Overthinking @overthinkthis - Tumblr Blog

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just a reminder to myself to love my own growth more than i despise my past mistakes

greenmossloveisreal1998iloveyou

you should be addicted to shutting the fuck up

You wanna fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid

whyenn-reader

#just tumblr things #addicted to shutting up

sunderwight

Soulmate AU where the soulmate thing is in fact totally fake and a conspiracy.

Turns out that there's this ancient society of wizards who perfected the means of telepathically linking up two individuals. While early uses included stuff like espionage and such, early on there was an incident where a wizard accidentally synced the wrong targets up. It just so happened that instead of syncing the crown prince to the intended informant, the mistaken target was a young lady who was a shrewd political match, and both their parents had been looking to arrange the matter (but were struggling with the reluctance of the relevant parties).

With sudden telepathic bonding on the table, the couple took it as a sign from the gods that they were meant to be, and got together of their own accord.

The wizards realized the potential for matchmaking as a means of manipulating the political landscape, and abandoned their prior attempts at subterfuge (a limit of the telepathic bond is that it's two-way, so the target also gains your secrets, which meant a lot of them had to be assassinated after the fact.)

So the wizards converted their lair into an ostensible temple of the Goddess of Love, where people could come to pray to find their soulmates. Wizards were also sent out to arrange matches that would advance the interests of their cult, as well as some random ones just to help cover their tracks. As the influence of the Goddess of Love grew, new branches of the temples sprang up. The cultists were soon divided into two categories: wizards who still knew the truth and pretended to be priests, and actual priests who weren't in on it and genuinely believed they were helping soulmates find one another.

The culture around it goes something like this:

Not everyone has a soulmate, and not all soulmates are destined to be together in every lifetime. But if they are, the Goddess will bless you with the ability to hear one another's inner voice, if it is your fate and/or if you pray hard enough. Some soulmates know each other from their first meeting, but others take time to recognize the bond and open their hearts to the possibility of connection. If you're wondering why it took like eighteen separate meetings with someone before the bond manifested, do some introspection and consider why you might have closed your heart off or whatever. Like it's definitely a you problem, and it's rude to blame the Temple of Love, which is only trying to help people and has no other agendas whatsoever.

Also consider donating more money to the temple next time. Higher donations mean more priests can petition the Goddess on your behalf, and she's a busy lady, sometimes it takes a lot of petitions to get her attention. 👌

How would this factor into a plot?

My thinking is that a pair get setup as soulmates, and they are just absolutely both adamantly convinced that they are not. Like not in an enemies-to-lovers sense or anything, they just get the psychic bond thing and it's like, no. I don't know what's up but the Goddess of Love has definitely made a mistake. So they set out to gain an audience with her, but along the way they uncover the truth about the cult and its manipulation of generations of political marriages and business alliances.

It could be a metaphor for amatonormativity. Like some of the priests argue that even if it's a con, it's one that's been running for so long it's already steeped into the culture. How could the main characters bring themselves to expose it? To tell people who think they've found their soulmates that it's not really the case? Think of all those bonds they'd be threatening!

But then like, wait a minute. That's bullshit. This whole format for relationships has so many problems, and it's all working in service of manipulating and controlling people anyway! Why should they let the cult go on hooking up individuals that suit it? Shouldn't people know that it's possible to CHOOSE to make a telepathic bond with someone they actually want to? Shouldn't they be able to decide to manage their own relationships as they see fit, without some misleading pressure of fate or gods? And what about the ones left feeling excluded and unlovable because they don't "have" a soulmate? It's not like people are going to stop loving one another or finding themselves if they aren't being led around to do it this specific way!

So they upend the whole thing, and upset a lot of people, and then have to deal with the fact that they're still telepathically bonded until one of them dies.

Ugh.

Stupid cult.

#this is amazing

homo-ousios

happy pride don’t forget to set billionaires’ houses on fire and steal their drugs

peatchsoda

🌈 babe at his siam center pride 26 panel

#he's so precious #babe tanatat

nonbinarymlm

The likelihood that trans women who act like radfems and endorse that kind of ideology are doing so due to “male socialization” is negligible. Plenty of cis women are radfems or similar. Women sometimes have shit opinions. This has a lot to do with them being human and very like to do with any [assumed] proximity to “maleness”

You don’t have up agree with every trans woman about everything, but you shouldn’t bring out the transphobic rhetoric just because you disagree with a trans woman. That’s just gross and wrong.

It’s worth calling out this behavior even if someone is on your “side” in whatever other discussion might be happening.

gothhabiba

“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“

#and when we tell half the children that they are not allowed to cry #it is not surprising when they end up trying to avoid emotionally difficult situations

ao3commentoftheday

I don't know if it's just me being in small fandoms, but fandom as a whole feels...really lonely as of late. People have split themselves up so much that they don't discuss things the way they did before, they just kind of post their stuff and leave and half their audience "consumes" it like "content". There's no comments, barely kudos, the only places fans talk with each other anymore are on private discord servers that no one ever finds out about...I don't know, I'm a bit of an old and I feel like I'm screaming out into the void for no reason at this point. Sure, "somebody" will like my stuff, but will I ever get to know about it?

I think about this kind of thing a lot, anon, and I think my generation (Gen X/xillennial) kind of did folks dirty a bit.

In our defense, we didn't know we were.

I'm an educator by profession, as well as on this hobby blog, and so I spend a lot of time thinking about how people learn things. A lot of learning is social, and a lot of it happens when parents teach their children.

When I was growing up, pre-internet, my parents taught me how to talk to other adults in our community, how to play with other children, how to order food in a restaurant, how to call a business and ask a question. They literally walked me through how to do all of that stuff and more because those were daily skills in the world at that time.

We've spent the last 20+ years talking about how kids today are "digital natives" - but have we spent enough time teaching kids how to keep a conversation going when you're not in the same room as the other person? How to leave a comment on a post by a person you don't know? How to show your appreciation to a content creator? What a content creator even is and how that differs from a fan creator?

I know there are a lot of jokes out there about different things that would kill a Victorian child, but I think what would actually be difficult for them would be the lack of rules and instructions that kids today receive from the adults in their lives.

I don't have kids myself, so maybe this is all just bullshit and I'm talking directly out of my ass. But a LOT of the time when I notice someone doing something 'wrong' it's because no one ever told them how to do it right.

I kind of suspect that might be part of what's happening in fandom these days. Combine the above with the fact that fandom got inundated with new members in 2020 during quarantine and lock downs, and it's not surprising to me that a large percentage of the people in fandom today don't approach things the way that we used to before.

i don't fault them for it. When fandom was smaller and the internet was new, we used to take the time to bring people in. But now, it feels like 'everyone knows XYZ' so why does it need to be taught? And with how fast things move, it's more rare for newcomers to lurk for a while before they dive into everything.

This is a very long answer to a problem that probably just needed a listening ear, but I hope what you take away from this is an understanding that you're not the only one who feels the difference. I see this same experience shared in the notes on my posts all the time.

There is no easy fix for the situation and it certainly won't be fast to change, but maybe if we mentor a bit more when we have the spoons to, we can shift the culture a bit? One fan at a time?

If you managed to get all the way to the end of this, do yourself a favour and leave a comment on a fic or reblog a post with some chatty tags. DM somemeone or tag them or send them an ask just to let them know you see them and you think they're cool.

Even if nothing happens as a result, you tried. And maybe you just made someone's day. 💗

#like i other people in the comments i also wonder about the impact covid had (or still has)#i barely know any adults over thirty who aren't overworked and underappreciated atm #even for the ones who weren't sick were hit by all the added workload and stress and there was never any time to recover #plus you know the whole state of the world #i wish i had more energy and time for fandom but i simply don't #fandom stuff

fashion-runways

HASSIDRISS 'Echoes Of The Abyss' Collection Couture 2025 if you want to support this blog consider donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways

thebroccolination

WU NATION, WE GOT MORE SPORTS

In his obvious commitment to showing Loyaly to All Teams Everywhere, we see spiritual rogue Niran fluently shifting his wardrobe between major league North American baseball to an all-female flag-football high school tournament aaand whatever this is for: