#ramblepost

Before this there's a few moments where one or the other clearly thinks about offering some kind of supportive touch, but decides against it.

Almost all other contact between them is incidental or a matter of business. What falls out of these two categories is still carefully constrained to the realm of plausible deniability. Even when they share a bed they always have their backs turned towards each other. This gets contrasted very heavily with both of the Manor girls constantly embracing Kirika.

it has been a WHILE since I wrote anything at all and even longer since i got an ask so let me whip this out while in class :3 (if it’s bad. no it’s not) (it’s 10 AM this is past my bedtime)

Toby is, first of all, a fag. He’s not just stealing women’s underwear, he’s huffing sweaty man shirts and sports bras after a jog. He’s very touch starved and has AWFUL personal boundaries, but if you’ve seen my headcanon of his penis you know he’s not exactly gonna be the type to go up to someone and fuck right away yk?

So I think Toby’s shy about it. Absolute horndog with the WORST scent kink, he likes nasty gross shit. He will smell your hair while you sleep. He will try to get choked out on an assignment or in a sparring match or even on the street on a hot day on the off chance you skipped your deodorant. HE IS A FREAK!!!

Toby also literally cannot go into public changing rooms. Or the gym. Or the swimming pool. He can’t handle himself and he gets his ass beat or he gets so hard he ends up passing out or paranoid, so he straight up just doesn’t go.

Most of that is just scent kink, but honestly? If he saw a hot fast food worker he would try to piss them off HOPING that they’d spit in his food. He’s really into spit too. Just a nasty little fucker. Spit on his face? Boner. Spit on the ground? He’s cartoonishly diving to catch it in his mouth. Drooling in your sleep? He came his pants. Not sorry, he’s pathetic.

Touching on sleep, he has a somno kink. Lite edition, but it’s there. The idea of sneaking into someone’s room and smelling them or watching them sleep is hot but it’s also a comfort thing, and the idea of someone sneaking into his room and maybe jerking him off or watching him have a wet dream or hell, even something further than that is DELICIOUS to this man.

Toby, to me, will swear up and down and sideways and across and back and forth that he’s not into piss, but if someone did it as a degradation thing or maybe had a little accident while he was playing top he’d cum really hard and then never think about it again also

Tl;dr for the people at the back: cracking down on perceived fakes has unintended consequences. If you don't know what you're talking about, what is "believable" is not for you to decide.

1984, unlike perhaps any other non-religious text, appears to no longer be a novel, but rather a subjective concept that is used as a blanket-reference to anything disliked without requiring further analysis.

All the scenes where Shinji refuses to save humanity because he first wants the adults in his life to acknowledge that they're being fucking assholes—wow, Shinji, that's obnoxious, but your actions...speak to me. It feels like I'm discovering the moral roots of all the spiteful behavior The Last Psychiatrist tends to write about.

The entirety of the scene where Shinji strangles Asuka in End of Evangelion is one of the most painful things I've seen in my entire life. I don't have familiar words for it. As Asuka scratches Shinji away and Shinji climbs her like a tree: Please, stop hurting each other. Shinji, how can you be this abusively clingy? Asuka, how can you be so cold and mean? My God. And then Shinji strangling her was like mainlining incel spree killer stuff into my psyche. The fact that they were both 14 made it worse. It felt so awful that I needed a solid week to recover from the depressive episode that sent me into. No other show has done that to me.

The early adolescence of the pilots and the way it so violently collides with the circumstances they're in—the world needing those scared, self-centered, horribly mistreated kids—I'm just a sucker for it. I'm sorry. I have been for that kind of storytelling since I was 13 at the latest, and I guess I still am now.

There's also a lot of other stuff that, while not absent from other things, doesn't seem so thoroughly explored. What is it really like to be a teenage boy who is surrounded by women you mistrust but are also attracted to, and in whose contemptuous gaze you eventually find a strange comfort? What is it like to be a teenage girl who knows she's fully replaceable and rolls her eyes at people who don't feel duty is enough? What's it like to be a teenage girl who is really all alone? What is it like to feed on attention but never feel full because you don't respect the judgement of those giving the attention? Why are crushes formed in early adulthood often so painful? Why do family members who can't get along force themselves to spend time together? These questions are too vulnerable to really make light of, so the show doesn't except in very light-hearted ways. The show is sexual without being prurient. The show is also prurient, but the most sexual parts of the show aren't really offered up for gawking (except, of course, by fans. Who...have gawked, on their own...a great deal in fact).

Before you read this, there will be spoilers for all the seasons and if you disagree with points I made, I ask you to respectfully point them out and not just come down on me with all your fury, I can not judge if representation is accurate if I do not belong to the represented group, I can just appreciate it for existing. I also mean no offense to anyone at all. Thank you.

Now with that said, I wanna share my thoughts on the whole show, and on some little details I really liked.

It was a huge cast with many many BIPOC actors, a lot of important characters where portrayed by people of colour and it was amazing to see a show where there wasn't just a few token people of colour, but really a big diverse cast. I can't judge too much on how well these were portrayed as I myself am white, but it was still nice to see

There was queer representation. There was less queerness than other representation, but there was lesbian main characters, mlm side characters, possibly bi characters, a bit of polyamoury, there was even one Witch that was most likely genderqueer to some extent. M/Medusa said "I could go with the boys to train under the witchfather or the girls to train in basic. Neither of those fit me." It isn't explicitly stating that M is genderqueer or trans in any way, but it was a nice conversation that at least touched on the subject. The queer rep was subtle at times, and maybe not always the best or most, but it was nice to see anyways.

Paganism was also an important part of the worldbuilding. There were little good luck charms, sigils for spells like unlocking a door, all little things, but most importantly there was always the talk of "goddess" instead of the christian god, and pagan holidays were celebrated. Beltane as the festival of spring beginning. It's a festival of fertility as well, so seeing it portrayed as a festival of sex was not too inaccurate. It also was a great way to shoe sexuality in that world and how it is viewed (I'll put a pin in that for now). There was also samhain as the celebration of the dead and beginning of winter. I learned that at samhain, celtic pagans would ask the dead for hints of how the future would be, so the talking with the dead made sense. Yule being a celebrated and important day was also nice. The line about "staying up all night and singing the yule song" from Nicte was especially interesting because it is the longest night of the year, and it is still believed by some Pagans/witches that you should try and stay up until sunrise, so that nothing evil can enter your house or body on the night where the sun is dead.

The Portrayal of Sexuality, not as in queerness but in the sense of sex positivity. Witches were believed to get their powers from having sex wit the devil, so the fact that sex made witches stronger was based in old beliefs. Furthermore, after said sex, Satan was said to give them a witches' mark, which can be seen in the lineage specific marks that the Salem witches carry, since they start shining metallic after they have sex the first time. But overall, sex was seen as something positive and nice, not something evil or shameful. There was no shame in having sex and there was also no shame in having relationships with many, no one was branded a whore, people just cracked jokes about "charging up for battle". And I think it's beautiful to see that.

The storyline was good. At the end of the series I could see how every thing was connected, even details they planted in the first season. Again, I will come back to this to elaborate, but everything was somehow connected and the only real "loose end" I can remember, is that one character disappeared towards the end of season three and we don't know where she went. She died presumably, but no one actually knows.

The worldbuilding and idea were phenomenal. The whole idea of magic and witches being based on voices, that sound carries power thanks to the extra vocal chords some people had was wonderful. But more than that, it was thought through very well. The way to stop magic was to make sure frequencies couldn't escape, the way to store magic like an attack was to put it inside a container that contained air, like a pill bottle, a balloon or a soccer ball. There was also the aspect of manipulation through said witch craft, Salva to fly, whips that turn molten hot, fire to change ones face (which is quite terrifying but amazing at the same time) and much more. The only complaints with this that I have is that we never got a list of the "seeds" used in their "work" cause there was a mention of 72 that were used by the millitary and much more that existed. I wish we could've seen more of that.

The developments in politics in season two and three were downright scary. I would go as far as to say that what was happening there was reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s/40s. BEFORE YOU COME AT ME: I am German and have taken what basically translates to AP History in the states, I have been to seminars and memorial places, I don't take this comparison lightly and I know what I say when I say it. With that said, the way witches were being treated mimics the early stages of prosecution in Germany at that time. They were given red collars that stopped their voices and were meant to identify them. They had curfews, got checked up on by police regularly, and they had to put those collars on their children too. It is similar to the yellow stars Jews had to wear. There was also records of family lines over multiple generations, genealogical research to find out who could be a witch. It was truly dystopian, witches that didn't wear their collars got arrested or beaten, and their mere existence even if they were civilians, was enough to justify all of this. Once again, I am not saying "Oh haha this was the holocaust!" no, I am saying it mimics aspects of how the prosecutions started and some of the cruelty inflicted on the victims. I am speaking from the perspective of someone who has studied this subject for multiple years in school and does not take it lightly. But it brings me to my next thought.

The second and third season of the show showed how popular opinion and support for politicians determine the fate of a nation. While the military was celebrated at the beginning, America began to fall apart slowly, with people turning on the military and on each other. Campaigns to detain the witches and organisations like "Not our Daughters" were sadly more a cautionary tail than pure fiction. It demonstrated how quickly things can go awry and that was dystopian, but also rather realistic.

Something not talked about too often, was that the society was matriarchal rather than patriarchal. It was refreshing to see, women in power and in charge of their lives. I don't have too much to say about this, but seeing a black female president, it was a nice thing to imagine.

Now to details I noticed: (Spoiler warnings)

One: Only women were able to pass down the witch gene/witch ability. Now, both men and women could have it, but only women could pass it on, meaning that it is like mitochondrial DNA, which was a silly detail but something I thought was cool.

Two: Abigail gets called a "Priestess of ancient Truth" by Abdil, which might have been his attempt at flirting, but turned out to be correct, seeing that Abigail was a steward of the First song. I don't know if it was coincidence, but I don't think it was. Either way it was a very nice detail that made me rather happy.

Three: The covens at War College were named after Goddesses, mostly war goddesses. Sekhmet being the coven that Raelle came to was nice because Sekhmet was not just a goddess of war, but also one of healing. Raelle herself was a talented fixer too.

Four: An issue I had was the healing in the Cession being a "christo-pagan" healing. Since the majority of people in the cession are indigenous Americans it made little sense for them to develop witch craft based on the bible. I thought it was a bit weird in general for that to even be a thing, but I guess seeing as they were a pagan based society and Raelle was supposed to have a stronger kind of healing, the closest thing was to pull on christianity. I think it could've been solved better, but not every aspect of a show can be wonderful I guess.

Five: Raelle was supposed to have stronger healing but it harmed her, which confused me until my dad pointed something out. The stronger a magic is, the worse the drawbacks of it are. Her healing damaging her while also fixing something nothing else can fix, it makes sense.