Aisling's Fandoms

"what about the people dont the PEOPLE have a right to exist??" yes! they do! however, they do not have a right to an apartheid ethnostate

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.

The Only Name You Have (login required) (4822 words) by aislingyngaio

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Final Fantasy Type-0 Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Relationships: Izana Kunagiri & Machina Kunagiri, Machina Kunagiri/Rem Tokimiya

Characters: Izana Kunagiri, Machina Kunagiri, Rem Tokimiya

Additional Tags: Angst with a Happy Ending, Semi-Canon Compliant

Summary: Machina and Izana grow up in the shadow of their parents’ deaths and Rem’s disappearance.

Thyme (login required) (3346 words) by aislingyngaio

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Relationships: Tifa Lockhart/Cloud Strife, Red XIII | Nanaki & Barret Wallace

Characters: Tifa Lockhart, Cloud Strife, Barret Wallace, Aerith Gainsborough, Red XIII | Nanaki (Compilation of FFVII), Cait Sith (Compilation of FFVII), Yuffie Kisaragi

Additional Tags: CW: Dealing with Gaslighting

Summary: It wasn’t the herb that mattered. It was the lies.

To have a child is to bring an entire person into the world. This person can not consent to this. This person is inherently vulnerable, hardwired to depend on you, and must be taught the skills neccessary to one day care for themself.

When you have a child, that child's well being is entirely on you. It's your job to keep them safe, to keep them fed, cloathed, and happy. It's your job to make sure they feel loved.

When you choose to have a child, you are signing up to spend years and years of resources on that child. That is your choice. The child was not alive and could not agree to your decision to drag them out of the void of nonexistence. The child was not asked if they wanted to experience an entire lifetime of conciousness, and all of the potential suffering and agony that comes with that.

That decision is entirely that of the parent who has made the choice to have a child.

You are not "granting the gift of life." You are not doing this hypothetical child a favor by having them. You are doing this for you, because you wanted to be a parent. You wanted to have the experience of raising a child.

This means that if you have a child, you owe that child. You owe them time, and love, and safety, and care. You asked for this, it is now your responsibly to follow through.

Children are not a toy. They aren't a fancy new car for you to parade to your friends. They aren't a fashion accessory for you to put on the shelf when you lose interest. They aren't a mini you. They aren't a magic cure-all to your trauma, and they aren't there to fill some void in your chest.

They are a vulnerable person who is easily abused and neglected and who will be at your mercy throughout much of their development period.

A parent owes their child. Failing to follow through with the responsibility they signed up for is a failing on the parent's part. Making the child feel guilty for the crime of existing is the fault of the parent. A child is never a burden.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Devil May Cry, Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Dante/Lady (Devil May Cry), Leon S. Kennedy/Ada Wong Characters: Dante (Devil May Cry), Lady (Devil May Cry), Leon S. Kennedy, Ada Wong, Nero (Devil May Cry), Original Child Character(s) Additional Tags: Christmas Fluff, DangerousBride AU, Child Nero (Devil May Cry)

Summary: Dante and Lady take Nero on a walk and meet some new friends.

Customer: “Can I ask what you’re taking pictures of?”

Me: “I’m documenting my ADA violations case.”

Customer: “What violations?”

Me: Points out five violations I can see from where we are. Explains how to see patterns of ADA violations.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: World of Warcraft Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Galeheart & Taelia Fordragon, Galeheart & Flynn Fairwind, Flynn Fairwind/Taelia Fordragon Characters: Galeheart, Taelia Fordragon, Flynn Fairwind Summary:

Yesterday we met up with a bunch of family friends and at one point my dad asked me to move a plastic table. “Can you come up here and help me move the table,” he said, “since it’s light anyway?” I was a bit taken aback by the last comment since, well, I could just go and do it and if it was too heavy I’d notice by myself. But I just say “sure” and decide not to comment on that.

So I come up to my dad, lift the large but actually incredibly light plastic table (it was something I could evidently easily lift with one arm, for reference); I realize there’s a bunch of chairs in the way so I tell my dad, who’s on the other side of the table and might not see it. I put down the table and start moving the chairs. All the while he’s started insisting he can call someone else to move the table and I keep saying “really, we just gotta move these chairs that are right here in the way”. He insists and I repeat that, and so on.

Now, most of the time when my dad is being unintentionally sexist I let him know, but this time all I could think of was that I really didn’t have time for bullshit about lifting some feather-light plastic table and I didn’t wanna stress myself out on vacation so I just insisted more forcefully on doing what I was doing.

Anyway, after I’ve moved all the chairs out of the way, I pick the table back on, my dad on the other side of it, and I start moving. Immediately another one of the guys runs up to me and starts offering to do this instead, to which again I say “no thanks”, adding “this is really light really” for good measure because I’ve been here many times before and I know that unless I reassure him the object in front of me is so innocuous even I, a woman, can take it!, he’s not gonna listen. He insists, I say no again, he comes up behind me anyway no matter how much I protest that I’m fine and picks up the motherfucking table (which is still being lifted by my dad and I as we move) on my side and starts walking with us while I refuse to let go. By the time we’ve reached some stairs, another two men have appeared behind me and are also insisting I leave the task to them. Eventually they corner me on the stairs and since the stairs are tiny and I don’t want them to fucking cause an incident because they’re basically bodily pushing me aside, I let go. (Funnily enough I end up in a corner and have to yell to let me pass because they’ve become too focused on talking amon themselves and moving the table through the door in front of them to realize they’re about to shove the legs of the table on my face).

I cannot tell you how livid I was.

When I told my sister, she told me about this one new guy who wouldn’t hit her no matter how much she insisted it was fine during krav maga practice. She comes from years of various combat arts. He later realized she’s trained and acted surprised despite the fact that she’d told him several times to just do the exercise as he was supposed to.

I told her the two guys at therapy will literally refuse to go through the door if I’m holding it open for them unless I act distracted while I do it (not look at them, make it look like I just casually forgot I’m still holding the door open). They’ll either bodily push me out of the way so they can hold the door open for me instead, or stay still and insist I go until I do it. I’ve had time to experiment.

My sister said the men at her therapy group do the same.

It involved a lot of physical labor, including moving objects of various sizes and weights. And it wasn’t necessarily easy or menial in any way, but it was well within my capabilities and it was, after all, literally what I was there for.

But I spent 75% of my energy that morning repeatedly telling the dude to stop trying to keep me from picking up anything heavier than a hand blender. It took me a solid four ours of insisting, cajoling, reassuring, and finally just outright snapping at the guy to get him to lay off and just let me do the job I’d come there to do.

Then, when I finally had him resigned (very reluctantly) to only helping me move large, extremely heavy furniture that legitimately required two people to move–which he started out trying to move alone because he was so insistent on “being a gentleman”–his damn stepbrother showed up and started up with the same shit (in addition to giving the dude crap for “letting me” carry all this heavy stuff myself).

Well, by that point I’d run out of patience, and I told him in no uncertain terms that I was here to do work, not stand around and look pretty while the big, strong men did all the work for me, and if he wasn’t going to help where it was actually needed to kindly get out of my way and stop being a distraction. I then proceeded to take the feather-light stack of plastic fucking lawn chairs he thought I was too delicate to carry back from him and continue with my work.

That day of work got me labeled “too independent” by all the guys in the volunteer group. Even my grandmother, a fierce Annie Oakley of a single parent with no qualms about speaking her mind and making her own way, told me I should have just let the boys “help” me because they were trying to be “nice.” No amount of explaining that they weren’t helping, they were being a hindrance, seemed to get through to anyone.

Nothing they did that day to try and “help” me was helpful. The other guy actually ended up injuring himself trying to keep me from helping him move heavy things. And every moment he spent trying to take things out of my hands and carry them for me was a moment he could have just picked up something else and moved it, or cleaned something, or otherwise helped actually make progress on the job we were doing.

So back in my girl mode days when I worked at McDs, I was heavily feminine presenting. Like, went to work always with nails done, hair done, full face of make-up… the works.

And a lot of the other girls there wouldn’t lift anything heavier than one 10-lb box of sauces… and not even that if they could help it. Like, they’d get a cart and block everything to stock one type of sauce.

So one day, about three weeks in, I get told to stock sauce. And there’s a LOT that needs stocked.

But the cart is in use.

Oh well. I load up all the sauces I need - a good 70 or so lbs; more than half my body weight at the time - and carry them in my hands to the front.

Or. I try to.

Twice I got stopped by male coworkers getting in my way trying to help me by taking my carefully balanced boxes off my stack. I almost had to shout at them to get out of my way and let me get to the front.

Eventually I trained them to just let me haul the heavy shit and not get right in my fucking path.

Then we got a new guy. Who did not take, “No.” or “Move.” for an answer. And just yanked the top four boxes of sauce off my stack one day.

They fell. And of course the boxes busted open and sauce packets went everywhere.

And whose fault do you think this was?

Well, obviously the guy’s, but he tried saying that, see, I couldn’t carry all that, I should have let him help.

Literally the only thing that shut him up was the male manager saying, “Dude, shut up. She does that all the time; she had it until you got in her way.”

So I was debating posting this but I think it needs to be said.

So I’m a student teacher and this week, we started at a new school district. Now I won’t presume to begin to pretend that I know what everyone’s political ideologies are in this school district but keep in mind that it’s in rural New York State and rural New York State tends to run red. Not as red as some other places but definitely not blue and not even really purple. 

Anyway yesterday was my first ever professional development day. So I’m all dressed up, introducing myself to other teachers, and I shake hands with the superintendent who seems like a really nice guy.

And about halfway through the day, he goes up to the front of the theater and he starts talking about the best ways to talk to and help transgender/nonbinary students. It’s the basic things we all learn in our education classes. And you can tell that he’s a bit uncomfortable and so are some of the teachers. And at last, he stops and says, “Folks, I have to be honest. My father is rolling in his grave right now.”

And I’m in the back like, “Oh no.”

And so he pauses again and then he starts implying that he was raised to have a very negative opinion on the transgender community. And he continues to say that he had to unlearn a lot in the past few decades and then he admitted that he still doesn’t get it. He outright admitted that he personally doesn’t understand how someone comes to the conclusion that they’re not their assigned gender. And he admits that of course he doesn’t because he’s never had to go through that.

Another pause.

And then he says, “But I don’t have to get it.”

The theater fills with whispers and then he says [and I’m paraphrasing here], “I don’t have to get it. I don’t even have to agree with it. Because it doesn’t matter what I think or what I feel or what my beliefs are. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that I respect that student and I respect their choice.”

And then he reminded the teachers of every single policy that the school district follows from letting any student use their bathroom of choice to changing the students’ names per the students’ requests to not telling the parents anything unless the student gives consent to do so.

And at the end, he brought it back by saying, “My father just rolled in his grave again. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter what you believe, because it’s not about you. It’s about your kids. And you need to love your kids! Love your kids! Love your kids!”

Look at the cure rates compared to mortality rates in universal health care countries and compare them to ours, then talk shit.

You don’t seem to understand about how it works. Firstly, operations are prioritised. If someone comes in with an emergency, such as a ruptured aorta and bleeding out - of COURSE they will get an operation STRAIGHT AWAY. Like what do you think doctors do here, twiddle their thumbs while patients die? 

And if someone has something that is not quite an emergency, but is serious, such as a bowel cancer, they will have their surgery within 1-2 weeks of seeing a specialist. And it’s free. The poor patient who is already stressed and worried sick about their cancer, will NOT also have to worry about insurance and bills and going bankrupt.

Sure, some operations that are not quite as urgent will have waiting lists. My gran just had her cataract operation - this is something that isn’t life-threatening, not causing her pain at all, but of course is still affecting her life because she couldn’t see very well. She had to wait a few months, which of course in an inconvenience, but she still got her operation, and she definitely didn’t have to wait years (and I have never heard of anyone waiting years for an operation, and as a med student I have talked to a LOT of patients) so I don’t know where you got that from (probably some right-wing american media, I assume). And like, I’m sure most people would rather wait a bit longer than have to pay, or not ever get their operation because they can’t afford it?

Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.

Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.

Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.

Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.

Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.

Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.

Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.

Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.

Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.

Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.

Play college sports Title IX of the  Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination  based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial  assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports

Apply for men’s Jobs   The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal.  This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.

Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.

Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.

This shit was within living memory.  I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.

There was this dude I knew through a monthly infosec meeting. He knew me and my fiancee and my friends through this meeting and he started coming to the coffee shop while I was working. He took a shine to one of my coworkers. He started asking me when she would be on shift and when I wouldn’t tell him he started showing up every night just in case. So she took on afternoon shifts and he started showing up in the afternoons. So she took morning shifts and he started showing up in the morning. So she started taking random shifts and he started showing up all day, from four thirty am when we opened until close at one am.

The thing is, while this is creepy in hindsight he wasn’t doing anything overtly creepy. The shop billed itself as “Smalltown’s Living Room” and there were a few regulars who hung out all day. And this guy bought endless iced teas and ate all his meals off our menu and bought ice cream for regulars and tipped extravagantly. He must have been spending close to a hundred dollars a day at the shop and never did anything beyond placing his order, chatting for a minute, and sitting in a chair where he could always watch the counter. Sometimes he’d talk to me after I locked up and asked if she liked him and ask me how he could get him to like her and no amount of “dude, it’s not going to happen, she’s not interested” could convince him. “But she’s so nice to me,” he’d say, “she smiles when she sees me and listens when I talk to her. No other girls do that for me.”

The owner felt a little hogtied by the whole thing - the guy hadn’t DONE anything, except spend more money than my coworkers and I made on a shift each day to have the opportunity to see her. At least five hundred a week on product. Almost the payroll of a full-time employee every week. And there was always a ten or a twenty from him in the tip jar at the end of every shift - five or ten dollars that represented about an extra hour’s worth of labor to everyone working there. So my co-worker and I felt bad too - he wasn’t really being THAT creepy, was it worth it to deprive our other co-workers of this extra income? (Spoilers: yes)

After a couple months of this (and yes, it was terrible that it went on for that long) my coworker got a better-paying, stalker-free job at her university and nobody was happier for her than me. It was my stupid bullshit that had infected her life and if I hadn’t told this acquaintance to swing by the coffee shop sometime she wouldn’t have had to deal with being scared and tense and having to hold a brittle smile every day at work just so that five or ten would reliably show up, so that someone’s hours wouldn’t get cut because of the dip in sales.

And when she left this guy was crushed. Didn’t show up for a month. Then he started coming in again. Started talking to me about how heartbroken he was, hanging out for my entire shift and thanking me for being such a good listener and marveling over the fact that my fiancee, his friend didn’t appreciate me the way I deserved. He’d follow me out on my lunch break and sit at my table. Eventually I went to the Smalltown Police Department and asked what I would need for a restraining order.

“Well, have you told him in clear words that he is not to speak to you and to leave you alone?”

“I can’t, he’s a customer and he only speaks to me in front of other customers.”

“Well, unless you tell him to cut off contact and he violates that there’s nothing we can do.”

And that was the real nastiness of this trick - always being in front of other customers. When you’re on register you can’t tell a customer never to speak to you again then casually move on to the next person in line. When you’re getting a muffin out of the pastry case you can’t tell a customer “go away and never come back” in front of some soccer mom who believes the customer is always right. You can drown someone out with a blender or an espresso machine, but only temporarily. There was a cubbyhole where we put our purses under the register - eventually it got to the point that if I saw him through the windows I’d let my coworker know then crawl into it to hide. Sometimes I’d spend half a shift doing dishes and making sandwiches in the back where he couldn’t follow me. At least we’d never run out of clean mugs, right?

It was too much. I told my fiancee and a couple other infosec friends what he was doing. He’d stopped coming to the meetings months before over a tiff with another dude so they weren’t seeing him. The had jobs to go to, they didn’t have the time to sit at a coffee shop with me all day. So they took a day off work in the middle of the week and when this guy followed me outside on my lunchbreak I texted them that he was there with me. I didn’t respond to anything that he said during that lunch, I only said “I don’t want to talk to you anymore, please leave me alone.” I said it quietly, but I said it in clear words, per what the police department had told me. He continued to talk while I continued to look at my book and try to eat my food when my fiancee and his friend showed up and joined us at the table. My fiancee (who is, by the way, over six and a half feet tall and built like a fridge) sat down next to him, our other friend sat down on the other side. They both very casually asked what he’d been up to recently. He didn’t say anything, just bit his lip, glared at me, and stormed off. He never came back to the coffee shop.

He DID email a friend of mine to rage about how I’d broken his heart and lied to him and misled him and sent mixed signals - how it was so nasty and two-faced to be smiling and nice one minute and turn on him the next, how he thought we had a connection, and why would I spend so much time listening to him and laughing at his jokes and smiling at him otherwise?

For two months nothing happened, then he showed up at the infosec meeting and as my fiancee and I were getting into the car to leave he charged at us and started trying to hit my (once again, goddamned enormous) fiancee and trying to push past him to come at me. This guy was about five ten and not terribly strong, and while we were scared we didn’t want to fucking KILL him, so my fiancee just sort of knocked him down instead of having a serious fight. The guy got into his car, rushed around  bunch of us in the parking lot, which was genuinely terrifying because we thought he might try to run someone over, then sped away into the night. We called the cops to file a report of assault. The cops didn’t want to talk to me, said I wasn’t involved in the altercation. They took a statement from my fiancee and two other guys who had been in the parking lot, then took down my number and a note that I claimed he’d been “close” to me. I told them he’d been harassing me but they just said that it wasn’t harassment if he just showed up at my job and didn’t actually DO anything.

Well, it turns out that while we were making our report this guy had driven to our friend’s house and rammed the house repeatedly with his Honda. He completely caved in the garage and tried to charge the living room but was stopped by a reinforced concrete wall. When the cops showed up there he was on the lawn raging about how we were all against him and trying to control him.

I missed all my classes the next day because I went to my college campus police department and said I needed a restraining order. I explained what had happened and their first question was how long I had dated the guy. Why did he think we were dating if I hadn’t been flirting with him? Had I led him on or tried to make it seem like I was interested in him? They escorted me to the women’s violence prevention center on campus and I spent approximately six hours filling out paperwork before the director of the center drove me to the county courthouse and made sure I was granted a temporary restraining order that day. It was made more difficult because I only knew this guy’s first name. At every step I had to reach out to my infosec friends or my fiancee to ask for his address, to check the spelling of his name, to confirm the make and model of his vehicle. This guy had chased my coworker out of a job, been showing up on every one of my shifts for months, and I didn’t know anything about him because to me he was just a customer who was an annoyance that had become a threat. But in his head I was the nice girl he’d had a meet-cute with at a fucking hacker hangout who blossomed into a romance in the goddamned coffee-shop AU he was scripting in his imagination, who spurned this rich, considerate, shy boy in favor of her lunk of a boyfriend who wasn’t good enough for her. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to explain a fifteen-year-old gray-hat hacker meetup to a judge in a way that doesn’t make it sound like you’re selling heroin? Calling it a professional infosec networking group didn’t work well enough to include it on the list of places on my restraining order. He couldn’t come to my coffee shop, my home, or my school but was free to return to the meeting where he’d attacked us that was full of my friends who DIDN’T have restraining orders so long as he left when I showed up.

I hate coffee-shop AUs, in case that isn’t clear. It perpetuates this idea that the person behind the counter is your ONE if only you’re persistent and sweet and generous and bashful enough to keep forcing them to endure your presence in their place of employment.

Look, it sounds fucking shitty to say it but most customer service jobs can be accomplished by machines. Automated phone trees can take the place of receptionists, you can get a latte as good as anything you’d get from a Starbucks out of a machine, cashiers can be replaced by self-checkout. Even bartenders can be replaced by some tubes and buttons if you have enough money to burn. The reason customer service still exists is because it is emotional labor that the customer is paying for. An automated phone tree can’t reassure you that it’ll pass your message along just as soon as possible and that we’ll make sure the tech gets back to you. An automated espresso machine won’t smile at you and ask if you’re having a good day. A self-checkout doesn’t make small talk about how great that ice-cream is or how nice the day is outside. A drink machine may be able to listen to your problems but it won’t say “I feel you,” and tell a funny story to make you feel better. We live in the fucking future, almost everything you could want can be accomplished with an machine an a cellphone. If you’re interacting with a human it’s because you want to interact with a human and you want that human to be nice to you. You are paying for their kindness, for their smiles when their feet hurt and their questions about your day when they haven’t had lunch yet.

Flirting with customer service workers at work, asking them out when they’re on the clock and paid to make you happy, telling them you think they’re attractive and expecting a gushing response - that’s breaking the rules. That’s a lose-lose situation that you’ve set them up for. If they continue to do their job and be nice to you they’re “leading you on” and if they react negatively and ask you to leave or to not speak to them that way it’s “bad customer service.”

A good rule of thumb if you’re thinking about asking someone out or flirting with them is to ask yourself this question: “if do this thing and it makes them uncomfortable can they leave this place without it impacting their livelihood?”

If the answer is “no” and you do it anyway you’re a jackass. That person is trapped. You have cornered them. You have put your desire to flirt with them over their ability to earn a living.

“Oh good, I’ll do it now, when they can’t get away” is not an effective dating strategy. It’s abusive, it’s creepy, and nobody is well-paid enough to put up with unwanted sexual or romantic advances while they’re trying to do their job.

there will always be people who are so emotionally stunted that they see an employee on the clock as something to use. but we as a society can stop telling them that’s okay and normal.