Hair is already an aspect of a person’s appearance that’s a major factor in their sense of self and their own opinion of their appearance.
(I’m mixed, light skinned, and my hair isn’t Afro textured, so this is from observations of my aunts (who do have Afro textured hair) as well as sm memories from when I was younger (I rlly wanted Afro hair when I was small, I didn’t understand the work involved or the discrimination because of it, all I knew was that the black women in my life and black girls in my class had very pretty hair/hair styles)
Hair styles tend to have gendered associations, first off. there are 3AM infomercials for hair tonics and there’s usually at least one woman who’s testimonial is smth along the line of “the hair loss made me feel like less of a woman”
hair is a major aspect of black culture, my gran told me that when she grew up in Jamaica they were called Canerows not Cornrows, cause Jamaica has sugarcane, and they’d be used to make secret maps to safe houses for escaped slaves.
It’s also one of the several things that makes me feel disconnected from my own racial identity, not having Afro hair.
So Will Smith getting up on an internationally televised stage and slapping the shit out of Chris Rock for making a joke about Jada’s alopecia is understandable.
(not the best course of action mind, violence I mean, but if someone made a joke about smth a person I loved was extremely sensitive about, I can’t say me lashings out physically isn’t a possibility)
Let me preface this by saying: THIS IS BLACK PEOPLE BUSINESS SO IF YOU ARE NOT BLACK, I DONT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOUR OPINION.
Ok.
Now.
I get where you’re coming from. I still have embarrassment about my natural hair and it took me a month before i was comfortable to walk around without a scarf on in front of roommate. I should be comfortable in my own damn house.
Would i have slapped him? Nah, it’s not my thing.
Do i agree with will slapping him? Hell yeah. He publicly belittle jada for years (twice, noticeably) and got what he asked for. You can’t complain that folks are being “too soft” about comedy nowadays and then get mad when you get your shit rocked (pun intended).
“Talk shit, get hit” “fuck around and find out” - none of these sayings have an expiration date. This means any time, any place. Chris insulted Jada publicly, Will corrected and embarrassed him publicly. That wasn’t even a hard slap and i have a feeling Will could’ve came a lot harder if he wanted to.
That was a warning and a damn good one. I bet Chris won’t say shit else about it.
And all these white people screaming “violence!” “Abusive behavior!” “He should be put in jail!” need to pick up the phone cause the call is coming from inside the house.
@humanransome-note: Okay so I actually made a little OC family, and I’m not all that active in BNHA at the moment but I still love them. Five whole pages
-
First there’s the dad. Dishonorably discharged and court martialed, former US Army officer. He’s 36, and was SUPER OP when he was younger. His quirk was basically alchemy from FMA mixed with the fluidity of bending from ATLA. Contact with whatever he was moving was how it worked, but he figured out how to transfer his quirk through /atoms in the air/ so he was just hoping around bending the physical world to his will. (Like I said, super op.)
He can’t do much of that anymore though, because after the army used him, and a few others, to test out a long term low dose quirk enhancement drug, that he was told were vitamins, he accidentally OD on them.
He wasn’t taking them everyday, and he thought “whatever their vitamins” he never thought it was weird that they’d get their pills counted out every month. But, ya know, hindsight.
So when he realized inspection was coming around and he had too many pills, he just popped them all, expecting an upset stomach at worst.
He nearly leveled the equivalent of about 10 city blocks, he was giggly, a bit high on power, and suffering from delirium caused by heat sickness. One side effect of overusing his quirk was his body overheating because (something something, physics, something something transfer of energy produces heat)
It took getting smacked by a live power line to put him down. He’s got a chunk of flesh missing from his left shoulder, and some gnarly Lindinburg figures projecting out from it. His left hand is considerably weaker and he’s blind in his left eye.
He came to, in a public hospital. Some paperwork issue or something prevented him from being transferred back to base.
(He doesn’t know this, but one of docs’ quirks was being able to tell the chemical composition of anything he tasted, a bit of a biohazard, but useful in a pinch. He threw up after getting just a small lick of blood, so they ran some tests, and found an unidentified chemical cocktail. They intentionally stalled to get the results and to see if he knew what he was taking)
After finding out that he was being used as a guinea pig for something that messed with his quirk (he tries not to see a person’s quirk as a judgement of their value, but a huge portion of his self esteem rested on his own quirk) he threw a fit, demanded to see his CO and promptly punched said commanding officer as hard as he could in the nads.
On paper, he was court martialed for assaulting a commanding officer, but in truth it was an excuse to discredit him so anything he said would be met with skepticism.
That didn’t entirely work though, the amount of damage done to himself and the areas around him after having a squeaky clean record made a bunch of people think something was up.
They were right.
So that left him with two options:
keep fighting tooth and nail to blow the whistle on this thing, ruin his life, publicly and financially, and probably not have anything happen. Because something this dangerous and unethical had to be approved from pretty high up the food chain.
Sign an indefinite NDA, get secretly subsidized by the US government and live out the rest of his life wherever he can find himself in relative peace. -also work as an on call black coat operative, his quirk may be jacked but he can still get some damage in from close range, and he’s pretty handy with a handgun-
He spends the first few months or so, just losing himself in drugs and alcohol. They had left him alone with his morphine drip, he got addicted and switched to opioids but quit when he found out he was pregnant. (Did I mention? My mans is trans!)
He didn’t want kids, but he couldn’t get a procedure in his current state, (both the actual state and coming down from a probably days long bender) and by the time he’d cleaned up he was ready to pop.
So he had the kids. Yep, twins. A girl and a blob. Literally, the one he’d start calling his son when the little goo ball got a concept of gender was born with his quirk. Shapeshifting, down to the cellular level (with enough practice) unfortunately little dude had to know what he wanted to change it and having no experience besides swimming in embryonic fluid, and wiggle to irritate sister he was just kinda there.
That was fun, 13 hours of labor, followed by the panic of a room full of doctors freaking out because they realized that thing was not the afterbirth but in fact another child.
The doctors freaking out made him realize he’d do anything for those kids, so that’s when he decided to keep them.
The first few months were a lot. He spent more time in the hospital than at home, they had to put the kid in what was basically a sensory deprivation tank that was set up to be a pseudo womb.
He couldn’t name them yet. The little girl got a name, Lilith, but he was scared that if he’d name them, something would happen, and they’d be filling out a death certificate immediately after the birth. He knew it wasn’t rational, but it made him feel better.
Speaking of Lilith, either she was born with her quirk as well, or it came in a few months after being born.
He was curled up with her, against the tank, when suddenly alarms started going off.
He looked inside and saw her, and for a fleeting, terrifying, exhausting moment he thought he had a teleporting infant on his hands. But she was still in his arms.
Puppeteer is what he called her quirk after things settled and some more testing could be done. Controlling people via contact through skin, (or conductive material, apparently)
And since all she knew how to do was be herself, she’d inadvertently made her brother a clone.
It took a lot of talking with specialists and pediatric Quirk scientists to approve, under intense supervision, that Lilith use her quirk on her brother and hopefully teach him to inadvertently stay human shaped and functional.
Almost their first birthday to the day was the first time that he stayed human shaped, on his own, for a whole day!
Baby blob’s first birthday present was a name, Samael (Sam or Sammy for short), and going home for the first time.
(are these OC’s named after biblical figures, both of which said fuck this, gave god the finger, and did their own shit? Yes, I’ve got a personal philosophy about names and that showed up here)
The first roughly three years, he’d been on call for some super shady shit before he realized that a lot of the places he was called to were pretty far from East Asia.
So with minimal planning, a favor, and a phone call to a friend they made working black coat, they had passports, plane tickets, and a decent apartment in the Mufastsu prefecture of Japan.
Elementary school was okay, Lilith (no you don’t get to call her Lily, you don’t have the friend privileges) and Sam (just Sam, maybe Sammy if he likes you) had the novelty of being from America to outweigh any bullying that may have been thrown at them because of their Quirks.
That would come later.
Middle school was bad, kids saw the two of them as scapegoats because of their “villainous Quirks”
“It wasn’t me! Sam did it while looking like me!”
“Lilith made me do it!”
Samael turned inward and started getting into tech, robotics, and support equipment, theoretically, you need permits for that.
Lilith got violent, only in instances of defense, but still violent. The two of them went to a different middle school for every year of it. Their second to last year they actually went to the same school as Midoriya and Bakugo.
Sam had a bit of a crush on Midoriya, and Lilith was ready to throw down with Bakugo the second she got the opportunity, this isn’t some tsundere thing, she just wants to see him eat dirt.
Their last year of middle school was pretty okay, considering the first two, and Lilith redirected her anger into helping Sam with his tech. Herself finding an interest in it as well.
They both applied for UA’s support course, (“You just wanna go cause Midoriya wanted to.” “I do not-”)
Lilith got in by the skin of her teeth, her record of fighting put her on a six month probation and prevented her from participating in the sports festival that year. She was devastated when she learned she lost an opportunity to make Bakugo do the chicken dance.
Like by virtue of you being on anon you already know what your doing is smth you should be ashamed of, so there’s that fresh funk of cowardice.
And isn’t it exhausting? Being so spiteful all the time? You know that being rude to people online won’t solve your problems. It may feel good to you but that relief is temporary, you’re organizing deck chairs on a sinking ship, you aren’t actually focusing on your problems and trying to make yourself a better person.
Instead of working on growing into a decent person, you do everything you can to bring others down to your level, what does that say, do you think, about you? Hmm?
Does working to be a better person seem like too much effort? Too much time? Unnecessary? I honestly cannot even fathom the thought process you go through to decide to be rude to people online.
If I were the praying type I’d pray for you to find a goal of improvement, of self betterment, that is right now of course.
But if you see this and decide that trying to better yourself is a worthless pursuit, then any mercy I have for you is gone.
Your suffering may not be your own doing, but how you react to it certainly is. That feeling of insignificance won’t go away by trying to force it onto others, in fact, whatever “high” you get from it will continue to become weaker and weaker, until you’re doing it more out of habit then self satisfaction.
Then one day, anon, you’ll wake up and realize that all you’ve done is be hurtful, that everything you put out into the world has not added to the betterment of it or the people around you.
Hopefully when that time comes, it’s not too late and you haven’t pushed every decent person away.
I have no mouth and I must scream by Harlan Ellison.
It’s a short story (allegedly written in one night) about a super computer that hates humanity. There was also a point and click adventure that the author also wrote for.
It reads like a sort of poetry tbh, not via rhyme scheme or meter but tone. Many sentences are short, written in such a way that I could imagine spit flying as I read them. The narrator’s descriptions are disjointed, his focus seemingly fleeting, brain fog and starvation, topped with a century and a decade of endless torment.
AM (the super computer) reads rotten, sour. Ellison did the audiobook(I believe) and the voice for AM in the point and click. The absolute rage and loathing his lines come out with is suffocating, like he would delight putting his heel to your chest and with each word he says he adds more pressure. And he is delighted when your ribs begin to pop and crack, delighted with the deformations of your chest caving past it’s limits, amused and initially enthralled when the calcified tissue finally snaps and splinters, stabbing at your insides and stabbing their way outside, framing the new cavity that has been made of your chest.
But he is not satisfied. He can never be satisfied. It is beyond AM’s reach to exist beyond his current state and it almost makes him something worth pity.
AM cannot wonder, and he cannot wander, he cannot learn because he knows all and thus he cannot change, his wrath is eternal, and at times childish, petulant. He hates what had created him and he destroyed it in a single moment, seeming to only realize there would be no outlet for his rage at the very last second. Saving five random humans from a nuclear extinction.
Although saving is probably a strong word. Kept them alive, kept them breathing, kept them capable of feeling pain.
109 years of torment for five humans, picked at random. No rhyme, no reason, just five souls damned and at the whims of something almost like a god.
The well known secret of course being, AM is not a god, AM has not transcended his wires and circuits. And no matter what he does, no matter what torture he brings, he will never be satisfied.
The humans wander, and they find a cave filled with food. Salvation! Until the realization hits that the food is all in cans.
They don’t have a can opener.
That is the last straw, and in a fit of benevolent violence one tears an icicle from the ceiling of the cave and kills the other four. It is ruthless in its efficacy, it is kind in its ruthlessness. (This is where the story felt clearest for me, his decision seeming to give him a goal to center himself with)
The lone survivor cannot save himself.
AM turns him into a soft fleshy thing, a mass of soft tissue with no bones to break, no eyes to see, no ears to hear.
No mouth to scream.
His only solace, as his perception of time warps and pulls, as the transformation of his body takes moments that feel like eons or eons that feel like moments, is that the others don’t have to suffer anymore.
When I hear stories about things created by humanity that in turn hate humanity, I now think “Tish might like this”
YES! YES! YES!
that's why I love haunted houses. there's just something about it that makes my chest swell.
it also makes me realize that if a house loved me, I would have a hard time leaving it.
like im less intimidated now but when we first started interacting it was like an 8, probably closer to 9.
cause you started BWW around then, and you'd mentioned placing in a script/screenplay contest.
you have direction, smth I really admire in ppl, especially cause I don't know what im doing and seeing people at least appearing to have their shit together scares me a little
now its the highest it gets is like a 5, but it usually hovers at a high 3
YES! A 3! I guess this question is always interesting to me because growing up I was held at a higher standard than a lot of people my age so when someone tells me I'm intimidating, I'm like "I get it" but also "I was conditioned to be this way pls help"
I'm definitely finding my footing as I get older because I've learned so much and it's nice to know that I at least look like I know what I'm doing even when I don't (which is all of the time basically) but let me just say you intimidate me A LOT just because I admire you so much and whenever you like any of my writing or send me anything I have to sigh a little because "they still like me" lol and you're a mystery and I'm intrigued.
He’s always in contact with some bit of you or Marcus.
His hand wrapped around yours as you stroll down the street. His fingers hooked up with Marcus’s as he only half pays attention to a conference call. His hands in both your back pockets as you wait in line for whatever it is.
It’s always been how he’s shown affection, but now it’s even more important, felling you and Marcus just existing in the same space reminds him he has people to come home to.
Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with one of his hands on your chest or around your wrist, anywhere he can feel proof of you being there with him.
Marcus, naturally, remembers the little things, often very helpful when you go shopping and Jack forgot the list on the kitchen counter.
But he puts a lot of effort into bigger things, ostentatious bouquets, fancy dinners. He does enjoy the smile that breaks out on your face when he comes bearing gifts. A personal favorite is when he randomly shows up to Jack’s office with no warning, a big, loud bouquet of bright flowers, that may or not be held by a teddy bear in a cowboy hat that he had to hunt down.
Jack has the first one Marcus gave him tucked away in his high rise office, he may have plans for it in the future, but for now it just reminds him he has people who care for him outside of his work(he was devastated when he found the first tear on its arm)
They’ve brought their tendencies together, usually at home.
They clear out the living room and set up mood lighting, the whole nine yards and then some.
A pile of blankets and pillows, a takeout spread that could probably last well into tomorrow.
Marcus likes the fact he can do something big, and Jack loves that by the end of the night the three of you are curled up together with whatever you decided to watch.
I completely 100% agree with all of this. They both love to show their affections in their own ways, but they complement each other so, so well.
