i’m staying with my parents a couple weeks until my new apartment is ready so they sit and watch me play zelda whenever they have a minute. and they always say stuff like “doesn’t link get lonely?” and “don’t you think he’s tired from running everywhere?” and “does he have a home?” like exactly exactly thats what i’m always saying. they have got to get on tumblr
i like to pretend i’m an intellectual but in my heart the 3oh!3 taio cruz ke$ha katy perry avril lavigne lmfao nicki minaj cobra starship rihanna cascada britney spears lady gaga era of music reigns supreme. ipod touch with the cracked screen type beat
class and gender presentation is a particular Thing for me cause like. I’ve been poor my whole life, like malnourished-since-seventh-grade kind of poor, and I’m quite feminine, and my femininity inevitably makes people read me as wealthy. when I was a young kid, my classmates would phrase it like I dressed “fancy” or “old fashioned” (“fancy?” I would think, looking at my outfit that was just a single dress, literally one dress, the most simple and easy outfit a person can wear), and as I and my peers got older, that changed to people thinking I was some kind of like, old money heiress. because girlies who get free school lunches are incapable of wearing perfume, apparently.
multiple times a semester, I would have to explain and re-explain to teachers that I couldn’t pay for mandatory field trips or extra-credit private tutoring, and every time they would think I was lying because I was too smart and too feminine to be poor. in some circumstances, when I tried to speak out about queerness or misogyny, it would get dismissed as hysterical privileged whinging because I had the audacity to wear dangly earrings and sit with my legs crossed while talking about domestic abuse.
like I Know there are ways that certain standards of femininity are locked behind paywalls or incompatible with manual labor jobs, but I honestly think a lot of our perception of femininity as upper class comes from the way that femininity / womanhood (not the same thing, but often considered as such) are seen as artificial, fragile, and frivolous. I would stand next to my classmates, me in my threadbare sundress that I’d been wearing for eight years and them in their brand new designer athleisure wear, and they’d say “okay obviously you’re going to play the rich bully in this educational skit about classism.”
anyway. I’ve never played disco elysium but I love this screenshot so much.
if i post a fic and get no kudos or comments in the first fifteen minutes i’m a failure and should never write again. but the moment i get 1 comment i’m the next stephen king
Here’s another adventure with the missing zero pronoun, this time from the engine room, when Cognitive Akechi shows up to be a dick:
Cognitive Akechi 認められたかったんだろ? 愛されたかったんだろ? mitomeraretakatta n daro? aisaretakatta n daro? You wanted to be acknowledged, didn’t you? To be loved?
Quick summary: these “zero pronoun” errors occur because a lot of Japanese passive sentences, unlike the English passive, have subjects who act on the sentence but are not directly acknowledged. So something that should have been translated as a direct statement loses its force, and becomes a “someone” or a “whatever”. It’s really easy to do when you’re rushed.
Here’s the big deal: mitomeru and aisuru are both TRANSITIVE VERBS. Someone is experiencing the verb (Akechi), but someone is also doing the verb.
nb - there’s a bit of confusion here because of that -takatta on each verb: the person doing the wanting is Akechi. But the person doing the acknowledging and loving is someone else.
So who’s the culprit? Who is it who Akechi so desperately wants to acknowledge him? Who did he just go on for ten minutes telling us it was? Who has he just been outed as wanting to love him with that forcefully intimate ai?
It’s Shido.
So let’s quickly retranslate that short little snippet:
You wanted him to acknowledge you, didn’t you? To love you?
It explains so much of the shock the Phantom Thieves express at that statement. They’re fucking horrified by what Cognitive Akechi has said. I’m horrified too, I’m going to vomit into my nice toilet, please join me.
Creeping back to this one because I’m down in the engine room scene (again), and wow, the sprite transition on that line. It’s the exact point Cognitive Akechi goes full batshit as he wields the knife.
There’s an interesting thing going on here where Cogkechi, who is genuinely cold-blooded and plays games of who-dies-first with his victims, is a true psychopath, and real Akechi, despite his actions, probably isn’t—but that is the mask he’s shown Shido. That’s what Shido believes he is.
明智の目的は、自分を捨てた父・獅童への愛憎の清算を果たす事だった。本心を明かした明智は敵となって襲いかかる… akechi no mokuteki wa, jibun o suteta chichi (shidou) e no aizou no seisan o hatasu koto datta. honshin o akashita akechi wa teki to natte osoikakaru… His objective is to get revenge on his father, Shido. After stating that, he attacked…
Does that look like rather a lot of Japanese to you, for those two tiny little lines? Let’s try it again.
Akechi means to conclusively settle his love-hate feelings for his father, Shido, who abandoned him. With his true heart revealed, and now an enemy, he swoops in for the kill…
清算 seisan—it’s giving me a bit of an embolism that we didn’t keep this, because while it’s being used here in the sense of ending a relationship, it means to liquidate or settle a debt. This emphasis of Akechi’s on personal debts and accountability wasn’t so visible pre-Royal—though his relationships were visibly transactional—except that it was likely right here all along. Shido owed him.
And what’s 愛憎 aizou? aizou means love and hate. It means exactly what Cognitive Akechi slyly told Akechi and everyone else. “You wanted him to love you, didn’t you?” Because this is so important to understand—Akechi hates Shido like poison, but he also loves him. This is why he joins him. This is why he’s there for years. This is why he doesn’t leave. This is why he keeps doing what he’s told.
It’s not fanon; it’s canon. We’re meant to understand it. And likely the only reason so many people miss this is that mangled line of Cognitive Akechi’s, up at the top there—where Shido (because it is Shido) finally tells him that he fucking knew, all along, and used Akechi’s fucked-up feelings to make him dance like a puppet.
Literally: “as for Akechi’s purpose, it was to conclude the settlement of his love and hate towards his father, Shido, who abandoned him”. Look at the emphasis here. The emphasis is not on Shido. The emphasis is on Akechi’s feelings, which have motivated him this whole fucking time.
A coin in the air, spinning. One side love, one side hate. And which side will it land on…? Well, Shido, that was always in your hands.
襲いかかる osoikakaru, BTW, is a swooping or diving attack—like a crow, right? It’s falling on someone, pouncing on them, throwing yourself at them—unleashing a massive attack.
Oh, “and now an enemy”? Yeah. It says 敵となって teki to natte—“having become an enemy”. It’s possible this is the direct sense of teki, as in “someone who is attacking you here and now"—so he’s only now openly opposing them, only now attacking them. Or maybe it doesn’t mean that. Or maybe it’s both.
*turns a perfect 180 degrees so that my cutting board-flat ass is facing you* *i walk away with feminine swagger but masculine contempt*
you see. a lot of people on this site have started to use “broke containment” when any post gets popular outside of their circle of friends, but its original use was when it was a vague fandom post (usually supernatural) gets reblogged by people outside the fandom
anway I got whiplash noticing op’s url and realizing this was about gabriel agreste from miraculous ladybug
And speaking of scurvy, I am eternally amused by the thing where some ancient form of healing that was born in a time where people didn’t know exactly how the human body works, or what causes it to stop working sometimes, that still somehow worked. Like how so many old folk medicinal plants were listed as a cure for various ailments that - from a modern view - are clearly just symptoms of scurvy, and the plant itself is rich in vitamin C.
I recall reading some story, no recollection of the exact time or place, where the king of a large empire suffered from constant horrible headaches and was incapable of falling asleep unless drugged or blackout drunk. Sick of taking temporary fixes to dull the pain and having to be sedated every night, he called up some old sage healer who was said to know how to fix things nobody else could explain, and the healer heard his symptoms and went
“Hmm. You spend too much time being a king. Your skull is packed so full of kingly thoughts that they don’t all fit in there and that’s why your head is in pain. You need to spend time not being a king.” And prescribed him to schedule three days every month where he must go to a peasant village where nobody knows he’s the king, live with a family there under a fake name and identity, work in the rice fields with them, eating the same food and sleeping on the same mats. Absolutely nobody is allowed to address him as the king, speak to him of any royal or political matters, and he himself is not allowed to think any kingly thoughts or think of himself as the king.
And naturally, this worked. Taking a regular scheduled break from a highly stressful office desk job to completely decompress, paired with physical exercise in the form of hard but simple physical labour, plain and simple food and Just Not Thinking About Your Fucking Job All The Time does help chronic stress, which here was worded as “spending too much time being a king clogs your brain.”
Sometimes you do have ghosts in your blood, though I’m not entirely sure whether you should do cocaine about it.
ALT
