This illustration can be found inside manga Volume 7.

I have sex now! I had sex a few days ago! I AM AN ADULT WHO GETS LAID.

And I see this FUCKING ART and suddenly I’m 13 and shipping the fuck out of it all again and wanting to read smutty fic.

WHY. WHYYYYYYYYYY

I REMEMBER THE SMUTTY FIC I READ. IT WAS DUMB. It was shit like “help we’re stuck out in the cold and need to keep each other warm to not die we Need to have sex” because that’s how teenagers god damn think.

This has been a scream into the ether I don’t know if anyone will see. I am embarrassed at myself and laughing at myself. Also I have HARD core just compartmentalized the Watsuki bullshit and that’s what I’m sticking with. I can’t do it with JKR but I can do it with him. Which starts leading down a terrible rabbit hole of how horrible they both are in totally different ways and nope not going there MY POINT WAS JUST THE RANT THAT I AM AN -ADULT-

I say in my toe socks eating apple sauce.

So, new goal, lay Ben again and. Have memories of it this time. Cus dammit I want to be able to remember it!

Also. You know. Don't throw up on him. Or anyone. Ever.

And in the process of looking for these posts of me losing my shit I got to relive what a human disaster I was at 23. It’s one thing to remember you were hungover every weekend and another to read post after post drunkingly ranting about how much you hate yourself.

Also to read post after post telling myself I would not lose the two most important people in my life, that that paranoia would not happen, reading this still fucked up two and a half years later about losing them.

And I always felt like the movies meant to, because there’s been flashbacks to Tomoe but the full story hasn’t been explained in the movie canon. And because the ending was a proposal, and that could be seen as a happy ending or a cliffhanger.

And imagine the Jinchuu arc a few months after Kenshin and Kaoru’s wedding. The movie starts with flashes of their wedding, of their joy, their happiness. Cute scenes of marital bliss. (Maybe have Kaoru be pregnant but I kinda think that would be going too far. I’m looking at you GoT)

And Kenshin thinks he’s safe finally. He thinks he’s finally hound home with his beloved adopted family and his beautiful wife and he’s finally letting himself be happy.

And imagine how much more heart wrenching, how much more soul destroying Enishi’s justice would be, then.

Just.

And I always felt like the movies meant to, because there’s been flashbacks to Tomoe but the full story hasn’t been explained in the movie canon. And because the ending was a proposal, and that could be seen as a happy ending or a cliffhanger.

And imagine the Jinchuu arc a few months after Kenshin and Kaoru’s wedding. The movie starts with flashes of their wedding, of their joy, their happiness. Cute scenes of marital bliss. (Maybe have Kaoru be pregnant but I kinda think that would be going too far. I’m looking at you GoT)

And Kenshin thinks he’s safe finally. He thinks he’s finally hound home with his beloved adopted family and his beautiful wife and he’s finally letting himself be happy.

And imagine how much more heart wrenching, how much more soul destroying Enishi’s justice would be, then.

These types are almost exclusively men. You don’t get hilarious, idiotic women being lorded as icons of our culture. Diane Abbott is dismissed as a cretin while Boris Johnson is a joker.

Which begs the question: is conscious male incompetence a form of misogyny?

If you labour the point that you can’t cook, then chances are that you won’t be made to cook. If you make a hash out of doing the laundry or hoovering, you’re forcing someone else to take over.

Few have the patience to watch someone do a job badly over and over again and so often, they’ll just take it upon themselves to do your chores as well as their own. Emotional labour is doubled when you’ve got an incompetent clown on your hands.

I was recently listening Semi Circles, a BBC radio comedy starring Paula Wilcox, first broadcast in 1989.

It’s about a housewife who recently wakes up to the fact that she’s spent the past eight years being a slave to her kids and nice-but-emotionally-dim husband.

Part of this awakening is the realisation that she does all the housework because her husband is crap at it. Left alone, he makes inedible food. He lets the kids stay up well beyond their bedtime. He leaves the house a tip. 

He doesn’t even try to do a good job because he fears that if he’s too good at these jobs, his wife will make him do more of them.

https://metro.co.uk/2017/11/01/male-incompetence-is-a-subtle-form-of-misogyny-7046248/

He literally puts his mere convenience over her actual well being. This guy thought up and executed a plan where she has to do *all* the work (because of course it wasn’t just this one specific thing) while he watches her tire herself out from the sidelines. Imagine this going on for *years*. …now imagine this with kids. You think this guy cares if she gets off during sex? Would he take care of her if she were to get sick? Would he ever lift a finger if he could get away not doing it? 

I want to add some of OP’s further comments on the thread she made:

“To be fair, I have pretty high standards for cleanliness and his idea of clean vastly differs from mine and honestly, that’s okay! But now I’m starting to seriously wonder if he sabotaged cleaning, too, just to get me to do it. Dishes, for instance. He will wash half and leave a nasty sink full of the rest, claiming he’ll do them later. This drives me nuts, so I just do them. Often he will leave crusted on shit on then, too, so okay, I’ll just do them, right? Now because of the egg business, I’m seeing it as malicious.”

→ The husband is lazy. He seemingly commits to housework, only to bail partway through, and doesn’t even put in the effort required to do the job right in the first place.

“Yes, he sucks at dishes and laundry to the point he is banned from doing them. He will leave clothes in the washer overnight and doesnt separate anything to the point I’ve had many white clothes ruined. My favorite white brassiere is now pink due to his bullshit.”

→ The husband is inconsiderate of his wife’s property, even that which is well-loved. Could his repeated failure to learn how to do this task have been a ruse? Did he anticipate his banishment from laundry duty? OP now has to genuinely wonder about this.

“I’m starting to think he does things wrong on purpose now just to get me to do it. Another example! My car. For a while my driver side door wouldn’t open from the outside, so I had to crawl through the passenger side. He ordered a handle and kept putting it off for WEEKS. Finally, he says his hands are too big to do it, so I had to do it.”

→ The husband makes excuses for himself that cast him as an unwitting victim to fate, with the implication that he would totally do [action], if only he could. He distances himself from any possibility of blame.

Obviously, anonymous forum posts are taken with a grain of salt — we, as readers, will never know for sure if OP is real. That’s not a concern for me, though. Like I don’t care. The fact is that if one assumes this is all true, it is very obvious that the poster’s husband is a perfect example of maliciously feigned incompetence. He’s manipulative and lazy to the point of cruelty, expecting his wife to work while he fails to lift a single functioning finger. The statement that “he likes her eggs better” isn’t cute like some have stated in the replies to this post; it’s just another excuse that walls him off from criticism, a bullshit reason he pulled out of his ass to make her feel guilty and unreasonable for being upset.

The absurdity of the situation when taken at face value — lying about eggs, getting mad about making eggs, even just the reality of deviled eggs (an inherently silly prep style) being someone’s favorite food — extends an air of the absurd to the wife’s concerns, and to others’ warnings. I have noticed several comments to the tune of, “These people are all mad about eggs? What a joke! How oversensitive. That’s just how men are; this is just what marriage looks like.”

It’s fucked up, is what it is.

Also, speaking for myself, a pall that will never be lifted has settled over Hokkaido arc. I will still read it, but not buy it. I will never be as happy about it as I could be. I am conscious of author bias in my consumption. In short, there will forever be a taint.

I am still very active in the fandom, of course. I refuse to give up something that has made me so happy. There are many, many creators that are deeply problematic, and I think that it IS okay to still consume the media, if it is done with an awareness of those issues. Also, I personally refuse to finacially enrich Watsuki, and am careful that I do not do so.

So … everybody has to figure out thier own path here, I guess, is what I’m saying.

I’m so sorry that it’s made you feel sad.

So I was on Facebook interacting with the announcement for the NYC live show. I came across a comment basically saying “this is going to be the show they bring Molly back in so I want to go!” As if the cast is somehow just waiting to bring Molly back on a dramatic way.

Molly isn’t coming back. Molly is dead and gone and the cast have made it really fucking clear at this point that Molly staying dead is fine by them.

First let’s talk about Matt’s handling of the situation. Matt is a very generous dm who has always given the cast a chance to resurrect a dead character should they want to. If Talisen in their discussion about Molly’s death had expressed a strong desire to keep Molly alive, he would have given them all the chance to resurrect them.

This brings me to my second point. That Talisen specifically has made many clarifications that he is perfectly fine with Molly’s death. Sure he was upset for a while but he accepted it and moved on. He’s fine with playing Caddyshack, that’s he’s having fun with it. He made a point of having Caduceus decompose Molly’s body so that there is no body to resurrect.

The rest of the cast has moved on. While they loved Molly they have also come to terms with the character being gone, and are excited to see what elements of Molly’s past come to impact their continuing journey.

Liam has clarified many times that the most fans try to push for things to happen, the less the cast wants to act upon those options because it devalues their feeling of having a choice. So, the more y’all try and force the idea that somehow, some way, Molly will come back just because it’s gonna happen, the less likely the cast will be to resurrect them.

The lost you push for Molly’s return you also have to consider how it sumiltaniously means you want Cadburycremeegg off the show. Tal can’t play two characters at once, so he would have to pick one or the other. Additionally, I see many people theorizing that Caduces exists solely as a tool to bring Molly back and honestly it’s really disheartening. Tal put a lot of work and feeling into Cads and to see y’all shit on him between the lines and minimize his fullness of character is sad. Tal wants to bring duces to life and make him a full bodied character but y’all can’t let him enjoy playing cads because y’all care more about the slim chance of Molly coming back.

As for how its affecting the fandom…. it’s getting really damn annoying. Every other thing I see is far fetched theories and complaining about how the cast isn’t making the “right choice” or how the past few episodes are going to be retconned just because it’s what you want to happen. Just stop.

Why can’t Molly’s permadeath be the most impactful story point to happen to the M9? Why can’t their passing be the catylist for change? Why can’t y’all allow the story to flow in its natural way?

Last of all y’all forget what critical Role is. It’s a bunch of nerdy ass voice actors who play this game because they love each other and love the adventure it gives them. CR is not a CW drama. It’s not an anime, or a movie series, or a Netflix special. It’s not run by a team of directors and editors and writers. It’s a bunch of middle aged weirdos having fun together, who have blessed us all with the ability to watch them play.

Somehow thinking the fan base is owed something or that anything “should” or “must” or “will” happen is just a continued disregard for what the show is at its core. The cast owes us NOTHING. They do not owe us any resurrection, they owe us no explination for their decisions, they owe us no fanservice.

Stop trying to disgrace Molly’s legacy, stop trying to deminish Caduces’ value as a character, stop devaluing the decisions made by the cast. Move on. Write your fan fiction, make your fan art, whatever. But stop insisting Molly will be revived canonically.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine Hiatus Creations:

week five → captain raymond holt

Taking a moment away from my crazy schedule again to say that everyone should be reading the conversation taking place here. A few highlights:

Andy was, as others have noted in previous years, a very messy and inconsiderate houseguest. Among other issues, he left sewing needles strewn everywhere, despite knowing that Molly’s dogs had to go through the guest room to get outside.

He made a costume for a friend of Molly’s and said terrible, gross, insulting things about her body while making a custom dress form for it. And the costume wasn’t even wearable; it split as soon as she put it on and bent over.

He made similarly awful comments about three other people’s bodies, followed by lavish praise to throw them off-balance. When one of them called him out, Andy gaslit the fuck out of her.

Andy lied about basically everything to that entire friend group, and didn’t even bother to keep his lies consistent. He even told one of them that he’d never been to LA before!

He made a number of homophobic and transphobic comments throughout his stay.

He was insulting, inappropriately competitive, and all-around weird with the men in the group. He told one woman that he’d assumed her boyfriend was a “trophy boyfriend” who didn’t even have a job, just because he’s attractive. On another occasion, he told Molly that he didn’t like one of her friends within minutes of meeting him, then tried to turn it around and manipulate her.

New content is coming out and so it’s time to put out a little PSA.

Most of us have likely decided how we’re going to approach or avoid the franchise and some of those feelings might be tested once June arrives with the new manga chapters. Everyone is entitled to THEIR personal decision and THEIR own relationship with the franchise, even if it’s disagreeable to others.

That said, I want to talk about the fandom community. Everyone can and should make their own choices for how they want to interact with the franchise, but entering a fandom space means entering a shared space. Shared spaces means following certain rules; I’m going to suggest two.

The first is easy; if you’re making posts please appropriately tag your posts, especially for new content. If you don’t want to see content, please blacklist associated posts.

The other thing is more difficult. If we’re going to talk about Watsuki, think critically about what you’re saying and don’t rationalize or apologize for his actions. I understand people are responding in their own way, especially emotionally, but certain things can’t be excused. You can treat the work separately, you can see it as complicit, but don’t try to rationalize or apologize for Watsuki’s pedophilia, especially to make Rurouni Kenshin seem tame or untouched.

This isn’t a SJW thing. I’m telling you to think deeply about what you’re saying and why you’re saying it.

I’ve seen people try to blame Japanese culture, try to say that the work is safe because he worked on it years ago, or that his crime wasn’t illegal until recently. That’s all bullshit. I get that nothing exists in a vacuum, but the intent of these arguments is to say that Watsuki shouldn’t be accountable for his own actions, and more insidiously, that his crimes should be excused specifically on the merit of his art. Watsuki was fully aware of his own actions and knew what he did was wrong. It is not the place for fans to excuse him because by doing so we agree that the abuse of others is somehow a fitting price for art.

In all the work I’ve consumed over the years in my studies and in my leisure, there has never been any artform that required the abuse of another person, yet so often men are given that permission and leeway nearly unchallenged. I’d rather not be a bystander to that in my fandom spaces.