Woo!

I am here with the pokemon fan base

can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?

You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.

You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.

You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.

You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?

Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog? 

Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.

Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.

But man.

That stuff is scary.

shit just got creepy

Or maybe magical healing doesn’t leave scars or damage. It is magical, after all.

So after years of fighting, your skin is still perfect. Unmarred. In fact, you’re actually in better shape than regular people who don’t get magical healing when they fall out of trees or walk into doors or cut themselves while cooking dinner. You’re in such good shape that it’s unnatural.

And the really good healing magic takes away more than just the obvious injuries. You first start noticing it after about ten years when you go home and haha, you look the same age as your younger sibling, that’s funny.

Not so funny ten years later when they look older. Or forty years later, when you bury them still looking like you did at twenty. When do you retire from this gig anyway? How much damage is too much damage?

How many times do you glimpse the afterlife, or worse, how many times don’t you? What do you live through, get used to, show no outward sign of except a perfectly healthy body, too perfect for any person living a real life.

How many times are you sitting in a tavern with your friends and you hear the whispers, because the people around you know. How can they not know? Your weapons shine with enchantments and your armour is better than the best money can buy and there is not a damn scar on you. You hardly seem human to them.

How long before you hardly seem human to yourself?

And you find yourself struggling to remember the places where the scars should have been, phantom pains that wake you screaming, touching all the old injuries and finding nothing there. It’s all in your head. Was it ever anywhere else?

How long before you’re fighting a lich or a vampire or some other undead monster and you wonder…

…what makes me so different?

And then there are the healers.

It starts with determination. This woman held a sword and shield and ran out and protected you, and earned a grievous wound in exchange. She gave herself so that you could live, and you will not let her go gently. Under your touch, at your request, the wound begins to close. Flesh heals. Bones knit. Nerves mend, capillaries unburst, hair regrows, and she is whole again.

She will not die under your watch.

But then - who will? The blacksmith making your weapon, horribly burned when his apprentice overheats the forge - healed, smiling as he returns to the hammer and anvil. The carpenter whose back broke when she fell from the roof of your house - mended, walking again, her family no longer in danger of starvation. The farmer who grows the wheat that goes into your bread, caught by a scythe in the field - whole once more.

The waiter with a burned finger, repaired. The cart driver with arthritis, mended. The child, injured falling down a hill, healed so his parents won’t be distracted. The dog, running after the child, healed so the child won’t be distracted and fall down another hill.

Everyone hurts sometimes, and you can heal it all, you can save them all. 

Except when you can’t. The injuries too grave to repair, or so old that they can’t be fixed. You weren’t there, you weren’t fast enough, your faith wasn’t strong enough, you couldn’t save them.

An infinity of tiny disasters that you couldn’t prevent keep you awake at night. Your body is whole, miraculously so. Theirs - careless. Thoughtless. Mended with your magic, but only at your sufferance.

Would it be so bad if they learned a little discretion? Would it be so bad if you taught them to hurt?

Or perhaps it starts with fascination. You can see how the flesh comes apart, and you know how it was meant to be. How hard would it be, really, to put it back together? How truly difficult, to make whole what should be whole? So you do. It’s the work of a moment. Flesh heals. Bones knit. Nerves mend, capillaries unburst, hair regrows, and she is whole again.

It was so easy.

You heal the warrior, and the wizard, and the monk - the elf, and the dwarf, and the gnome. Each body has a different shape, each body goes together differently, each body healed is new information.

The blacksmith, thick and muscled. The carpenter, lithe and strong. The farmer, tall and bulky. The waiter, thin and desperate - the cart driver, old and frail - the child, young and undeveloped - the dog, not even humanoid.

You find all the differences, and you can catalog them all, you can understand them all.

You know how they all go together. And one sleepless night, it occurs to you: you’ve been artificially limiting your research subjects. You’ve been waiting for people to get injured so you could see how they go together and make them be that way.

Nothing’s stopping you from taking them apart yourself.

It would be so easy.

the concept and idea of “you can always start trying to be a better person” is extremely important to me both in media and irl and i continue to be deeply deeply disturbed by the trend on this site pushing that these ideas in media are bad writing or even morally reprehensible

because theyd rather someone stay terrible or just straight up die than become a better person 

from a compassionate point of view it’s deeply distressing and from a pragmatic point of view it’s outright frustrating

it’s fucked up. 

What is the most important step a man can take?

The next.

I think part of the pushback about this is the idea that, to “redeem” bad people, their victims must first forgive them for unforgivable acts.

This is false. No one is obligated to forgive you. You can learn from your mistakes and become the best, kindest person on earth, and the people you’ve hurt still won’t forgive you, and you’ll have to accept that. And that doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to grow. Because we aren’t just “pure” or “sinful”, we’re complex.

A Quest is about your goal

An Adventure is about the things you encounter and do

A Journey is about the road you travel and places you go through

All of these could be literal, or metaphorical.

So, going to the store for eggs is a quest, going for a walk is a Journey, and making friends is an Adventure?

Going to the store to buy eggs using an unfamiliar route and making friends on the way is an Adventurous Journey on the Quest for eggs.

maybe the real treasure was the omelette you made along the way

starting my lifelong collection of pictures of cats in ukrainian folk clothing now.

if you are reading this i want you to stop for a moment and imagine a crab

God, anyone else remember when everyone understood that the correct feminist position about sports was that women should be allowed to compete with men because they're just as capable? When it was a trope in media to have the mysterious star athlete who just blew everyone else out of the water to take off her helmet and reveal that she was a woman the whole time?

Now people are rabidly arguing that supposed "men" (trans women) have inherent insurmountable biological advantages in literally every single possible activity and cis women are too weak and dainty and unskilled to ever compete and must be protected, and then they try to call themselves feminists who are being silenced as if that's not just the mainstream sexist patriarchal opinion

Anyway, desegregate sports. There was never any reason to separate them by gender in the first place

For people who don’t have any reading comprehension: no this post is not advocating putting a 90lb 4’10” woman against a 270lb 6’5” man in a boxing match. In most sports there are things called weight classes and height classes and they actually mean a lot more than what’s between your legs as far as performance. That said I took tae kwon do for a lot of years and by far the worst person in my classes to go up against was a 5’ nothing teenage girl who nearly outclassed the assistant teacher in sparring matches so even with the size disparity it’s not unheard of. Hell the reason the MLB was officially segregated was to keep out the girl who struck out Babe Ruth or the Olympic swimmer who caused the mens swim team to move because she was “breaking them” by lapping them without a second thought. Womens soccer is notoriously more aggressive and high energy than mens with vastly higher average scores for games. And all of this despite the fact that womens teams have consistently had lower funding for coaches and training equipment and lower pay for players. Hell that’s an argument to end sex segregation in sports right there, let women join teams that have the funding to hire the best coaches and watch how many would come through as world record breakers. I don’t have a doubt in my mind that there’s girls in school right now who could, with the right training, be better quarterbacks than anyone in the current NFL. And keeping trans girls out of sports isn’t gonna help them do that one bit.

Your daily dose of cat memes

[ ] Single

[ ] Married

✅️ Feral

What able bodied authors think I, an amputee and a wheelchair user, would want in a scifi setting:

What I actually want:

I think X is a brilliant name for Twitter because every time I end up on Twitter I want to press the X on my browser window

what is it with this man and the letter X

Remember how we were little and we loved pink and Barbie and dolls and princesses?

Remember how we got old enough to realize that people were making fun of us and not enough people told us to ignore them so we got embarrassed and we hated ourselves. Pink was our least favorite color until perhaps recently when we were neutral towards it at best.

But something in us changed when we decided we needed to see Barbie (2023). The women and girls I saw wearing their best pinks today. I purposely bought MYSELF something pink for the first time I can remember.

We’re giving ourselves the freedom we took away.

Who goes there

I work at a movie theater.

And personally? To be in the tickets booth, and see young girls, teenagers, adult women, coming in to see Barbie,

the most highlighter pink outfits, some of them coming in with the dolls they’re dressed as, laughing to each other, cheering for each other,

to see the men they’re coming to see it with, dressed in pink, cheering them on, taking their pictures with smiles and cheers in the lobby at the photo op

touches something so deep in me

I can’t say any nuances of the movie that haven’t already been said, but like, fuck man, love is so deep and so kind and to be able to see glimpses of it from behind my little ticket desk makes me a little less nihilistic.