I’m glad Maes Hughes died.
He’s a fan favorite character and I enjoy him a lot too, but I think fundamentally he’s a character who has to die. His role in the narrative is to haunt it.
I might be even more of a weirdo because I enjoy his manga characterization over his Brotherhood or ‘03 portrayal, but I love the idea of Hughes being someone the Elric brothers barely know - someone we, the audience, barely see.
Until he dies.
Because suddenly he’s everywhere. He was Roy’s friend and Armstrong’s superior officer and Winry’s acquaintance and Elicia’s father - and he was the soldier both Ed and Al knew, but didn’t actually know, that got killed because of them anyway.
In the manga Winry stays at Hughes’ place, but Ed and Al enter his house for the first time after they found out he died. For them, it’s not about losing a friend (though I am sure they liked him just fine) because that story is already Roy’s - for them it’s about realizing that this plot they’ve involved themselves in kills people that aren’t actually directly involved at all to begin with. It makes sense for their allies and friends and loved-ones to be targeted by the antagonists - but a soldier who mostly joined in because he was at the right (or wrong) place at the right (wrong) time? That’s not supposed to happen. And that’s what makes Hughes’ death so hard on them.
(and poor Elicia - abandoned children without their fathers were always a weakness of Ed’s)
But Roy? Yeah… he suffers. From the moment of Hughes’ dead on, Roy is haunted by it. By him. His best friend follows him everywhere. We see it in the way Roy only involves himself in the plot because Hughes figured something out and Roy is desperate for answers. He hunts down the homunculi to save this country, sure, but mostly so he can burn his best friend’s murderer to the ground. When Riza talks about winning against the Führer and their military dictatorship, she talks about all of them, not a hint of revenge coloring her vision - but Roy? It is telling that it isn’t a greater ideal that makes him torture Envy, but the agony of his best friend’s death.
The thing that almost breaks Roy is Maes.
No.
It’s Maes’ memory haunting the narrative.
And isn’t that beautiful?
The tragedy of it all, the horror, and the realization that Roy Mustang never really recovered from the War, that his friends are the only think keeping him in one piece, the fact that Roy Mustang is a Hero and a Monster and a fallible human capable of love.
Maes Hughes has to die to remind all of us of what Roy Mustang is capable of: love, loyalty, devotion…. and the slaughter and torture of numerous people.
His ghost is haunting the narrative - and for that I love him.
missing babe so much right now
you’ve saved me so much weapon durability in botw and i want to u to know u were appreciated
u cut my trees
u kaboom’d my bokos
i love u
Because y'all are being psycho! They're probably terrified people are going to target and kill them. Wth are y'all advocating for killing people? Murder is not an option. This is disgusting and you should be ashamed. Are you so stupid and useless the only way you can protest is by calling for violence? Y'all need to grow up.
lmao now they're just straight up trying to wipe the names of executives off of the internet. the light switch has been thrown and the roaches that have infested this house for far too long are scattering like never before.
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Reblog if you're comfortable receiving crabs on Crab Day (July 29th) so all your beloved followers know who they can comfortably crab on crab day (July 29th) without feeling nervous about crabbing someone 9n Crab Day (July 29th).
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To believe in something beyond objective reality is a religion. You cannot force people to believe your religion.
Yes, let's talk about "your" pronouns for a moment, because I have some thoughts on the matter...
What's that? Oh, silly me. By "let's talk about," what you actually mean is "unquestioningly comply with my demands."
Be that as it may, "we" - which is to say, "I" - am going to talk about it regardless.
Let's analyze this for a moment.
She gives the game away right up front: blue heart is for boys, pink heart is for girls. This ideology is based on stereotypes. If you still doubt this, I don't know what else to show you to convince you.
Secondly, her "gender" isn't a profound knowledge of personal identity, because it changes faster than the weather. I'm not even sure it's her personality, because anyone whose personality changes that rapidly and that wildly has some kind of severe disorder. What she's calling "gender" seems to be nothing but her mood.
Thirdly, and I keep having to repeat this, if your "gender" requires others to participate, then it's not a "deeply personal sense of self." Just like your faith cannot be "a personal relationship with Jesus" if everybody else has to pray or refrain from pointing out the flaws in the bible. "Gender is a social construct" means that your "gender" only "exists" to the extent people play along. People are sick of being bullied into pretending for narcissists.
More importantly, you don't get to make others participate and then deny them any say or input. You can't give people an obligation with no authority, because if you think you can, then others can give you an obligation with no authority.
And you don't get to make others responsible for your mental wellbeing, to carry the burden you cannot or will not, and then get angry when they don't meet your standards or decline the obligation at all. You are responsible for you. Trying to make other people responsible for your emotions or mental state is psychotic. Xians insist that humans - and particularly children - are responsible for keeping their god happy, evidently because he cannot do it himself. You're just as much of an immature psychopath. We are not responsible for keeping you from bursting like a fragile soap bubble.
You can have a personal, unquestionable conviction, or you can have a matter of public interest and discussion. As soon as you insist others participate, you forfeit the right to cordon your beliefs off from scrutiny. If you want your beliefs to go unmolested, then keep them to yourself.
If it's nobody else's business, don't make it other people's business. You can't claim your "gender" is nobody else's business, nobody else gets a say, and then insist it is their business to comply with these demands and prop the whole delusion up.
Private concern or public interest. Choose one.
Fourthly, anyone who comes up with rules like this is a sociopath who is trying to control, manipulate and trap others. Since third-person pronouns are used primarily when someone is not present, when referring to an individual when talking to others, this is a form of authoritarian thought-control. You do not get to dictate how others must see you or think of you. They get to decide for themselves what they think of you, regardless of whether or not you like it, and it's none of your business. And if your sense of self is so flimsy that you must coerce them to conform their view of you to your own view of yourself, then you have bigger problems than "your" pronouns.
When she walks into room, people stiffen because they have to talk like idiots around her - and that's part of the appeal. She wants to be "misgendered," because who is she if she's not a marginalized victim and the center of attention? That's the trick: either you comply, and she wins, or you refuse, and she gets to pretend to be a victim and she wins. Nobody's obliged to pay attention to these insane, imaginary rules, much less play along. When she's already gamed it to win no matter what, the only way for you to win is to retain your integrity and self-respect and tell the truth.
And finally, you do not have pronouns. The pronouns belong to the language, in this case, English. The English language has pronouns for you. You don't have your own pronouns any more than you have your own conjugations or your own adjectives. Other languages, such as German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese and Japanese, have their own structures, and they're not for you to "fix" with your stupid activism.
And yes, languages change. They evolve through common usage and common acceptance, not through narcissists performing blunt-force creationism enforced with emotional manipulation and vilification.
She's an average, unremarkable girl who's found a socially acceptable way to control other people and pretend to be interesting.
My adjectives are amazing/brilliant/impressive.
Misadjectiving is hate. #BeKind
P.S. I miss the days when pink, green or blue dyed hair was a sign of rebellion and uniqueness, rather than a predictable trope and red flag that warns the world about all your views and opinions before you ever open your mouth. #MakeDyedHairCoolAgain
sure there are owl city albums but there are also secret owl city albums (Adam young, sky sailing), double secret owl city albums (port blue, swimming with dolphins), and triple secret owl city albums (color therapy, windsor airlift) and that's JUST the stuff on spotify. the top secret stuff is on eleven year old youtube playlists (insect airport, behold! lawns, aquarium, a fuck ton more windsor airlift, etc)
Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
This graph implies either 1996 was 1000 years ago or the wheel was invented 90 years ago.