i find it hard to believe i'm a human but i don't want to be a nonhuman like some other people/entities i've seen.
i find some comfort in the idea of dollhood. having no humanity and not needing to in order to be valued. finally being useful to someone. surrendering the burden of autonomy, though it's not like i ever had power over my life to begin with.
so many people still talk about adhd like it's something mild. and i spent my whole life believing it. it's just a quirky personality, or it's some problems with focus and organization that can be helped easily with meds and the right system, and it's your job to fix it. nobody talks about the broken autonomy that comes with adhd. unable to control your own actions on the most basic level. subject to the demands of a brain that is uninterested in what you have to say. having all your efforts be completely meaningless because you won't perform any better anyway, no matter how hard you try.
and yet.
i still want to be human, at least partly. i still want the autonomy and self-determination that comes with being a human. i am an artist by nature, and whether or not i create something tangible my soul, or whatever the hell i have within me, burns with the need to create, the need to assert power over something and make it my own, tell a story with it. i need an autonomy that i don't have in order to do that and trying to keep up is exhausting.
and beyond that, i love humanity. i love seeing it in others. i value human connection and relationships so deeply but i am so so terrible at them. i constantly cycle between believing in a love i carry that is so deep, so profound, and believing that i am incapable of loving at all. perhaps whatever i feel is not love but something similar, though far more selfish. something not quite right.
a doll doesn't have to understand how to connect with a human. i wouldn't have to fight to decipher the humans around me, i wouldn't need to feel guilty over not being able to love like a person.
i wouldn't mind being a doll on occasion. a nice break, to let go of everything i have to fight so hard to keep.
but i want to be able to return to humanity. i want to be a human.
a full human. not something that was almost a human but couldn't make it.
i think that's the part that hurts the most. nonhumanity brings me relief from the burdens of keeping up a humanity that doesn't come to me naturally. but it isn't who i truly am, at least not fully. i'm not not a human. i'm almost a human. part of a human. i have some humanity in me and it dances and loves and embraces. and it isn't enough. i'm not enough.
I know it doesn’t mean much coming from me because I’m always complaining about Aka’s writing, but…
And I mean it when I say that I expect nothing 😭 This was literally my first ever OnK-related reblog and its tags are more relevant than ever lmao
These, too:
#honestly I didn’t think too hard about any of this during my first read #because the romantic endgame seems so obvious that it kind of discourages guessing lmao #but re-reading these chapters has made me appreciate Aqua’s side of his bond with Akane a lot more
Back when I first got into OnK, I mentioned that Akane was the entire reason I kept reading the manga. I didn’t care about the romantic subplot, found Aqua/Kana extremely obvious and predictable, and Aqua plain boring.
It’s only during my second read that I paid close attention to Akane’s interactions with Aqua and I ended up playing myself into both, caring about Aqua and shipping him with Akane lol
This chapter has made me realize that despite everything, I'm not emotionally invested in whether they end up together or not. I’d prefer it, obviously, because Aqua truly is at his most interesting whenever he’s around Akane, and their dynamic has the best development in the manga (so far).
But it’s just like I said before: If they don’t end up together, that’s just Aka’s loss, not mine. I’m just here for Akane 😂
And as an Akane fan, I feel like the best thing for me to do right now is to just take a step back and watch things unfold, because Aka will do whatever he wants regardless of how any of us interpret his manga lol
So instead of posting the long post I originally wrote about this chapter when the leaks came out, I'll just share a a clown gif because in hindsight it was silly of me to expect Kana out of all people to have any sort of meaningful insight into Aqua 🤡
And a couple of things that caught my eye because I can't help myself:
Kana didn't even see Aqua and Akane have any sort of meaningful moment, just those two standing in each other's vicinity was enough to make her throw herself a pity party. How many more times is she going to pity herself and give up? How has Aka not tired of writing her this way? Where did her development from the Scandal arc go? 🤡
So Chapter 147 featured Kamiki thinking Ai doesn't love him and Kana thinking Aqua likes her. It even had a helpful "Cut 139: Misunderstanding" panel and everything. Will this mean something? Who knows!
Kana used guilt-trip! It was super effective!
Oh the irony! Poor Akane looks like she's been hard at work convincing herself that she's over Aqua. And you know what? I cheer for her and respect her energy 100%. I'd rather see her doing her mightiest to help him without any ulterior motives than to have her crying for him and hoping to get back with him every other chapter lol
Akane calling Kana out for her pity-party and for being cowardly was so cathartic that if I didn't already stan her, I'd have become a fan right now 😭 It also means that Aka is 100% aware of the way he writes Kana, so when will she finally be allowed to grow?
Kana's praise to Akane made me so sad though because yes, Akane is pretty and she's talented and she's kind. That's sweet of her to say. But that's not what made Akane someone special to Aqua: it was the way she understood him. The worst part is that Kana ends her praise by saying that Akane is a "goody-two-shoes" but... that's the opposite of how Akane views herself. She sees herself as someone who's not decent and not normal. So it's no wonder that while she gets flustered (it's her dear kana-chan praising her), she seems to get a bit sad/frustrated afterward. After all, for Akane it's probably the opposite. Men would prefer a decent, normal, bright girl like Kana - Aqua included.
I wish someone would tell Akane that she is too ignorant of her own charms and that she doesn't have to act like an adult all the time. Truly the pot calling the kettle black! Sadly, unlike Kana, Akane seems to have no one in her corner in this manga. Aqua was the only one there and the poor guy is barely even a character anymore lol
Overprotective mother or controlling ex-girlfriend? Take your pick!
The English translation left something pretty important out in these panels. Akane doesn't just say "if you have a girlfriend", she says "if you have a precious/important girlfriend". This distinction is very important because it goes to show that... as expected, Akane doesn't think she was an important girlfriend to Aqua. It's like she didn't count and Kana would be the real deal. Oh, Akane...
Which takes me to her very silly, very convoluted yet very predictable plan (in true Aka fashion).
When Akane thinks “I know exactly what you hate”, I imagine she means that Aqua hates hurting and endangering those he cares for. So I'm guessing Akane thinks that if she plays matchmaker and quite literally throws Kana at him, someone he has a soft spot, then Aqua won't be able to go through with his revenge because that would mean breaking Kana's very fragile heart.
In other words, it looks like Akane is going to try and use Aqua's guilt-complex against him and her weapon of choice is love. But not her love, obviously, because as far as she's concerned, her romantic love already failed to save him.
Granted, using Kana's romantic feelings to her advantage is kind of... well, wrong. To quote Akane herself, [Kana] is neither her pet nor her property, but a person. But I'm guessing that Akane may be falling victim to the same loophole she got caught in in Chapters 96 - 98. She thinks she knows what's best, so she's putting her own beliefs aside for the time being.
Kind of like Aqua, actually.
And, ironically, it's Aqua himself who first realized how easy Kana is to use.
So! All in all, I'm here for Mastermind!Akane but I hope that Aka will actually make it worth our while. Will Kana realize that she's about to be used as a chess piece in this Proxy War? Who knows, characters in this manga seem to walk in circles, only being allowed to grow when it fits the plot 😂
Last week we wondered whether Aka would subvert expectations or go the predictable route, and down the predictable route he went. His way of making it less predictable is by including a twist in the form of Akane's ulterior motives, but will this be enough to allow this ol' used trope to lead us someplace new? I guess we'll have to keep reading to find out, but given the quality of the writing lately, I'm not expecting much lol
the story im putting out tomorrow on @queer-triple-a for An Assumptive Anthology is maybe my favorite story I’ve written. It’s lesbians in victorian england. They’re gay and in love. I love them both with my whole heart and I cannot wait to share them!!!!!
It also has a (not so subtle) OFMD reference, but I don’t remember if that’s in the first or the second part of it..........
The new SIFAS chapter dropped a couple of days before Ayumu's birthday on March 1, but it did have a present for her! The chapter opens with Ayumu and Her Childhood Friend (who is probably textually distinct from Takasaki Yu, but...) talking out on their bedroom balconies about the school idol website work that's been taking up a lot of the latter's time:
(Of course, this gets finessed a little; we're not going AnaPomu end game here. Ayumu's Childhood Friend gets to stay the blockheaded harem lead.)
Hmmm. On the topic of fear soup, if my OC Ria used one of the many (all extremely valid imo!) taxonomies of fear different than Smirke’s, she would NOT consider herself dual-aligned. She’d serve an entity that includes some aspects of the Web, some of the End, and some of the Dark. The entity? Modeled off of the “Mother of Puppets” nomenclature-wise, but distinct from it - The Hand of Fate. The idea that unknowable forces (Dark) guide you through their plan for your life (Web), eventually deciding when and how you’ll die (End). This is just the seed of a concept I may or may not expand upon in the future, but just. Many thoughts!
archivist sasha tma au living in my head rent free is just the truth babe!!!!
wrote a little something because while not!jon is fucking great i had to put my own spin on it for a minute. this is all well and good and definitely not awful
now on [ao3]
During the Prentiss attack Jon gets separated from Tim in the tunnels after they both lose Martin, and he finds himself back in the Institute. In artifact storage.
He’s not alone.
After he meets back up with everyone, he’s……not acting quite right. Martin can’t put a finger on HOW, but he concludes WHY is because of this Very stressful encounter with the alleged supernatural firsthand. He doesn’t think about it again for a long time.
Everything’s back to normal, or at least as “normal” as working in the Magnus Institute really can be, but Jon is… different? But not in ways immediately obvious. More…mellow. More keen on making conversation than refusing to shut up about the Leitners. Doesn’t fidget with the stapler anymore. Much more easily pressured to clock out on time instead of staying late.
Every time Sasha’s mind wanders over to one of these thoughts, she can’t help but dismiss it without a second thought. She’s glad that Jon’s making healthier decisions since the attack, it had really taken a toll on his physical and mental health more than the others. She’s glad that she doesn’t have to worry about him, she tells herself, though there’s something lingering behind that sentence she can’t quite parse.
A woman had arrived in the Archives, though to provide support for her friend making a statement rather than herself. She had a statement of her own inside her, Sasha had been growing strong enough to… know that, but the woman just didn’t want to give it, was all. Georgie Barker, she said her name was when Sasha asked.
They got to talking, and both Georgie and her friend Melanie had stayed in touch, being intrigued by the supernatural themselves and apparently what Sasha had to say about it. Georgie had been visiting one time when Sasha noticed she had been looking strangely at someone at the other side of the room. Sasha knew that Georgie and Jon had been together at one point, and now they weren’t, so she didn’t really pay attention to the weird glance Georgie was giving him until she spoke up.
Why was Jon drinking coffee?
At Sasha’s confusion, Georgie started listing things that as they were pointed out suddenly became clear they didn’t make sense. Jon hated that sweater vest, he’d always said it was so scratchy he could feel it under his shirt. Jon claimed to like being tidy, but he could never get papers in just the way they were neatly piled on his desk now. Jon wouldn’t be caught DEAD listening to his old Mechanisms songs for fear that someone would see and find out about the band he was part of in college. Georgie knew Jon, why was he acting so differently? Somewhere behind Sasha’s eyes begin to hurt.
Sasha’s clever. Of course she’d realize something had been shifting her attention away from the couple of statements she’d dropped three times now, one of them even in the trash. It had taken an ungodly amount of excruciating focus to listen and read through each one of them, one after the other. The house on Hilltop Road. A psychology experiment gone wrong. A student choked by a thick cloud of strings that had pulled them along through living for weeks, unnoticed. A tape that had turned on back when Sasha had rushed out of the room to warn Tim of the woman behind him, of Jon confiding in Martin about his encounter with a Leitner when he was a child.
Sasha listened to this one for as long as she could, somehow knowing it to be the last record of Jon she had before… it was the last time she had heard Jon being scared, she realized. The next day, when Sasha looked closely, she could see the faintest of oily threads glinting in the air above Jon’s hands.
Jon was being punished for pulling back the curtain, for showing a thread pertaining to him thought to be invisible, even to just one person that he loved.
And she hated it.
When she’s ready, she sends the rest of the staff home early, and thinks she has Jon cornered. He’s lying still in the cot in one of the back rooms of the Archives, the one he hadn’t used in so long ever since he had been…”convinced” not to overwork himself, with the lights off. When Sasha calls out to who might be the puppeteer, he freezes, curled up so tightly that he felt more like a crumpled sack of….. than a person. When Sasha calls out to Jon, though, he risks a glance over his shoulder toward the door of the room and, seeing a figure there, quickly turns back to the wall, muttering to himself near inaudibly; if he doesn’t move at all, doesn’t struggle, then maybe the Spider watching at the edge of the web he was trapped in wouldn’t notice, and more importantly, he’d know that his inaction was his own–
Sasha hears rope of all kinds of thickness stretching and tightening from down the hallway. She snaps into focus and hefts up Jon in her arms, much to his (though not disgruntled) bewilderment, and carries him out of the institute as fast as she can, wiping cobwebs stuck in Jon’s hair and clothes away, and pulling apart the now oh-so delicate spiderweb threads attached to his hands, his legs, his tongue….
The floor is sticky beneath her feet.
A few days later, when Sasha was still letting Jon stay at her flat and giving everyone paid leave while the…exterminators? got rid of the spiderwebs and the rest of the unexplained infestation, she invited Tim and Martin to get lunch with them.
Jon told the three of them how at first, it really didn’t feel like he was being controlled or compelled. When he did something just a touch too out of character, even for him, he felt surprised, but he guessed the attack had changed him a lot more than he thought.
That is, until he noticed the strings.
Before he could properly realize what they even were the strings tightened, thousands of impossibly strong threads constricting around him so tightly he couldn’t move.
Until he did.
It hadn’t hurt, no, but it felt wrong, walking too slowly and standing too straight, words coming out of his mouth so alien it felt like someone else’s, with the bitter taste of bad coffee lingering on his tongue. The strings hid any sign of loosening its suffocating hold, so he became numb, slowly turning complacent that he would never be able to act of his own accord again at the same time as being utterly terrified out of his mind by that very same thought.
As the months went on he felt something else rise up, however. Jon had lost his tongue to a string ages ago, and when whatever was speaking did talk… they were polite. More considerate to Martin when he slipped up. Friendlier with Tim and easier to laugh with. Jon became all too aware that whatever- whoever he was was taking greater care of himself than he had ever thought to. Maybe- if he ever DID come back- it would just be better to give himself up again, if he did anything himself he’d just ruin everything, he should just not-
At that point Jon had full collapsed with his head on the table, shaking and sobbing in front of the three of them. Martin had been crying as Jon spoke, and now reached out tentatively to comfort him. Tim was certainly no worse for wear, looking completely distraught as he thought about the talks he’d had in the past seven months when someone who was Jon, but somehow so very not Jon had been working with them, and they had just….never noticed.
With Jon’s permission, Sasha placed the tape recorder on the table in front of them and pressed play. They wordlessly listened to Jon and Martin panicking and hunkering down in the Archives, hiding from the worms, when Jon had told Martin about Mr. Spider; the last time in seven months any of the four of them had heard Jon speaking.
