To Those Who Dream @perpetuallyamess - Tumblr Blog

toph and aang being bad parents makes sense

i hate the discourse that aang and toph wouldn’t be terrible parents. like obviously it’s shit that these beloved characters are so bad at parenting but it makes sense when you think about it properly.

aang’s father figure was a monk, a man who’s first job wasn’t raising aang, it was teaching him. aang grew up around peers who could bend and none of them had a biological family either - his childhood was far from ordinary. he didn’t know what a normal family looked like, with two parental figures in a loving and kind household. so yeah, he loved his kids, definitely, but it’s only logical that he struggled when it came to raising them. he had katara to help, of course, but also consider: when he had kids, he knew it was the only chance he could ever have to rebuild the air nomads. so obviously he paid more attention to his one singular airbending child. does it suck that he paid less attention to bumi and kya? yes it does. does it make sense? absolutely. aang loved his culture, and he made sure that he did everything he could to pass it on to his airbending child, so it wouldn’t get lost. even if he unintentionally lost his other children along the way.

toph grew up with overprotective parents who never let her do anything. she literally left them when she was 12. her family through her teenage years were her friends: she was never raised properly by parents in a loving and healthy manner. her default, when it comes to children, is to give them all the freedom they want, because it’s what she never had. so when lin and suyin beifong grow up resenting their mother for always leaving them alone, it’s because toph thinks it’s for the best. that her distance is what her children want, not her love and affection. toph’s childhood is what makes her a bad parent: she fears becoming her parents so much that she instead becomes the complete opposite, and alienates her daughters in a different way.

sucks that our favourite characters are shitty parents, but in terms of their character, it makes complete sense, and furthermore, it makes them flawed. they aren’t perfect, and i think that’s more beautiful than making them be absolutely healthy parents. the writers might have disappointed the audience, but they didn’t disappoint the story.

kuro-von-shitsuji

Character Development

One thing that really struck me in Chapter 140 is the juxtaposition between Sebastian’s arrogance at the start of the contract and his anxiety in the present. Look at this:

He’s so sure of himself here. He thinks this contract will be nothing – that he’ll bow to the whims of a child for awhile before going home again having had a good meal and a bit of a laugh. This is a game for him. What could possibly go wrong?

But here:

Here his cockiness has all but vanished. A soul he’d long since consumed has come back to life, his friend(?) is dead, and now he has to face the reaper he’s already lost to twice. Then of course there’s his physical appearance: he’s soaking wet and his hair is dishevelled - not at all the immaculate Sebastian from the past.

By this point in the series Sebastian has already tasted failure a number of times and almost lost his master on several occasions more. There’s been signs of Sebastian’s confidence wavering for awhile now, but never has it been as clear as in this chapter. He’s on high alert, he’s anxious, and I’m going to make a bold claim here: Sebastian Michaelis is frightened.

Sebastian’s character has been developing extraordinarily slowly for a main character, but when you look at chapters like this one you can see just how much he’s changed. He’s still overly arrogant and is the literal embodiment of secondhand embarrassment, but he’s clearly learning that he can’t throw cutlery at every problem that arises and expect certain victory.

Sebastian is learning to fear and I love it.

dangermousie

So, I got to this sequence in Nirvana in Fire, where MCS and Prince Jing discover definitely that the army and the Lin family and the first prince were all framed and how and by whom and what really strikes me is how MCS is usually so collected but it’s not that he doesn’t feel, it’s because he feels too much so he represses it - and here he really can’t, not fully, not any more, and he is so quietly but thoroughly shattered.

And even for hours afterwards.

This is an episode where things really come to a boil and that repressed trauma - ouch. Honestly, what got me even more was Prince Jing’s reaction. I expected quiet devastation like this:

But I did not expect him to literally break down, breaking the rules and in his mother’s palace no less (and it says volumes how few people he has that he can genuinely let down his guard in front of - there is nowhere else he feels safe to do so, nobody else he feels safe with to do this.) He is normally so very stoic that to see that was genuinely shocking.

Honestly, ever since that day 13 years ago, there have been so many walking wounded left in the Kingdom, only because the King was paranoid about his oldest son and his top spook decided to help him deal with the prince and the marquis jumped on the chance to rise. The thing is - you can see how much it kills MCS to give up revenge on the ultimate perpetrator, the King - he has to give it up because it’s futile. And I love love LOVE Prince Jing putting righteousness over prudence and wanting justice no matter who is involved (I find MCS tragic and interesting but Prince Jing is the one I genuinely love.) Honestly, this reminds me of Goodbye My Princess in the futility of seeking revenge on the top boss because just as in GMP, here the ultimate perpetrator of injustice is the King and so you can’t ever fully get justice or vengeance for that. (And, the irony - the Lins were a side casualty. The spy boss and the KIng really wanted to bring down the then Crown Prince. The fake Lin treason was just the instrument; if the spy came with some other method to remove the CP, they may possibly have been left alone.)

I mean, MCS has to counsel the Prince not to seek justice for his own Lin family. That has GOT to be killing him.

guzhuangheaven

[x]

hopekidoki

he deserves all the love ♡ (trans)

kim-taehyung

Taehyung says “Smile! •◡•”

whitepeopletwitter

godyoupeopleareannoying-deactiv

im gonna be real w u every person reblogging this and not realising the kind of violence war and police horses are capable of is doing a disservice to those animals and, more importantly, the people (mostly poc) who were harmed by them.

horses used in war and police forces are trained not to respond to fear and to actively trample the enemy. they’re bred and trained to assist in violence, and while obviously they dont have a choice, horses and animals as a whole dont have a human moral compass. these horses still represent white supremacy. the horses do not know what white supremacy is and only know what theyre trained for.

its the same situation as police dogs. yes, its animal cruelty, but these animals are still used to commit white supremacist violence. they still represent the groups they were part of. in a better world, we wouldnt use animals for this, and in an even better world we wouldnt have these organisations whatsoever.

but in the end i think it trivializes the pain of people who have to see white supremacy celebrated and protected through confederate statues, to go “oh but lets keep the confederate horses!”

the horses are an extension of the confederacy. the dogs are an extension of the police. they do not have their own agency and still represent the hateful beliefs behind them.