im not really a “ready theory or shut up” person but bad politics in a fantasy show is a silly enough issue that i feel like play stupid games, win stupid prizes applies here. darkling antis look up the villainized revolutionary trope and THEN read theory or SHUT UP

Wait! Why does the "Darkling's offspring" automatically becomes the General and leader of the Second Army?? Grisha aren't nobility? Even if they were, that's not how army positions work.

The Little Palace may have money by being essentially sponsored by the King but they're still lower than nobility. They don't pass down titles if you want to make the argument that what's being passed down is the operation of the Little Palace.

Dark powers or not, the Grisha who put in time, blood, sweat and tears on battlefields next to the previous general is going to feel some type of way with rando shadow baby thinking just because daddy was great he's good. Walking around thinking he's a Lanstov.

What I'm saying is, Darkles with a moustache was mercilessly teased and bullied going through the army ranks again. Darkle Sparkle's powers has been witnessed a thousand times during the century by the Grisha under him. You can not tell that the novelty hasn't worn all the way the fuck off. Rare but unimpressive.

My guess is Lantsovs see another Shadow Summoner and automatically assume the same set of abilities and that's as much as they can be arsed to consider, regarding those pesky witches.

Second Army elders are simply aware it's still the boss, only with much worse haircut. How is he still fooling otkazat'sya? Well, percieving us as subhuman might have some pros...

That’s most likely the case. I think that this has something to do with economic dispensability and proximity to the absolute monarchy. This is more theoretical, but you can understand the Second Army as a community within a caste system, meaning that there is some type of social honor to be allowed among them and that they are tied together through ritual or ethnic classifications, etc. We can assume that ‘ritual’ allows for social honor: ritual in this case meaning raw power. This puts the Darkling at the top of his respective caste because he holds the most of this power. I would think that this is ultimately measured by usefulness to the absolute monarchy, as they reside within the highest caste and are the creators of the caste system. Darklings are more powerful, therefore more useful - it only makes sense that lesser Grisha (meaning less powerful) would be under their service.

reblog and make a wish! this was removed from tumbrl due to “violating one or more of Tumblr’s Community Guidelines”, but since my wish came true the first time, I’m putting it back. :)

this video saved my life

when she says “ooo” I die

They aired this!!!

this is what happens when fetuses are given legal personhood– women lose their’s.

All hot girls have one or more of the following

honestly i get so sad when i think about the irreparable damage done to the bisexual community because of the ahistorical redefinition of what it means to be bisexual, like i spent so long thinking that i couldn't be bi because I'd been told emphatically that bisexuality didn't include trans people and that other identies focused on personality over gender/genitals where bisexuality didn't, and that's not only biphobic as hell that's also just.... wrong

to all those people out there wondering if bisexuality is for them, the definition of bisexuality has been "attraction regardless of gender" since the 1970s, there's such a wonderfully diverse and rich history of bisexuality, i promise you there is room for you in this identity and I'm so sorry other people have told you otherwise

I really want to emphasize the slightly ridiculous timeline of Bruce taking in children and how funny this has the potential to be re:Dick being the eldest, because I think it's really important that people understand that Bruce basically only has Dick around for like...11-12 years. Dick formally moves out when he's around 19 or 20, and roughly six months to a year later, Bruce picks Jason up. Dick and Jason never live in the same house at the same time, and three years later, Jason dies. So he gets 2 kids over a 15 (ish) year period, which doesn't sound too ridiculous, right?

Except then his adoption tendencies accelerate, because he picks up Tim and Cass within 2 years of each other (and Steph came as a package deal with both of them) and then finds out about Damian 2-3 years after that. Then we've got Duke, who (when you vaguely fit together timelines) enters stage left about 2-3 years after Damian.

So after a 15-year period with two kids, Bruce manages to pick up 4 1/2 others (counting Steph) within the 7-8 years afterwards. The sheer missed comedic potential of Dick being a grown-ass adult and then his dad decides to adopt a pack of kids within 5 years of him moving out is incredible. Dick went from being essentially an only child for his entire life to being eldest of 6, only one of which he's ever actually lived in the same house with, all because Bruce got Empty Nest Syndrome and went "well I raised one child to adulthood successfully. What's another 5 or 6 at the same time?"

Like I know we've talked about how it's better if Batman doesn't reciprocate the Joker's arch-enemy fixation and is like 'genuinely please spontaneously drop dead so I can forget about you forever,' but the version I would really love to see is one where his actual archnemesis as far as he's concerned is like.

The Koch brothers, or suitably fictionalized equivalent.

Roughly the same amount of money he has to bring to the problem, being poured out with way fewer ethics about things like appropriate lobbying, just buying politicians outright & blocking all common-sense gun control legislation for decades. Enemy billionaires fighting him on the nature of their shared world.

Because the Joker's like. Sure, Batman hates him. He's dealt the Bat a lot of pain. He'd earned some hating after Barbara, never mind Jason.

But the Joker isn't nemesis material. Not really. Batman is about fighting the whole edifice of violent crime, every factor that leads to the situation of people shot to death in alleyways, the whole tower of it. And Joker has only ever been a symptom of the rot. He's not a cause.

And the thing is, Batman can never tell him. Not just because of his secret identity, since the gun control crusade is kind of distinctive--no. That's not why.

It's because if Batman told the Joker that the Kochs were his actual nemeses, there is an 85%+ chance that the Joker would then kill them.

He's got to look at the Joker, every time the damn clown targets him, capering away in his absurd quest to feel important, and think: I could weaponize you so easily.

If I told you about my actual arch-enemies in the right way, I could guarantee you'd kill them. Out of jealousy. Out of pride. To grandstand.

You'd think you were hurting me--taking advantage of my having let the information slip, making me responsible for the murder of people I hated, forcing me to wrack my conscience for it. You'd think it meant you got to make me live with being responsible for killing my archnemesis, and still be alive to watch. You'd think you'd won something. You'd never even know what I'd done.

You aren't a complicated machine, Joker. Unpredictable, sometimes, but not complicated. You point a direction and something sparks inside you, and violence comes out. Terribly simple. It would be easy. All I'd have to do is tell you the truth.

But I swore never to become the man holding the gun.

bi pan discourse is so tiring and i absolutely hate getting into it but um the vast majority of micro identities like pan and omni and polysexual were created out of a misunderstanding of bisexuality in general and have created a unique brand of biphobia wherein people believe labeling yourself as bi is inherently transphobic when in fact it is not. bisexuality is by definition attraction to all genders. the cultural misunderstanding of this and subsequent labeling of bisexual people as inherently transphobic comes from the creation of micro identities that stem from ignorance about bisexuality and misinformation spread by those who invented such identities without doing proper research about bisexuality and the lgbt community in general. it hurts bisexual people! there’s no use pretending it doesn’t! have a nice day and if you disagree with this i don’t care

no capes! batfam, but they still stop crime just by accident

bruce wayne, drunk as hell, wanting to go home from a gala: hey dick, you can drive right? 14 year old dick whose experience from driving is a plastic kids' car: yeah sure i can

Breaking NEWS: Billionaire Bruce Wayne Beats Up Career Criminal Trying To Steal Painting "What, like it's hard?"

looks @ Todd Oldham fw94

82 YEARS AGO - BATMAN DEBUTED FOR THE FIRST TIME Eighty-two years ago on March 30, 1939, Detective Comics #27 hit newsstands, introducing the Caped Crusader for the very first time in a featured story called “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate.”

“And for all that fierce exterior, I’ve never met anyone who cared as deeply about his fellow man as Bruce Wayne.”  - Amanda Waller, Justice League Unlimited, Season 2 Episode 13 (2005)

this video is so well done it deserves an oscar

IN A ROW?

oh my god the lipsync on this is so good

[Mako: You sucked that guys dick? Korra: Yeah…how do you think I knew that he… Mako: wait, but you said that you only had sex with three different guys! You never mentioned him! Korra: Because I never HAD sex with him! Mako: You sucked his dick! – Mako: What?! Something like 36? Korra: Lower your voice… Mako: Wait, what is that anyways, something like 36? Does that include me? Korra: ….You’re 37 Mako: I’m 37?! Korra: I’m going to class! Mako: uhh, my god! – Mako: 37! My girlfriend’s sucked 37 dicks! Bolin: In a row?]

world heritage post

you know what’s really genuinely unsettling? the degree to which men fucking do not want to sympathize with/be interested in women.

male audiences will happily watch a dozen superhero shows, but then something like Agent Carter or Supergirl turn up and they’re panned from the first trailer and have to struggle for ratings. male audiences will watch countless installments of a franchise as long as it’s about men doing man things but the second a character like Rey or Furiosa or god forbid four entire female Ghostbusters steps up and takes a position of prominence it’s “pandering sjw bullshit”.

it’s not pandering. men just aggressively don’t want to have to be invested in a woman’s narrative and it’s really gross.

anyway re: everyone telling me to “Stop making this a gender thing” or some variation on that

this isn’t like… an opinion I’m pulling out of my ass here? this starts where earlier than tv shows and hollywood blockbusters, when all the kids in a class are reading Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or Eragon o Lord of the Rings or Maze Runner or whatever the hip book is right now. the books like that, the ones that become popular reading, are overwhelmingly about male leads, because male is still considered the default. 

there’s a split in YA literature, between books that are “for everyone” and “for girls”, and that’s honestly the entire issue in a tiny little box right there. stories about men are supposed to be accessible for everyone, but stories about girls are seen as 1.) inherently for women and 2.) something that only women will care about.

men grow up in a society that doesn’t make them go out of their way to get into the heads of women and empathize with then. historically it’s been very easy for men to not engage with female-led media if they don’t want to, whereas (like someone else commented on this post) girls and women have had very little choice in the past because everything was about men. we didn’t even question it.

and now the women are arriving in mainstream media in ways that say they’re important and they matter and

small (or sometimes not so small) but loud-enough-to-be-acknowledged groups of men lose. their. shit.

because they think there’s something inherently Not For Them about a woman’s story, and they never learned how to deal with it.

(also once again, because  LOT of ya’ll don’t seem to get this here: I’m trying to talk about knee-jerk reactions to female-centered works - often before they even come out. not whether or not you personally thought [x show or movie] was good. ya feel?)

i don’t think i’ve ever read a single post that i’ve agreed with so totally and so immediately and here’s why:

i love books, right? and from the ages of about 11-15 i was insanely invested in teenage/ya fantasy and sci-fi. harry potter, percy jackson, all of the books op listed above- and one of the things that made those books so great was that you could have a conversation about them with anyone! a lot of the guys in my class also loved this type of genre and i’d often talk about books with them (even my own brother has read all of the books listed above) we’d have long, interesting conversations about these books and it was great.

but then i’d mention something about the hunger games, or the divergent series, or uglies, the raven cycle, mara dyer, the mortal instruments, the selection, etc. and the response would always be the same: either ‘i haven’t read it’ or ‘i couldn’t get into it’ or ‘it doesn’t seem like my type of thing’

even outside of the ya genre, looking at something like contemporary fiction or whatever- do you know how many guys will talk endlessly about the great gatsby or catcher in the rye or any other male-centric novel? but when you bring up something as influential as pride and prejudice or jane eyre or practically /anything/ written by/focused around a woman- you get the same responses as before

society has made it so that women have no choice whether to engage with male-centric stories or not: from children, a big portion of the media we consume focuses on the male perspective and like,,, that’s not necessarily a bad thing /in itself/- the bad thing is that it doesn’t work both ways and it’s not an even split. whereas young girls are surrounded by and expected to empathise with films/books/media concerning men, it’s not the same for young boys: they have narratives that either focus entirely or largely around them. 

women have no trouble consuming media that focuses on a male narrative because it’s been labelled as the default, the ‘normal’- whereas men struggle to watch/read anything that doesn’t focus around them because they’ve never /had/ to.

this video saved my life

when she says “ooo” I die

They aired this!!!

thinking about how novartis is running a lottery where the prize is literally the life of babies and apparently this went unnoticed

Spinal Muscular Atrophy is a degenartive disease that affects between 4-10 children in every 100k live births. For those of you unfamiliar with epidemiology, this number might not have a lot of meaning, so suffice to say it is a rare disease, but among the rare diseases, it’s a common one. When it comes down to diseases which only affect one gene, SMA is the most common cause of infant death. 

I won’t go too deep on how and why it happens, or all the diffferent subtypes of the disease, but what it entails is that for the severe presentation, because the baby is lacking one gene, they’ll gradually lose the strenght in their muscles. By the age of 4, most those children are dead. 

It’s not an easy death. The child loses the capacity to breathe and swallow by themselves because of muscle weakness. We provide support as best as we can, but there’s not a lot we can do about something like that. And though muscle strenght is lost, cognition is unaffected, which means the baby brain is maturing as it would regularly, inside a weakening body. 

So, it’s horrific. But because it’s a single gene causing the mess, and because science has advanced this far, scientists went “hey what if we could give the kid this gene?” 

And that’s exactly what they did. Enter Novartis, pharma giant. They decided to try it out: put the gene inside an empty virus, give the virus to the kid. Did it work?

to those of you who don’t speak medical: yes. yes it did. it worked really well. it worked well to a point where they ran tests with 15 kids and all 15 kids survived without need for respiratory aid, as opposed to the usual 92% death/permanent ventilation rate. 

“Wow, this is good,” said Novartis. “I’m going to put a 2.1 million dollars tag on it.”

“What the fuck?” said the parents, who are regular people who do not have 2.1m sitting on their banks.

“Well, you know,” said Novartis. “You only have to take it once in a lifetime! Seems like a fair price to me. Uh, but also, do bear in mind it only works if you give it to the baby before they turn 2 years old.” 

but does it end there? no! although the drug was FDA approved, Novartis needs their prized treatment to get cleared on the rest of the world. people are complaining about the price tag, too. so they have an idea. a brilliant idea! 

“We’ll get the contacts of the kids who have it around the world,” said Novartis. “And then we’ll run a lottery! Because we are generous, we’ll give away a hundred doses a year for the entire population of planet Earth! Of course, that means your country has to agree my drug is legit.” 

“What if I don’t get picked,” wonder the parents of the children.

“Well, you know. You can always just raise 2.1 million dollars, but remember you have to do it before your kid turns two.”

so now i sit here seething in hatred toward big pharma, watching mothers desperately trying to raise an absurd amount of money which is even more absurd if your coin is weaker than the dollar, saddled with the weight that if they don’t do it in time, they’ll have to watch their kids die

and then every once in a while one of them manages to raise the cash, and then they’ll post videos in their social media and i get to watch as the babies gradually regain strenght and starts sitting on their own, then moving their limbs, then standing up by themselves

while the other mothers share increasingly desperate videos of their kids who can no longer sit, and no longer swallow, and no longer breathe, until it all ends with a single text shared through instagram that just says “thank you all, but my child has passed, and we’ll give what we managed to raise to the next one.” 

meanwhile novartis pats themselves on the back for their generosity of playing roulette with the lives of babies

… i just confirmed this. I am floored. There is no humanity in these people. It’s called Zolgensma.

it's 2020...... stop being nice to racists

racists get more second chances nd more empathy than the black nd brown ppl they hate. there is no harmless racism there is no casual racism. racists do not deserve to be coddled i don't care how old they are or where they grew up. black nd brown CHILDREN are killed everyday by racist systems so white CHILDREN can face the consequences of their racist actions. stop saying shit like 'educate them' it's 2020 if you're racist you deserve to get your shit rocked. period