Ember's Blog

Ember, she/her, over thirty. Into a variety of animanga, western animation, and video games, particularly anything with f/f. I enjoy writing fanfiction as a form of self-expression and a sort of conversation with the source material and fandom.

[mars-gallavanger]

Rosammy

[kuromi-hoemie]

hey um. so sorry to tell you this, but op of that post plays toys kinda weird. yeah you should just block them, that's not how normal people play with toys

[kuromi-hoemie]

this is what shipping discourse sounds like to me

[yearofdoodles]

Pov you're Three and multiple fuck off massive ships saw you from across the bar and liked your vibe ✨

Very vaguely inspired by this from Platform Decay (mild spoiler):

[yesornopolls]

The last character you wrote about is put in the last video game you played for a week. Can they survive?

The last character you wrote about is put in the last video game you played for a week. Can they survive?

Yes

No

See results

Voting ended onMay 29

[emberkeelty]

He Would Not Fucking Say That variant She Would Not Fucking Bring That Fetus To Term

[annabelle--cane]

I agree that much shipping content in aggregate isn't very good, but that's not because it's shipping content, it's because it's not massively well considered work made by hobbyists for the lulz, and non-shipping focused fan works are often much the same. first thing I do in any new fan space is go digging for analysis posts and most of those are also vaguely to Extremely bad because their primary function is to be enjoyable for the person who made them, not to be academically sound and worthy of scrutinous peer review. which I'm sure also applies to everything I've ever posted but well that's not any of my business really. but basically my point is that if you want more fan works that are Good then you should push for More Good as opposed to Less Shipping as the shipping-shipless axis is different from the good-bad axis. it's 4:39 a.m.

[chuckeedle]

request on my ko-fi was: "Asriel Dreemurr and King Clawthorne playing with toys together?" really want to thank @emberkeelty and their patience as I was recovering from surgery + bonus doodle

[bornetoblood]

Fraw + Amuro animatic…

[emberkeelty]

Kind of funny how the Feddies in Hathaway are so obsessed with making Odyssey references when what's really going on around them is some blatant House of Atreus shit.

[emberkeelty]

That irony has to be intentional, right? They want to pretend they're living in a world where you go off to fight for a while and then return to a home that, however changed, can be restored to its proper state. Kenneth, a married man, calls the woman he wants to make his mistress Circe. But the only Penelope, the only constant, is the Gundam itself. Wake up and smell the modern warfare.

[emberkeelty]

More about this + Gigi. Kenneth calls her Circe, the nymph who kept Odysseus away from his wife against his will, when he's the one who took off his wedding ring to actively pursue her. The count tries to make her into his emotional anchor, his steadfast reward for surviving the trials of patriarchy, his Penelope (though unlike Kenneth he's either not nerdy enough or not gauche enough to outright nickname her as such), ignoring how impossible that is when he's paying for her "love". So many Federation men projecting so so so much onto women to try to comfort or absolve themselves in the midst of a Hell of their own making, just like Hathaway himself, just like Char before him, but as the Federation, which represents Westernization/globalization/Japan as an ally of America/American hegemony in Japan, they keep drawing from this one particular ancient narrative that the West has reified.

[emberkeelty]

Kind of funny how the Feddies in Hathaway are so obsessed with making Odyssey references when what's really going on around them is some blatant House of Atreus shit.

[emberkeelty]

That irony has to be intentional, right? They want to pretend they're living in a world where you go off to fight for a while and then return to a home that, however changed, can be restored to its proper state. Kenneth, a married man, calls the woman he wants to make his mistress Circe. But the only Penelope, the only constant, is the Gundam itself. Wake up and smell the modern warfare.

[emberkeelty]

Kind of funny how the Feddies in Hathaway are so obsessed with making Odyssey references when what's really going on around them is some blatant House of Atreus shit.

[emberkeelty]

A somewhat small thing that stuck out to me in the new Hathaway is... (spoilers below)

... the scene where Mafty retrieves the one survivor from the unit that got shot down and he's openly crying about his failure to save anyone else, and people immediately hug him and reassure him that he still did a difficult and worthwhile thing by saving himself. Because that is just so extremely not how things ever went with the AEUG, let alone any more mainstream Federation forces. Most things are as horrible as ever if not worse, someone as young and full of potential as Hala shouldn't have had to die like that, Hathaway is pretty obviously trying to push himself toward increased ruthlessness as part of some kind of spiritual sunk cost fallacy because he views himself as morally wounded by having murdered someone when he was a little kid and gotten away with it because of who his dad is, and yet overall it still feels like this crop of protags is smothering their own humanity a lot less than you usually see in UC Gundam. I'm not entirely certain how much that's intentionally saying something about Mafty being different versus how much it's changing sensibilities from the creators (similar to the leap in consumer technology since CCA pretty clearly not being something we're supposed to think about too hard in diegetic terms) but it feels significant to me.

I also wonder if having an actual ship's cat rather than a Haro is meant to convey something about maintaining/reclaiming humanity. I'm of the opinion that Haro in early UC usually represents the potential for technology to be something benign and joyful, in contrast to the giant murder machines, but perhaps by this point you could consider it as coopted as Amuro himself.

[thatsbelievable]

[undasura]

two friends that are both three apples tall

[bitchautism-deactivated20250906]

dislike how many mental health posts on here are just "you've never done anything wrong in your life ever and they were evil for that"

[bitchautism-deactivated20250906]

maybe you did do something wrong. maybe you hurt someone. maybe you have said awful things. maybe you were just as bad as them. maybe. but what matters is that you move on. you have to try. you have to wake up and be kinder. you have to learn and listen and grow. maybe you did do something wrong but that doesn't mean you have to keep doing that. as long as you are alive, you can change

[emberkeelty]

Sometimes, sure.

But also, maybe you hurt someone, and their hurt is fully valid and worthy of acknowledgement and apology and not an attack on you, but it isn't an indicator that you need to fundamentally change yourself to avoid ever hurting anyone again. It is not actually possible to move through the world as a human being without harming anyone, and making that your goal will exhaust you. Life cannot be a competition of who is least harmful and who is most harmed where the winner gets to be perfectly justified forever and the loser is required to Do Better or be villified. No one space can be a safe space for everyone, and no one person can be a safe person for everyone. Competing needs exist, and not because anyone who has needs that conflict with yours is evil.

"If you are mentally ill, self-improvement is your responsibility" is the dominant narrative in most of society. That is not something that anyone on here hasn't heard before. That message wears people down, because they can wake up and be kinder a hundred times, they can learn and listen and grow for years, they can stop doing any number of things that they were doing wrong, and STILL end up hurting people and have no way of conceptualizing that besides "I guess I'm not recovered enough yet." Meanwhile "normal" people are rarely called on to reflect on how the ways they move through the world can hurt others, let alone change themselves to mitigate it. And that's part of what makes tumblr's flipping of the script from "you are bad and wrong if anyone ever expresses being hurt by you, and you are not allowed to rest or be comfortable with yourself until you have improved yourself to the point of never hurting anyone" to "actually, you are always perfectly fine and everyone else is bad and evil for not seeing that" so seductive in spite of its obvious irresponsibility.

[corviiids]

btw it is sexy and cool to uplift and admire people who have skills you wish you had without using their ability as a stick to beat yourself with. even and especially if you are jealous of them.

[tlirsgender]

We gotta start calling it a sex change again to remind everybody you can change your sex

[tlirsgender]

Obviously the old narrative/misconception about "having The Surgery" was uh. Stupid lol. The common refrain was "which one?" to emphasize transition doesn't work like that. But now we're living in "sex is an immutable Natural Fact" world and it's like well no actually. You're somehow wronger about how trans people's bodies work than you were before. There is no singular The Surgery because "sex" is made up of several different traits, nearly all of which are changeable, through surgery or hormones or even just exercising different muscle groups to change their appearance. "Buh chromosomes" you don't know what a chromosome is