have to let a grown man lead HIMSELF into healing... stop trying to do it for him based off of potential - the habits he developed are his own until he decides to do better. you are NOT his therapist.

i'm speaking from experience. like are you enabling the drama because you enjoy the thrill and chaos? are you tolerating it because you conflate abuse with "relationship struggles"? are you crying about it because you fear being alone? it's so, so valid but you have to shift your focus to what you CAN control right now. and you can control how you move on.

i hate to say it, but sometimes WE are the problem. like... some of y'all are dumbing yourself down and ignoring your God given intuition. i'll admit that the cult of domesticity has us fast forwarding to trying to build a home. but with NO foundation? we all need a home, but remember, it starts with the SELF first. if you got no routine, no accountability, no faith... a partner/situationship becomes nearly like a God - your answer to anything and your purpose for everything. and that's unfair to both of you.

you have to dedicate your free time to being a better woman. we gotta touch grass. linkedin, indeed, traveling, self improvement, knowledge, doing silly girl things, devoting time to build your beliefs and morals, following your dreams, reinventing/creating a vision, getting healthy, relearning yourself... i don't know. just stop making excuses and do better. and i'm saying this as your big sister from experience. take a break from dating and focus on you until it's time again.

when ppl see this & this, directed by the same person, and think the narrative is "anakin is evil" not "anakin is a steward of the balance, a force demi god, as was foretold on Mortis" 😂