Latest Posts by pre-reform-voice - Page 3

ok now I need to subscribe to you on Ao3, who are you?

Haha, same as here pretty much: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pre_Reform_Voice

Thanks a lot!

If anyone ever wonders why I left the Abramamitic religions behind me in favour of some weird form agnostic omnism with strong pagan leanings, read the answers to that one. So much earnestness for what can't be proven, so much fervour for old story books. Oh boy. With someone who hasn't done this entire Catholic thing any more for almost two decades, this is bizarre.

I mean. I did consider myself Catholic, I even considered joining a convent, but it NEVER occurred to me to call pagans satanic or any such things. This is the kind of attitude that turned me off the whole thing. (Apart from the bits that say 'I am the only god' and 'I am jealous of all the other gods that TOOOOTALLY don't exist' thing that makes ZERO sense and is toxic af. I don't want anything to do with jealous people, human or otherwise, they can stay the hell away from me. I ain't doing this.)

That the person in question is not even Christian doesn't matter. All three are the same thing to me. Same sky daddy, same arbitrary rules that made some sense back in the day and none now, same fervour in the followers that gobble up what they're fed by the higher-ups in their particular brand of the 'I love you but if you step a toe out of line I'll destroy you even beyond death' cult. They were when I liked them and they are when I'm glad to be out.

Boy. I really don't like them any more it seems.

Edit: I mean, it's poetic, in a way. I used to wear a gold chain with a small cross, Star of David, and crescent to signify that they have the same value and worth, and then I started, little by little, to resent all three. That process took many years. And then, one day, my chain broke. I was really sad and decided to have it fixed. I noticed in time and didn't lose any of the pendants. I never had it fixed. I know now I never will. The broken chain is a symbol in itself. I am lost to them and they are to me.

really recommend getting a partner with a different religion than you and very little knowledge of your religion because the opportunities for explaining things to each other are just exquisite

Watching Heaven Official's Blessing with my Mom

The highlights so far after season 1:

'Why is he scared when someone mentions butterflies?' (I ... honestly can't answer that. Yeah, their wings can cut stuff - or people - but still, it seems so excessive.)

'Idiot woman, have some self respect.' (About Xuan Ji. Not how I would have put it, but I share the sentiment.)

'I want a little ribbon like that.' (About Ruoye, obviously. I tried to explain to her that she might reconsider eventually. She has since produced a white silk band from God-knows-where in her house and keeps fondling when we watch.) 'Aw, come on, how bad can it be?' (Worse. I offered to lend her the books after season 2.)

'I like that snake. I want one.' (She's a biologist.) 'Okay, maybe not that many.' (The scene where they pour down into the sinners' pit.)

'Are we going to see those two women again? They seem fun.' (Wind Master and Earth Master in Banyue arc. I told her yes. I managed not to look like I want to cry.)

'Isn't it a little early to be giving him a ring? Waiiiiit. ARE THOSE HIS ASHES?' (We had a death in the family recently and burning your ashes into a diamond was a VERY present topic of conversation over the past couple of weeks, but I feel so stupid now because I only got that one when HC says if the place where they're kept is destroyed he doesn't care anyway.)

Edit: I'm forty, she's seventy. I swear she knows more anime than me and this is the kind of story she totally digs.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - Tho’ Much Is Taken, Much Abides

New beginnings need new rules.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - That Untravell’d World

A mental exercise to purge concern.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - The Thunder and the Sunshine

How to cross a burnt bridge.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - There Gloom the Dark, Broad Seas

When yelling on the scaffold, choose your words with extra care.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - Seek a Newer World

You well would you hide if you didn't expect to be sought?

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - A Bringer of New Things

People from your past don't always stay there.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - Always Roaming with a Hungry Heart

The most bitter tears are those that none can see.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - Made Weak by Time and Fate

Some things cannot be forgiven.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - The Long Day Wanes

Some nights are very long, and not for good reasons.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - Subdue Them to the Useful and the Good

Finding a traitor for beginners.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - From That Eternal Silence

Trust is not a prerequisite for an alliance.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - That Which We Are, We Are

Some things, once lost, are hard to recover.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - Make Mild a Rugged People

The night will keep your secrets when you lay your heart bare.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - Men That Strove with Gods

How unpredictable do you like your friends, and why is the answer, 'Yes'?

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - I Am a Part of All That I Have Met

How wary should one be of a stranger offering passage on their ship?

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - By This Still Hearth

Sometimes you have to settle down for a bit in order to proceed.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - Offices Of Tenderness

... And sometimes the answers are the people we left behind.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood - Unequal Laws Unto a Savage Race

Sometimes, the biggest questions have to wait.

Dye Their Flowers With My Blood

A solar eclipse, a curse, and the age-old question: Why are we here? Having died twice already adds a certain urgency to that one.

(I have reached the half-way mark in my YOI project, and I needed a moment to collect myself. This one has been a long time coming.)

Redemption by Proxy

When my best friend informed me what the Dark Urge in Baldur's Gate 3 is, my brain screamed, SUIKOTSU.

Mind you, my brain defaults to the Band of Seven more than I like to admit, because sue me, but I love almost all of them. (Mukotsu can die in a fire and I have no attachment to Kyoukotsu because we meet him for all of five minutes, but I honestly love the rest of them, all of them, as of late.)

When I first watched Inuyasha, I fell for the poor unfortunate soul but I understood he had to die. I was about 20 and never thought beyond this.

Cue the pandemic, and I binged Inuyasha for the first time after way back when. Of course I still loved Suikotsu, but I also sort of started liking Kikyou and how she grows. From someone who has learned (been told and adapted to that logic) that she cannot live among humans to someone who sees that ... she could? Because this guy, this dead guy, he has no idea he's a corpse, but he's here, helping, for no reward. Purest, softest, altruism, the way she offered before being ousted by an overzealous monk. And when later, he has a clear moment and begs for death, she wants to save him instead.

Of course, she can't. Not because Jakotsu is faster. Because in the Middle Ages there is no helping a man with severs dissociative PTSD. And of course, because the only thing keeping him and her alive is a jewel shard they won't be able to hold on to. But adult me thought, please just let them leave. Let them go away, far away out of Naraku's reach and just find peace somewhere together, giving all the love and warmth they have to offer to poor people with no-one else bothered to help them. It was never an option, but oh how I wanted that.

And along comes BG3 and when halfway through my first run I understood what the Dark Urge is and what Shadowheart is, I knew I can give them exactly that arc through those proxies. I have no idea what the Dark Urge is exactly, I only started a couple of days ago. The casualty I couldn't avoid so far was a squirrel, and I fear this will get a lot worse before it gets better. But I'll keep resisting and trying to make this work. I know the redemption is possible and I'll fight tooth and claw for it.

This is him, by the way. I picked a Drow over a human, but apart from that, I think the visuals check out.

The Russian one jumped out at me because I say it so much *ahem* and then I started looking at the rest, and oh boy.

Add in your own language

Oooh this is interesting. When I write gay couples (in fan fiction or in original fiction), I usually depict them as an egalitarian's wet dream. (I'm shamelessly borrowing that wording from somewhere, but I cannot for the life of me remember where.) Hold on, my couples are always like that, but with straight couples I sometimes feel like I have to make more of an effort to make this evenness seen, if that makes sense.

Now I've read a bunch of YOI fan fiction, some very recent one, among them, only a couple of months ago, that depicts Yuuri as the sole provider of household chores. With one particular creator, that became so glaring that to me Yuuri seemed to be more a glorified maid with benefits than a partner, and I wondered, what on earth is Viktor doing while you slave away? Sleep? How did he survive before? Yuuri, of course, is completely grateful that he's allowed in Viktor's life and of course he's doing what seems to be his tasks by default.

Now I can totally see Viktor having a cleaning service. I can also see Yuuri saying that this is really frivolous and unnecessary and they can do it bloody well themselves. I can see Viktor saying, yeah, great, knock yourself out. But I can't see him letting his partner do everything without lifting a finger like Yuuri is his demure wife in some male boomer's utopia.

I was aware of this entire uke/seme division and that there are people who see a clear divide there, but I have dismissed it because it's completely ridiculous to think that the preference towards being receptive or active in bed equals personality traits and what the person is expected to do in the household. This is not how people work, pure and simple, it's dated, it's harmful, and above all those, it is plain false.

Now かっこいい is probably the exact word I'd have used for Viktor. It's the word Yuuko uses for Viktor in the flashback. In the anime, however, Viktor has several moments, where I think かわいい is much more fitting a descriptor for him. (Where he's fallen asleep against Yuuri on the plane, for example.) In YOI, both characters can be assertive and cautious and foolish and kind and harsh and soft. Just like people in real life. Reducing them to this flawed uke/seme duality does them a huge disservice. It makes them so much less human.

Of course this is just a 0730 opinion that deviates miles from the original post and not any sort of deep wisdom or insight.

Today's translation #460

Go Yuri Go!!!, Yuri!!! on ICE official fanbook, Jun'ichi Suwabe interview

Part 4.

-- Please tell us about a scene, in which you had trouble playing Victor.

S: The honest answer would be "all the scenes", but if I have to pick up some, then I will say it was the beginning of the show, episodes 1~3, I think? It was really tough for me, trying to understand the nature of Victor Nikiforov. It seemed to me that I didn't have enough information to create the character as one realistic, living human being - well, one reason was that it is an original anime. I don't usually have to worry a lot about how I should express emotions of characters I play, but as I've mentioned before, in case of Victor, I often was asked to play him in a completely different, almost opposite, way to what my image of the character was. It was me, who played the role, but I don't really feel that I did. Probably because often I was expressing [in my performance] different emotions than those of Victor that lives inside me.

-- What the directing was like during voice-over recording?

S: If I played the character going based on the context of the lines I was saying and additional information written in the screenplay, Victor would become a cool (かっこいい) character. But I think that the directors wanted Victor to be, first and foremost, not so much a "cool character", but "a genius that don't fit the standard". I think it was like a trial and error method for us to get that right. I was often asked to do multiple takes like: "It wasn't bad, but lets try something different".

-- Victor's "Vkusno!" was so cute. Was that you who came with the idea to say in that way?

S: I said it that way during a test recording and I wasn't told anything about it, so I said it in the same way during the actual recording.

[Notes: I must have stop reading this interview on the Makkachin vs. Yuuri answer, because it really surprised me that he has said that Victor wasn't supposed to be a "cool character"...

A large part of YoI fandom in Jp were fujos absolutely obsessed with gender norms and who is seme who is uke blah blah... (I've ranted about this before).

Seme should be cool (かっこいい) and uke should be cute（かわいい）period... And based on that cute Victor arts were according to them "against canon".

It's really interesting, because before this guidebook was published uke-Yuuri fujos had a massive meltdown over the art that was drawn for it, with Yurio in the center and no rings.... It was then slightly redrawn (but Victor still has gloves, so "no ring").

There was so much anti-fujos dog-whistling in YoI, and reading this interview I wonder if maybe this "Victor not cool, but cute" and the weird, slightly anti-Yuuri answers (the Makkachin vs. Yuuri etc.) were because of that... It would take me a lot of time to summarize for you the whole history of this behavior from Avex&co., but one day I'll do that 💀]

That one time I bought a cheap automatic wrist watch at a discount store, just to see if it would work for me. The cashier told me twice that it was a men's watch. Both times I said that I knew this and I wanted to buy it. If she'd said it a third time, I would have asked where she thinks a man would wear the watch so that I, as a woman, can't. Sadly, she clearly read on my face that it would be better to shut her trap.

dude today a customer brought me a birthday card and asked me "is this a girl birthday card or a unisex birthday card? I thought it was unisex but when I scanned it at the self-checkout it said girl birthday card." the birthday card was just a bunch of balloons with the text "happy birthday". and then when I was like "i dunno I think that's just the official name of the card on our system I'm sure a boy would be happy with the card" the customer was like "well if it is a girl birthday card can you tell me if this other birthday card is unisex or for girls? if the other card is unisex I'd like to exchange the girl birthday card for the unisex one". Like what. You can look at the cards. With your eyeballs. You are holding them both you can see them and decide whether or not you want the card. What the fuck are you talking about why are you asking me this

How bad is it that I know exactly which episode and scene the TOS pic is?

to demonstrate the issues with spock’s characterization in certain star trek adaptations i’ve made this convenient chart

as you can see here, recent spock iterations simply are not serving enough cunt

we can clearly see that snw spock is at a critically low level of cuntiness, whereas aos spock does have noticeable cunt. however, it is negligible seeing as tos spock was already off the charts in cuntiness.

What in the demisexual erasure is that take anyway?

"having sex with your friends is basically incest" is a take of all time

Honestly, I have learned from constructive criticism in reviews/comments (how to arrange dialogue is my big one thing because I did that in a fashion that was confusing until I got a hint and followed it) and sometimes people find actual mistakes - which I'm very grateful for.

So, I have to contradict this mindset, I welcome it when it is good advice. If people tell me I use the wrong typography because I use ' instead of ", I send them to f themselves because that's common in British English, which is what I use. So it depends. If you're giving me a heads-up that I missed something or that something isn't clear, that's great. But if you tell me my correct spelling is wrong, we won't be friends.

I just saw a Tik Tok that said writers on AO3 are not looking for constructive criticism in their reviews. I have no audience on this platform so I have to know if this is true? I've always left my pros and cons when reading a fic and now I'm concerned that the authors didn't like that.

Yeah writers are Not looking for criticism, constructive or otherwise. Unless they specifically ask for it, it’s considered rude and honestly a bit hurtful. In the least bitchy way possible, don’t do that. It’s unwanted.

This German native speaker is currently howling with laughter. :D

so this European clothing retailer decided to advertise their jean cuts on youtube and it's unintentionally the funniest shit I've seen today. why? well.

now important context here: in German, die (pronounced 'dee') is just a feminine article, it literally means "the".

but if an ad gets placed in the middle of an English video and doesn't use a single explicitly German word for most of the ad, even a native speaker is gonna think "they want me to die how?" it keeps getting funnier.

I mean, holy shit

i will use these as reaction images until i die