#shortcomings

[mndvx]

SHORTCOMINGS (2023) directed by Randall Park | written by Adrian Tomine ››› Justin H. Min as Ben Tagawa

[natalyajjohnson]

forgiving yourself is how you come back home to you. it’s where your peace is, your hope is, your strength is. when you're on this journey, it's hard at first. it’s not always easy being gentle with yourself, especially when you make mistakes or when you're being self critical. but self forgiveness is your superpower. it’s the most healing thing you can do for you. that’s one thing nobody can ever take from you. once you start, you end up giving yourself so much grace, because that's what you are deserving of. it’s knowing within yourself that you have always been worthy of forgiveness. choose to honor your shortcomings. give love to your weaknesses. make peace with your past. most of all, be patient with all of the versions of yourself that you have yet to become.

[koizan]

whenever I watch a really cool film about blackness full of beautiful and talented black actors and telling very black story - or like. ANY media centered around POC with little white presence, tbh - I’m always so excited to see some cool analyses or gifsets from tumblr about it and am inevitably disappointed when I see only a couple posts with like maybe 24 notes each.

unless there’s some famous British white boy in it for more than 0.2 seconds in which case it’ll boost it up to like ~75 on average with over 70% of the posts being thirst posts about the white dudes.

i shouldn’t be surprised when this happens at this point and yet I still manage to be disappointed

[hesjustcarter]

ϖ (bellepetitefolle)

In between being vomited on, punched in the sternum by a pedes patient, and getting his foot run over by a morgue cart in transit to the elevator, Carter wasn’t having the best of mornings. Perhaps this was why when he entered the breakroom for a bit of a reprieve, he could barely even muster the energy to ask why not one, but several of the present nurses were tittering around the table.

Finally, he glanced their way to acknowledge them, his brow creasing once they kept peering between him and their phones before bursting into renewed laughter.

“Okay, I’ll bite: what’s so funny?” he asked. “Is there another video with a baby going around? You guys seem to love those.”

Chuny’s grin was cheshire as she replied, “I suppose something about this could be baby-sized, yeah.”

Haleh and Lydia howled with laughter, and perplexed, Carter glanced down just when he got a ping on his phone. To his mortification, he realized that someone — Roxanne, from the looks of it — had hijacked his phone, and then sent…well…very personal photos to every single person on his contact list.

Opening Roxanne’s farewell message, he blanched once he read:

[SMS: Roxanne] The last time we spoke, you were a total dick, so I decided to show everyone yours.

​[SMS: Roxanne] At least now everyone can see your shortcomings.

Lurching upright, Carter quickly scrolled through his text messages in a panic, realizing that yes, every single DM — including one to his mother, dear God — had been forwarded several incriminating photos below the belt.

Cheeks pink, he clicked on the topmost text to start doing damage control.

[SMS: Daisy] Not for you. Sorry.

​[SMS: Daisy] I mean, I’m not sorry that they’re not for you…

​[SMS: Daisy] Just sorry that you had to see them.

If memory served him correctly, he and Daisy hadn’t even spoken in ten years — they just remained contacts for the sake of Carter functions — so this was going to be one hell of a re-introduction…

[chasingm00n]

JUSTIN H. MIN as BEN TAGAWA

SHORTCOMINGS (2023) dir. Randall Park

[mrkmciver]

#You Will Find It!

[jokerislandgirl32]

I Just Had This Realization…

Maybe I am reading too much into it, or maybe it’s just been blatantly obvious and I’m just now realizing it, but I feel like the entire Mystery of The Weird Looking Walrus episode (or MOTWLW) was an attempt to sort of make fun of, and more importantly draw attention to one of Zach’s shortcomings/key weaknesses…

That shortcoming/weakness being: Overindulgence….

See below cut for more…I rambled on a bit more than I planned!

We learn that Zach overate clams and became ill at the finding your inner villain seminar: Overindulgence.

Zach stole the Arctic Pearl and wanted more pearls for financial gain: Overindulgence.

And who is directly connected to these revelations…Donita Donata. She is part of the reason why Zach wants to collect pearls in the first place, and she points out that he became ill after the clam incident.

It may be a stretch to say this, but her connection to these revelations makes me think she knows that overindulgence is one of Zach’s weaknesses. Although this is one of their first episodes together, they obviously have enough of a history that Donita knew she could pull this out as ammunition against him. She knew it would make him take pause, giving her an advantage over him so to say. And she took the chance when it presented itself.

And the fact that Eva Almos, Donita’s voice actress, wrote this episode…It makes me think she might even know or sense this weakness of Zach, namely, that overindulgence is one of the keys to defeating him. And by extension she, the other writers, directors, the Kratts, etc. also know this weakness of Zach.

We often see Zach being defeated after he has “overindulged” himself. In this episode, we clearly see how his need for pearls, his overindulgence in these material objects for financial gain, resulted in the Kratts victory and him being strung up like drying laundry.

And this is just one example of the negative impacts of his overindulgence in the show. For instance: He wanted a black table in a Huge Orange Problem, leading him to cut down more and more trees…cue him being thrown into a river.

In Choose Your Swordfish, Zach wanted to collect all the fish in the oceans so he could sell them and make zillions of dollars. But as he overindulged and collected more and more fish he ends up being confronted by Aviva in the fencing match and nearly becoming the mako’s lunch.

Throughout the series this trend continues. But it’s the interaction between Zach and Donita and Zach’s goals within MOTWLW that just makes it so much more apparent to me. It’s like the writers and Kratts know this is a key weakness of his and they want the audience to know this. Zach can be stopped, he can be stalled and defeated if his penchant for overindulgence is entertained.

I’m sorry if this post seems a bit rambling and confusing, but I hope it makes sense!

[dk-thrive]

Shortcomings were always easy to find. If all you ever thought about were the negative aspects, you’d never see what was good about a thing.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard, The School of Night: A Novel. Martin Aitken, Translator. (Penguin Press, January 13, 2026)