Irresponsibly Hopeful

Speak up! Love unconditionally. Rejoice with your friends. Welcome the stranger.

[dance-hall-dyke-deactivated2019]

Adoribull prompt: first fight?

Oh boy. This made me sad. But I did it! Hope you like it =)

Dorian and Bull bicker and argue near constantly, even at their most affectionate times. It was their language. Dorian would call him a ‘brute’ and Bull would call him a ‘brat’ and it all meant something entirely different. Even earlier in their relationship any hostility was entirely one sided. Dorian’s side. Bull never doubted the other man’s loyalty and Bull never blamed him for his unease.

Even apart from the bickering Bull loved talking. So after the Storm Coast the silence that hangs is heavy. The pouring rain seemed fitting. Even The Chargers have gone quiet, a change from their usual jovial banter. Bull falls behind the rest of them and Dorian thinks he’s never seen the hulking man look quite so small.

“Is there anything I can do?” Dorian asks quietly, slowing his pace to match the Bulls.

“Just say something,” Bull sighs “Anything.”

And he does. He talks quietly to Bull for a few hours. About whatever pops into his head. Politics at first, then eventually descends into complicated magic theory. Eventually, without Bull to spur on the conversation he lapses into silence again.

Bull puts on a decent face for the next few days. Drinking in the tavern, sparing with Krem and the others, and thwarting an assassination attempt by tossing a man off a balcony.(Which Dorian will never admit to finding that kind of hot.) But when he and Bull find themselves alone at night, wondering hands and breathless kisses, Dorian can see- or more accurately- feel the changes. Bull has always been impossibly gentle for the kind of sex they engage in. But this is different. Bull started treating the mage like he was made of glass. The touches are almost timid. Dorian tries to spur the warrior on with playful bickering but Bull doesn’t bite. Both metaphorically and literally. At first Dorian lets it slide, it’s not as if the sex it bad, it’s just different. A bit of tenderness isn’t such a bad thing after all. But he can’t keep his mouth shut for long.

“I’m not exactly fragile, you know?” Dorian says one night after a long string of much to gentle nips along his jaw. He digs his nail into grey skin, hoping Bull will get the idea. He wants nothing more that night then Bull to toss him on the bed, manhandle him, tie him up, and littler his skin with fresh bruises.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Nonsense,” Dorian again tries to spur him on, raking his nails down Bull’s back “You never have, I’m asking, Bull, please.”

But Bull doesn’t move. “I’ll hurt you.”

“What on is going on with you?” Dorian can’t hide the frustration in is voice.

“Without the Qun-”

“Bullshit,” Dorian spits pushing Bull away. “You’ve never hurt me. You never would.”

There’s a long pause as Bull considers his words.

“The Qun is what keeps us in check,” He says finally “Without it we’re savages, bandits and murders. I can’t let that happen.”

“You honestly think that of yourself?” Dorian is beginning to find it difficult to control his emotions. He’s aware he’s almost shouting but can’t bring himself to lower his voice.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” Bull turns away and Dorian can feel the anger boil up inside him. Partially at Bull’s refusal to simply ask for help, tell him what he needs, but mostly at the society that’d convinced this man- this good, loving, gentle man- he was a beast that needed to be controlled lest he slaughter his friends. That there was something wrong with him.

“Then explain!” Now Dorian is shouting. He takes a breath to collect himself and continues.  “Talk to me, please.”

“Talking?” Bull laughs, short and humorless over his shoulder. “After Redcliff is that what you did? Talk?”

Dorian can’t speak. This sentence is going nowhere good.

“Or did you get drunk and crawl into bed with me?” It was mean to hurt. To drive Dorian away. But it didn’t. Not truly. He knew Bull too well for that. Bull turns away from him again, the action betraying him. Bull couldn’t look a wounded Dorian in the eye. Couldn’t stomach the looking at the pain he caused.

“You can’t get rid of me that easily, Bull.” Dorian says, emotion cracking his voice only slightly. “I’ve loved men who’ve said worse to me and meant it.”

Dorian hold his ground. Stands even when Bull crumbles onto the bed, heals of his hands pressed into his eyes. His shoulders shake. And…that’s enough. The mage is by Bull’s side unable to simply watch the man weep.

[corruptingtheyouthwithkindness]

Damn. Deep feels.

[winninghumans]

Beauty Does Matter After All

Understanding Beauty has been a thought project of mine since sophomore year of college. The reason this seemed so important comes from the fact that I’ve been female my whole life. Female worth and female beauty can hardly be untangled in our culture, especially for teenage girls. I went through my fair share of body image issues and disordered eating habits in pursuit of acceptance, not to mention spent a shit ton of money the practice & habits of trying to be pretty. & did a pretty damn good job of it if I do say so myself. Despite my success with eyeliner and hairstyles, I went through teenagerdom feeling not quite pretty enough, and at the same time I felt as though my black belt in martial arts & my 31 on the ACT have got to count for something on the self worth scale. It was like I was picking up this message from who knows where: “It’s awesome to be a badass and a genius, buuuuut if you are a woman, it only counts if you are beautiful too.” Now I’m a grown up and I say fuck that. Pretty is overrated. It’s more fun to be awesome than pretty.

At the same time, I haven’t been able to avoid thinking about beauty and wondering if it has any meaning at all. I grew up going to church & got some nice messages there like,  “outer beauty fades but the inner beauty of good character lasts forever” and “true beauty is on the inside,” and “man looks at outward appearances, but God looks at the heart.” That sounds nice and all but a little shallow and unfulfilling. That kind of sentiment doesn’t explain what beauty is and why it’s so compelling, and if it has any meaning. That kind of message just says that beauty is an illusion. So come college & some thinkin of deep thoughts & reading of big books, the intellectual fires were stoked and I could not just leave it at that. Since I’ve dug into the meaning of Beauty I’ve written a few articles & done a few public speaking gigs & maybe even an academic paper or two on the topic, and maybe changed my mind a few times. For this blog I’ll stick to casually discussing what’s at the center of my thoughts about Beauty currently.

Here’s what I’ve got to say about Beauty and its effect on our souls. For the purpose of this discussion I’m gonna jump into a story from Plato’s Phaedrus and along with it, some assumptions about the existence of some kind of divine being or force or god that is the source and the essence of Beauty and Goodness and Truth. Along with that comes the the existence of souls who have some kind of ultimate purpose involving unity with the divine. Even if you don’t literally believe your soul is on a journey toward God, it’s still a true metaphor of how beauty compels us & inspires us to move towards goodness to create our best selves.

Beauty is divine. It’s much bigger than what you get when you google search the word beauty; that will get you a bunch of photoshopped pictures of thin white women. Beauty is much bigger than any kind of female beauty though it includes it. Beauty includes human bodies, human actions, and human creativity, and human feeling. All these things reveal the spark of the divine within us. Beauty also includes nature in all its order and chaos and sublimity and mystery that is beyond us and our ability to quantify it and tame it with science & technology.

Beauty draws our souls to the divine. Plato’s Phaedrus contains a beautiful story to show how beauty works on the soul. In the story, the soul is like a chariot pulled by two horses, one white, one black. The white horse always pursues the highest form of Beauty. It’s never fooled by an illusion or even by attractive things that are in front of it, but is focused on the destination: being united with divine Beauty itself forever. The Black horse also runs after Beauty, but it is quick to rush towards any and all expressions of beauty, not just the highest and best. The black horse is not evil, but it’s driven by impulse and appetite. In its hunger for beauty, it is sometimes fooled by things that appear attractive but are actually destructive. It’s strong enough to through the whole chariot off course and into chaos, since the two horses could be pulling in opposite directions. The task of the chariot driver, or the intellect, is to get both horses running in the same direction, to ascend upward on its journey to Beauty itself.

The lesson here is to get in tune with your white horse, that intuitive inner sight that knows the best & truest & most beautiful path. Listen to the white horse and feed it and let it grow strong. Don’t be driven by the black horse, but rather let your intellect, the chariot driver learn to rule it, train it, tell it where to charge forward with its energetic hunger for beauty. The black horse is slow to learn the lesson that “all that glitters isn’t gold”, but it can be reined in and yoked to the white horse so that they work together. In the dialogue the chariot is slowly spiralling upwards to eventual union with the divine. You will get there eventually, even if the going is slow. Even if your black horse is unruly and you go in circles for a while, it’s ok, you’ll get there. Just pick up the reins and again and guide the white horse to look for the next step.

What do humans want? What is our deepest desire? It’s really a simple answer: to possess the Good and Beautiful forever. Our desire for true goodness and beauty is the love that moves our souls. Our desire, (the greek eros), drives us onward and upward to the divine. Beauty matters. Beauty inspires love, it makes us want to be better, to become more fully who we are meant to be, to express our highest selves. But so often we get fooled and our black horse gets distracted, because every day we see photoshopped images of one single kind of beautiful female body that we forget how to see beauty in all its other expressions. So then, in true need & desire for beauty, we go after what we see in front of us and try so hard to become beautiful like those magazine covers; or others try to possess & control female bodies and their beauty. And thus our souls go in circles.

So let’s take up the reins. Let’s develop eyes to see true Beauty and learn to cultivate a beautiful life. Look outward for beauty and let it inspire you and fill you with love. Look for Beauty in daily life in people, nature, good actions, relationships, art, food.  Make a beautiful life: develop skills, talents, strengths, work hard, think hard, accomplish something, practice something, create something, serve others. Live a beautiful story. Realize that you already are living a beautiful story. You are a part of God’s beautiful story. One of my favorite poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins uses a metaphor of a theater to express how divine beauty is lived out in us: “Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his, to the father through the features of our faces.” Christ is the player and so are we, and the universe is the theater, and who is watching but God, not judging but enjoying. There’s divine beauty in every act, around every plot twist, and in every performer if we can learn to see it. You are beautiful, because you are part of the beautiful story and are creating your own beautiful story. Things may not look that way now, but look to the end!  Your soul will be moved to union with God by love & desire for true Beauty & Goodness. That’s the love that moves the spheres. Keep your eyes on that Beauty; let your horses leap on to that end.

[lunatictoons]

[princelamb]

the greatest horse in all of animation history

[corruptingtheyouthwithkindness]

lol

[winninghumans]

Disclaimers:

Trigger warnings for rape and sexual assault. I am sharing my story in this. If you show this to friends or family members who know me well, feel free, but please leave my identity out of this. This is very personal for me, and in some ways it is therapeutic. Feel free to ask me any questions on my personal blog (firagaproductions.tumblr.com), I am generally very open to discussing these things. Being a very personal piece, this may become close to graphic. Please heed the trigger warnings. Do not make this blog an unsafe place for you.

*Names changed for my privacy.

Keep reading

[winninghumans]

Protest Music

I was first introduced to protest music in my freshman anthropology class. It was only 4 years after the invasion of Iraq by US military forces. In high school, I was quite the patriot, one might say jingoist. I watched the coverage of “shock and awe” bombing of Iraqi cities as a teenager with disturbing sense of “finally, go get ‘em.” It wasn’t until college that I began to intentionally open myself up to accept expressions of experiences different from my own.

In that class, we surveyed very briefly the history and culture of the Middle East, but then spent a good amount of time discussing the morality of preemptive military action (something I’d accepted easily in earlier years) and Iraqi and Arab perspectives of the conflict. I didn’t really want to know these things, but they came flying at me. I knew I had to take them seriously. These were people, too, after all, right? Iraqi-American rapper TIMZ was one of the first whose perspective got in my face and forced me to look again. His music video “Iraq” disturbed me. It never let me think the same way about war. It still disturbs me. But now because I see the faces of my Iraqi friends and I am crying out for the death and destruction to come to an end.

“We say, who needs Iraq? But everyone in the world bleeds Iraq.”

Two years after this class, I’d meet my first Iraqi friends who fled to the US to escape the war, not without their own physical and mental wounds. I don’t know where I’d be without those friends, and I don’t know if I’d have cared to meet them in the first place if protest music hadn’t pierced my armor-plated ethnocentrism.

[hotcomicsforcoolpeople]

[corruptingtheyouthwithkindness]

Hahahah😭😭😭😭

[best-of-memes]

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler

[corruptingtheyouthwithkindness]

Yes

[blackfashion]

[corruptingtheyouthwithkindness]

Pretty😍

[soleuna]

Friendly reminder that

bisexual girls who have a boyfriend are still part of the LGBT+ community

bisexual girls who’ve never kissed a girl before are still part of the LGBT+ community

bisexual girls who are more attracted to boys than to girls are still part of the LGBT+ community

bisexual girls who’ve never had a boyfriend/girlfriend before are still part of the LGBT+ community

bisexuals are part of the LGBT+ community

[medleymonster]

Kid’s President Letter To A Person On Their First Day Here: (x)

Take brain pictures! Because amazing things will happen everyday!

[winninghumans]

Steven Universe

So there’s this show called Steven Universe. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you haven’t. It began airing on Cartoon Network in November 2013, but there was a pilot aired online in May 2013. It’s wonderful creator, Rebecca Sugar, who is only 28 years old, is the first woman to ever create a show on Cartoon Network. The show is basically about a group of three aliens called the Crystal Gems who fight to protect the Earth, especially their adopted hometown called Beach City. They raise a young half human, half gem boy named Steven Quartz Universe who is the child of their former leader, Rose Quartz, and a human man named Greg Universe. They teach Steven what it means to be a gem and how to use his powers. Rose Quartz gave up her physical form to have Steven (as far as we know, gems don’t reproduce through birthing), but his father Greg is still in town and has a close relationship with Steven even though they don’t live together. I’ll keep this as spoiler free as possible, but here are a few amazing things about this show.

Non-Nuclear Family

Steven definitely lives in a non-nuclear family. He lives in a home with three female aliens, and he occasionally visits his dad, who lives in a van at his car wash business. His dad wants the absolute best for his son, which is why he has Steven live with the Crystal Gems. This is joked about from time to time, like with people not understanding the relationship between Steven and the gems, even going so far as to have one character calling them Steven’s sisters.

LGBTQ Representation

Later in the show, it’s revealed that there are two female characters who are in a romantic relationship with each other, and that relationship makes them much stronger and even better. Some children’s shows may hint at LGBTQ relationships, but this one is very clear and shown in multiple episodes. Sorry I can’t describe it more, but I really want to keep this spoiler free.

Body Positivity

All the characters have very different body shapes, and it’s never used as a joke about weight or height. In fact, Steven dreams of seeing the gems “fuse” (two or more gems fusing to become one big, super-powered being that has qualities of both original gems but also some new qualities) so that he can see a giant woman (YouTube “Giant Woman”). There’s even a song about it. One character, Sadie, who works in Beach City, may even be a little person* (this has never been addressed in the show, but it is speculated by fans). She is a teenager, but she only slightly taller than Steven.

(Photo credit)

Character Growth

Each and every character in this show experiences well-developed growth. Steven grows in his physical powers as well as his friendships with the gems, his dad, and the people in town. Each of the gems experiences personal growth as well as growing friendships with each other. They all have fights with one another, showing both healthy and destructive ways to deal with anger, and they are very clear about which is which. But they always resolve their issues, even if it takes a few episodes. Many of them also have a struggle with their pasts, but so far, have seemed to find redemption, even if it hurt to get through the hard feelings.

So have you seen Steven Universe? Have I left something out that you would like to add to the list or do you disagree with anything here? Let’s talk about it! Just try to stay away from spoilers for those who have never seen the show but would like to watch it some day.

 *I’m sorry if this isn’t the proper term. I tried to look up the best term, and this is what I found.

[corruptingtheyouthwithkindness]

Will have to watch this!

[isabelcortes]

owen and baby raptors. <3

[corruptingtheyouthwithkindness]

[corruptingtheyouthwithkindness]

Thanks for this assistance with common sense and decency Matt. You're an MVP.

[juliaccarpenter]

My hope is that going forward we can have a Pennsatucky Test for rape scenes much like the Bechdel Test. Is the victim’s point-of-view shown? Does the scene have a purpose for existing for character, rather than plot, advancement? Is the emotional aftermath explored? As long as sexual assault continues to be a scourge of our society, TV shows ought to mine the subject; it’s important we keep the conversation going. Just take care of your characters. Don’t rape ‘em and leave ‘em. They deserve to have their trauma acknowledged. They deserve to have their stories told.

OITNB Is the Only TV Show That Understands Rape (via mygirltucky)

[torn-apart-hurricane]

[ronswansonmemes]

Parks and Recreation Merchandise: http://bit.ly/1nsXYqC

[corruptingtheyouthwithkindness]

Story of My life 😂