Chaotic Illusion

Welcome to the home of The Claimed

[gabriel-picolo]

Zodiac Arrows 

♈️ Aries were the vanguard, they invented the custom arrows. The purpose of the horns was to stake their claim on the target or territory. ♉️ Taurus arrows are tied together with a lace that has a bull’s nose ring at its end. Taurus are stubborn and don’t ever give up so their arrow can be used as a spear if the fight demands it. ♊️ Gemini made their arrows so that they would avoid routine and boredom. So, as they’re extremely thin, Gemini arrows are the only that can be shot together, the number of arrows in each shot is always changing. ♋️ Cancer are deeply sensible and easily hurt so they designed their arrow in a way that long fights are avoided. Their arrow is the most painful and cannot be removed. ♌️ The fletching on a Leo’s arrow is made out of lion’s mane. The arrows are used to protect the Leo’s kingdom - it may be anything, from home to a partner. Their jewels work as fuel for incendiary shots. ♍️ Virgo’s perfectionism made them extremely picky about their enemies. Although their arrow seems delicate and calm on the outside, it only takes one shot to kill. ♎️ Libras are the diplomats of the zodiac. Their arrow’s tip resemble the pans in the scale of Justice. Just like “Justice is blind”, so is its arrow’s tip. It is meant to end fights; not be part of them. ♏️ Scorpio have the tail of a scorpion on their arrow’s tip, which is poisonous and it kills their victim slowly. Scorpio have a natural secretiveness so they chose not to change their arrow’s fletching - after piercing an enemy in battle, it’s hard to tell if said arrow came from a Scorpio. ♐️ Sagittarius were not influenced by Aries custom arrows. As natural archers, their arrows were always the shape of their zodiac sign. These arrows can travel unbelievable distances, and are often mistaken by shooting stars ♑️ Capricorns were always resistant to big changes so they decided to modify their arrow only once and never again. The fish tail in the place of the fletching is reminiscent of their sign symbol (a sea goat). It can change the direction of the arrow after being shot, making this arrow impossible to escape. ♒️ Aquarius are know for their inventivity and originality. They improved the arrows transportation forever: instead of a quiver their magic arrows are carried on a water bearer (resembling their sign symbol). To pick their arrow they pour it from the bearer. ♓️ Pisces arrows were the last to be created. As Pisces is the sign of mysticism and spirituality, their arrows are capable of piercing the enemy’s soul. Much of this arrow’s characteristics are yet unknown.

[rasstegai]

when life is kicking ur ass but u tryin to stay positive

[gabygirl1243]

[toastyhat-deactivated20180203]

man I don’t like it when people are like “fan theory: confirmed” when…it’s not…actually confirmed.  even when it’s a solid, interesting theory.  like, no.  not confirmed.  subjectively interpreted by you, because you were looking for it.

[moosekleenex]

[flyingpurplepizzaeater]

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

[do-as-youre-told-deactivated201]

This is so well put I am stunned

[lazycb]

The originals fallen children xDD

Oh, god, I love this image ^^ I’ve seen and I’m watching this series and I love them <3 

[lovecrimers]

Misha trolling Jensen while he talks about personal space. (Lmao look at Misha’s smug little face!!)

[andarthas-web]

“Seeing this upsets me, so it must be wrong and the people doing it must be bad and evil....otherwise I wouldn't be upset, would I?“

The Anti Mentality and how equating emotions with reality makes fandoms turn toxic

One thing I have noticed when interacting with antis of all kind.

1. They are highly abusive in their behaviour, going as far as telling people to kill themselves

2. They believe their abuse is justified, because they perceive other people’s shipping preferences or fanworks as an attack against themselves

3. As a rule, they never address arguments made questioning whether their perception and their accussations are actually rooted in reality.

It is all about “Seeing this upsets me, so it must be wrong and the people doing it must be bad and evil….otherwise I wouldn’t be upset.“

Thing is….an while back, there was an excellent article on abusive parents and how they bond together in “estranged parents forums”, and the patterns are surprisingly familiar.

Here too, we have abusers, who believe that they are the injured party, NOT based on what has happened or what the facts of the situation are…but on how they feel about the situation.

Here too, we have people pulling a DARVO, denying the attack, and then reversing victim and offender.

Here too, we have people who believe that it is other people’s responsibility to cater to their feelings….and that if other people refuse, this must be because the others are the evil ones….NOT because they themselves are in the wrong.

But take a look at this excerpt from issandei’s article yourselves:

“Posts in estranged parents’ forums are vague.

Members recount stories with the fewest possible details, the least possible context. They don’t recreate entire scenes, repeat entire conversations, give entire text exchanges; they paraphrase hours of conversation away. The only element they describe in detail is their own grief or rage. Nor do the other members press them for more information.

Compare this with the forums for adult children of abusers, where the members not only cut-and-paste email exchanges into their posts, they take photos of handwritten letters and screenshot text conversations. They recreate scenes in detail, and if the details don’t add up, the other members question them about it. They get annoyed when a member’s paraphrase changes the meaning of a sentence, or when omitted details change the meaning of a meeting. They care about precision, context, and history.

The difference isn’t a matter of style, it’s a split between two ways of perceiving the world.

In one worldview, emotion is king.

Details exist to support emotion. […] Context is malleable because the full picture may not support the member’s emotion. […]

Emotion creates reality.

In the second worldview, reality creates emotion.

Members want the full picture so they can decide whether the poster’s emotions are justified.

Members recognize that unjustified emotions (like supersensitivity due to trauma, or irritation with another person that colors the view of everything the person does) are real and deserve respect, but they also believe that unjustified emotions shouldn’t be acted on.

They show posters different ways to view the situation and give advice on how to handle the emotions.

In short, they believe that external events create emotional responses, that only some responses are justified, that people’s initial perceptions of events are often flawed, and that understanding external events can help people understand and manage emotions.

The first viewpoint, “emotion creates reality,” is truth for a great many people.

Not a healthy truth, not a truth that promotes good relationships, but a deep, lived truth nonetheless.

It’s seductive.

It means that whatever you’re feeling is just and right, that you’re never in the wrong unless you feel you’re in the wrong.

For people whose self-image is so battered and fragile that they can’t bear anything but validation, often it feels like the only way they can face the world.”

[bespangeled]

So either reality creates emotion - or emotion creates reality? I suspect most of us are somewhere between those two poles and probably moving on that continuum regularly.

I am still not quite sure what an unjustified emotion would be since there is no source outside this paradigm. Anyone deciding which emotions are justified is simply declaring a personal preference. I suppose there are people out in the world who have no experience of  trauma - or who have shut their emotions down so that they always maintain perfect rational judgement. But I don’t think that would be a sign of a healthy psyche.

Gonna go with the old stand-by - respect the fact that others have the right to disagree with you. Judging them as less psychologically healthy is a zero sum game.

[andarthas-web]

Disagreeing is not the problem.

The problem arises when people use their feelings as an excuse to abuse, harass and bully others, taking offense at things that aren’t there and accusing others of things they haven’t done.

Criticism is based on facts and on fact and on sound argument.

But this is NOT what’s happening in fandom.

What we get in fandom is verbal abuse, people getting told to kill themselves and people having their inboxes spammed with anon hate.

To illustrate this further:

Veterans, due to the trauma they’ve suffered, might be highly uncomfortable around 4th of July fireworks.

People who have gotten bitten by a dog might be wary and afraid of all dogs, even the most well-behaved and friendly lab.

Parents who grieve the loss of a child might find it hard to watch a movie where a child dies.

And yet, we do not ban fireworks, or dogs, or movies where children die.

And we would NOT find it acceptable if people who liked fireworks, dogs or sad movies got harassed or abused.

Somehow though, in fandom these days, doing exactly that seems to have become acceptable.

You create fanworks around a fictional villain?

You write about bad things happening to characters? Why the mere depiction must mean that you endorse all of that in real life!

Strangely enough, that kind of thinking only happens within fandom.

All those horror flics and crime novels centered on serial killers?

Why, that’s just fiction and going after crime novel authors or horror film movie makers would be rather stupid.

So yeah, some people in fandom, if they see something that makes them uncomfortabel? Can and will abuse and harass fans and fanwork creators for daring to like something that squicks them.

And if called out for their abusive behaviour? Well….they’re hurt aren’t they? Their buttons were pushed.

So any criticism of them and their abusive behaviour can’t possibly be right, can it? And so, they keep on attacking, abusing and bullying people, because to them, facts don’t matter.

What matters is that they feel hurt, and they take it as sufficient reason to also feel entitled to abuse and harass others.

And that?

That is NOT o.k.

[bespangeled]

That’s why I stepped in - to stop someone from bullying. The bullying victims were simply asking to be left alone. They didn’t care if anyone agreed with them.

The bully was insisting that somehow disagreement with a set of self serving facts counted as personal abuse against them.

[andarthas-web]

Wether you’re really doing good with this depends A LOT on the context and the circumstances.

You MIGHT be truly helping people. And if you are, that is really good.

You also might be letting yourself be co-opted by an abuser to do their dirty work for them.

Remember that bit I wrote about DARVO?

Denying the attack, and then reversing victim and offender?

Here on tumblr, what we often get is the following kind of interaction:

A: I am victim of X. Knowing that fanworks that I associate with X exist is really painful to me. If you are creating such fanworks, then you are gross and disgusting and excusing X and you need to self-censor yourself and stop.

B: I create / enjoy the fanworks you are talking about.

You might associate X with the painful thing that happened to you, but it has entirely different meaning Z for me and others and above all, it is NOT an endorsement of thing X that hurt you.

Here, have evidence 1, evidence 2 and thought-out-argument 3,4, and 5 showing this. Also, could you please stop verbally abusing me?

A: I don’t care about your arguments and your evidence. I am a victim and I am in pain. If you even dare to question if my emotion is based in reality or take issue with my attacking you, then that is only proof of how you are an abuser and endorsing X.

B: ???? WTF???

Thing is, in this kind of interaction, A is the aggressor, using their victim status as a tool to silence anybody who might question their reasoning and their right to attack others.

It is a typical DARVO, and that kind of behaviour is rampant on this site.

[andarthas-web]

Btw, I recently found out that psychiatry actually has a term for this kind of thinking: emotional reasoning.

Basically, it is a cognitive distortion where people believe that their negative emotions reflect the way things really are, regardless of actual facts.

Often, it is negative thinking, applied to oneself (e.g. “I feel stupid, so I must be stupid”) but of course, it can also be twisted in a fashion that bolsters a person’s ego and validates them (e.g. “This grosses me out, so it must be bad…and if I attack the people doing it, then that makes me a hero, fighting the good fight.”).

The thing is though, that like Don Quixote, who rode into battle against windmills, thinking they were evil giants, the “good fight” that antis believe they are fighting, is often no more and no less than bullying and harassment of other fans.

There are many ways antis manage to delude themselves into believing that such harassment is justified, one of the most prominent probably being the refusal to acknowledge that things in fiction usually carry a vastly different meaning than they do in reality.

And that not only people will enjoy the heck out of things in fiction which they would totally abhor and shrink from in reality, but that people are also very well able to tell the difference between fiction and reality.

It’s why some of the most best-selling novels of all times are crime-novels featuring serial-killers, with their deeds explored in gory detail, and why movies and series featuring everything from vengeful ghosts, to hungry zombies to even more serial-killers are so immensely popular.

This is not to say that there aren’t things out there that might actually fit the definition of “problematic”.

But the way to deal with such things is NOT to attack and harass other fans.

If someone thinks something is wrong, they can still go ahead and write meta about it. Do some research on the issue, gather some supporting evidence, make a good argument.

A good place to start learning about how to make a good case for your ideas is  Graham’s Hierarchy of disagreement, which is further explained here:

Oh, and one should also strive to avoid logical fallacies.

That said, it would make fandom a safer and overall kinder place, if people learned to block / filter any content that squicks them (a good how-to guide can be found here), instead of screaming for censorship and about how people who create things that make them uncomfortable are evildirtybadwrong!1!!!! and if we returned to respecting what is generally referred to as “The Three Laws of Fandom”:

Don’t Like; Don’t Read (DL;DR)

Your Kink Is Not My Kink (YKINMK)

Ship And Let Ship (SALS)

[standingcowrrdly]

sucks when you’re just sitting around having an okay day and suddenly a wave of I Wanna Die™ hits you

[2893071298743-deactivated202104]

[thegrumpymathematician-deactiva]

Reblog if you ARE a woman in STEM, SUPPORT women in STEM, or ARE STILL BITTER about Rosalind Franklin not getting credit for discovering the structure of DNA and the Nobel prize going to Watson and Crick instead.

[astrasperas]

Shit. The thing with DeanCas.

Is that it want to make you want to explain love a billion different ways.

They make you want to talk about love in the form of simple kisses underneath foliage of trees but also in sprawling metaphors of the universe’s energy and celestial bodies.

They make you want to define love through the the written word, the spoken word, the sung word, the drawn word. And you write a hundred thousand sentences, and you sing their ‘i need you’s, and you immortalize their faces on paper, and you speak in the tongue of the greatest love story that has ever been told.

They make you want to find love in a monstrous world; or in classroom halls, or in warm coffee shops, or in a little house with a garden, or by the ocean or maybe sea.

And the greatest thing, really, is this:

They make you want love to happen. Not even to yourself. But to somebody else. 

I don’t know about you.

But fuck.

[crystalheartsthings]

This is so beautiful

[mooserattler]

Reblog this picture of me holding a Family Size box of Honey Nut Cheerios? I’d really appreciate it.

[moonblossom]

How can I say no to such a great photo and such a polite request?

[allthelittlebeagles]

i will always support this post

[freshrosemary-deactivated202303]

@mooserattler back on my dash!

[jjflow]

Why isn’t this at a million notes, yet, Dante???

[mooserattler]

I’m not sure. Hey lovely people who have taken me over half way to a cool million! If you’d like to reblog again, I’d love that, if not, I still love you, and hope you’re having a great day. I’m gonna go do some stand up tonight.

[bidoof]

god come on we’re so close. this is like the only meaningful thing that this website could ever achieve

[agoodcartoon]

Guys who complain about the friendzone often don’t care about their female friends’ personal boundaries, forcing their female friends build more walls up. A good cartoon.

- submitted by Gene

[sciencevevo]

why is he tearing down a wall with an axe

[officialcyndilauper-deactivated]

i hate it when your put in the friendzone and made to tear down a wall

[ondoinganevildeedblues]

Mr. Gorbachev…tear down this friendzone

[cheaphalloweencostume]

how you gonna draw some shit that makes you look like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and still feel like you’re the victim

[bogleech]

I DON’T *CHOP* UNDERSTAND *CHOP* WHY *CHOP* YOU CAN’T *CHOP* JUST *CHOP* LET ME *CHOP* BONE YOU *CHOP* ON AN INDEFINITE *CHOP* EXCLUSIVE *CHOP* BASIS *CHOP* WHEN *CHOP* I’M *CHOP* SO *CHOP* NIIIIIIIIIIIICE *CHOP*

[dr-archeville]

“I’m going to wall you up now, Fortunato.”

“Ha ha, and then what? ;) ”

[magistrate-of-mediocrity]

“For the love of God, Montresor!” -Cask of Amontifriendzone, Edgar Allan Poe

[digitaldiscipline]

Incessantly, I heard a smacking, as of some entitled dipshit whacking, whacking on my chamber door.

Resignedly, I placed another layer, voicing a quiet, repeated prayer, “This dude thinks he’s a player, but I am not a point to score, he should fuck off and bother me no more.”

Quoth the friendzoned, “Fucking whore.”

- The Craven, by Edward Allen Bro

[agoodcartoon]

edgar allen bro

[zinglebert-bembledack]

Oh my god

[yournewfriendshouse]

holy shit

[legendsfromcorruptapostasy]

COMING SOON ~~~ Whelp. This is long overdue.

[legendsfromcorruptapostasy]

Prologue: The Cave (Part One)

“It was an average day when we found the cave.”

“It was an intricate dwelling for an ancient people. The walls were decorated with art depiction humanity’s beginning.”

“It had been raining, so we sought shelter in the only place we could find. But upon further inspection….”

“Most, if not all, of the other drawings were illegible, but it was clear that these beings… these demons….”

“On the first day of existence, the two Primevals greeted each other, and in those moments they created the four Primordials.

“That night, the Primevals left and the Primordials thus created a younger generation of Demons. That night, Earth was made.

“After an insuing [sic] argument, one Primordial took residence on Earth, followed by several others. Humanity was overjoyed, but several Demons were less than convinced.”

Prologue: Pt. 1 (you are here), Pt. 2 (coming soon)