Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
1: First Steps Towards Freedom
Having your body and mind stripped away and replaced with something new, Kaylee quickly learned, was like swimming in a stormy sea. You can fight it, sure, but it always drags you back under. She’d tried countless times to fight the curse that’d been plaguing her family for about six years now and was beginning to grow tired of being greeted by the red light glaring down at her cell like an angry eye every time the curse subsided.
all the anime fans thinking ruby is just some cute little girl who’s dream is to be a dome touring idol I need u to read to manga pls pls pls. aqua n ruby the wonder trauma twins r so slay I promise
the thing about doctor who is that its only good when the writers remember that the doctor is Literally Just Some Guy. doctor who should be a show about a weird annoying burnout who travels through space and hangs out with humans because his own species don’t want him. whenever the show buys into the idea of the doctor being a Very Important Universally Beloved Hero Prophesized To Save The World instead of a cosmic dipshit driving a busted old car he stole on graduation day doing the alien equivalent of backpacking across europe the show starts hardcore sucking
sorry to be autistic about this post but they literally solve this dilemma in the show because U only get a cutie mark during a life defining moment where U discover your true passion and also cutie marks mainly Represent more abstract passions not jobs. like pinkie pies is balloons not because she’s gonna become a balloon maker but because her life’s mission to to bring joy to other people and she does that through her parties. so even if pinkie Decided to do something else with her life her defining trait is still bringing joy to other people and her cutie mark wouldn’t change. like the cutie marks Are very personal and are specific to the individual because it’s pony magic… Also destiny is real in the show anyway and U get a cutie mark at the point U begin to fulfill your destiny (like twilight got hers when she got into magic school) so like moot point. I don’t play about those talking horses.
Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.
Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.
Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.
Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer
...Not to get weird and dark on a useful/amuzing writing post, but...
Years and years ago, I read someone's experience of finding out that his mom's boyfriend was a serial killer. How much it sickened him to put together odd bits and pieces of their experiences together, recontextualizing them, suddenly understanding new and horrifying things.
But while that was awful, what really fucked him up later wasn't the clues he'd missed or anything-- it was that, one time, they'd been working together on some kind of home project, and he'd been on a ladder and suddenly gotten off balance-- and his mom's boyfriend had immediately reached out, yanked him back, both of them frightened and swearing and then gasping in the aftershocks of panic, and how grateful he'd been that the boyfriend had been there, how they'd both started laughing as the adrenaline washed through them and out again, hugging fiercely, how grateful he still was that the boyfriend had been there, because he owed his life to this man, this almost-father that had kept him safe and had been afraid for him, and the cognitive dissonance of that, the visceral disgust and the aching love and what it meant to be beholden to a monster for the gift of that moment--
And that's why we need to practice the little lies of fiction, where we can see that characters may not always be rendered in black and white-- it helps us learn how to live in a world that may serve us the worst people we may ever know doing us the greatest kindness of our lives.
Funy how tumblr has become the place people go when there is nowhere else. give us your tired, your sick, and your cringe masses or whatever
all blonde men deserve to be put through an evil maze against an evil spectre of themselves who sows deep worries and thoughts about themselves
