EveningRelics

Link in mystic armor

It's a lot healthier to go for a daily walk than to sign up for a gym membership you won't be using because you hate that kind of exercise. It's a lot healthier to eat a frozen meal than to skip a meal because you were too tired to cook something healthy. It's a lot healthier to take a quick shower than to procrastinate an elaborate routine for days. Don't aim so high that you won't be hitting anything!

this is actually really helpful and affirming thanks

To some people you’re an NPC

To other people, you’re the special, unlockable character that they worked and worked to finally get- and when they do they’re so happy because they got the game just so they could find you.

The fact y'all are still passing around this post, eight years after I made it. Exquisite. I hope it’s still resonating with people outside of mid-2010’s tumblr.

FFVII Characterization Note:

Tifa is a sweetheart with a core of molten rage and a tendency to beat things and people to death with her fists.

Aerith is a jackass with a deep lake of compassionate serenity buried under her neuroses and healthy self-respect, and a specialty in healing magic.

Tifa can be a jerk, and Aerith can be really kind, and honestly it’s often good for them when they are, but those are not their default modes of interaction.

And when I say neuroses…this is a woman with a pattern of fleeing buildings to avoid having emotionally challenging conversations.

Who lies about her emotions almost every time they come up. Who emphatically pressures everyone to just pretend Barret isn’t slipping into depression over the recent reminder of his murdered loved ones, with the stated reasoning that if they ignore it he’ll snap out of it faster, and she wants to have fun at the resort.

Aerith has every reason to not be okay, starting at the latest with Hojo’s entry into her life at age 20 days, and I don’t blame her at all for it, but Aerith was not okay.

But also just seriously, Aerith’s casting strength is biased toward healing and she does grow into a sort of protectiveness toward the world generally, but she doesn’t in the OG show any real signs of a nurturing personality.

Aerith is an asshole. Aerith is the person who if you start unburdening your personal feelings to her there’s a very high chance you will look up and discover she fell asleep, or started building a castle out of the little creamer cups and sugar packets, or just quietly left the room.

Aerith is actively opposed to performing emotional labor for others.  She will make fun of you or instruct everyone else to ignore you until you get over it or just straight up run away.

(This is incidentally why I wound up falling hard on the side of Aerith/Zack as really important relationship to her on the basis of Crisis Core; he went to her to grieve and she stayed with him and gave him hug, that was so far out of her comfort zone.

Can you imagine how long they’d have needed to be together before they could actually talk sensibly about their problems tho. Couple of avoidant chuckleheads lmao.)

Tifa on the other hand talks a tough game sometimes, especially when coping herself, but caretaking is in fact her primary love language.

#yes thank you #while the juxtaposition between tifa and aeriths physical appearances + combat styles vs their actual personalities is likely on purpose #i kind of wonder how much of the popular perception of aerith as less blunt and brash than she actually was #is due entirely to her wearing pink #if everything about aerith were the same but her dress was black the world would be very different. #like literally change nothing else but the color of her outfit and opinions would shift all over the place (via @submarinedog)

Wow I pictured it and you are entirely correct. Like, her whole martyrdom shtick certainly contributed. But people would have been so much more prepared to notice and recall the sharp edges of her in a black dress. I am shook and exasperated and sadly not shocked at all. o(一︿一+)o

Like. The aspect of Tseng’s not-actually-death scene where she’s like ‘mmm sucks for you’ and he’s like ‘lol that’s you all over’ and then she’s like ‘yeah i’ve known Tseng forever he knows me super well’ would probably have been analyzed way harder on the ‘Aerith is a bitch and Tseng accepts the fuck out of that’ side, if she wore black.

Wow the powers of pink i’m.

bleachedraptor2

I mean, she’s a reasonably good person. She’s perfectly willing to risk her life to help people. When her longest-held nightmare is playing out against a backdrop of mass murder, she’s able to prioritize the wellbeing of a small child she’s only just met and making sure her guardian knows where to find her, and she keeps that sort of thing up.

Her greatness is in her strength and her world-saving, though, not in being nice. She’s kind of an asshole. And that should be allowed. Guy characters are allowed. (Though admittedly their edges get sanded down too. Fanon Vincent would never say some of the things Vincent actually says.)

The reason she was like that with Tseng, though, which I’m realizing is not mentioned in my post, is that the reason he’s possibly-dying is he got stabbed by one Big Bad while serving the other Big Bad: the megacorporation that killed Aerith’s parents and held her prisoner in their science department as a child, and whose runaway ecological irresponsibility is on-track to end the world if Sephiroth doesn’t get there first.

The reason he knows her so well is he’s been creeping around her entire life since shortly after she escaped, surveiling her on behalf of the corporation. The fact that he never actually brought her back in until after the start of the game may have been him evading orders and it may have just been his superiors toying with her, but either way the fact that he’s gotten attached to her doesn’t obligate her to Stockholm on him in return, especially since in the end he did kidnap her back to Shinra, and slap her for talking. Tseng is weirdly sympathetic, but he’s still commander of the fascist secret police.

And the mission he was on when we find him stabbed was to loot the Temple of Aerith’s ancestors for clues on how to find the imaginary magic country that would allow Shinra to go off and continue to practice unfettered capitalism with no consequences to themselves.

It’s actually really badass that Aerith is able to look Tseng in the eye and tell him his mission was stupid anyway, and could never have succeeded. She has incredible strength of will.

She’s not very kind, but she’s rarely cruel either, and she usually has a motive–her treatment of Barret at the Golden Saucer is her lowest moment as a character, in a lot of ways, because Barret doesn’t deserve it and she’s being driven by her need to compartmentalize her terror of confronting her own past, and you can’t just force your coping mechanisms on other people but here she’s doing it anyway.

What bugs me about all this is that the time Tifa tried to push her coping mechanisms on Cloud, when she pushes him to get off his ass and do something in response to trauma instead of just sitting with it, is very much remembered. Even though it’s much less characteristic and much more justified behavior.

A much less coherent and grosser version of it is replayed in the sequel movie, which of course a lot more people have seen than have played through the game, so it’s widely factored into characterizations of Tifa, along with her failure of nerve that helps drive the main plot vis: never having told Cloud there was something weird with his memory of the worst day of her life.

But for Aerith none of that’s there. There’s only the martyr, the flowers, the smile.

Aerith is damaged, and angry, and proud, and awkward, and kind of a dick, and so very strong. She’s a main character. I might not especially want to hang out with her because I don’t handle being teased very well (and tend to talk about feelings more than she’d be comfortable with), but I wouldn’t hold that against her. She’s got enough charisma to be likable even though she doesn’t always bother to be pleasant.

But that’s not how we remember her. We remember her as sweet. And that’s a real disservice.

(◡‿◡✿)

(ʘ‿ʘ✿) “what you say ‘bout me”

(ʘ‿ʘ)ノ✿ “hold my flower”

✿＼(｡-_-｡) “Kick his ass, baby.  I got yo flower.”

i found it

the original post

i found it

this should have the opportunity to be on everyone’s blog. 

*tour guide voice*

and here on the left ladies and gentlemen, you see one of the posts before everyone went batshit crazy

World Heritage Post

Everyone here is dead.

Throughout Heaven and Earth,

only Darkness shall remain 🩸

finding out your friend has a new name/gender is so hype. Like yess give us the patch notes

when he finds out you pirated his gloomdredger

My literal first landing on Hyrule be like

how do you infinite scroller webcomic people DO IT

mio i think there’s more pressing matters at hand rn other than ‘where is mayu’… 

Oh I LOVE this. Conservation is an art unto itself and can completely change the way we look and interpret artwork! I love the choices made here. The lighter colour and bigger and fuller skirt really brighten the statue and add something to the silhouette that makes her immediately recognizable as a little dancer.

One absolutely hilarious part of human existence is the repeated incidents of spicy bananas. People who have lived their entire lives up to this point just assuming that a specific fruit or vegetable is supposed to taste bitter, tangy, or spicy, having no fucking idea that all this time, they've been allergic to this plant. Because how would they have known? You learn what things taste like by tasting them, nobody's going to tell you that bananas are supposed to be one of the mildest flavours out there. And people already eat so many things that taste hot, bitter, tangy and tart! Because they like how that kind of thing tastes like!

You can just happily much on a plant, thinking "ah, this angry plant tastes sharp because it hates me. Much like all the other sharp angry plants that people eat because they like the sharp", and it wouldn't cross their mind to think that the plant just hates you, specifically.

This is sitting on the shelf of human experiences riiiight next to people who don’t realize they’re colorblind.

My best friend’s husband didn’t realize he was colorblind until after they were married in their mid-twenties and she watched him run a stop sign that was in front of a big bush. He’d lived his entire life not knowing. So when they did some tests and realized “hey, you’re super colorblind,” he got to thinking, it’s X-linked, right? Which means it had to have come from Mom’s side of the family, so he started digging and asked his mom’s dad, and Grampa was like “Well that would explain a lot, I suppose. I kind of thought your grandma was just pulling my leg about the tomatoes.”

Because Grandma had apparently banned him early on from picking the tomatoes in the garden because he was constantly coming in with unripe ones, and he thought she was just being super nitpicky about it. This was a lifelong family joke, that Grandpa couldn’t tell a ripe tomato to save his life, and nobody ever stopped to wonder if maybe he and the grandson who routinely colored the grass red on his drawings might have something going on with their ability to see red and green as distinct colors.

i thought aloe vera gel was SUPPOSED TO burn your skin. like how rubbing alcohol burns when applied to a cut. figured that everyone else was just better at gritting their teeth and bearing the full body aloe sting than i was. i just didn't feel like the stinging was worth the mild healing properties aloe had.

yeah... turns out it's NOT supposed to burn and i was just allergic to aloe

STORY TIME!!!!!!!

My husband comes from a “weird” family. Like, the whole county knows. “He’s a total weirdo. AAAH THAT’S HIS LAST NAME THAT EXPLAINS IT OKAY NO PROBLEM GO FLY FREE DUDE WE LOVE YOU!!” The family’s just a bunch of freaks, like the Addams Family meets the Beverly Hillbillies. I ADORE them.

It was celebrated because they’re so valuable to the local community. This one sells meticulously grown veggies at the farmer’s market, then hisses at you for suggesting they wear soemthing that isn’t tie-dyed. That kid was in kindergarten before she said her first word, and that’s cool because her older sister translated for her NO THANK YOU TEACHER WE DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR THAT IS NORMAL FOR THIS FAMILY GO AWAY. She’s got two quiet kids of her own now and WE STILL DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR GO AWAY. That uncle knows everything there is to know about every car engine ever, and he never wears shoes with laces because he literally never worked out how to tie them (He’s 60). He’s also the top mechanic in his town and makes serious dough that put his super-smart daughter through college, and now she’s an ace veterinarian who pterodactyl screams at acrylic sweaters and keeps everyone’s pets alive. I shit you not, the family matriarch gets excited for tax season every year and begs everyone to bring her their taxes so she can MATH at them. It’s her freaking hobby.

Whatever. They’re in OUR family. It’s totally normal for us. The family’s just full of freaks, that’s all. We encourage our people to go with their strengths and use their skills to make our little corner of the world a nicer place to live in, then teach them how to manage the difficult parts of the world because we all had to learn to do it ourselves. “Because this family’s full of people just as freaky as you. You’re one of us.”

No, most of them don’t go to college. It’s rural Illinois, of course they don’t. Lots of them end up in specialized trades, like electricians or farmers, and they always kick ass at it. They tend towards jobs that require a lot of focus, and attention to detal, and very specific, in-depth knowledge that is almost useless outside of whatever field they’re in. We’re mostly spread between two or three small towns in Illinois, and I do not think these three towns would function without my husband’s family fixing and growing everything they do.

One of our cousins’ kids got diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder a few years ago. His now-ex-wife insisted that something was wrong and that our cousin was a jerk for not caring enough to notice. The family reacted with “He’s fine, it’s normal, we all did that when we were his age... wait... shit... what do you mean it’s genetic?”

It turns out that like 70% of my husband’s side of the family is autistic as fuck. We’re talking about grandmothers. Uncles. Cousins. People are in their 70s just now figuring out why they are how they are. 

They’re just so famously weird in our community that they attract the other weird people as partners, and then they have weird little kids, and no one really looks twice. A bunch of the people (including me) who married in were informally adopted first. “Oh, your parents punished you for this behavior? We all do that here. Come to the barbecue!” Two years later, I had their last name and was helping watch their adorable little handflappy babies.

We’ve got an entire gene pool over here of autistic people thriving so well that no one noticed we were all autistic.

Also, that cousin got RID of his wife when she started talking about how “tragic” their son’s autism is. Their son is a perfectly normal child in our family and will be raised as such. We joke now that when something needs fixed, “Oh, just call Uncle So-and-So, he’ll autism at it.”’

I fucking love this family so much.

Beautiful, wonderful story, no notes (except maybe asking if there's room for one more at the dinner table).

Anyway, back to the original post, I am in deep gratitude for it, because it's the only reason I thought to wonder if chickpeas are supposed to be spicy.

(Hint: Apparently they're not. The genetic lottery locked the good tasting falafel and hummas behind an allergy wall.)

....what,,, what is aloe vera supposed to feel like?????

It's supposed to feel cool and soothing.