dont be scared, dont be scared!

tragedy enjoyers when a character upholds the system that they themselves were a victim of

Achievement Available:

#(thousand-yard sex-disinterested aroace stare) cool opinion. love seeing this same sentiment 10000 times a day on this website

honestly, i just love shipping. i love the spirit of it. at its core, for me, is treating canon as a playground of endless possibilities and interpretations. where you can look at all these moments, or all these characters, and dig into what the elements of the story suggest they'd be like together, narratively intertwined. i think it gets a weirdly bad rap as being somehow counter to caring about canon or the "real story" but like, it really isn't. like i find shippers are some of the people who care the most about canon and viewing it through a lens of interpretation and story analysis. it often leads to some great critical analysis, and rich character studies. but another part of it i love is how it's so embedded into the suggested space of canon. the stuff gestured or left in subtext. the gaps between what they do show you and what they could've shown you, just off screen. and if they had, and it went like this or looked like this, with the context of everything around it, what might that be like? what if we played with this element or that? what would it be like if the story jumped ahead, what would it be like if it leaned into this tone or that one? i think that is always an endlessly fascinating question to explore as fans and that's why shipping appears in every single fandom, no matter the canon story. it's an act of both passionate interpretation and creation, at its best moments.

Current Naoto discourse reminded me of this one xkcd comic where it points out the inherent issue of trying to establish one universal standard.

Sadly, the new Persona 4 won't have this

affirmations for my printer:

(having a good week) that’s right. the goal is to increase my baseline. make the spirals shallower until they spin lazily on the surface of the water, lose their suction. im not trying to fix it all at once, im trying to incrementally improve my way into something tolerable. and once im there maybe i can shoot for good