"god damn it, you've got to be kind"

the girl who won’t grow up

seeing all the leaked screencaps of the aged up gaang got me thinking about yue </3

Not, like, fake compliments or randomly giving scrounged up compliments to everyone you pass in the street, but -- say you see someone with an article of clothing you really really like. Cool accessories or a great haircut or something. Tell them.

I told an old woman yesterday that I liked her blouse. It was this super pretty white-at-the-top-floral-at-the-bottom shirt which was really lovely. So i backtracked where I'd walked past her and I said "excuse me - i love your shirt." And this harried, stressed-looking 80-something year old brightened up immediately, and beamed, and then when she and I headed off in separate directions, she had a pep in her step.

This other time I told a woman that I liked her boots. She gave me a company name thats since become my favourite brand of shoes. I told someone else that her scarf was cute and she was like "do you like it? Here, you can have it," and she dropped her scarf in my hands and then got on her train and left. I once saw a woman who had clearly put effort into her outfit that day but was now looking harried and frazzled as she wrangled four children across the road, and I told her that her outfit was gorgeous and she lit up like a christmas tree. I told a gay man that I loved his whole look once and he turned into a smiling, blushing mess as his super delighted and proud boyfriend was like "yea, he DOES look gorgeous doesnt he?"

Jon and Martha find the Kryptonian ship in their corn field, but when they open it the baby is not well. He’s traveled light years, and even at the fastest speeds, it was days or even weeks. What fluid was sustaining him has been gone for some time.

They work a farm. They know what a sick baby looks like.

They take the baby inside anyway. It’s far too late for anything to be open, so they break out the milk replacer for the livestock. The bottle they find has had a goat kid sucking on it, but they wash it good, because what other choice do they have?

The baby doesn’t take to the bottle well. He barely eats.

They both know a lack of appetite is a death knell.

“I can’t watch a baby die,” Martha says. She’s done it before. She and Jon struggled to have kids. The closest they got — well. It’s a hard memory for them both.

“I know, love.” Jon’s a good old country boy. He grew up being told it’s a man’s job to take the burden. He’ll take it now. “Go to bed. I’ll stay with him.”

Sure, they both know Martha won’t sleep, but at least she won’t have to see.

Jon takes the wee babe out onto the porch. He tries to poke more milk down him. Rubs his chest, bounces him, pushes the bottle past his lips, every damn thing he can do. The hours are long and hard, but he would never forgive himself if he didn’t try.

The baby continues to fade.

The eastern sky starts to lighten.

“I’m sorry, little fellow,” Jonathan whispers. It’s not long now. He can feel it in his bones. He’s held plenty of animals as they died. He’s waiting for that long last exhale. “Sorry you came all this way and this is your welcome. Can’t even enjoy the sunrise.”

He told himself he wouldn’t cry until the boy was gone. Wasn’t fair, that his last moments would be a man crying instead of comforting him, but Jon does his best to do both at the same time. He cradles the poor little thing even as his shoulders shake.

The sun breaks over the horizon, and light floods the porch. Jon closes his eyes against it and his tears.

It’s a hiccup that is the first sign something changed. Then the wiggling.

Jon nearly drops the baby in shock.

When he looks down, the little boy sure hasn’t died. He’s got this rosy little glow to his cheeks and his eyes are bright. He’s throwing those little hands around like he’s trying to figure out how they work, but he seems to be trying to reach for the sun.

Jon just stares at him until the baby gets frustrated enough with his clumsy limbs that he opens his mouth to tell the world about it.

The baby’s cry is so powerful Jon falls right out of his rocker. It’s a miracle he doesn’t launch the poor thing.

Only thing he can think to do with a screaming baby that’s about to take his eardrums out is shove that bottle right in that open mouth.

The little boy shuts right up and clings to the bottle for dear life as he drinks with a fury.

When Martha comes stumbling out wild-eyed in her jammies, Jon’s sitting on the porch with a grin as bright as the dawn despite the fact his ears are still ringing.

SO I was thinking about how strongly Tara dislikes Gale's in-game hair and beard and it made me wonder if it was originally a result of him locking himself away from everyone but then sort of became intentional later. Also brace yourselves for some character analysis which seems to be unpopular in fan works but is interesting to me:

Gale knows he's handsome.

I love this so much.

Again, I think it’s part of his rewrite to make him less objectionable to..well, to dudes.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Gale isn't insecure. I think that is definitely a facet of his personality, but it's a much smaller piece of the whole wizard than most people ascribe.

Gale has Fucked Up™️

His hubris has led him down some dark roads, not the least of which is becoming the realm's sexiest nuke.

He carries some heavy shame for that. The orb in his chest is a constant reminder that he wasn't good enough, didn't work hard enough, couldn't accomplish what he set out to do—which was a Classic Gale Dekarios Romantic Grand Gesture™️

So in one fell swoop, he lost his archmage title, his Chosen title, his lover, and his goddess.

And Gale Dekarios—who devoted his time, his energy, his life, his whole entire heart and soul to obtaining and maintaining those things—would feel an IMMENSE amount of shame and insecurity about losing them.

So yeah, Gale is insecure about some things.

date night ❤️ [C2E126]

after 3 weeks, i finally finish my beauyasha date art! amidst all the other crazy shit that’s happened since then, i still got this episode on my mind.

So my main thought is that Friendship is the hardest form of love for our culture to see as distinct and important in its own right, and “found family” often (though not always) ends up as a sort of...middle ground between that point and the “Only Romance Is Important” idea. In a ship-dominated culture, Friendship is often reduced to Level 1 Romance, and—at least in some ways—a found-family-dominated fandom culture can end up reducing Friendship to Level 1 Family.

In practice, I think that....even when we know that we don’t see or want to see an important relationship as Romantic, a lot of us still struggle with the idea of Friendship by itself being equally valuable or important. So we equate “familial” with “important” (because family is undeniably as important as romance, right? Or at least it’s a lot easier to make that case—and also, there is the not-at-all-insignificant benefit that it marks your view of a relationship as CLEARLY platonic!), and then we try to fit every relationship we love into a clearly-labeled Family-Shaped Box, in order to affirm its importance and give it legitimacy that “just friendship” might not.

...which is, ironically, what shippers are sometimes doing when they seem to be putting every relationship they love into a Romance-Shaped Box for the same reason. That’s the highest-status box there is! Don’t you think this relationship deserves the highest Relationship Rank??

But Friendship—philia, using the Greek word (or at least using it as C. S. Lewis uses it—isn’t a weaker form or “first stage” of other loves. It’s its own form of love. Not lesser, but different. And if we keep following our instinct to “legitimize” it by conflating it with family/storge, we end up doing both kinds of love a disservice.

(And I am definitely including myself in the group of people with this instinct! There’s a fandom I’ve gotten into recently that—as not infrequently happens—has a central relationship you could easily consider “father-son,” “best friends,” or a mixture of the two, and there’s variance within the fandom. I personally view this relationship pretty much purely as “best friends” in my own interpretation, but...a few years ago, I would have been much closer to the “father-son” camp. And even though I’ve consciously changed my approach to character relationships over those last few years—mainly due to a variety of other fandom exposures over the past few years, and the pro-friendship opinions I‘ve formulated while thinking about them—I still have some of those pro-familial instincts I entered fandom with! They’re very much what I came here with, and even though I now like other approaches better, they’re still in my brain.)

The disservice to philia comes in the fact that we are still not celebrating it as a non-romantic, non-familial form of love in its own right—which stinks, because it’s great!! and important to humans!! and we should all appreciate how wonderful Friendship is without feeling like we have to turn it onto another kind of relationship once it passes some Importance Threshold. It’s also a less-important disservice to specific fictional relationships that we try to fit into a Family Box and maybe end up misrepresenting or oversimplifying in the process.

The disservice to storge comes in the fact that, with the label of “Family” so highly valued in itself, it tends to get overused and slapped on everything until it’s started to lose all distinctively familial meaning. It becomes harder for us to explore the depths and beauties of distinctively familial love when we’ve lost the verbal distinction between “relationships founded upon specifically familial roles, a strong shared background, and/or an unchosen yet unbreakable connection” (which is how I would identify storge relationships just off the top of my head) and the “found family” definition of “any group of people who love each other not-exclusively-romantically and aren’t related.”

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.