#rosycrk

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well I certainly didn't think I'd start my day today by learning that Gingerbrave and fucking Slenderman are the same fucking age and their birthdays are two days apart yet here we are

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WHERE THE FUCK IS THIS FROM. IS THIS OFFICIAL ART. HELP ME I'M GOING TO CRY

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I've been collecting text posts for Days to do this

please enjoy my only real contribution to this fandom

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also obsessed with how every official crk pride art they post is always "the girls the gays and gingerbrave"

like he's always just. there

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BY THE WAY. I JUST REALIZED SHADOW MILK'S OFFICIAL TURNAROUND WAS ON HIS CRK WIKI GALLERY SO LOOK WHAT I DID.

shadow milk is in fact TALLER. and like, significantly taller??

anyway here you go shadowvanilla artists

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MAJOR BEAST-YEAST CHAPTER 14 SPOILERS

Ok but after this I NEVER wanna hear anybody talking shit about EN dub Shadow Milk AGAIN.

LIKE. HOLY SHIT? He just. Dropped the clown persona ENTIRELY and the contrast is so fucking STARK. I was fucking STUNNED by this. Absolute cinema.

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Some thoughts on shadowvanilla, empathy, kindness, and compassion:

(tl;dr: stop glossing over the selfishness of SM's part in this relationship just because you're worried it's "problematic" and you're going to get canceled. And stop arguing that you should never ship these two for that exact same reason. People with emotional struggles and low empathy who have been abused or struggled to learn to love kindly deserve love and understanding too. Those who struggle with learning to connect with others, to care for people kindly and unselfishly, aren't monsters who have no chance of redemption. They aren't naturally abusive and don't deserve to be shunned. It reflects pretty poorly on how yall feel about folks like that when you either say that you should never let characters like that be in relationships with others, OR simply write that relationship as magically fixing their "problems.")

A VERY important thing that I see glossed over a whole lot is the fact that SM's feelings for PV aren't caring or compassionate. Like. Yeah, he does have feelings for him, and they're clearly INTENSE, but that doesn't mean that he actually has any amount of compassion towards him.

Now, lemme establish something up front before I get into this next part: low empathy does NOT make someone a bad person. Full stop, end of sentence. Empathy has nothing to do with being a good person. I know folks with almost zero ability to feel empathy and they're some of my best friends in this world who I would trust with my life. All that "empathy" really means is that you can relate to and feel the emotions of others. You are empathetic towards them. A lack of empathy doesn't mean you don't CARE about how others feel, or that you're incapable of caring for others, it just means you can't put yourself in their shoes or relate to their feelings.

All of that said: it's very clear that SM has little to no empathy for other Cookies. He doesn't connect with other Cookies, he struggles to grasp PV's emotions even though he can literally FEEL them directly. The issue with SM's limited empathy is that he also has forgotten how to be kind and compassionate towards others. In his isolation, he's grown bitter and detached, and he can't see past his own misery to find it in himself to truly care about how he affects the people around him.

Hence how his feelings for PV are selfish: he desperately wants to be near PV, he wants his attention and devotion, he wants to keep him by his side forever, but he doesn't have the kindness or compassion in himself to properly CARE about him despite that. And, without empathy, he struggles to even understand the way PV feels, whether it's towards him as a person or just in general. So, in the context of them as a pairing, SM wants to be beside PV, he wants to be loved by him, but he doesn't know how to love him in a healthy, kind way. It's why he tries to force PV into an unhealthy and one-sided relationship: that way, he's in control of their dynamic, and he isn't expected to give PV anything he doesn't know how to give, like vulnerability and understanding.

None of this means that their relationship is terrible and should never happen. It just means that SM has growth he needs to do and emotional healing to go through before they can connect in a healthy, mutually beneficial way. He has to learn to be compassionate, to allow himself to be vulnerable, in order for that to happen, and while it would be an uphill battle, it CAN happen.

THAT SAID, SM recognizing that he HAS feelings for PV isn't going to magically make him start being understanding and kind towards him, and that's something I see happening in fanwork of them a lot. That isn't how that works! Love, even reciprocated, doesn't magically heal all of the emotional wounds someone has, it doesn't just "fix" the damage they've endured. You don't magically start being caring and kind just because you love and are loved. You can start to learn HOW to do that as a result of realizing that you are loved, and that you love someone else, but loving someone doesn't automatically mean you're going to treat them well and that you unselfishly care for them.

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【Cookie Run Kingdom】 - 《"Hidden Path" COVER Eng Sub》 by Kim Ye-rim & Kang Soo-jin

Please go support the original video!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1RoLVE8qa8&ab_channel=%EC%84%B1%EC%9A%B0%EA%B9%80%EC%98%88%EB%A6%BCI

There's a subtitled version of the shadowvanilla duet out!!! (For those on the shadowvanilla tag who don't know, this is a cover sung by the actual Korean voice actors for Shadow Milk and Pure Vanilla!)