Zeddylux

Sypha&Belmont: 👻🧛‍👻

our last post died in traction. the leader of this group of LGBT refugees, Muhshin Magala, has been sick with ulcers for weeks now. she needs surgery to remove them, and needs $5000 for it. all we've raised currently (and in the past) has gone towards food and medication, and paying off her current hospital stay.

she NEEDS this surgery to live, and we need help from everyone else for this to even begin to be a possibility.

have you considered that she has no assurances that any promises being made will be upheld?

from her point of view, the dragon gods have only hurt her friends and threatened everything she loves, she has NO reason to trust them!

The dragon gods are acting like her father did, denying her the agency to make her own choices even when she states what she wants loud and clear. The threats to her country are being made BY THESE DRAGON GODS, these threats are not some immutable fact, they have a place of origin, and she refuses to accept ANY of this.

Because she's not the spoiled selfish princess her father sheltered from everything anymore

She's a woman who has seen the world at its best and its worst, and is determined to forge a path ahead with her own hands, with the people she cares about, for the country she cares about

Yona is choosing to have agency, even when gods are trying to strip her of it. Their threats are threats, and she will see this mess they have made and fix it.

The dragon gods are being selfish.

Why do you want Yona to give in to these demands? To bow her head to the ones proclaiming to know what's best for her and her people? Who keep adding threats to what she loves JUST TO MANIPULATE HER INTO DOING WHAT THEY WANT?

The point of Akatsuki no Yona is not that "Soo-Won has always been right to discard all emotion and focus solely on saving the country" OR that "Good emotions are all you need, you must never face any hardship and it will all work out okay"

The point is Yona's journey into finding a 3rd path, a balance.

She can love her father and think he was not fit to be king. She can still care deeply for Soo-Won, and think he makes a better king, and yet be hurt by his actions.

And she can mend all the pain of the past, and stop the cycle of revenge, and stop the cycle of pain and hurt for EVERYONE. Her country, her dragons, her people, her friends.

people have sex without setting boundaries. people have unprotected sex without talking about their sexual histories or producing recent sti tests. people play with kink without discussing it ahead of time or establishing a safeword. they have anal without 'enough' prep or lube—they may even prefer it like that.

and none of this is really a fantasy. it's all pretty normal. you can feel that it's inappropriately normalised, and you'd probably be right! but it is normalised: one study found that 58% of female undergraduate students on the campus studied had been choked during sex. 20% of those students said that they'd never been asked if it was ok; another 30% said they'd only sometimes been asked if they consented. fully half! (non-paywalled journal article on choking during sex here, including these numbers.) despite a rise in stis of all sorts, condom use is declining. (pdf link to the full text of this study about declining condom use in the us; aidsmap article about an australian study with similar results.)

even when people do talk about things—sex or anything else—they communicate imperfectly. 'yeah, but don't go too far' is consenting and setting a boundary, and also relying that the person you're talking to has the same metric for 'too far' that you do. for some people, 'the trash needs to go out' is a neutral, factual observation; for others, it's a request that the person they're speaking to take out the trash.

even when people understand each other perfectly, people react unpredictably to things sometimes! we behave irrationally! people laugh uncontrollably at funerals, or get angry at the straw that broke their back rather than the enormous load they were already carrying. they get scared and lash out at people trying to help them. when hurt, most people do not instinctively reach for therapy-approved grounding exercises and 'i feel' statements.

pretty much any bad choice that characters could conceivably make is a choice that people make in real life, on purpose, all the time. people do things that can have catastrophic, life-changing effects because it felt like a good idea at the time, or they're leaning into the vibe, or they just didn't think about it all that much, or an infinite number of other reasons.

so i will say it again: fiction is a reflection of life, but it is not real life. fiction does not have to set a good example. fiction does not have to be safe, sane, or consensual.

Contribute to or at bare minimum share Black/BIPOC mutual aid. It is the literal least you can do to make a tangible difference especially for small bills/needs. Sometimes you can keep a Black person housed, sometimes you feed us, sometimes you let us have clean clothes or get to work.

It is literally the BARE MINIMUM you can to do pass it on so that if you don’t toss like $5, $20, more their way, someone following you might and it can literally save a life.

Last year two of the most prominent cis Black disability activists died bc they couldn’t crowdfund money - one for a rideshare hospital trip when they knew an ambulance might bankrupt them, the other for cancer treatment.

If well-known/loved cis Black disabled people can’t survive from crowdfunding, imagine the hopes of Black trans disabled people for example.

If you can’t FUND US then at least fucking reblog our shit! That’s how you use your privilege!

Example: my friend @harumscarumcos had their power cut off and they only need another like $100 to get it back on and be able to work again. If you can, toss a bit their way and share! https://www.tumblr.com/harumscarumcos/788718438281625600/8450-14183