#putting it under a readmore because... reasons...

[waytray]

I’M MAKING MYSELF EMOTIONAL THINKING ABOUT JAYVIK WITH THIS SONG 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, they’re alive in another dimension! 

[sn0wbat]

at the time of posting this, i realized it was august 31st on a saturday again, and that's not exactly common, so screw it.

here's the night they met einarr, on the last saturday evening of the summer of 2019.

the rest of this chapter is under the cut!

disclaimer: despite my research at the time, take the historical accuracy with a grain of salt. this is a webcomic. i may be very autistic about this subject, but i also have no background in academia. thank you <3

and then we get to the older part that i haven't redrawn yet!

and that's the end of this chapter!

thank you for reading <333

[irawhiti]

to be clear with regards to my post attempting to coin ngāti rangiātea, i say a few times in vague terms that people will expect you to go to drastic lengths to find your iwi that are not reasonable nor moral. i'm not remotely exaggerating, especially about the moral part.

the final straw that prompted drafting the post and term for me was when, after mapping out my entire family line to pinpoint the person who came from aotearoa to australia over multiple years only to find VERY solid evidence that they were born on the ship to australia and their mother deliberately obfuscated their identities + there is literally no tribal record due to them fleeing aotearoa during the musket wars, i was told to send a physical letter to a person who married into my family who i found out by chance currently lives in aotearoa. this was only possible because i found she is semi-popular in certain circles and has a p.o box at her work address.

despite this being a pretty extreme invasion of privacy, i sent a hopeful letter asking for any information she may have had. obviously i never got a response. this was met with people telling me that i need to send more letters to this complete stranger. when i said "yeah i don't want to do this, there is a 99.9% chance she doesn't even know we're māori due to my specific situation, she clearly isn't interested in speaking to me, i've just found out she was a truly awful person towards my immediate family, and this is a gross invasion of privacy" i was criticised for giving up.

and forgive me for saying that i just don't think that this should be the state of things. to put the concept of Maybe Potentially finding one more crumb of info to put towards Maybe Potentially discovering a piece of your family history above basic human decency and respect.

and it's like... alright. theoretically: what if this did lead to the discovery of my iwi? what exactly does this do for me? like, functionally? i'm not from aotearoa. my family have been diaspora māori for almost 200 years now. my fires have been put out, i have no access to a marae, my entire family (alive and dead) has had a fundamentally different life experience than the other māori from the iwi we came from. hell, entire iwi have come and gone in 200 years, absorbed into other iwi through marriage or wiped out through conquest.

apart from being a brief nod to my whakapapa in a pepeha (followed by the harsh reality that i still wouldn't know my hapū to recite immediately after my iwi), what would this mean for me? for my whānau? why am i expected to run around in circles, ripping myself and everyone around me who may have a single fucking crumb of information apart? who does this validate? because it sure as hell doesn't validate me. i've decided that i'm much more interested in representing and learning about my whānau than the people i was separated from nearly two centuries ago at this point and hey, if that makes strangers feel a bit pissy for some reason, that's really not my problem.

so, i'm ngāti kangaru, a tongue-in-cheek label, and i'm ngāti rangiātea, a call to action.

and above all, i'm done doing morally objectionable shit and begging like a kurī for a scrap of fucking respect.

[networksupported]

You stare out into the darkness & wonder what time it is.

( You realise with a dull ache that you are now 'you' once more ; the being you were so afraid of no longer surrounds you, but sits instead coiled within your chest / your brain / your mind / your heart )

( You are now 'you' but far less yourself than you have ever been. )

But this pondering doesn't come from the puppet strings now tightened around your limbs, or the whispering in your ears, or the blackness of your vision- it seems a deep, ferverent ache so far in your bones you cannot tear it out of yourself nor distinguish it from your own soul, even if you tried.

( You do not have the energy to try. )

( Perhaps you do not even have a soul. )

You only have the awareness that you need to know like poisoned bread still needs to rise / like acid rain still needs to fall ; you need to know so much it feels like a force of nature in & of itself - & perhaps it always has been.

( Perhaps you will never know what time it is. Perhaps you never have. )

You stare out into the darkness & wonder what time it is.

A circle, of course.

You know that much.

But how did it become so?

( How did a snake get so far in devouring itself? Was there not a point it realised teeth from tail ; prey from self ; hunger from insanity? Did it not- would it not- consume itself completely? )

Perhaps it already had.

Perhaps it was not that time was a circle that endlessly chased itself ; finding madness in desperation & desperation in madness - finding villains in itself & itself in villains - but that perhaps you were.

( Perhaps you were time. Perhaps the matter was you did not know yourself. )

You stare out into the darkness & wonder what time it is.

The darkness returns the favor.

You have heard, of course, that walls have ears ( but it seems, in the absence of those boundaries, that perhaps it was more that space simply had eyes / and doors mouths / perhaps you would never be heard here ; perhaps your cries meant nothing & that is why you no longer cried / but you were made to be watched & you cannot escape that. )

( Perhaps all you can do is stare back. )

[musemelodies]

me: (watching house of mouse again) do you think big bad and the bimbettes--

also me: OH LORD.

also me: yeah. probably. 

[indigosfindings]

hey indigo. idk if youve been keeping tabs on the recent shit with patricia taxxon, but i was rewatching the gaylor video and it suddenly struck me how closely the bad-faith argumentative tactics described in the last third of that essay mirror the ways she’s being harassed currently. do you think there’s anything that can be done to get through to people who are starting from the conclusion that an individual is evil and looking for proof after the fact?

this is an old ask (sorry, i havent really been keeping up with asks the last couple months) but recent events have made this relevant

i have some familiarity with the harassment against patty from having been mutuals with her on here (my followers might remember how at the start of the year somebody sent me a callout ask urging me to denounce her). (readmore because this is going to be Long)

the comparison you posit here is pretty apt-- barkbarkbarkbarkarf also compared patricia's harassers to a conspiracy theory group. the tactics i laid out at the ~70 min mark of my video on gaylor can be seen in these harassers, but there are other similarities beyond (narrative-weaving, isolated self-propulsion of belief). having said that, i think there's a crucial difference in the form of the intent & outcome to which these strategies are put--this outcome can be revealed by considering a couple of the cardinal cases argued in the harassment against patricia.

the first of these points is that patricia taxxon is a corrupting--if not outright *contagious*--force to those around her. the asker i mentioned above was coming at me not even for interacting with patricia but for interacting with a person who interacts with patricia--as if to say that having *any* number of degrees of separation from her is sufficient to tarnish you. when i criticized that person, they accused me in replies of having been "groomed" by patty--as if to say that the only explanation for me saying "you are being transmisogynist to this trans woman" is that a woman whom ive only directly interacted with a small handful of times (& who afaik is multiple years younger than me) has sexually preyed upon me, such is the extent of her Evil.

the second point, while distinct, is in some ways an elaboration upon the first: that patricia taxxon is hyper-agentic. another piece of common ground with gaylor actually, although the valence is reversed. the notion that patricia has near-superhuman agency & control over the way people perceive her is reflected in the frequently repeated claim that she encodes Perverse Messages into even innocuous posts. when patricia's friend drew art of their fursonas hanging out, this was construed as sexual & pedophilic (even though deer has said repeatedly that theyre not interested in women!): patricia's Agentic Miasma is so powerful that Another Person's drawing has to be understood as orchestrated by her, & another person's interactions with her must be categorically Sexual & Perverse

the reason for these two points (& their concomitant tactics) becomes pretty clear when understood as an effort to isolate patty--"people close to patricia taxxon are either corrupted or puppeteered by her (& must therefore be subject to all the cruelty we can muster)." their strategy is to try to force people to disconnect themselves from her under the implicit threat of becoming subject to a similar harassment as what she's faced: in other words, the harassers attempt to present the choice of "support & further patricia's isolation" vs "be treated as untouchable by me & my friends" -- this is what i mean about what distinguishes this from something like gaylor: the narrative-building against patricia is actively done with the intent of harming her. actually, more than that, it is fueled by the desire to harm her-- it shores up the position that harming her is not only justifiable but necessary

to actually respond to your closing question -- whether there's a way to get through to people participating in this campaign: frankly, the prognosis is grim. the most vocal supporters of this harassment are certainly going to resist any attempt at being convinced-- if it comes to it, theyre going to make *active efforts* to not give up on their beliefs & actions. this is in part because to even engage in something like what has been done to patty (treating her like a social contagion, framing her as a Powerful Degenerate while sincerely believing yourself to be The More Progressive Person in the exchange), you have to force yourself to ignore what is material & what is reasonable.

there's also, as with gaylor, surely a factor of sunk cost: if you stop engaging in transmisogynist harassment, you have to face the fact that you did it in the first place. but imo there are three ways in which transmisogyny actually acts as a strengthening force in tandem with sunk cost to embolden commitment to this harassment: (1) the aggressive nature of the in-group encoding direct risk in the prospect of leaving, (2) tme people having a material investment in the suppression of trans women, & (3) the previous points synthesizing into a need for a thought-terminating party-line stance held together by its own surface tension. let me elaborate on each of these.

(1) if you exit the harassing group, you risk making yourself the next target of that group's aggression (the extent of which youll know firsthand from having participated in it!). one of the key tenets of the cruel & insular group is "those who are outside of our group will be the targets of our cruelty"-- can a person in this group even begin to consider leaving it? can it even enter consideration as a possibility?

(2) one of the prevailing theories of transmisogyny is that it specifically aims to keep trans women a marginalized & abjected class for the benefit of patriarchy (this post lays it out pretty succinctly)--further to this abjection, people fucking HATE it when a trans woman is successful or correct. isabel fall was torn down for writing a story proffering an intelligent, poetic, & incisive view on gender, trans woman athletes are met with moral panic, & patricia taxxon is characterized as some kind of embodiment of predation. in all cases, the threat of a trans woman being correct (or successful, or good at what she does, or even just "not suffering") makes various flavours of reactionaries feel threatened & scramble to protect the privileges of men, of cis people, and/or of tme people, & they thus have a vested interest in saying "she needs to be put in her place". transmisogyny, as a cultural force, allows this reaction to be not only acceptable but desirable.

(3) now consider also the specific things these harassers have been using to attack patricia--relitigating years-old arguments (incl trying to find reasons that patty being ~eccentric~ or missing an unreasonable, unspoken cue is actually Malicious And Evil), circular logic (patricia participating in kink is bad, because it Normalizes kink, which might make other people think kink is ok, which is bad, because kink is bad), even trying to take her to task for having acted out as a literal child... these "criticisms" have various throughlines, including: (i) patty must presently be "held accountable" for literally every event in her life, no matter how long ago (or how trivial), (ii) any complaint against patty by anyone (short of, like, overt terfs) must be legitimate, & (iii) just like you said: "Patricia Is Evil, And Always Has Been" must be presupposed, & assessments of her statements & actions must follow from that assumption. relatedly: a consistent feature of callout-style harassment in general (even in cases when the victims are not trans women) is that the target is not afforded a way out: apologies & retractions & clarifications (whether or not the target was ever even in the wrong in the first place) are dismissed as "hollow", "insincere", "backpedaling", "damage control", etc.

now, there's a pretty clear result here (resolve the contradiction: if a group of people decide to levy harassment (social, sexual, & otherwise), cruelty, malicious misinterpretation, & false accusations at a single person, & they claim that they are doing this for a reason, but there is absolutely nothing the target could do to mitigate that reason, what do you think the group's desired outcome is? 🤔🤔), but there's also a form of self-propulsion at play here imo. my theory is that continued cruelty can act as a defence for past cruelty: a hunt for reasons that prior mistreatment of patty was justified. "was i in the wrong? no, actually the other person is An Ontological Villain that cant meaningfully be harmed." remember that guy that wanted free labour from patricia, acted rudely toward her, & ultimately cut her from his project? his subsequent treatment of her (making innocuous anecdotes out to be malicious, framing her as The Exploiter in their dynamic, trying to convince people that she is some kind of predator) is consistent with a person who has wronged someone & now fumbles to justify it by claiming that that person is a categorical evil--a subrational, thought-terminating evil. & as mentioned above, trans women are a category of person that are considered acceptable targets for this kind of thing.

all the above is to say: while i am generally a believer in the ability of people to change, learn, unlearn, atone, etc, the single-issue commitment these people have is something that, under current conditions, they are not going to permit to be challenged. to return to the question in more practical terms, i think (1) trying to convince or reason with one of these people is more trouble than it's worth, & (2) as with a sizeable portion of online debate, if you are going to engage with them, you are better off doing so not with the aim of convincing your opponent but rather for the benefit of observers--to convince people on the fence, to fortify less-aware allies' understanding of the situation, & to demonstrate in concrete terms why & how the harassers are both wrong & malicious.

[jonphaedrus]

NOW FOR PRE-ORDER: UN CASO ASSAI BIZZARRO BY J. PHAEDRUS

Don Magnifico, Baron of Montefiascone, has drunk his stepdaughter’s inheritance and gambled away her dowry, treated her as his servant for twenty years, and now whether he likes it or not, Cenerentola—Angelina—is the Princess of Salerno. In a single strange day, a valet became a prince while a prince became a groom, a servant became a princess, a baron became a cellarman, and somehow true love won in the end. Goodness has triumphed, pride has fallen, and in the aftermath of all these strange reversals of fortune, everyone must put their lives back together. The princess might have forgiven her family their neglect, but the prince hasn’t: debts remain unpaid, apologies unmade, and questions unanswered. To win back any degree of respect, Don Magnifico will have to humble himself and accept the consequences of his actions. And despite that, Dandini the valet wants to marry the baron. Don Magnifico wants to marry the valet. Un caso assai bizzarro—a most bizarre case.

Do you like OPERA? Do you like OLD MAN YAOI? Do you like ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION? Do you like GENDER? Do you like THE MORTIFYING ORDEAL OF BEING KNOWN? Do you like SURPRISE LESBIANS? Do you like GETTING FUCKED COULD FIX HIM?

✨✨✨Then I wrote a book for you! ✨✨✨

Based on La Cenerentola, Rossini's Cinderella opera, UN CASO ASSAI BIZZARRO is my first novel, illustrated by the incredible @insecateur and laid out (with hand lettering for the title!) by the inimitable @subvertebra. It's beefy, clocking in at over 300pgs and a whopping 24% smut by volume.

This thing has been a labor of love from its first nascent imaginings as a fic submission for Old Man Yaoi Zine vol. 2 (and you can read that original fic here!) to the final product. It comes complete in three acts with illustrations, an academic foreword, and some of the nichest opera jokes I've ever put to the page (keep an eye on those running headers in act 2...).

Pre-orders are available via form RIGHT NOW!!!, with full release coming in March.

FAQ under the readmore!

How are pre-orders being handled? For a variety of reasons, mostly due to shipping complexities (Austria has restrictions on shipping packages to the US) pre-orders are being run through a form. We're using CryptPad for end-to-end encryption, so your data is secure. After your pre-order I will email you directly with a confirmation certificate, a sample chapter, and a PayPal invoice for the cost of your pre-order, including shipping if applicable.

When is full release? EPub/PDF fulfillment will be sent out via email on 15 March 2026 to all customers. EU/international print copy shipping will begin in March 2026, with US shipping starting in August 2026.

How much is shipping? US Shipping: 5€ EU Shipping: 10€ Other Shipping: 25€ Free pickup will also be available at Y/Con Paris 2026 (in November). Or directly from me, if you know me in real life.

What's the deal with US shipping? Because of the restrictions on package shipping to the US from Austria, shipping in the US will be fulfilled by @ladzwriting starting in August. Further details will be sent to US print customers closer to the time of shipping.

If I change my address between pre-orders and release? Don't worry! You can always email me at [email protected], and I'll make sure to update your address.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? You can contact me here on Tumblr, on bsky, or email me at [email protected].

[uwouldthink]

I feel like people misunderstand my problem with the ending scene of the chained titans.

It's not that there isn't any way to explain why Adrien sees being a superhero as a burden. There are. Just over the last day I saw about a dozen different explanations and they were all plausible and had some backing in the text.

That's the problem. The show leaves Adrien's motivations as something for the audience to fill in with whatever they want. But motivations are not some minor detail you can headcanon however you please without significant changes to who the character is. They're the core of who a character even is.

Take Marinette and Nino for example. In Vampigami and The Chained Titans they both did the same thing. They got anxious about the idea that they don't like the same thing as their partner so they lied to try and prevent a disagreement. But their motivations for doing so are different and so they tell different things about who Marinette and Nino are.

Marinette lied because she's an anxious wreck who regularly catastrophizes and takes said catastrophizing as truth. She thought a minor difference in tastes (not even a disagreement) would lead to Adrien not loving her anymore. This tells us she's someone who has some serious mental health issues to take care of, that she often lets her anxiety control her and that she's unable to deal with even small flaws or imperfections.

Nino lied because he has a lot of pent up anxiety about his home situation he's trying to repress. He saw his parents dynamic in even small disagreements between him an Alya or their friends. This tells us that he sees his parents constant fighting as something awful that needs to be completely avoided. And that as much as he tries to put up a strong front for his brother and ignore what's going on using his headphones, the anxiety he has about it is strong enough that it gets out in many other ways.

Do you see how the same action given different motivations tells us completely different things about the characters?

What a character does in a story matters mostly in what it tells us about them. Being able to explain an action in every way you want is just as bad as not being able to explain it at all. Either way, what you actually learn about the character is nothing.

If I wanted to make up a guy, I have my own stories I could be writing. When I'm watching a show, I'm not interested in doing the writers work for them and inventing on my own a character arc for Adrien that happened off screen and never actually goes anywhere in canon.

It's great that people can come up with their own headcanons that organizes all the inconsistencies in the show into something resembling logic. That still doesn't tell me who Adrien is or what story they're telling with him.

And just to demonstrate my point I went and collected a bunch of reasons I've seen people giving and explain what each would tell us about Adrien, but it got long so under the readmore it goes.

If the reason is that he himself enjoys it but he recognizes that it would be a heavy burden to someone else, then that tells us Adrien is a considerate person with high emotional intelligence, who's both self aware and very good at putting himself in other people's shoes. He's someone that either values being a superhero so highly that all the downsides natter little, someone who can handle the downsides well enough that they don't bother him much or both.

If the reason is because he was deeply affected by this or that negative experience he had as Chat and doesn't want to inflict it on another person, then that tells us that Adrien is self sacrificial to a fault. He's able expertly mask the way he'd been affected (considering we barely got any indication of him being affected by things like that) and has a tendency to take stuff on his own shoulders so that it won't burden others.

(The exact thing he was deeply affected by would also tell us a lot about him.

If it was his own powers then he's someone who's scared of himself, his powers and has a lot of complicated emotions tied up in wielding the power of Destruction. Alternatively, he's someone with a highly developed sense of responsibility who's both very aware of the damage he can cause, exerts a lot of control to prevent that and either doesn't want someone else to live with that or doesn't trust them to be as responsible.

If it was seeing seeing people turned into akumas then he's even more empathetic then previously thought to the point any upset from someone else would affect him.

If it was Sentibug being destroyed then he's someone who sees sentis as living people and is haunted by the thought of someone ceasing to exist on another's whim.

If it was his own role as distraction and sacrificial pawn then he's someone who's aware of some of the unfairness in the dynamic towards him but his self esteem is so abysmal he thinks it's fine if he suffers it but wouldn't allow such a thing to happen.

If it's because of Ladybug's treatment of him and/or him needing to do so much emotional labor for her then he's someone that in addition to having abysmal self esteem also has some very complicated feelings towards Ladybug. He sees at least some aspects of their relationship as negative and may even be harboring resentment.)

If the reason is that he actually doesn't think that but was simply making an excuse, then that tells us that Adrien doesn't trust Ladybug, doesn't want anyone else to have Plagg's ring or know who he is, doesn't mind lying and is very good at it.

If the reason is that he disliked the idea of him having a replacement, then that tells us he's deeply insecure about anyone wanting him around if they have other options, is willing to take underhanded means to prevent that from happening and then lie about it to make himself look better.

If the reason is that the last time he sent the ring away his father had to step up as a replacement and ended up dying because of it, then that tells us he's so wrecked by guilt over to the point where he'll irrationally reject something that is both tactically sound and can benefit him just because it's a situation that kinda resembles what happened then.

Some of these reasons may seem compatible with each other, and that's because they are. However, there still needs to be one that is most dominant and colors Adrien's reasoning here. He's not a real person. He can't simply be a multifaceted guy that just exists despite all his contradictions. He's a tool being used to tell a story.

It's there where the reasons become mutually exclusive. Because is this a story about Adrien being self-sacrificial? Insecure? Responsible? Empathetic? Distrusting?

What is the story being told here?

Who is Adrien?