Something that kind of struck me with Noir is that I think the first time Kirika and Mireille share anything resembling a hug or embrace is when Mireille pushes the gun back into her hands, in the episode before last.
Before this there's a few moments where one or the other clearly thinks about offering some kind of supportive touch, but decides against it.
Almost all other contact between them is incidental or a matter of business. What falls out of these two categories is still carefully constrained to the realm of plausible deniability. Even when they share a bed they always have their backs turned towards each other. This gets contrasted very heavily with both of the Manor girls constantly embracing Kirika.
I think this aspect of their relationship is probably my favorite. There's so much unsaid and so much they each can't face, despite both of them wanting to. They're both restrained so heavily by their fears and the expectations they hold for their relationship. To this end the show is very adamant about limiting the extent and nature of their physical intimacy.
pls pls PLS give me your take on ticci toby and how perverted he is. like whats his freak level. from basic stealing panties to sneaking in the woman's restroom to take photos. pls let me know.
it has been a WHILE since I wrote anything at all and even longer since i got an ask so let me whip this out while in class :3 (if it’s bad. no it’s not) (it’s 10 AM this is past my bedtime)
Toby is, first of all, a fag. He’s not just stealing women’s underwear, he’s huffing sweaty man shirts and sports bras after a jog. He’s very touch starved and has AWFUL personal boundaries, but if you’ve seen my headcanon of his penis you know he’s not exactly gonna be the type to go up to someone and fuck right away yk?
So I think Toby’s shy about it. Absolute horndog with the WORST scent kink, he likes nasty gross shit. He will smell your hair while you sleep. He will try to get choked out on an assignment or in a sparring match or even on the street on a hot day on the off chance you skipped your deodorant. HE IS A FREAK!!!
Toby also literally cannot go into public changing rooms. Or the gym. Or the swimming pool. He can’t handle himself and he gets his ass beat or he gets so hard he ends up passing out or paranoid, so he straight up just doesn’t go.
Most of that is just scent kink, but honestly? If he saw a hot fast food worker he would try to piss them off HOPING that they’d spit in his food. He’s really into spit too. Just a nasty little fucker. Spit on his face? Boner. Spit on the ground? He’s cartoonishly diving to catch it in his mouth. Drooling in your sleep? He came his pants. Not sorry, he’s pathetic.
Touching on sleep, he has a somno kink. Lite edition, but it’s there. The idea of sneaking into someone’s room and smelling them or watching them sleep is hot but it’s also a comfort thing, and the idea of someone sneaking into his room and maybe jerking him off or watching him have a wet dream or hell, even something further than that is DELICIOUS to this man.
Toby, to me, will swear up and down and sideways and across and back and forth that he’s not into piss, but if someone did it as a degradation thing or maybe had a little accident while he was playing top he’d cum really hard and then never think about it again also
HES MY PATHETIC PEVERT MEOW MEOW!!! SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH HIM!!!!!
yall can i talk about the “SMAAASH!!” effect when you get crits ion earthbound? You feel that shit. You feel lie you killed someone. you feel like your skull caved in. And the way it flashes and rolls the text in is like!!! Im not even that much of a design nerd but its so fucking rad. I totally get why folks like this game.
There's been a lot of discussion about the validity of neurodivergent self-diagnosis, including a fair bit of fuss about the notion that there is a whole swathe of people faking their disability for attention, so I think it's a great time to dissect a few fun topics such as representation, intersectionality, prejudice and privilege (this post is unapologetically long).
Tl;dr for the people at the back: cracking down on perceived fakes has unintended consequences. If you don't know what you're talking about, what is "believable" is not for you to decide.
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To those with concerns, a few questions. What was your first encounter with disability? A joke in a movie, perhaps, or an insult you heard at school?
Incidentally, did you know the brain uses your first impression as the foundation for your understanding of any concept? This can be tricky to reflect on (we all have a built-in resistance to changing our minds), but if you are comparing the people you see online to Rain Man you might have some catching up to do.
There's this insidious notion of being "reasonably disabled". People tend to go for an all-or-nothing dichotomy without really thinking about it, which is detrimental to literally everyone in between. Personally, I think it has something to do with our discomfort around being bad at something. As if being blind was somehow more legitimate than having poor eyesight - it sounds ridiculous, but tell me there isn't a part of you that thinks this way.
Likewise, there are plenty of neurodivergent folk that are able to function in society, but will not quite match up to the neurotypical standard in certain contexts, whether we lack the performance skills or just have a different taste in things. Y'all seem to be having difficulties translating a theoretical understanding of this into not cringing like we're bringing down the average grade.
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Okay, but aren't we talking about a medical diagnosis? Surely that should be left to the professionals? Yes & no. Hope you don't mind that I explain with the help of anecdotal evidence.
I am at a point where I am feeling pretty good about how I identify, i.e. officially diagnosed with adhd, and self-diagnosed as autistic. Through a combination of digging through online resources and a whole lot of recuperation, I've been able to put many of the struggles I was fighting blind with into a framework I am able to understand. I feel more like a person than I ever have in my life, and that, for me, is the greatest benefit of a diagnosis, official or not.
While I am certainly not ruling out seeking a doctor's confirmation of my autism at some point, there is some trepidation involved.
A non-trivial part of this is my adhd diagnosis experience. This was during the pandemic, I was just coming to terms with being burnt out and was so so ready to finally get some answers as to why. An immigrant (read: used to paying for healthcare) living in the UK, I naturally opted to seek guidance and support from the National Healthcare Service at this vulnerable time in my life. If you're familiar with the NHS, you can probably guess how it went to bother this already overwhelmed and underfunded organisation that definitely did not want to deal with my trauma dumping.
After being coerced to try an SSRI "to find out what's under all that anxiety" and having a terrible time with it, plus feeling legitimately gaslight in my pursuit of getting to the bottom of what it would actually take to get approved for an assessment, I found out about my right to choose and swiftly obtained both my diagnosis and prescription via Psychiatry UK, a private organisation.*
A decidedly shitty experience overall, but I ended up with a lot of useful insight into navigating the bureaucracy, and I can safely say that taking (the right) medication has helped a lot with symptom management, and thus, life in general.
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Now, autism has been in the public eye much longer than adhd and has accumulated more research over the years, but its implementation is far from adequate, especially for autistic adults. Some of the studies that shaped the understanding of doctors practicing today betray the derogatory and/or infantilising beliefs of doctors of the past.
So I have concerns about the toll another clinical runaround might have on my mental health. It would take a lot of work, too - prior to assessment, you are more or less expected to build a convincing case for yourself, which means you have to do enough research to persuade a medical professional who may or may not be inclined to think of all this neurospicy nonsense is a waste of time.
Even if I did get approved for an autism assessment with the NHS, the waiting list is years (yes, years) long. Private care is prohibitively expensive, unless you're desperate enough. Or, you know, rich. I've seen prices in the thousands (yes, thousands).
I'm also unsure, in practical terms, what I stand to gain from an official diagnosis as opposed to, say, seeking out a local branch of the autistic community. Not because I don't trust institutions, but because "access to accommodations" rarely gets elaborated on further, and is not a guarantee. There are also situations where the label would create incompatibility where there previously was none - for example, certain immigration policies reject autistic people outright. Not that I'm thinking of moving to New Zealand, but still.
There's a lot to consider. I haven't gotten around to making an exhaustive list of pros and cons and I don't think I'll have the energy for it anytime soon. Please feel free to add your two cents if you'd like.
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Alright, so an official diagnosis isn't quite the no-brainer you thought it was, but "that doesn't excuse people labelling themselves for the fun of it".
Buddy. Friend. Kindred spirit o' mine.
We are doing this because we are having difficulty surviving in a world that wasn't built for us. I don't know what your definition of "fun" is, but I can think of a few other things I'd rather be doing than grappling with burnout and existential crises for half of my twenties - because that's what happens when you grow up being told that your lived experience isn't real. That you couldn't possibly feel this way, because the rest of the class feels fine.
People worrying about fake disabilities are still trying to fit neurodivergent content into a neurotypical point of view. They see someone trying to normalise the disabled experience and think: "If I did that, I'd be doing it for attention," then carry on to brutally mock them as some sort of righteous punishment for being too weird online.**
I have had to sift through a metric ton of trauma to build my identity back up from scratch. Really puts the "fun" in "dysfunctional". And believe it or not, I have had a relatively easy time of it.
About that intersectionality:
My trials as a disabled immigrant have been frustrating, but I'm also a young, straight-passing, cis white woman. People of colour go undiagnosed at far higher rates - their symptoms are overlooked more, and when they are recognised they are often misconstrued as threatening. Trans people get written off altogether, because transitioning apparently means there are no other medically relevant aspects of your life? Same thing if you're overweight.
I cannot speak with authority on these experiences, but I can say that defining someone by a single facet of their personhood is redundant and insulting, and causes real harm when that preconception bars access to the care they need. It's high time we put work into understanding how our differences interact, and hammer home the fact that intersectionality isn't the exception, it's the rule.
If there's one thing that's going to make it harder to recognise the signs of genuine neurodivergence, it's facing constant doubt. Which we do, about our struggles themselves, and the severity of them. The things that happen to us either happen to nobody, or they happen to everybody - so don't be such a bummer, it's neither the time nor the place, etc.
Maybe there is no adequate time or place for these conversations by design. Maybe the discomfort you feel has less to do with sensing pretense and more to do with rejecting something you don't understand. Maybe it's possible for us to think, speak, and act a little differently than you do, all while being sincere. Maybe letting us exist as we are won't make the world implode.
Food for thought.
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I'll end on this note, because there is always someone who needs to hear it: Whatever the rest of your life looks like, if you are neurodivergent, you are part of the community. I believe you. You belong.
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*In the case of the NHS being unable to provide adequate care, it is a patient's right to request access to an alternative healthcare provider, free of charge. This is known as the right to choose. I've linked Psychiatry UK because they have a comprehensive explanation (and they were nice to me), however their waiting lists have also extended into oblivion.
**Like when Chloé Hayden (actor, author and disability rights advocate, with diagnosed auDHD) received overwhelming backlash (after posting a video of herself displaying unmasked joy) that led to her stepping away from social media.
Nothing in modern literature I think parallels the impressive absurdity that has emerged from the modern interpretations of 1984 and its key concepts. In my research on the novel over the last two years, the references and usage of quotations I've seen online, particularly in political commentary, have become more apparent; though what impresses me the most about these usages is that they seem to rely on the poster, speaker, and audience not reading the text to begin with nor understanding its messages.
1984, unlike perhaps any other non-religious text, appears to no longer be a novel, but rather a subjective concept that is used as a blanket-reference to anything disliked without requiring further analysis.
Honestly, I'd love to do a short series on this blog of people sending me examples of political or general 1984 references so I can pick them apart, because I really do love this novel and the interpretations applied to it online both worry and intrigue me. (Asks open.)
Even if you proved to me that Evangelion sucks, I would still love it. One reason: it evokes many different feelings no other show before or after has for me.
All the scenes where Shinji refuses to save humanity because he first wants the adults in his life to acknowledge that they're being fucking assholes—wow, Shinji, that's obnoxious, but your actions...speak to me. It feels like I'm discovering the moral roots of all the spiteful behavior The Last Psychiatrist tends to write about.
The entirety of the scene where Shinji strangles Asuka in End of Evangelion is one of the most painful things I've seen in my entire life. I don't have familiar words for it. As Asuka scratches Shinji away and Shinji climbs her like a tree: Please, stop hurting each other. Shinji, how can you be this abusively clingy? Asuka, how can you be so cold and mean? My God. And then Shinji strangling her was like mainlining incel spree killer stuff into my psyche. The fact that they were both 14 made it worse. It felt so awful that I needed a solid week to recover from the depressive episode that sent me into. No other show has done that to me.
The early adolescence of the pilots and the way it so violently collides with the circumstances they're in—the world needing those scared, self-centered, horribly mistreated kids—I'm just a sucker for it. I'm sorry. I have been for that kind of storytelling since I was 13 at the latest, and I guess I still am now.
There's also a lot of other stuff that, while not absent from other things, doesn't seem so thoroughly explored. What is it really like to be a teenage boy who is surrounded by women you mistrust but are also attracted to, and in whose contemptuous gaze you eventually find a strange comfort? What is it like to be a teenage girl who knows she's fully replaceable and rolls her eyes at people who don't feel duty is enough? What's it like to be a teenage girl who is really all alone? What is it like to feed on attention but never feel full because you don't respect the judgement of those giving the attention? Why are crushes formed in early adulthood often so painful? Why do family members who can't get along force themselves to spend time together? These questions are too vulnerable to really make light of, so the show doesn't except in very light-hearted ways. The show is sexual without being prurient. The show is also prurient, but the most sexual parts of the show aren't really offered up for gawking (except, of course, by fans. Who...have gawked, on their own...a great deal in fact).
Freud is still one of the best thinkers about sexuality, and Evangelion is kind of what convinced me about that. The sheer volumes of doujinshi and stories about Eva seem a vote in that direction. Some eva fanfics are among the best essays on trauma and sex ever written. Woody Allen is such a lightweight, honestly.
I watched Motherland Fort Salem season 1 and 2 last year, waiting for season 3 to drop on Amazon, which it didn't cause it dropped on Disney Plus and I found out right in the middle of my graduation exams. But since I am almost done with them and I needed study breaks sometimes, I have now also watched Season 3 in its entirety.
Before you read this, there will be spoilers for all the seasons and if you disagree with points I made, I ask you to respectfully point them out and not just come down on me with all your fury, I can not judge if representation is accurate if I do not belong to the represented group, I can just appreciate it for existing. I also mean no offense to anyone at all. Thank you.
Now with that said, I wanna share my thoughts on the whole show, and on some little details I really liked.
It was a huge cast with many many BIPOC actors, a lot of important characters where portrayed by people of colour and it was amazing to see a show where there wasn't just a few token people of colour, but really a big diverse cast. I can't judge too much on how well these were portrayed as I myself am white, but it was still nice to see
There was queer representation. There was less queerness than other representation, but there was lesbian main characters, mlm side characters, possibly bi characters, a bit of polyamoury, there was even one Witch that was most likely genderqueer to some extent. M/Medusa said "I could go with the boys to train under the witchfather or the girls to train in basic. Neither of those fit me." It isn't explicitly stating that M is genderqueer or trans in any way, but it was a nice conversation that at least touched on the subject. The queer rep was subtle at times, and maybe not always the best or most, but it was nice to see anyways.
Paganism was also an important part of the worldbuilding. There were little good luck charms, sigils for spells like unlocking a door, all little things, but most importantly there was always the talk of "goddess" instead of the christian god, and pagan holidays were celebrated. Beltane as the festival of spring beginning. It's a festival of fertility as well, so seeing it portrayed as a festival of sex was not too inaccurate. It also was a great way to shoe sexuality in that world and how it is viewed (I'll put a pin in that for now). There was also samhain as the celebration of the dead and beginning of winter. I learned that at samhain, celtic pagans would ask the dead for hints of how the future would be, so the talking with the dead made sense. Yule being a celebrated and important day was also nice. The line about "staying up all night and singing the yule song" from Nicte was especially interesting because it is the longest night of the year, and it is still believed by some Pagans/witches that you should try and stay up until sunrise, so that nothing evil can enter your house or body on the night where the sun is dead.
The Portrayal of Sexuality, not as in queerness but in the sense of sex positivity. Witches were believed to get their powers from having sex wit the devil, so the fact that sex made witches stronger was based in old beliefs. Furthermore, after said sex, Satan was said to give them a witches' mark, which can be seen in the lineage specific marks that the Salem witches carry, since they start shining metallic after they have sex the first time. But overall, sex was seen as something positive and nice, not something evil or shameful. There was no shame in having sex and there was also no shame in having relationships with many, no one was branded a whore, people just cracked jokes about "charging up for battle". And I think it's beautiful to see that.
The storyline was good. At the end of the series I could see how every thing was connected, even details they planted in the first season. Again, I will come back to this to elaborate, but everything was somehow connected and the only real "loose end" I can remember, is that one character disappeared towards the end of season three and we don't know where she went. She died presumably, but no one actually knows.
The worldbuilding and idea were phenomenal. The whole idea of magic and witches being based on voices, that sound carries power thanks to the extra vocal chords some people had was wonderful. But more than that, it was thought through very well. The way to stop magic was to make sure frequencies couldn't escape, the way to store magic like an attack was to put it inside a container that contained air, like a pill bottle, a balloon or a soccer ball. There was also the aspect of manipulation through said witch craft, Salva to fly, whips that turn molten hot, fire to change ones face (which is quite terrifying but amazing at the same time) and much more. The only complaints with this that I have is that we never got a list of the "seeds" used in their "work" cause there was a mention of 72 that were used by the millitary and much more that existed. I wish we could've seen more of that.
The developments in politics in season two and three were downright scary. I would go as far as to say that what was happening there was reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s/40s.
BEFORE YOU COME AT ME: I am German and have taken what basically translates to AP History in the states, I have been to seminars and memorial places, I don't take this comparison lightly and I know what I say when I say it. With that said, the way witches were being treated mimics the early stages of prosecution in Germany at that time. They were given red collars that stopped their voices and were meant to identify them. They had curfews, got checked up on by police regularly, and they had to put those collars on their children too. It is similar to the yellow stars Jews had to wear. There was also records of family lines over multiple generations, genealogical research to find out who could be a witch. It was truly dystopian, witches that didn't wear their collars got arrested or beaten, and their mere existence even if they were civilians, was enough to justify all of this. Once again, I am not saying "Oh haha this was the holocaust!" no, I am saying it mimics aspects of how the prosecutions started and some of the cruelty inflicted on the victims. I am speaking from the perspective of someone who has studied this subject for multiple years in school and does not take it lightly. But it brings me to my next thought.
The second and third season of the show showed how popular opinion and support for politicians determine the fate of a nation. While the military was celebrated at the beginning, America began to fall apart slowly, with people turning on the military and on each other. Campaigns to detain the witches and organisations like "Not our Daughters" were sadly more a cautionary tail than pure fiction. It demonstrated how quickly things can go awry and that was dystopian, but also rather realistic.
Something not talked about too often, was that the society was matriarchal rather than patriarchal. It was refreshing to see, women in power and in charge of their lives. I don't have too much to say about this, but seeing a black female president, it was a nice thing to imagine.
Now to details I noticed: (Spoiler warnings)
One: Only women were able to pass down the witch gene/witch ability. Now, both men and women could have it, but only women could pass it on, meaning that it is like mitochondrial DNA, which was a silly detail but something I thought was cool.
Two: Abigail gets called a "Priestess of ancient Truth" by Abdil, which might have been his attempt at flirting, but turned out to be correct, seeing that Abigail was a steward of the First song. I don't know if it was coincidence, but I don't think it was. Either way it was a very nice detail that made me rather happy.
Three: The covens at War College were named after Goddesses, mostly war goddesses. Sekhmet being the coven that Raelle came to was nice because Sekhmet was not just a goddess of war, but also one of healing. Raelle herself was a talented fixer too.
Four: An issue I had was the healing in the Cession being a "christo-pagan" healing. Since the majority of people in the cession are indigenous Americans it made little sense for them to develop witch craft based on the bible. I thought it was a bit weird in general for that to even be a thing, but I guess seeing as they were a pagan based society and Raelle was supposed to have a stronger kind of healing, the closest thing was to pull on christianity. I think it could've been solved better, but not every aspect of a show can be wonderful I guess.
Five: Raelle was supposed to have stronger healing but it harmed her, which confused me until my dad pointed something out. The stronger a magic is, the worse the drawbacks of it are. Her healing damaging her while also fixing something nothing else can fix, it makes sense.
I probably have more, but it's been a while since I saw the first two seasons and I already made this post really long, I just needed to share this all.
