BlueBird1348

We literally do not have enough friendships. Our culture's obsession with romance over friendship is shockingly new (1850's on) and it is having a serious impact on our health across the board, specifically men. This problem has become sharply exacerbated in the last 20 years.

We need more friendships. We need more friendship in media. "But what if they kissed?" What if they didn't, and the love that was there mattered anyway??? Take my hand. Imagine this with me. A relationship unbound by law or expectation. People who choose one another again and again. To stay in each other's lives when there are no societal tethers holding them together.

The only things that work without rest are machines; literally everything that lives requires rest.

The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.

This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.

Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.

This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.

In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.

Then in 2020:

Or, I would say it's much broader than being sexual. I struggle to make generalizations about it. People tend to want to whump characters they find attractive, and whump is about the character's body. Obviously bodies can be sexual and are deeply related to sexuality, but it isn't just about the sexuality of the body, it's about the body's vulnerability, the body's need for care, the body's experience of pain, the body's psychological and emotional meanings.

Where whump has a relationship with pain kink, it is just as closely related to masochism as it is sadism.

Whump is not a sexual thing for me, but I've always been interested in whump and I've always been a masochist, and it just...doesn't make sense to me that these things would be totally unrelated. Like, come on now.

I think for most people, whump is about catharsis in some way. For me personally, the appeal is about taking a character who is strong and untouchable and digging into the ways they are weak and need care. It's about a character who isn't expected, or maybe isn't allowed, or maybe is terrified and ashamed, to show pain or weakness finally "breaking" and being able to receive comfort and reassurance. It's about the shame of needing care and the fraught nature of trusting someone with that.

It's about the horror of the body's vulnerability; digging into the ways a body can experience helplessness and violation and really acknowledging how awful that feels and how scary that is.

It's about pain as an inherently private experience, something invisible that can't be objectively measured, and the ways that pain is made visible and the ways pain is judged to need care or to not need care, and how that judgment affects the experience of pain.