Really Captured Her Feral Energy PERFRCTLY

You live in a world where, if you meet the right person, you can fly.

Your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, even your older cousins, fly. Your first favourite songs were about two people flying together for the first time. The bedtime stories you read and animated movies you watched were all about learning to fly with that special person that seemed made for them.

You learn that flying is the ultimate happiness. You can follow the sun across the sky, watch thunderstorms from below, and see snowflakes form. There is nothing like it in the world, and everyone can do it.

You’re older now. You think you’ve met the right person, and you’re over the moon. This is what you’ve been waiting for. You’re ready to fly.

And you don’t. Moreover, you can’t. As the other person sprouts wings and begins to fly, holding onto you, you feel them pull you up from the ground and you get scared. Your stomach flips and you let go, dropping to the ground. It wasn’t supposed to feel like this. They return, confused and upset, and you know they’ll never want to be around you again.

You panic. Surely you can fly. Of course you can. There have been people that haven’t flown, or chose not to. But they’re not liked for this. It’s thought of as a weird quirk of theirs at best, and snobbish attitude at worst. Who would want to be on the ground?

But there has to be someone, anyone, like you. That couldn’t fly, no matter who they were with. Maybe there were one or two across history, but they aren’t known for that. Or it’s assumed they flew in secret.

You’re older now. A new tv show makes you feel hopeful. The main character can’t fly, and feels left out. All their friends fly, and try to help them find someone to fly with. And just when it seems like the big reveal is coming: they can’t fly! They’re just like you! It turns out.. they just prefer to fly with some other kind of person. And they fly. Their life is fixed. They’re happier than they’ve ever been. They have been saved from a miserable life on the ground.

Flying is all you can see now. The flying games. The tv shows that take place in the air. Floating restaurants. It’s everywhere. Did you know that, if you can fly, you can get tax benefits? Of course you can. It makes sense in a world where everyone can fly.

No one you talk to seems to get it. Your friends are all a little frustrated with you. Are you even trying? They don’t know that you once forced yourself to let a partner carry you up higher and higher until you couldn’t take it anymore, and told them to let you down again. That angered them. You weren’t flying on purpose, in their eyes. What kind of heartless partner won’t even fly? They drop you, and the long fall hurts. No, you never told your friends that. You know they’d think you deserved it.

You’re even older. You were supposed to pass flying milestones years ago. It’s whispered about, behind your back. What life is there for someone who can’t fly? What you want to tell them, what you want to scream from the rooftops so that the couples above can hear you, is that you’ve swam in the deepest oceans. You’ve trekked the wildest forests. You’ve walked along beaches and over mountains and through fields and you know, you know, there’s so much more to life than flying.

But in a world where everyone can fly, everyone wants to fly. They expect to fly, and they will. Life is equated to flying. Happiness is flying. It is the universal experience- who are you, if not a flyer? Your forests and oceans are fun, maybe a little juvenile, but nowhere near as important as flying.

You know that, having been told again and again that you don’t belong. When two characters don’t fly, you celebrate it in quiet, while everyone else is raging, because you pretend they’re like you. When you suggest a day to celebrate those who can’t fly, or try to speak up on non-flying issues, you’re ridiculed and berated. The words you use to describe yourself are used as jokes. No one cares that you can’t fly. You’re not special. You’re not cool.

You live in a world where, if you meet the right person, you can fly. But there is no right person. There is nothing in the sky that you desire. If that is your fate, so be it. Let them pity you, let them roll their eyes. You have the forest and the ocean and the whole earth. You will not be miserable because you’re told you should be. Looking back, were you ever truly suffering? The pebbles under your shoes, the tide running through your fingers, the scent of flowers. You do not need to fly. You never did.

You live in your world. And it is beautiful.

I was moved to write a metaphor for my experience as an alloaro person and the feelings of the aspec community at large. Sorry it’s long but it tells our story. We have never needed to fly. 💚

I’ve been wanting to redo my bad batch ref sheets because my style has changed a bit (plus they deserve actual ref sheets), so here’s Crosshair!

Pop culture reduces It's a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn't exist and a little girl saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

If this movie has light and hope, it's not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It's just about as realistic as it gets.

And May The Force 

✨🌙   𝐀𝐑𝐓 𝐋𝐎𝐆 ->  @404ama

some old star wars art for may the fourth

[id in alt]

The colors are so prettyyyy.

i love a girl who looks like a haunted doll. what can i say

why are star wars planets more boring than earth and our solar system like sure we’ve seen desert, snow, diff types of forest, beach, lava, rain, but like… 

rainbow mountains (peru)

red soil (canada/PEI)

rings (saturn’s if they were on earth) 

bioluminescent waves

northern lights (canada)

salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)

and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens

BASICALLY like???? come on star wars you had one (1) job where are the cool alien species

Attacka

I think the fact that there are advertisements on cocomelon and advertisements on baby sleep soundtracks makes me feel unspeakable levels of violence.

The baby I was just rocking to sleep does not know what your product is and there is zero percent chance of them ever buying it or me remembering you fondly because you just woke the baby up who is now screaming in my ear if you had any thought that it's justified because just MAYBE I'll hear enough words to think about your product.

We are living in an increasingly breathless world that screams 'think of the children' as it loads yet more disruptive, loud adverts onto platforms and media for small children and quite honestly I think that 90% of advertisement should be illegal.