Muahahahahah - Muah-Ha-Ha

This scene really struck me, and ever since I saw the movie I’ve been trying to figure out why.

And now that I’ve had a while to think on it, I believe I know.

Here we have Wanda:

Wanda, who has just shown herself to be incredibly, dangerously powerful, to the point that she not only destroyed an infinity stone single-handed (a feat that was supposed to be impossible) but also managed to hold off Thanos and his entire array of infinity stones at the same time.

Wanda, who has just been forced to watch yet another person she deeply loves get slaughtered in front of her - this time by her own hand, for the sake of the universe - and who has at this point simply given up on her will to live.

And then we have Thanos:

Thanos, who has just seen firsthand the power of someone who could potentially take him out (and, if it weren’t for the time stone, would have succeeded) whether he holds five infinity stones or not.

Thanos, who has just watched her make the ultimate sacrifice to keep him from succeeding, and in doing so has proven to him that she will do anything to stop him.

Thanos, who has just had what was supposed to be an easy victory suddenly snatched from his hands by the exhausted girl on the ground in front of him - a girl who is a fraction of his size and laughably weaker than him physically. (He was throwing Cap and Thor and Hulk around like they were nothing.)

And right now, they’re the only two left standing.

Wanda just waits there, lying in the dirt, for him to kill her.

She doesn’t fight, or shield herself, or try to run when Thanos starts walking toward her. She has nobody to step in and save her, because everyone else is trapped or unconscious.

Wanda doesn’t even try to get up.

She doesn’t want to live anymore. She has nothing to live for.

She wants to die, and at this point is more than willing to let Thanos be the one to strike that blow.

Even when he physically puts his hand on her head, all she does is flinch.

Thanos, on the other hand, is unscathed.

He’s standing - towering - over the one person who poses an actual, legitimate threat to him. She’s down for the count, hurt and exhausted and with no will to live, waiting for him to finish the fight.

He’s got her at her absolute most vulnerable, and probably the most vulnerable he will EVER have her - this chance isn’t going to come again.

But he doesn’t kill her.

He reaches down, gently strokes her hair, and walks past her to finish what he came here to do.

Even when he brings Vision back and she stands to fight him once more, he still doesn’t kill her.

He strikes her away, and does so gently enough that she manages to recover and crawl over to Vision’s side before she’s taken by the stone.

Given every opportunity and every reason to end her, he doesn’t do it.

Why?

Now it could be argued that Thanos figured there was no point in wasting the effort because he was going to wipe half of all life from the universe as soon as he got the last stone anyway, but as it was mentioned earlier in the film - the selection of who died would be random.

The stone would not pick and choose - it would take rich and poor, passionate and dispassionate, strong and weak, etc. - completely at random.

There was no guarantee that Wanda would be among those that were taken.

So knowing that she is a legitimate threat to him, and that there’s a 50/50 shot of her surviving that final finger snap…

Why would he let her live?

The second thing that strikes me is how gentle he is.

We’ve seen him order half of a world’s population slaughtered for the sake of his goal.

We’ve seen him torture multiple characters without batting an eye.

We’ve seen him crush skulls and snap necks with his bare hands.

But we’ve also seen this.

And this.

And again, the clip with Wanda.

Thanos has instances where he is incredibly gentle.

And it’s honestly a bit unsettling to watch.

He’s so convinced of the true morality of his own objective - so blinded by the end goal - that the means to reach it no longer matter.

Thanos believes himself to be good and kind, and that he is simply making the tough call that nobody else was strong enough to make for the good of the universe in centuries to come.

He’s culling the herd so the rest don’t starve.

Now I’ve seen the comparison made a few times to seeing pictures of Hitler playing with children (and I’ll admit that’s what came to mind for me as well) - it’s disturbing because we don’t want to humanize someone who has committed genocide, and sympathizing is exactly what our brain tries to do when we see someone being gentle and kind to another creature.

We see Thanos not only being kind to a young Gamora, but being surprisingly good at it, and our brains sort of short circuit for a second because we think that he’s not supposed to be CAPABLE of that.

And yet somehow, to an extent, he is.

Hell, even when he’s about to kill half the universe, he doesn’t cause death wantonly.

He traps Bruce in the cliff, but lets him live.

He catches T’Challa by his throat and punches him into the ground but doesn’t break his neck. 

He shorts out Sam’s wings to drop him out of the sky but doesn’t finish him off.

He destroys the suit around Rhody, but doesn’t crush him.

He throws Bucky aside but doesn’t kill him.

He tosses Okoye aside but doesn’t kill her.

He pins Natasha with a bunch of rocks, but doesn’t crush her.

He rips Groot’s vines away but doesn’t go after him.

He punches Steve out, but doesn’t continue once he’s down.

Hell, when Thanos goes after Wanda his gauntlet lights up blue with the teleportation power of the tesseract. He’s planning to move her - not fight her.

And even when that fails, he doesn’t grant Wanda’s silent wish for death.

He lets her live.

Thanos is not crazed, or high off his own power, or running on blood lust - he’s doing what he thinks is truly the right thing, and going about accomplishing it in a cold and calculated manner. When he’s not trying to accomplish his goal, he acts in a way that might even be described as good.

I believe that Thanos is truly Lawful Evil.

And that’s what makes him so scary.

Jo I’m crying

We (germany) had a comedian party to vote for the european election and a guy named Nico Semsrott will be in the parlaiment

He makes commedy about depression and his show was called “happiness is just a lack of information” this cracks me the fuck up hahaha I love that dude

Witches’ Sabbath / The Great He-Goat, 1823, Francisco Goya

Medium: oil,canvas

who else mourning the person they could've been if they were treated kindly as a child

A Real Narrative of Borderline

Warning: Triggering, perhaps, to some. A bit of a narrative I wrote recently to help people understand what it can be like living with a disorder that is often signified as ‘bad’. 

________________________________________

Sometimes I’m scared of myself, because of my disorder. People say ‘commitment’ and I curl in on myself and feel my heart constrict tightly in my chest. Commitment.

“Commitment? There’s no such thing as commitment when you have borderline, it’s even harder when you have antisocial.”

And no, it’s not because I get a need to dump a friend for someone more exciting that snorts cocaine and gets high every minute, nor need to have a quick fling whilst in a relationship. No, it’s because commitment means committing to me, a monster, and in turn, this monster needs to learn to commit to them lest it makes their lives miserable. It means 24/7, 100% effort that you, as nothing but a human, don’t have the mental capacity for.

When it comes to borderline, it’s safe to say I hate it. Everything triggers it, every word, every emotion I don’t understand. I can’t handle anything ‘normally’ and every feeling is exaggerated so much my head feels like it will explode- sometimes, I wish I had a gun so that I could actually make it do so. Then the ‘pressure’ would leave my head.

“I like you.”

Makes me happy, yet I don’t return the sentiment. Am I meant to like you back? I don’t even know if I can feel love. Once upon a time I ignored that statement and went for it, now it’s ingrained in me to go ‘that isn’t fair on them,’ and leave.

“I’m okay if you don’t feel the same.”

Makes me happy, yet I know that it will lead down a dark path. When hasn’t it? When has my borderline been on my side? It hasn’t. It’s no one’s fault, but its fault. It can’t handle emotion and doesn’t know what to do with it besides release it in a fit of rage. It’s 0 or 100, no in-between. For me that is punching a wall, or, on a bad day, playing with fire.

“Break up.”

Is like a double-whammy. It’s soul-crushing because you feel betrayed, even if you don’t really feel betrayed. It’s also a sigh of relief, ‘I don’t need to hurt them anymore. And thus, I will no longer be hurt.’ Some of us don’t’ want to be monsters, in fact, I daresay with borderline, the idea of being monsters tortures us endlessly. There’s this notion that being alone is better, and I think the longer you live with borderline, the more you realize loneliness is the best way to cope with it. You have nothing but you and your dreams and little room to hurt and hurt others, there’s no real people involved – real people you care about.

Friends leave. They don’t stick around except a few really good ones, who are able to see your hate and look past it. Relationships? Forget about them. The minute you make a friend, you start to get attached, and god help you if you like them. If you like them and think they’re cool, or epic, then that’s it. You’re doomed.

So are they.

You don’t want to hurt them, you’re a monster inside, but no matter how you go about it, you will. They like you: so you can swallow that anxiety that the future will fall apart and that you don’t want to lose a friend or cool person who you’re attached to, and you’ll give them what you want. Or: you shatter them and lose a friend anyways. Either way, your friend is gone. The person you cared about is out of the picture. One involves ignoring that you feel like a shithead, the other involves being a shithead, but it may work out better for them later. There’s no winning in borderline. Only losing. Only hurting people. And it’s never them that’s wrong– oh no. It’s always you. And no matter how much you deny it, you’re very aware of it.

So when people ask me what borderline is like I skirt the edges of truth because I know it’s ugly. It’s an ugly disorder, and very few except two people in my life get it. The one person seemed to understand the practicality of emotions, but not nearly as loyal a friend as the other and ended up following his own dubious impulses. I forgave it quickly, because I, although borderline and not antisocial, knew having impulsive behavior was tricky to get rid of – I still find myself punching the wall, or walking along a river at night. The other, a longstanding friend, gets it on a level unlike any other:

1.       The anger: mostly at yourself, and when you’re angry you get so angry you want to blow a hole in the wall, then in your head.

2.       The loyalty: loyal to a fault, so loyal you’d rather suffer and crawl through the dirt for someone than have them abandon you because you like them. That’s the problem, you care too much and feel emotions too much. But at the same time…

3.       Emotionless: that disassociation, where you feel nothing sometimes for days on end, where eventually you become so good at acting you don’t even know what real emotions are. Underneath it all, you care so deeply, but you don’t know why. ‘Why do I care?’ will have your brain feeling like it’s crushed because the question is beyond your comprehension.

“They baffle me,” is how he’d put it, “People ask me what I’m feeling, and I can’t answer. We don’t feel, or we feel too much.”

And then there’s the self-hate.

“Self-hate,” he’d say, “Is what gets us Cluster B’s. On the one hand, this personality is a part of us, it’s who we are…but we see others happy, falling in love, we see them get hurt by some action we did that we don’t get, and we realize …that will never be us. We will never be the good ones because even if we learn to behave properly and act good, in our head, we’re bad news. In my head, I still think ‘I want to punch you in the face.’ It makes you hate yourself when you’re aware you’re bad news, and especially so when you can control it. Then people don’t believe you anymore.”

We all hear the familiar words and phrases from loved ones. Many deny it – what, after all, even is borderline? Or antisocial? Narcissism? Stories and tales that depict the evil characters in books! Plot devices! Consider those as well, who don’t understand it: how can you not feel? Are you insane?

I am insane, at least I feel I am insane. But I still feel that twinge inside, that hurt when you call me as such. You’re side-lining me, making me an outcast for something I have no control over. I didn’t choose this.

Then there’s those who think they’re helping. These phrases vary from “It won’t hurt me if you tell me” to “That’s a bit selfish,” “Hah! That’s a funny thing you said there!” and “That’s evil!”

It is selfish, isn’t it? Imagine being called selfish. Or evil. Or having others find you amusing for your savagery, and the fact that you beat up a guy who looked at you funny.

Imagine being called a word that is immediately connotated with ‘bad’. Imagine being essentially called a bad person for something you can maybe control behaviourally, but can’t erase.

Eventually, you want to give up, run away, and let loose. ‘I’ll cut my hair, get 10 tattoos and have that crazy orgy I never had whilst getting high on cocaine. Because I’m bad anyways, and no one seems to care.’

Having this disorder sometimes feels like a sentence. A very misunderstood sentence that I’m being punished for.

The worst is…

You feel like you deserve it.

shoutout to abuse survivors & victims who fluctuate between “they didnt Really abuse me it wasnt That Bad its fine everything is okay” and “i hate them i want them to Burn” as a survival strategy, especially if you’re stil in regular contact with your abuser, and you wind up with a lot of self doubt because you spend so much time actively buying in to their gaslighting

it Is a survival strategy, it doesnt make you fake or bad. 

I know I'm unlovable, I just sometimes like to pretend that I'm not

The whole self love thing is good and all but some people can’t fathom being loved. They can’t imagine there being anything good about them. So they can’t simply just stop doing unhealthy things, there’s a process.

If the vibes r off I will assume you hate me and want me dead