Me: *minding My Own Business.*

Me: *minding my own business.*

My body dysmorphia: “You look like this.”

On Merrill's Rivalmance

I often hear people argue that rivalry is the sensible path to take with Merrill, that it’s irresponsible to blindly support her as she makes decisions she barely understands, that a Hawke who cares about Merrill would not stand idle and watch her bear the consequences she didn’t know were there.

But here’s the thing.

Pol didn’t die because of Merrill’s blood magic. Pol died because he was scared that Merrill carried the taint; a lie that was spread by keeper Marethari.

Keeper Marethari didn’t die because of Merrill’s blood magic. Keeper Marethari died because she refused to give Merrill a chance. A choice she alone made.

Merrill’s clan, if killed, didn’t die because of Merrill’s blood magic. They died because they refused to believe her, accused her for something Marethari alone did without informing anyone, and attacked her, forcing her to defend herself.

“Fear makes men more dangerous than magic ever could.” She said before the final battle, having experienced the truth of it firsthand.

Merrill’s blood magic never hurt nor threatened anyone, where prejudice killed an entire clan.

Merrill endured a lifetime of blame and hatred. Even the visions of her dead friends taunted and blamed her. Where she had hoped to make new friends, people called her a foolish child and repeatedly tried to dissuade her from her path that she had been forced to walk alone, a choice she made so as to never bring harm to anyone.

Her eagerness to act, the sacrifices she took for the mirror, her alacrity to do anything that was needed to fix the eluvian, was often mistaken for ignorance. For foolishness. People often told her she did not know what she was getting into, which was why she acted with no reservation. Except…

“If things go wrong, if (the demon) possesses me, I need you to strike me down.” She said, fully aware of the risk.

Merrill had always known the cost of the the burden she chose to carry for the sake of her people, who had done nothing but make her feel unloved.

Her eagerness to do the things she did, so selflessly like it was nothing, was not because she was ignorant to the consequences. It was because even if there was the slightest chance, she had to take it, for the people she valued above herself, even if it meant them hating her, even if it meant everyone she cared about renouncing her, because her eyes were fixed on something she believed was bigger than herself.

Merrill, after having lived an entire life with no human experience, was made to live among them, and they made no effort to accommodate her.

Merrill was called a monster and an idiot.

Merrill, who used to wander forests; trees and flowers of all kinds growing as far as her eyes could see, for her to enjoy as she pleased, was thrust into a world were gardens were a luxury restricted to the privileged, and they laughed at her naivety as they explained to her that she was not allowed to pick flowers in people’s private gardens.

Merrill, who lived an outcast among her people and an apostate among humans, was never made to feel at home.

What Merrill lived through, what she had been told, how she had been made to feel, was enough to make anyone lose heart, to doubt themselves and wonder if they were truly a monster who needed to be stopped, to be laden with enough regret to weigh them down and drag them to the bottom and into a dark place, but does she succumb to it? When the whole world blamed her, did she take it?

Let’s compare Merrill’s words after A New Path, presumably after her clan had been killed, in both the friendship and rivalry versions.

“Why didn’t any of them listen to me? All this time, I thought… I could help them. Save them. But they chose to destroy themselves in order to escape my help.”

The sight of her dead clan, along with whom she had once considered a mother figure, would be enough to bring down anyone, no matter how strong. Yet she stood by her cause, supported by Hawke who had been there with her through every step of this difficult path.

“There was nothing you could’ve done.”

“No, I know that. Maybe it’s time I stopped living for them.”

What I also love is that there is the dialogue option for Hawke to tell her “Fear did more damage to your clan than blood magic ever could.” and I like to think that when Merrill echoed those words before the final battle, she thought of Hawke as she tried to make people see who the true villain was, just as Hawke did to her at her most vulnerable moments.

Now let’s take a look at the rivalry version.

“Willfull, stubborn idiot. All of this is my fault. I’ve… I’ve done everything wrong.”

She takes the blame for a crime she didn’t commit. She hates herself for things that she isn’t. She punishes herself for only doing good. All the words, all the insults, that she once rightfully dismissed, are now sinking in deep.

They were right all along and she was oh, so very wrong, she now believes. She thinks she is a monster, an idiot.

This is abuse. I have no other word to describe what the rivalry path does to Merrill, romance or not.

To rivalmance Merrill is to overlook everything about her character, everything that makes her so wonderful.

Because Merrill, who never preyed on anyone’s emotions while they were hurting, as they always liked to do to her, is not immature.

Merrill, the only one who argued to spare Anders because she was willing to see reason where others could only listen to their rage, is not a child.

Merrill, who told a romanced Isabela she wasn’t surprised anyone would love her, where others said that sleeping with her was only ‘expected’, is not blind or ignorant.

Merrill is a strong, beautiful, and brave character, who deserves the world, but gets so little of it.

And romancing her on a friendship path is not unrealistic, complacent, or irreponsible. Hawke is not her parent. They are not there to scold her and decide what they think is right for her, not having lived her life or known what she had gone through and her reasons to do what she does.

But Hawke can be a hand that holds hers and a place to call home. They can be what reminds them that there is still good experiences in the world for her to be had, that there is love to be felt, that she did not have to give up all joy in favour of finishing her task, that she can have both, that she is worthy of being loved, and respected enough to be given the right to make her own decisions, where she had lived a life of others insisting they knew what was best for her.

And she deserves that much.

Hawke, of all people, would know what it feels like to be blamed for things that were out of their hands. They would know what it meant to carry regrets instilled in them by people whom they called family, but could never understand them.

Hawke and Merrill could heal together. They could recover and learn to be kinder to themselves.

Or they could carry their shame and their guilt and live a life of trying to make amends.

That anyone could prefer the latter is beyond me.

When I first made this blog, I reblogged some dumbass “actually Islam is feminist” #woke post and pointed out that literally every sentence of it was wrong. It’s been months since then, but recently the author of that post messaged me and linked me to a wikipedia article to prove me wrong. It was then that I learned of the strange saga of Jagged 85.

Did you know that a Muslim woman founded the world’s first university? Were you aware that Islamic scientists invented the hand crank, discovered gravity, and were the first to realize that the earth revolves around the sun? Has it ever occurred to you that Muslim women gained the right to keep their surnames hundreds of years before Western women and were given the right to inherit wealth, which was unheard of in pre-Islamic times?

If you answered “yes”, you may have read a wikipedia article, or something based on one, written by a Bangladeshi-British guy with the username Jagged 85. This anonymous gentleman dedicated several years of his life to putting blatantly false, completely made up bullshit into wikipedia articles covering an incredibly broad number of subjects. Most of these additions were fairly well-written and sourced. If you read them, you wouldn’t think much of it. A wikipedia article tells you some guy named al-Ghazali influenced René Descartes and it has a little number indicating an academic source next to it–are you really gonna think too hard about it, or are you just going to accept it?

Well, most people evidently fall into the latter camp, since Jagged 85′s inventive editorializing continued undetected for quite a while. He created new articles (Islamic feminism, Physics in medieval Islam, Avicennism), added tens of thousands of words to others (Muslim world, History of geometry, Islamic Golden Age, Islamic economic jurisprudence), and removed anything critical of Islam–and inserted sources supportive of it–into hundreds of others.

How long can someone pump out hundreds of thousands of words on a subject before someone else looks at it and says “gee, I dunno, that doesn’t sound right to me”? Oh… I don’t know… maybe 80,000 times or so. Issues were first noted in the year 2009, four years after he began his little project, but he wasn’t banned until 2012.

What did him in? What finally convinced the good people of the wikipedia community that something was amiss? Did they read their site’s articles on Islam and notice that everything was presented in glowing terms, citing only either Western white Orientalists or Muslim scholars? No. In fact, it was something else altogether.

You see, our friend Jagged 85′s interests were not limited to Islam. No one can say why–perhaps he had just run out of Islam-related material, having blanketed the entire site several times over. Perhaps he had some strange fetish for putting false information into wikipedia articles. Maybe he was playing a game and seeing how far he could take it before someone noticed. But around 2010, he turned his attention to… video games and anime. Yes, Jagged 85 is an Islamic otaku, which explains many things.

The strange edits started out minor. Sometimes he’d inflate the sales of an obscure game. Then he’d assign undue importance to some game or another, calling it “the first game” to do something or saying it was the beginning of a genre. Again, he would always link to a source–it’s just that the sources didn’t really back him up. But who cares? Who reads the sources? It’s wikipedia, man.

Well, evidently someone cared, since the wikipedia gaming community has strict standards for statements like Silpheed “was the first fully 3D polygonal shooter”. Like a pack of hyenas, the kuffar descended upon our brother, chronicling his errors and demanding his blood. And they got it on the 22nd of September, 2012, when Jagged–who was only trying to spread our true faith and a love of Neon Genesis Evangelion–was heartlessly banned from the home he’d helped build.

But can the disbelievers ever truly prevail against Allah? They cannot. And we have evidence of this in the fact that ol’ J85′s work still stands across hundreds upon hundreds of wikipedia articles, due to disinterest and a lack of expertise by most other editors. From Criticism of Muhammad to the History of Bangladesh to List of Mobile Suit Gundam 00 chapters, our brother’s words have withstood their attacks, lingering in near-obscurity in order to avoid the knives of the enemies of Islam.

Fight on, Jagged 85, wherever you may be. The ummah–which invented math, moist towelettes, and the slice-of-life genre of anime–is with you.

🥺

what's the tour montarvaprpawrqr or whatever french shit that word is?

ok im gonna infodump about fucked up buildings for a second so this is probably gonna be long

tour montparnasse in paris is my least favourite building in the entire world and i am slightly obsessed with it just bc of how much it sucks. its an office building and if you saw it from up close you might think ok this is a building. like its a little bland but theres nothing special about it

but then you zoom out a little 

wow!!! what the fuck. that is so ugly. it literally looks like someone jammed a tv remote into the earth and i hate it so much. also this is paris so this monstrosity is within BLOCKS of the eiffel tower and just completely destroys the view. its so evil that there is now an 8 storey building limit in the area to prevent anything this criminal from happening again

some other shitty buildings i like include marina city chicago aka the corn cob buildings, which were designed with the idea in mind of a building with no right angles since ‘right angles do not appear in nature’

and rainier tower in seattle, which honestly just makes me anxious

but my FAVOURITE shitty building is part of the sydney university of technology (uts) campus

not just because it looks like someone made a building out of wet cardboard, but because the original design sketch is a work of art and it makes me cry laughing every time i look at it

behold 

fucking impeccable. thank u for listening

So about the pallas & midheaven charts I will get to those when I have free time so don’t worry they are not forgotten 🕊🤎

Let’s do a game shall we🥳🤎

All you have to do is reblog this post:) MUST BE FOLLOWING ME (but only doing this w old followers)

Go to my asks and tell me something you feel about me that you can feel through my blog and uh keep it positive please i havent been the best lately ajsjsjsj and make sure it’s not superficial “I feel like you’re beautiful” well I know but try to find something more complex or different that catches my eye:)

You can ask one of these questions and I’ll try to answer intuitively (i’m clairvoyant + psychic)

1) Whats the future of my blog? (Near future)

2) Tell me something random about my soulmate / next love interest

Only choose one of these either 1 or 2.