amount of information perpetually too low

aktiss dernuk, she/it trans girl-bug-thing (also there's kirito in my gender long story). in my 20s, downright vampiric, polyglot, homestuck. i read books and manga and light novels and detect eggs in them. conlanger, spec evo enthusiast, theological hoarder(/keterist), too many hours in stellaris. ask me what a nareg is (if you dare)

[approximateknowledge]

beater syndrome or: "why people misunderstand vriska and kirito for the same reason"

so a little while ago i made a random shitpost that ended me up with this image

^cursed entity

and it's come back to haunt me with ungogly revelations which i will now share because i have to it feels important

context: originally i was just gonna make a post about kirito, explaining how people misunderstand the character and *why* (and why it's completely understandable); but then i realised there was a real pattern here and the subconscious connection that led to the above cursed image suddenly made sense in my mind

so here it is:

the reason kirito gets mischaracterised so often has entirely to do with the combination of:

a) most people only having watched the aincrad arc (<;keyword watched),

and

b) the fact the anime gives a twisted image of the characters due to the fact the internal dialogues from the light novel get cut out completely

the end result of this is that when most people talk about "kirito", they're actually talking about "the beater", and those are crucially *not the same*!

the "beater" is a *role*, and a very specific one at that; it's what happens when you try to "own up" to accusations and unreasonable expectations (internal or external) to such an extent you're always playing the same self-destructive part, and because it's fundamentally a defense mechanism you just get stuck in it until things change drastically enough it finally feels safe to stop playing that horrible role and try to remember who you really are, after everything's over

that's what's happening here; when people say a character is "a kirito" they're actually referring to the beater, and the reason those characters suck ass is because they unironically use what's actually a coping mechanism in a horrible situation for a character's actual personality; of course it sucks! because they're doing it wrong!

it's about trying to convince yourself being a loner destructive scapegoat is "cool" despite always having a nagging insecurity it might just not be, but given the circumstances you're in too deep and so the sunk cost fallacy compels you to keep going

it's not *actually* cool; if anything it's depressing

now i think it's becoming obvious how all of this applies to vriska as well, but there's one crucial difference: the death game never actually *ends* for vriska serket; even now in post-canon she's arguably the *only* character who seems to still be playing sgrub, or maybe she never even stopped flarping

except for one version of her. for (vriska) the game did finally end. and they're the same

the beater dies when the game ends, and we see it happen to both of them

(also they're both transfem i didn't know how to fit that in but they are and that's a fact)

[approximateknowledge]

screw it this is gonna be my pinned post from now on

[nyandotexe]

Random transfem headcanon: kayaba akihiko. I see you wanting to transform into a giant laser-shooting woman with a massive cleaver sword >.>

Unrealistic transition goals:

[fernsnailz]

so did pjackk say anything before he got bload up again or did his corpse just kinda roll through here like a tumbleweed

[sabertoothwalrus]

much appreciation for people who create ocs that are clearly derivative of The Character because even if the inspiration is clear, they had the self awareness that their headcanons had snowballed so far past character analysis into pure self indulgence that there was very little of source material left. and that’s beautiful. sometimes when you’re preoccupied playing touys it’s hard to take a step back and realize you’ve actually created something wonderful and new

[sabertoothwalrus]

which is another reason why “this reminds me of The Character!” comments can be annoying because!! ok yes maybe there’s a connection, but appreciate what makes the oc unique!! don’t flatten the creator’s achievement to break away and explore on their own!!

[mousidy]

a lot of my disillusionment with the trans "community" comes down to the fact that too many of you take "gender is different from sex" and go "ah ok, so instead of saying women are fragile and men are strong, I should say afabs are fragile and amabs are strong. to be Inclusive"

then you just treat gender like a surface level aesthetic draped over what someone "actually" is. really is indistinguishable from terf rhetoric

[mousidy]

you all need to unpack your bioessentialism, but we also need a better theory of gender than "it's just dressup." I will pick my words carefully here, but the word "gender" itself refers to so many different phenomena that have been lumped together, and we need to un-lump them

[mousidy]

in a feminist context, "gender" has historically referred to externally imposed categorization and the internalization and performance of said categories. in a paper I wrote on this subject, I called this sense of the word "extrinsic gender"

"intrinsic gender," on the other hand, is what I used to refer to the sense of the word "gender" that a lot of trans people are talking about when they discuss social gender dysphoria and euphoria. it's the internal sense of category that's resistant to external impositions

but then we also use the word "gender" to refer to subconscious sex, which is the term Julia Serano coins in Whipping Girl to name the phenomenon we're talking about when we talk about bodily dysphoria. it is the "gender" being "affirmed" by gender affirming healthcare like HRT and bottom surgery

so, "gender" is: a social classing system, a performance, and at least two internal phenomena as well. and I really don't know if it's doing us a service to conflate all of these things!

[mousidy]

a lot of people lately seem to be going heavy on the "performance" use of the word, ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) social classing, intrinsic gender, and subconscious sex. this seems to have led to a lot of "progressive" people treating trans women like men "amabs" who wear womanhood as a costume, and nobody understands why that's wrong because they also think gender is just a performance

[mousidy]

see also "why can't you just be a femboy/feminine man/etc"

[mousidy]

furthermore, some trans people experience social dysphoria but not bodily dysphoria, and vice versa. but bodily dysphoria in particular has gained some stigma in the last few years

because we use the word "gender" to discuss both "intrinsic gender" as I termed it above, and subconscious sex, there's been a certain strain of argument from some trans people that says that medical transition reaffirms societal gender norms about bodies, and that bodily dysphoria must only result from externally imposed norms about what kind of body corresponds to what gender, and thus it would just go away if the gendered associations were unlearned

I'm strongly of the opinion, though, that our bodies are not like clothes! gender dysphoria related to clothing would generally have to do with one's intrinsic gender clashing with the gendered norms of their culture surrounding clothes, but I believe "gender" dysphoria related to the body itself is really, in large part, subconscious sex dysphoria, and this component cannot be alleviated by changing norms or associations. I strongly believe I would still seek HRT and bottom surgery if I lived my whole life in a cultureless vacuum

you cannot sidestep my dysphoria by regendering parts of my body I'm trying to change, and frankly it causes me a lot of strife that fellow trans people who flirt with me think they can talk about my body however they like as long as they gender it correctly. the word "girlcock" is not a magic dysphoria repellent, because the dysphoria doesn't just come from the gendering

[rockytheeridian]

PROJECT HAIL MARY + Ilyukhina's dress 2026, dir. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

[goth-queen]

[meatgrinder-0]

[pokeballvictimized]

always kinda funny to see a character who is so clearly transfeminine coded, like, the dissociation, the rejection of masculinity, the clear disconnect between the character's desires and the heroic or leadership role that's being forced on them and to look at the fanbase and see that people are calling "him" a malewife. like oh what's that? you think there's something weird about him being a husband? you don't think he'd like that? you think for some reason a relationship that makes him happy would actually have him as a wife? for some mysterious reason?

[fungienjoyer]

they brough back pjackk for like 3 hours before taking his corpse out back again. what the fuck is going on

[k1ntsug1-r0b0t-g1rl]

some days i feel overwhelming grief for the fact that i never got to be a teenaged girl

[k1ntsug1-r0b0t-g1rl]

i should have been an awkward tomboy slowly figuring out she's a lesbain and crushing on my best friend but instead i was crushed into nothing by feelings i couldn't even point to

[communist-hatsunemiku]

who gives a fuck about that stupid metal bastard BRING BACK IRISH AMERICAN CHAN !!!!!!!!!!!!

[k1ntsug1-r0b0t-g1rl]

I'm not mourning my teenage years because i falsely believe all girls have a magical adolescence I'm fucking mourning it because i didn't get to be a real person. I'm really fucking glad you can talk about how being a teenager wasn't perfect, i didn't exist.

[yamada-ryo]

PJACKK CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD!?!?

[s-lycopersicum]

about to make some ill-advised directory naming decisions

[s-lycopersicum]

If you think about it, someone has to be the edge case that countless programmers have to account for, or else their work is wasted.

[maspers]

Imagine waking up to find yourself in one of those "the mice and other small animals have a secret civilization hidden from humans" settings. And you've been turned into a mouse and you're horrified to discover that you were already living in that sort of setting but there's some sort of weird perception filter that causes mice to appear as nonsapient animals acting on instinct instead of the sapient creatures they actually are. Like, human brains cannot comprehend the mouse society. It's like an entirely separate wavelength of the same reality. Language becomes squeaks, furniture becomes scraps and rubbish, furnished homes become a dusty hole. You had no idea it was there, because you couldn't have any idea.

And if that existential horror wasn't enough, it becomes clear that the perception filter works both ways, and humans no longer appear sapient to you. You can read the books in your local mouse library just fine, but the human road signs? Incomprehensible scribbles with no rhyme or reason. The humans are lumbering, unpredictable creatures which fashion large structures with bizarre, barely comprehensible purposes. They don't seem sapient, they seem monstrous. Just as wild as a mountain lion or an eagle, and just as threatening, yet their excess materials are strangely useful. It's terrifying. Every once in a while you manage to identify something with how it is in your human memories, you can extrapolate what the humans must be doing or saying because you remember what the human context is, but you cannot recognize human civilization anymore. Because you're a mouse now, living in a mouse's reality. And nobody else has been through this, so nobody else in this mouse world can understand what it is you're going through. And you're so small.

Anyway would that be messed up or what? Give me some mildly horrifying mouse world isekai.

[onedollopofsourcream]

if bending was real, which element would you be?

water

earth

fire

air

knowing my luck i'd be the avatar

none i don't want to do all of that training

Remaining time: 4 days 18 hours

please reblog so we can reach a bigger crowd this time