I need y'all to understand why this comic's never once left my memory, ever since I read it back in 2013. BRO I related to this man so hard that he basically became one of my largest role models in dealing with my own mental illness, and combatting the feeling of going fuckin insane, back when I was being gaslit by my mother that I wasn't being abused or neglected.
I've lived aligned with those same values ever since; to believe in that hunch, and actively question what I feel is dangerous. Even if nobody else sees what I'm seeing. Even if I'm called insane for it.
Not in any casual way; this comic, and this character have quite literally laid out a framework from which I was able to save my own life with, and escape an abusive home situation. It's very literally been one of the most influential pieces of media I've ever read - despite it being just a 27 page comic.
Oh also - I know that this is gonna be a damn crapshoot, and that I'm probably not gonna get much responses (if I even get any, at all) - but if anyone has a book rec for me, I wanna read it. I quite literally don't give a shit about the genre, but I'm just gonna say that I probably won't finish reading the thing if it's like, some booktok romance werewolf mpreg story or whatever.
I'm into things like short stories, classic lit (yes I am very pretentious, thank you for noticing) or sci-fi of any kind. YA novels are also cool, and I'll be honest I haven't actually read a lot of books that other people around my age seem to have liked; things like the "Percy Jackson" series or "The Hunger Games". Are those any good??? I don't know a lot about the really popular books that've become movies, and that is why I am very extremely willing to have literally anybody autsitically infodump their fav books/book series onto me. Even about them damn booktok werewolf romances.
I love getting infodumped on. A lot of my friends are hesitant to just fucking yap around me, and I'll be very honest; I kinda miss it.
...well, a lot, actually.
I guess I just miss listening to people talk to me about what they really, really love. I honestly find it so fuckin cute when people trust me enough to be absolutely and unmistakably autistic about shit, but I haven't had anyone to talk to like that, in a long time. I miss it.
I think it's one of the best quintessentially human qualities that a person can have. Makes me understand why quite a number of tumblr girlies find outwardly autistic nerd men to be cute. Nerds are fucking cute. They got that shit so right bro.
Dude i GOTTA write/draw about DQ11 one day. LUMINERIK ESPECIALLY
fuckin "maybe I was born to meet you" ahh Erik is GOING TO KILL ME. Like i relate to him so bad I am GOING TO SELF COMBUST
Its also just SUCH a good ship bro.
Just.... Bro................. I love this game too much man.
The fact that Erik is the first party member that you make??? AND the fact that he is ACTUALLY one of the MOST USEFUL members in BOTH final bosses??????
THE GAME TREATED THIS MAN RIGHT. DUDE???????
I don't know if you understand how many games just assign you your best bro as a first party member and then absolutely NEUTER THE MAN by the time endgame comes around. Persona series i am looking directly at you
Also just. High-crit phys attack thief man meets the budding hero in jail (like the lowest point in both their fuckin lives), escapes together - and then basically becomes the hero's (possibly a lil obsessive) biggest ally and supporter????? EVEN WHEN HE'S LOST ALL HIS MEMORIES OF THE HERO AND DOESN'T KNOW WHO TF HE IS?????????
...........DUDE??????????
Like you can quite literally choose to propose to Erik (thief) like TWICE. In one of the two scenarios, you can propose to him while he has 0 fuckin recollection of the entire journey before you meet up the second time - and he's STILL in fuckin awe of the hero proposing to him, of all people.
And once man gets his memories back, literally EVERY SIDE INTERACTION with him in that arc is him saying shit on the lines of "my life was shit, but if its what led me to you, then I'm glad it happened the way it did."
i mean who WOULDN'T fuckin explode, right. Right??????
Just makes it kinda WORSE that i relate to this man. Like HARDCORE.
I am quite literally going to do as a hydrogen bomb does. And that is to explode into a million tiny pieces. Maybe take out an apartment building on the way out. As you do. Ya feel????????
Woke up. Saw a dance video. Somehow went down a rabbit hole of cultural dances, and so now I'm gonna yap about my own culture's (so Japan and Philippines) folk dances.
Initially I was looking for ソーラン節 as an example for the Japanese stereotypical folk dance. Honest to god I don't even know if this entire performance contains any arrangement of that dance, but this performance is still a very recognizable arrangement on a lot of Japanese folk dance moves. If you're wondering why I'm such a cold, militant bastard by nature, this is your answer. I remember having to do dances like this as a kid.
And yes, punching shit is literally one of our hallmark cultural dance moves. Lmao.
For the Philippines side of stuff... One thing I have to preface is the fact that there are a lot of different cultures within the Philippines itself. All the tribes are very different from North to South, because we literally all live on seperate islands. The first video is based on a Mindanao bamboo dance called Singkil (it's basically Tinikling but make it parkour), and although it's a very well-known "Filipino dance", it doesn't actually align with my own cultural background.
Near the end of the video, you'll see a sword with a curved blade; my Lolo had a dagger version in his study, and also a saber that hung on the wall. The bendy blade is a culturally significant weapon, and tbh I'm not sure if I've ever seen anything like it outside of the Philippines. Not entirely sure if it's just an us thing, or a South East Asian thing in general.
I actually remember having to learn/perform this dance as a kid, as well. I think I did both parts, but ngl I only remember 'the funny big cloth I'm supposed to swing around'; so it's more likely that my performance came down to me doing one of the guy's roles. In my first elementary school, there were way more girls than guys, so I think I just got auto-balanced by my teacher out of doing the girls roles.
Lastly, there's my actual culture's folk dance. Because I'm ilokano by cultural heritage, its the Talip dance. Cause ofc. Lmao
(and yes, if you're wondering, I think the camera angles on this video are kinda cringe, too. Dw. I just couldn't find a better video tbh)
Yo unrelated to anything that matters, but someone tell me exactly why 14 (or is it 13????) year-old me was so casually admitting to an online audience about underage drinking, literal arson, theft, and also being a fuckin sadist apparently - on DeviantArt?????? Bro.
Anyways this is the only reaction to anything I fuckin said that actually matters, and honestly bro? I kinda see why basically every sane adult on the planet looked at teenage me and said "you are a terrible influence". LMAO???????
Apparently I did not come pre-installed with any sense of morals or shame; and looking back on myself, I gotta say that the adults yelling at me during my rather frequent detention periods and student correction/advisory periods were right bro. Jesus fuckin christ. I honestly forget that I was legitimately just an evil person, when I was younger.
So I made a new discovery with my voice/throat. I'm trying different things atm, to see what works. I still have to get used to singing in a lower register, tho.
Random thing, but I always somehow seem to forget that a lot of foreigners don't actually know how absolutely strapped the average mall security guard is, in the Philippines. I've talked quite a bit about my "shady past" of paying off police officers to look the other way in the cases of minor misdemeanors, and some otherwise entirely common and rather psychopathic mindsets and behaviors of the extreme upper class, in my homeland. I've talked about growing up with the sensation of having a (honestly not-so-figurative) gun to my head, and how the fear of violence has been a very defining part of my past, and childhood.
There's a mild understanding that most people outside the country wouldn't even understand the half of the sheer terrors that the average pinoy citizen has to live through, from day to day. At the same time, there's also an awareness that people don't actually understand how honesty blessed I've been, in comparison to the average middle-class person living in Manila. There are layers to what I've been through in my past, and several different reasons why I ended up so hardened, by my environment. Still, what I've gone through is a lot better than a lot of what the normal pinoy has to face.
These are pictures of your average security guard, standing on the corners of the street, in front of stores and banks. All of these are pulled directly from the top Google search images of the term "Philippines mall security guard". The third guy, is posted somewhere very close to an area that I used to live in. This is what I grew up seeing, on a day-to-day basis:
You think that these men are heavily armed? This is the average security guard. Do you now have a better picture as to why so many people in the Philippines have grown up hardened, and actively living in fear of the authority around them? That is because these people are everywhere.
...The Philippines isn't exactly what anyone would really consider an extremely dangerous place for the most part - and it is in a sense thanks to people like these - but the reality is that growing up in that country isn't for the faint of heart. I have been inconceivably lucky, to be born into the family, and status that I was. Most other people aren't as fortunate. This includes people like Steam, and most of my other friends, who are normal people living a life that can at times become extremely hostile, at the drop of a hat. It only takes one thing to line up wrong, for somebody less fortunate than me to end up dead.
The Philippines will forever be my homeland, and I am proud to call myself pinoy, at the end of the day. But the reality of my origins isn't very pretty to the average person, no matter how many times people will try to paint in a different light, for foreigners and rich folks who can monetarily afford to get in and out of the country, scot-free. Steam and I used to talk about the sheer inequality of this shit a lot, even though we just try to ignore the topic of national politics, at this point.
I was raised there, with the express condition that I was to one day leave my homeland for good. And I'm not sure how much I can express, that I really wish that this wasn't the case. The Philippines was one of the only places that I could say that I felt like I could truly call my home. Most of my friends are pinoy. The reason why I choose to speak English above Japanese, is because that's what I spoke in the Philippines.
I've never once turned back, once I left that country - but at the same time, I feel like I never truly left it. Despite its dangers, its objectively shitty environment and government; the Philippines has always been my home.
I don't want people to see the Philippines in a bad light, or to paint a picture in their own minds of "a dangerous, shitty third-world country" when they imagine my homeland. But I want people to understand just a little bit more clearly, what my friends, and the people that I've known and loved across my life, have to go through on a daily basis. We are nothing, if not resilient, and also extremely stubborn. The national spirit of the people that I love, is in that tenacity that they have to embrace just to stay alive, on most days.
I'm not exactly proud of my country's government. I'm not proud, or even emotionally welcoming of the authority that has had the country in a nepotistic chokehold for several generations, now. But I am extremely proud of the people that survive all that shit, despite every little thing that my homeland tries to throw at them. It's in that culture of resilience that I was formed, and it's the reason why I present in the way that I do.
Most of my friends share this same passion, to fight back against the odds, and live despite it all. That's why so many of us have the ability to become gifted, and determined creators. So many average pinoys have lived through so much worse, than I've ever even seen in my entire life - and yet, nobody outside of the country ever seems to truly understand the sheer bullshit that we're faced with, on a day to day basis. And many people misunderstand and mislabel the characters of a lot of online Filipino creators, as a result.
So many are creating things in the midst of an existence that doesn't want us to survive it. So many are fighting an uphill battle against life itself, while still putting things out online, to a foreign audience that may never actually understand the severity of what they've been through, in their offline lives. That is the reality of most online pinoy creators, out there.
There is strength in the creative culture, and the people we see online - that we Filipinos ought to be proud of - and a lot of people outside our own country don't understand the desperation in which we use to create. There are reasons why so many of us appear standoffish against people who won't try to understand our situation, and the things that we go through, as people. This is something that I've been wanting to shed some light on and properly explain, for quite some time now.
