New Attempt At 432..... Very Much Enjoying Thjs One :-) Guy Who Is Shapes

some arcane stuff again!

the most accurate snape quote i’ve ever read by someone on a forum: “

Risking himself to save others is the pattern of a man who believes in a good beyond himself, his own interest, his own loves and hates. For those who believe Snape can only be motivated by revenge- keep in mind- he had his chance at revenge on Black when Black was unconcious after the Dementors attack. What did he do? He conjured a stretcher and delivered him to Pomfrey for medical attention, in sharp contrast to Black’s own recent treatment of the unconscious Snape, dragging him and bumping his head into things. Snape changes over the course of his lifetime. Snape never becomes a nice person. He does become a good one.”

it’s very wild to me that people can earnestly and sincerely say shit like “well snape fought back, so was it really bullying?” and not just like… hear how utterly gross they sound tbh. like do i have to use the “think about if this was an actual, real kid” argument to get people see that fighting back doesn’t erase victimhood or magically turn bullying into rivalry or friendly roughhousing?

idk. i feel like people say that shit really never experienced bullying in their whole damn life. bc how could they truly think that fighting back against bullies, shoving back, throwing back insults and punches, is anywhere near making things “equal”? defending yourself is not nearly the same thing as starting a fight for fun. protecting yourself is not the same as hurting someone else. like do they just like… forget how to use empathy and critical reasoning skills when it comes to snape or are they just really that clueless??

Ghost caught on camera

ive been thinking a lot about papyrus lately n how the fandom looks at sans and papyrus’s relationship and like.. i know most people would just take this line as a joke, why wouldn’t they, pap is trying to feed a fucking rock, but like… i think some of it rings true. papyrus is a big naive sweetheart, sure, and sans is always looking out for him, sure, but ppl tend to take that to this extreme where they see it as like “papyrus is too silly and childish to take care of himself and sans has to be the big protective older brother even if pap doesn’t rly notice”.

but…. papyrus actually does rly well for himself. look at him. he’s living a life most young adults could only dream of. he’s got a clean room, a nice house, a good work ethic for a job he’s very passionate about, a positive outlook on life, high self esteem, and even a racecar bed. who doesn’t want a racecar bed? i don’t even like racecars and i’d kill for a racecar bed. like, yeah, he’s kind of got an unusual way of doing things and doesn’t always pick the smartest option, but apart from the occasional possessed murderchild coming after him with a knife, he can take care of himself just fine.

and…. sans knows that too. sans doesn’t try to intervene with every little thing papyrus does, even when he messes up. he mostly just cheers him on from the sidelines and tries to make him happy in all the little ways he can. and sans is a lot stronger and more knowledgeable than he lets on, yes, but in contrast to his brother he does a really shit job of living a healthy lifestyle. he’s messy, lazy, he slacks off at work and overeats and has generally completely given up on being happy. and im saying this as a severely depressed person myself, i get it. i love sans for those qualities because i relate. i just think people give him too much credit, and papyrus not enough.

people talk about how papyrus is the thing that matters most to sans, and he puts most of his remaining energy into making him happy, which is true, sans loves his brother more than anything. but papyrus isn’t something he needs to protect. if anything, i think sans actually envies him sometimes, for being so unwaveringly confident and soft-hearted in such a bleak world. they take care of each other, balance each other out. they’d probably be a lot worse off without each other, but papyrus isn’t a fragile baby and sans isn’t his babysitter. and it matters to me (again, as someone who Relates) to be able to see sans as somebody who’s pretty bad at existing in general, and for people to be able to recognize that positivity isn’t inherently childish… them’s my two cents

Encanto is on Disney+ for Christmas, so here’s another piece of meta that no one asked for but 

As much as I like Bruno, I don’t think he’s actually immune to the whole “trying to do the right thing but causes harm instead” itis that plagues the rest of the family 

Like, to start with, his disappearance after Mirabel’s gift ceremony. He thought he was trying to do the right thing, but he didn’t really stop to think about the emotional and psychological harm that would cause his family. (Even Alma was probably retraumatized IMO, given that her darkest moment was someone she loved disappearing from her.) 

And yes, Pepa has her whole “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” song, but she’s also the first person to run and hug him when he returns and I bet 100% that it’s easier to be pettily mad at Bruno then to be sad all the time (and potentially flood the Encanto.) 

BUT that’s not even the main thing I want to talk about: Instead I’m talking about him fixing the cracks. 

“Wait, why is that a bad thing?” You might be asking. 

Simple: He’s only fixing the symptom, and he’s hiding from the rest of the family the fact that there’s even a problem in the first place. He’s spackling up the cracks so that everyone only sees smooth “perfect”/”strong” walls. No one is aware of the faults, so they operate under the assumption that everything is fine, until the cracks get so big that they can’t be ignored any longer.    

tl;dr A Madrigal takes a course of action that they think is for the best based on their own history of trauma without really acknowledging how it would hurt their family emotionally/psychologically. They then spends their time focusing on covering up the cracks/issues in the Casita/Familia Madrigal allowing it/them to project a facade of strength and perfection without actually unpacking the underlying cause of damage. 

Am I talking about Bruno or Alma? 

tl;tl;dr Bruno takes after his mother 

(editing to add: this is not an Anti-Bruno post or an Anti-Alma post. I left the theater caring for all the members of the family.) 

I was part of secretsamol for the first time this year, and got to draw Es and Lye hanging out for mr_marielda on twitter!

(if you're a collector of magic stuff and your friend has SO MANY of her weird eyelashes anyway...cant you have just one..?)

I still have thoughts about this, so to continue in something of the same vein as last night…

The thing about Rincewind is, he’s not really a character who ever becomes a hero.

I know we can argue all night about the definition of the word hero, but he doesn’t consider himself one, and other characters don’t consider him one, so there’s that. But what I really mean is that he doesn’t have a hero’s journey.

I sometimes see people talking about the Rincewind books in the context of facing your fears. That’s fantastic; whatever you get out of it is good, of course, that’s what fiction is for.

But Rincewind himself doesn’t get brave. He doesn’t really learn to face his fears. He doesn’t slowly grow into someone who thinks of it as his solemn duty to save the world. He is always and foremost a cowards. The entire span of the books, this is true.

Mostly he just gets more resigned to how the world works. In The Last Hero he has a genre-savvy knowledge of how things are going to end up, so he volunteers; but it’s not out of bravery, it’s out of weariness. He knows how his life works so he just skips all the fuss and gets on with doing something he still, really, does not want to do.

He doesn’t get what most of what he wants. He doesn’t learn to use magic. He doesn’t develop any extraordinary skills. He doesn’t get a love interest, which is fiction’s common recourse when rewarding a hero (a device which bothers me immensely, so personally I’m glad of that). His major reward after the conclusion of his independent story arc is, essentially, a semi-peaceful retirement from adventure.

Rincewind is a mess. He is a coward, and he will admit that freely. When he does save the world, it’s because no one else is going to do it, and someone has to, and he doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t get rewarded, except possibly by continued living. He doesn’t learn to be brave, except in the desperate last-chance way he’s always been. He doesn’t learn to be good at what he loves.

That’s important. That’s very important. That’s what makes him stand out. Because - where do you go, when you’re too tired to be a hero, when you’re exhausted from people telling you to be brave and stick it out, when you’ve been trying so hard and you still can’t do well? When heroes only remind you of how inadequate you are, how much you can’t be them? When you don’t, especially, want to be inspired, because you are just trying to get by. Who do you turn to then?

That’s Rincewind. You may be down in the mud and unable to pull yourself out, but at least he’s down there with you, sighing and talking about how this always happens to him. And it’s okay. It may or may not get better, but you’ll be okay, for a given value of ‘okay’. You’ll survive. That’s an achievement

That’s what he means to me.

drops my briefcase 💼 oh no my sillies!!

I genuinely have no clue where this fandom gets the idea that James and Snape were rivals. The definition of rivalry is competition for the same objective or for superiority in the same field.

If James and Snape were rivals, as many like to call them, what were they competing for?

Lily?

No. Snape and Lily were best friends, years before James and Snape even met. And Lily is not a “prize to be won” which many people—including James, as we see in SWM—fail to understand.

Their studies? [I’m including this because I’ve actually seen someone try to use this argument before]

No. That had nothing to do with their feud. And James and Snape excelled in different subjects. Snape was brilliant at potions and DADA. James was highly knowledgeable in transfiguration.

Unlike Harry and Draco (who were rivals when it came to Quidditch), James and Snape had nothing you could argue they were “competing over.”

Another important thing many people seem to forget about rivalries is that it means equality. Rivals’ statuses/dynamics are meant to be balanced. Does that apply to Snape and James?

James Potter: was a rich, well-groomed, spoiled pureblood Gryffindor.

Severus Snape: was a poor, unattractive, neglected half-blood Slytherin.

It can only ever be called a rivalry when both sides are equally powerful, which cannot be said for James and Snape whatsoever.

A huge reason as to why people like to call it that is because Snape apparently “gave as good as he got” (I like how there was not a single time that phrase was ever used in the series). They use a line said by Remus—one of Snape’s bullies, funnily enough—in OoTP as evidence of Snape’s supposed fighting back:

“Snape was a special case. I mean, he never lost an opportunity to curse James, so you couldn’t really expect James to take that lying down, could you?”

To a majority of this fandom, never losing an opportunity (opportunity: a time or set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something, Remus never said anything about Snape succeeding all the time) to curse James—who, in the author’s words, relentlessly bullied Snape for the past six years—in their 7th year (one year) meant “giving as good as he got” and automatically cancels out everything James did to Snape for the six years before that.

Demonising Snape for wanting to get back at James after being subjected to bullying, assault, and even attempted murder (the werewolf prank) for years is complete and utter victim-blaming. If the victim fights back, it is to be called self-defence, not “bullying back” (there is no such thing anyway) or a rivalry. Acting as though in order to be a “good victim”—whatever that’s supposed to mean—you have to take the bullying lying down, and if you defend yourself, you’re reclassified as the bad guy, is genuinely disgusting to me. If a woman were to defend herself against her assaulters, would she be in the wrong, would that negate what the assaulters did to her?

The pro-bullying and victim-blaming attitude that comes from this fandom is revolting. Defending oneself does not alter the dynamic from a person with more power bullying a victim to a rivalry between two equals. When will people learn to understand that.

And besides, there is absolutely nothing to back up Remus’s claim. In fact, there is more evidence that he was lying:

Remus makes it sound like Snape would just come up to James randomly and just hex him there and then. If he did, don’t you think Lily would’ve found out? Or at the very least the Hogwarts staff? That very much suggests that it was James who initiated these fights.

The Marauders had the cloak of invisibility, a map that could track Snape and everyone at Hogwarts’ every move, and the two-way mirror. What did Snape have?

Why would James hide it from Lily? If he was truly innocent and was the one being hexed senseless, he obviously would not have hidden it from her. What would he even have to hide if that were the case? It’s clear that he knew he was in the wrong and that Lily would have never gotten with him had she known what he was doing behind her back.

Remus is canonically a liar, who lied to Harry many times, especially about Snape. Why does this fandom act like his words about the person he used to bully should be trusted?

Moving on, none of the Marauders’ reasons for bullying Snape exactly scream rivalry:

James himself stated that he bullied Snape because he exists.

Remus called it “an old prejudice” when he and Harry talked in HBP, casting the Marauders as bigots (especially when you remember that Snape was a Slytherin whom they bullied because of his existence).

Sirius (in GoF) claimed that “Snape was just this little oddball who was up to his eyes in the Dark Arts.”

In SWM, we are shown that the reason James and Sirius attacked Snape—who was minding his own business—was because Sirius was bored, meaning they had done it for fun.

Lily claimed that James walked down corridors and hexed anyone who annoyed him “just because he can.”

Sirius claimed that “we [the Marauders] were sometimes arrogant little berks.”

Tell me, does this seem like a rivalry to you?