Dykefag Supreme

Shuriken was raised to be a Darkage warrior and likely faced a lot of pressure from his elders to be “better” than his sister. Meeting and befriending Vine Staff while still being in Darkage’s high control environment likely led to a LOT of cognitive dissonance. He’s been raised to love and trust his parents and superiors, so why do they lie to him? Why are they so controlling of him? Isn’t he good enough? Why can’t everyone get along?

Shuriken doesn’t understand he was in an abusive environment, so this mental battle will CONTINUE for him into adulthood. He’s so much happier in Crossroads, but at the same time, he’s had to leave behind friends, family, community, not to mention a lucrative future in the military. It’s likely his body and nervous system cannot handle being in such a mundane environment, as he’s SO used to pushing himself beyond his boundaries that being comfortable feels WRONG.

This cognitive dissonance is represented by his two sides, Shuriken and Silver Shadow. Shuriken pretends to be living a normal, happy, comfortable life, meanwhile continuing to overwork himself and put himself in danger as the Silver Shadow, because he truly believes that’s all he’s good for and he cannot imagine himself without this side of him.

Being trained for a military job, being a baker is fun but he can’t HANDLE that, he NEEDS to use his gear, he loves that thrill, it’s what he was made for.

Shuriken feels incomplete without Darkage, but he also feels very guilty, which is one reason why he hides his alter ego. Slingshot and Vine Staff finally have their perfect life, and he views himself as selfish for missing Darkage at all, despite being raised to view it as an important part of his identity. He was deeply hurt and abused there, but he misses it anyways, and he doesn’t quite know why.

Slingshot was very clearly stressed out in Darkage. He’s been using baking as a form of escapism since he lived there, and despite receiving military training as well, he lacked friends or family to put any real pressure on him. He was lonely. Moving away felt like freedom, like he was finally being saved. He could finally be himself.

He’s still dealing with the trauma with it, but unlike Shuriken, Slingshot has no reason to miss Darkage. He loves his new life and his bakery, and I think if he ever found out Shuriken MISSED that place, he’d be very confused or maybe even feel betrayed. Of course, they’d get over it, but I think Slingshot would have a lot of trouble understanding where Shuri is coming from.

Slingshot is extremely perfectionistic because it’s been drilled into him that he has to keep up a perfect mask. If he let slip any unhappiness or discomfort to the elders in Darkage, they’d think he was betraying his faction or letting worthless feelings get the better of him. His perfectionism when it comes to masking parts of his identity carried through into smaller things too. His baking has to be perfect, his cafe has to be perfect, or else what good is he?

Slingshot and Shuriken are parallels to each other in this way, and there’s something important about them. They both use Vine Staff as a way to process their feelings (? let me explain)

A lot of Shuriken’s guilt comes from thinking about Vine Staff. What would his sister think if she knew he was longing to go back to the place that exiled her so carelessly?! Shuriken cares very deeply for his sister, so of course these feelings would make him confused

Slingshot thinks Vine probably agrees with him about hating Darkage, and also wants to make things perfect FOR her, so SHE can be happy and heal from her trauma.

VINE STAFF would agree in ways with BOTH of them. Being isolated from a young age was horrific, terrifying, being emotionally neglected and having to care for/comfort herself. She was literally in a constant life or death situation for the first 15+ years of her life, and it HAS messed with her.

She’s weary of anyone from Darkage and probably has trust issues in general. She’s so used to isolation that she struggles to accept affection or make friends.

At the same time, she did have a REAL connection with Thieves’ Den’s wilderness, and misses feeling so connected to nature. Living in a city with so few plants and bugs and so much light pollution, let alone any plants she’d recognize from Thieves’ Den, is VERY difficult, especially since her gear is PLANT THEMED! SHE MISSES NATURE!

Hence, she both agrees with Slingshot in absolutely hating the Darkage clan, but empathizes with Shuri because she does miss her home.

Still one of the best animations I've ever done. Took just under a week and was equal parts fun and challenging. So here are some process passes! The full version had too many colors so I had to do some compression T0T

I mean kind of? Its a bit more complicated than that but like. The doctor who gives the transfusion gets paid. The administrative staff of the hospital gets paid. The person who draws the blood gets paid. The patient who gets to blood is charged for the blood transfusion, and it isn't charged "at cost" and no one is donating their time and expertise to the process (talking about the US here, but I think the point stands even in other healthcare systems)

By any coherent definition, the person receiving blood is being sold the blood as part of the medical procedure that is not free. Which is fine! People should get paid. But it is very odd to me that the only person in the entire process who does not get paid is the person who actually made the blood.

And its not like donating blood is free. There is the time investment, of course, but there are also some risks involved (which is by definition an economic cost) and the blood a person makes comes directly out of their food budget in a very real way. Your body converts food into blood, which you then donate. Which means you have to eat more food.

People say it is unethical, but I think that is bullshit.

The fact is blood donation is extremely well understood and the costs and risks easily quantifiable. Whatever else it may or may not be, it is a routine form of labor. There is absolutely no reason we could not provide compensation for donating blood safely and ethically.

The logical fallacy at play here is that it could lead to things like selling kidneys or whatever, which is honestly silly. The risks involved in things like major surgery or medical experimentation is a completely different problem than providing compensation for something so routine it barely counts as a medical procedure. It is absurd to equate these on an ethical level or to say that one will lead to the other. It is a slippery slope fallacy at its most obvious.

Now I don't think you are wrong to bring that up because it is the widely accepted ethical position and we don't learn anything if we don't talk about these things. I don't think the accepted position is well reasoned or free of bias. Many, many widely accepted "ethical" positions are the result of bias or irrationality and are actually deeply unethical. I mean we (talking about the USA here) live in a society where months or years of slavery is a widely accepted ethical punishment for minor crimes. That alone should tell you that conventional ethics can be unethical.

Medical ethics are no more free from this bias and irrationality than anything else. We like to put up hard ethical walls to pretend that medicine is free from ethical violations, but that simply isn't true. The reality is that "ethics" are often used to justify horrible ethical violations. Consider that the most common justification given for denying hormones to trans people is medical ethics - pretending that denying life saving medications is ethical because there is a tiny chance that someone might regret it later.

I could name dozens of cases where accepted ethics are used to justify actual ethical violations. And I believe that the treatment of the poor is one of the most common areas where this occurs. Having literally been poor enough to have sold my blood to make rent (plasma, specifically, but its ethically the same thing) I would submit that the argument that we can't compensate for blood donations has more to do with well off people being uncomfortable than what is actually good for poor people.

It's a lot like the arguments for banning sex work. Sex work makes people very uncomfortable for several reasons, but one you often see is that people don't like the idea of a woman being forced to turn to sex work to cover cost of living. The irrational, unethical response is to make it illegal, which of course does does far more harm to women forced into that position making the entire thing far more dangerous. Banning sex work isn't about protecting women, it is about soothing the upset feelings of people who don't actually have to make difficult decisions about survival. If you actually want to help women financially forced into sex work the answer is to solve the circumstances that force women into sex work, not punish them further for being in those circumstances.

-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)

-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt

-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint

-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-

People killed: around three quarters of a million.