We Will Kill The Most Diverse X-Men Team This Era Has Ever Seen, But Don’t Worry, Self-described Genetic

Sits TF fandom down gently. Please. Please understand that the whole 'Decepticons as revolutionaries/workers/etc' thing is new to TF from IDW1 and Aligned onwards and was not in G1. Or anything through TFA, for that matter. It isn't some inherent part of the canon that must always be there. Please do not 'correct' people on this, because you sound. Silly.

Fascism sells a synthetic nostalgia.

“This triangular dynamic among bully, victim, and audience is what I mean by the deep structure of bullying. It deserves to be analyzed in the textbooks. Actually, it deserves to be set in giant neon letters everywhere: Bullying creates a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself. Not only does this drama appear at the very origins of bullying in early childhood; it is precisely the aspect that endures in adult life. I call it the “you two cut it out” fallacy. Anyone who frequents social media forums will recognize the pattern. Aggressor attacks. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor ramps up attack. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor further ramps up attack. This can happen a dozen, fifty times, until finally, the target answers back. Then, and only then, a dozen voices immediately sound, crying “Fight! Fight! Look at those two idiots going at it!” or “Can’t you two just calm down and learn to see the other’s point of view?” The clever bully knows that this will happen—and that he will forfeit no points for being the aggressor. He also knows that if he tempers his aggression to just the right pitch, the victim’s response can itself be represented as the problem.”

—

The Bully’s Pulpit            On the elementary structure of domination

David Graeber

(via argyrocratie)

Best Megatron Optimus Dynamic?

I really love the unrequited kismesis relationships Megatron has with Optimus in the G1 cartoon.

Megatron thought of himself as Optimus’s greatest arch-foe, while Optimus Prime only thought of him as “the current Decepticon leader”.

If Megatron ever found out that Optimus didn’t care about him as a person but only as a threat and symptom of the actual problem*:the Decepticon cause, I think he’d be crushed.

Megatron:“How can this be, I betrayed you and killed your coworkers back when you were a dockworker!”

Optimus:“You’ve killed alot of people. After a while its hard to take it personally. and unlike you I go to therapy”

*remember that in the cartoon they were on the Third Great War between Autobots and Decepticons. Megatron was not their founder in the original cartoon.

An under-talked about part of Columbo is the way it presents non-murderers. Most episodes have at least a few scenes where Columbo talks to people involved in the case who, you know, aren't the ones who killed the victim, and in those scenes to see a multitude of ways people handle grief (or, if not grief exactly, the simple shock of someone you know no longer being around). I'm watching one of my favorite episodes right now, the one with Leonard Nimoy as the killer, and Columbo is interviewing one of the victim's co-workers, a nurse, and she just keeps going on an on about how much better the victim was morally than her - how the victim really cared about healing people as opposed to herself, who only wants to advance her career. And in this brief, minute-long interaction you get both the comic relief of Columbo quickly realizing this woman will provide almost no useful information but being unable to get her to stop talking without being rude, and a very clear illustration of how the victim was inspiring to others and how this co-worker in particular not only admired her, but feels inadequate for not living up to her. It's a very short interaction, easy to ignore in the scope of the episode (Leonard Nimoy gives SUCH a good performance as a villain it'd be hard to talk about anything else), but it all adds a humanity to the episode that would be sorely missing without it. If you didn't care about the murder before, you sure as hell do now, and you know Columbo is a better person than the killer because he actually cares about the effect these murders have on people enough not to coldly shut down a grieving friend of the victim when she's rambling on about her feelings.

Anyway, I know this is a hot take for Tumblr, but Columbo is really great.

I can't lie, I find it very odd that posts cautioning people against donating to individual* campaigns and promoting the idea of supporting mutual aid efforts and community kitchens in Gaza can rack up 10k+ notes--while a post promoting a community kitchen (that I can personally vouch for) struggles to get 1k notes, and has barely pulled in a couple hundred dollars over the past week.

I actively try to avoid using guilting tactics in fundraising, but this is weird to me. It's like people are using these posts as an excuse not to do things they already didn't want to do anyway, rather than actually taking their recommendations on board...

*In my experience, these campaigns often support large extended families + their neighbours

Chuffed

Mawasi Al-Qarara Mutual Aid Project

This campaign is a mutual aid initiative involving myself, my friends Mohammad Abu-Alwan and his two brothers in Palestine, and Shakhya Scri

MAQMAP is a community kitchen aiming to support families in the Mawasi Al-Qarara area.

Brawl Tier List (Based On The Relevance of What They Were Doing When We Meet Them In Subspace Emissary)

I'll explain some of my choices under the cut

So a lot of these choices are pretty obvious, although some are a bit iffy or require explanation of the Subspace story which can be found in trophy descriptions & The Dojo.

The first category was for characters who were engaged in the Subspace plot from the get-go and were the "good guys". In case you didn't know, King Dedede is the hero of Subspace, and if it weren't for him, Tabuu would have won, since he made the "reset badges", and his initial plan was to hold onto some people and give them the reset badges in case Tabuu used his Off Waves. Meta Knight is considered to be a good guy, even though he mostly just wanted to get the Halberd back. Fox I put into this category as well since he's first seen giving chase to the Halberd in his Arwing, so I consider that pretty engaged, even if we don't know the exact reasoning.

The second category is open and shut. They're the Bad Guys. Ganon, Bowser, and everyone's favorite winner, Wario. Technically Wario kinda defected from Tabuu and wanted to just steal all the trophies, but I'm counting him here.

Next was the "Used by Tabuu" tier. According to the lore, the entire Subspace Army is made from the power of Game and Watch (although it says the Game & Watch are unaware of this). Pikachu's electricity was being used to power a lot of the operations (most notably the Subspace Bomb Factory iirc). And it's implied that R.O.B was coerced into helping Tabuu, feeling so ashamed that he put on the Ancient Minister garb to hide himself out of shame.

The "Was Doing What You Expect" Tier is a tricky one, since some characters like Mario & Kirby weren't doing what you'd expect in their normal games, but they were fighting, which is something you'd expect in Smash, but I was kinda lenient. Pit was watching from Skyworld, which is in character. It's shown that Pokemon Trainer was looking for Ivysaur and Charizard, so we can assume he was on that journey when we found him in the Ruined Zoo. ZSS's motivations are kind of unclear about whether she knew about the Subspace Bombs and tried to stop them or if she just knew her Power Suit was there and wanted to get to it. I always figured it was the latter, so I'm putting it in this tier. Marth was defending a castle, which sounds right (I haven't played Fire Emblem). Ice Climbers were climbing ice. Monkeys were getting their bananas. Link was getting Master Sword. Yoshi was sleeping (which only gets him out of "Just Standing There" tier because he is Yoshi).

Next are the ones who just kinda showed up. And it so happens that all five of them make a pretty grand entrance. Sonic is the obvious example here. Ness also counts since there's no implication that either he or Lucas actually live in or even near the Ruined Zoo, but then again in the dialogue-less cutscenes tying together over 30 characters, I don't think that detail was important. Falco makes a grand entrance, although you could argue that he was meant to be Fox's backup. Ike makes a grand entrance with this Great Aether. Captain Falcon literally shows up to jump out of his car, punch a robot and kill approximately 50 aliens in one fell swoop, so either there was an F-Zero track around the Island of the Ancients that we don't see and he quit in the middle of his race to do that, or he just did that. Either way there's something wrong with him.

And then finally we have the characters who were Just Standing There. Luigi obviously was minding his own business when he got got by Dedede. Peach and Zelda I almost put in the "Doing What You Expect Tier" (or at LEAST Peach since she knew Mario at least), but honestly? They were just standing there. No hate, obviously. Sometimes you just gotta Stand There. Olimar was minding his own business letting his Pikmin eat a robot before they were murdered. Lucario was vibing on top of a mountain (as you do). Lucas was just being sad. And Snake? We don't see any sign that he's on a mission. We just see that he's been on the Halberd for an undisclosed period of time before dramatically revealing himself way way later. I like to imagine he accidentally fell asleep.

And then the last tier are for the 3 characters that are unlocked after Subspace, so I don't really count them.

Anyway in case you can't tell I am back on my ADHD meds! Hope you enjoyed this. See you all for the Nuzlocke stream later.

There's a huge difference between redemption and humanization. I feel like a lot of "redemption arcs" aren't actually redemption at all, they're just attempts to humanize the villain so that they seem multi-faceted, but people read them as "redemption arcs" and think that that is meant to justify all the evil they've done before and negate whatever made them a villain in the first place. I think true "redemption arcs" are actually kind of rare because true redemption would take making the villain acknowledge their crimes, reevaluate their actions, actively choose to do better, and then proceed to make amends and become a better person, and that would this take more time than most stories are allowed to give their characters.

I've also seen people argue that a character has to be poised for redemption from the jump for it to work because once a character does something "too bad", they can't be redeemed. I completely disagree because redemption isn't justification or forgiveness, so no matter how horrible a character's actions, they could choose to become better, but because a lot of people (including writers) think redemption means "erasing the character's flaws and making it so they did nothing wrong ever", a lot of attempted "redemption arcs" just end up erasing a character's entire history or justifying every evil thing they've ever done. And yeah, in these cases, the only way to make a character go from a villain to a perfect cinnamon roll with no flaws *is* to have been planning it from the beginning and make sure they never do anything that can't be explained away later.

TLDR: real redemption arcs require a lot of self-awareness, patience, and growth, which are things that are rarely actually allocated to villains, and that's why real redemption arcs almost never get executed. The reason people think redemption arcs are overdone is because there are so many attempts to either humanize a villain that get misconstrued as redemption or attempts to blatantly erase who a character was in the name of "redemption", which is really just poor character development.

Any thoughts on the Russian-Ukraine stuff or would you like to keep your opinions to yourself?

There is literally nothing I need to say in this situation.

I am watching and listening, and helping where I can. My opinion is irrelevant in the face of much more difficult things real people are facing.

I've seen many Russians make statements online apologizing on behalf of the country - cursing it, cursing Putin, cursing the government, and tearfully explaining how disgusted they are by it all, and how ashamed they are of being Russian.

I understand the urge, I really do, but the problem is that it ultimately does nothing. No matter how hard you punch yourself, your friend's wounds will not heal. That's not how it works.

At the moment, all anyone can do is:

Listen and read instead of posting - and think critically about which sources you get your news from (US media tends to be sensationalist, and Russia media is largely propaganda). There's also tons of misinformation online, and I've been trying to avoid posting/reblogging anything that I cannot 100% confirm as true.

Help out those directly affected by events - but be mindful of scams! Paypal and venmo is not available in the Ukraine, this is true. BUT - many Ukranians, especially those who have lived or live abroad are able to use it through connecting overseas banks or cards, and they CAN channel that money to family. It's ultimately YOUR responsibility to fact-check this before you reblog anything asking for donations. Be mindful of what you spread.

Keep informed and don't just spread fearmongering images/fatalist threads. Ukranians are currently trying to stay safe. Poland has opened borders to everyone with a Ukranian passport and suspended VISAs, and there is talk of other neighboring countries doing the same. They don't need more tweets about bombings. They don't need your jokes about WWIII and being drafted.

Ultimately I'm taking a seat and doing as much as I can, but the last thing you all need to hear is my casually uninformed opinion - or ANYONE'S uninformed opinion. Tweeting about current events does not make anyone an expert in foreign policy. If you're wondering what you should do - sometimes, the answer is 'nothing'.

Sometimes, not causing any extra damage through misinformation is the best thing you can do.

tutorial for drawing characters with Down syndrome!

DISCLAIMER... please keep in mind that this is an introductory drawing tutorial and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. it's more of an overview of features that are common in people with Down syndrome, not meaning to imply that every person with DS has all of them 👍👍 thanks

if you draw any characters using this feel free to tag me!!