#of a sort!

[antspaul]

also sorry second ask, separate idea that i couldn't fit into the first: i think you raised SUCH an interesting point by mentioning the whole 'aussie grit' thing and i think there's definitely an undeniable connection there -> so much of elite sport is about representing your country/the responsibility you feel as an athlete to perform to ‘serve them’. you want to fulfill that commitment, provide the glory, prove your loyalty and that sense of duty correlates to masculinity a lot as well. i could honestly go on abut the whole nation identity in relation to professional sport for ages but zooming back into mr webber, him basing such a big part of his identity/brand around it is kind of him validating that masculinity to himself through his national identity if that makes sense. despite leaving at such a young age, not having lived there for years, not being able to be their champion, just being a real solid aussie bloke is clearly something that is so important to him, so necessary to feel secure in himself. especially when you consider early danny ric at red bull, what his presence implicated for how much mark meant to australia and how mark fought for him to be considered, how he eventually retired from motorsport, the whole scottie mclaughlin story, his management firm that im pretty sure focuses on aussies/kiwis. it is SO important to him and he needs to be validated through it. and then oscar, who he sees and knows will be the next big thing for australia, might even get them the glory that he wasn’t good enough to bring, that he once again feels a responsibility to push forward so oscar and australia can realise that dream. he's trying to make up for his failure but he'll never be able to do it entirely himself, oscar has to. there’s bound to be a lot complicated feelings there. and then on oscars side, he’s talked about looking up to mark, not as a driver per se but strictly as an aussie in f1 and he also cares a lot about his aussiness in general, i think theres something interesting there from a less rpf more sports theory perspective on a larger scale than just oscarmark but yea idk if this anything. thank you for being so open though!

omg hahaha i actually hadn't read this ask when i responded to your first one! i didn't realize the discussion already went in the direction of national identity and masculinity. just for reference this is what i said about the aussie-ism of oscarmark in that response:

I think you’re spot-on with Mark seeing Oscar as a second change, a more enduring legacy. The importance of their Australianism is definitely at play here — which is why the Aussie Grit part is so critical. It’s not just that Webber aspires to a specific kind of, like, humble salt-of-the-earth rugged masculinity, it’s one completely intertwined with his national identity as an Australian man. Genuinely to understand Mark and Oscar’s public persona (and Daniel’s too), you have to understand the Anzac spirit. It’s not just that Mark is trying to bring forth through Oscar a champion who can live up to the (distinctly masculine) aspirations Mark failed to realize; it’s that Oscar will be an Australian champion living up to the masculine values that Australians are expected to embody when they represent their country on an international stage (things like stoicism, endurance, loyalty, and—well—grit). (Tbh I think any non-Aussie Oscar fan should have a working knowledge of Anzac masculinity lol. Some of the fanon interpretation of him seems kind of like… a bit ridiculous when you’re familiar with it.)

for the record national identity and masculinity (and how the two are COMPLETELY inextricable from one another, especially in a settler-state like Australia) were incredibly important aspects of my historical research (& time period that i studied). i could talk at length about these things, but that would be boring for you and not that related to psychoanalyzing millionaire athletes, so. just know that you've hit the nail on the head - aussie national identity is considered synonymous with anzac spirit, which is a specifically masculine set of values. these ideals are quite obviously what mark refers to when he says "aussie grit".

also part of that australian national identity is a sense of marginality on the world stage, which is seen nowhere as strongly as in british-australian sporting rivalries. the ashes in cricket is the shining example of this (and i think that it's no coincidence that cricket is one of oscar's favorite sports outside of f1). the fact is that there are really no good pathways into f1 domestic to australia; all three successful recent australian drivers have needed to uproot their entire lives and move to Europe (didn't Danny Ric move to Italy at first?? or France or something? idk lol anyways they all eventually made it to the UK) in order to have a chance at success in their field. REGARDLESS of how they were actually treated in the UK, or how much privilege they had access to while there, the fact remains that they were australians living in England, and defecting from their home country was a necessary step in their careers. i think that sort of experience - in which every day these racers are reminded of their difference compared to their peers and competitors, of the culture and country they left behind, of the nation & national values they are now expected to embody in european competition - would only cement someone's national identity, would make it even more important than if they stayed in australia.

i think you can see the aussie chip on the shoulder in both mark and oscar. with mark it's glaringly obvious - not just in his Aussie Grit persona. there are a million little anecdotes in his book where mark feels that his intentions and emotions were misconstrued, when they were really expressions of, for example, his aussie sense of humor.

With Oscar it's less obvious, just because he hasn't written a memoir and is less prone to drawing explicit attention to times he's felt misunderstood. but he genuinely is misunderstood, and i think that it bothers him a bit. he's been in England since he was 14; that's certainly enough time (and at a young enough age) for him to have assimilated more into English culture than he has. It doesn't seem like he has any interests in English sports? like aside from cricket (but the Australian cricket supporter culture is so different than the English supporter culture that it doesn't even feel apt to group them in the same category. he did play though). and that seems like an interest in football that a 14 year-old boy in a new boarding school in a new country could've developed to connect with his peers. idk.... just interesting. that bit probably means nothing but it's interesting to ME.

regardless, i totally read his aloof persona and no-drama mentality as extensions of a specifically australian masculine identity that oscar would have had to intentionally preserve in himself from a very young age. which to me says a lot about his feelings around national identity & his reaction to moving to the uk.

WHICH IS ALL TO SAY. that this is something that mark and oscar have IN COMMON; they'd be totally aligned there, i think.

[hayleylovesjessica]

My partner's spending the weekend at Myrtle Beach with her sister and niece. Her sister is a crazy 2nd Amendment Republican who's prone to conspiracy theory bullshit, so I'm a-okay with missing out on this little trip. Moreover, I'll have the house to myself for a couple days, which will be nice. Without my partner home for summer vacation and distracting me, I'll try to work my ass off. However! I think I'm going to read some poetry while she's gone, specifically Dart by Alice Oswald and C+anto and Other Poems by Joelle Taylor. I'm also going to watch a couple movies that I don't think she'd be interested in, Chimera and Evil Does Not Exist, and listen to the Beethoven and Fauré piano music CDs with Steven Osborne and Pascal Rogé that I got today.

[moved-to-void-kissed]

shoutout to my friends for making such lovable characters

[darkearthsuggestions]

Prompt : deer, moss, mushroom, rot

I who war amongst the leaves, sans word, sans sword, sans thought– I walk the path the moss has laid and find my quarry caught.

 The deer that falls amongst the leaves, gasped breath seeped through with mud– proud face, fine visage of kings, lays broken, streaked with blood; his boastful hooves, whose beat once burned the field to red despair, now cycle, churn, through empty space, through helpless, wheezing air. and those antlers, which scored with righteous rage into the hides of foes– crack as he collapses, to final, soft repose. 

Here he falls and here I race–I rally to his side. Stretch my roots across his pelt and wait that final sigh– I who fight amongst the leaves, find victory in my wars; and call my crown in bugle-song with each triumphant spore. When the new king falls, I’ll be there too, in twining cap and stalk, and I will lay beside his grave, to watch and eat and rot. 

[codenamesazanka]

omg omg omg Here’s the surprise present a best friend got me for my birthday !!!

You can even tie the hand to his face 😭

This Tomura Shigaraki Crochet Doll apparently came from this awesome esty shop! Ruthiesdolls, and it looks like they have other villains too!! How awesome!! 

PS this the same friend from this chat screenshot lmao. 

She and her puns... 

[moved-to-void-kissed]

So, I don’t think I ever said anything about this, but: the reasoning behind that MMD render of Xiara apparently being experimented on by Vexen is because Xiara is actually not truly a Nobody, though for the most part she does function like one.

To summarise: Xiara’s a data-Nobody, and that’s why she and Aria exist concurrently. The reasoning behind how this came to be and how that can actually make sense in the context of Kingdom Hearts’ mechanics is something I have attempted to explain under the readmore.

Back in the age of fairytales, after the Keyblade War, the new Union leaders set up something called Shift Pride, where the Dandelions could do PvP battles against data recreations of their fellow Keyblade wielders, so they could train without having to physically battle each other again. Though Aria is not a Dandelion, Liviana was, and they managed to get Aria to be input into the system because they could sense she was actually still alive. Maybe the Union leaders had already collected data for all the Keyblade wielders before the War happened, I don’t know. However, the software did not know how to process data taken from Aria, because of what she is, and ended up creating a glitched thing that better resembled Ves (since it didn’t know how to handle, or maybe just couldn’t read, Aria’s Heartless aspects). Later on, this corrupted data was in turn altered by the glitches that were afflicting Daybreak Town, so it picked up more free will and autonomy than the Shift Pride framework accomodated for, and had a stable enough physical form to “exist” in some capacity (because it needed to physically exist in a tangible form for PvP battles in the first place, then was further augmented by the other external glitches).

This “broken PvP data” was then sent forward to the future via the same means as Lauriam and Elrena were (which.. we still don’t know how that happened, but we’re about to find out, I think), ending up being seen as something that resembled a Nobody enough to be treated as one, and thus was brought into the Organisation alongside Marluxia and Larxene. By this time, the technology to create data recreations that could physically exist in the real world had been lost, so since Xiara didn’t display any evidence of having a heart or any ties to light or darkness, or many memories for that matter, even she assumes she’s a normal Nobody like the others. However, since she is actually made from corrupted data, this information is used by Vexen to help him with the Replica Program.

So, I suppose the best way to sum up what Xiara is is that she’s a “data-Nobody” - unlike Xion, who I guess would be a replica Nobody? - because data worked differently in KHUX’s time and I really don’t know enough about Coded and whatnot to handle things in a way that’s more straightforward. Kingdom Hearts lore is already convoluted, so.. why not just  make it moreso? This rambling is the result of my attempts to try and get Aria and Xiara to exist in the same timeline of events, since to do that you kind of have to duplicate Ves somehow, and this is the only way I could think of to do that.

I know none of this is going to make sense to most people because they don’t know a lot of detail about KHUX, but- I kind of just extrapolated from in-game information and brainstorming with my friend about whether that would actually work on our self-inserts, and it kind of just spiralled from there, and I wanted to try and explain that in some capacity! So, thank you to anyone who has read this ^-^

[uracilcherubs]

it is not qUite 3 in the morning where i’m at -- bUt i’m feeling fashionably early tonight!

and, perhaps...a bit spacey! @u@