SAME MAN I WAS BEFORE: Chapter 8

Begrudgingly buddies… 👑🤝🐲

This is actually part 1 of 3, because I’ve lost control of my life.

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Anyways, entirely unrelated doodle, luigi ironing him and mario’s clothes please enjoy their littleness.

no bc guys. people are sleeping on the will byers trauma train somehow. like HOW? this boy isn’t compelling to you??? imagine you got kidnapped by an evil tooth monster to another dimension and your sister you hadn’t met yet tried to find you but you were unconscious and then you DIED and then got better and came home and started coughing up slugs and then you had to go back to middle school and then you got possessed by evil smoke and killed a bunch of scientists AND your mom’s boyfriend AND almost killed all your friends (but you got helped by the power of family and rainbows and a little gayness) and then you were unconscious AGAIN when you tried to meet your sister for the first time for the second time and then you tried to strangle your mom and then your boy best friend’s sister tried to burn you alive and then your boy best friend started dating your sister who you finally met and then he called you gay and you cried and then you had to move to the desert and your weird brother got a new weird friend who drives you to school in a pizza van and then you find out the evil smoke that possessed you is named henry and he still fucking hates you and you actually are gay. and also your dad sucks

listen, I- I cant help but think every time i see will and eddie interact in fics, that will would not have liked eddie like

at all

Eddie? is a dick.

and like maybe this is me just being insane, but i think will's love of Dnd comes from an actual love and appreciation for character and story and a love of his friends and his community he found playing dnd. It gave him an outlet, it let him express himself, it let him be brave and when you see him trying so hard to come back to that in season 3, you see he uses it as a way to express what he's going through. But most importantly, Will plays dnd because he loves his friends.

eddie is so rigid with his dnd obsession. He uses it as a way to control things, to (honesty) control people. He uses it to build himself a throne. A LITERAL THRONE SITS AT THE HEAD OF THE HELLFIRE TABLE. The party always played at a square table, they all looked at each other, all equal, all on the same playing field. But eddie, he's different. Even at lunch you see him sit at the head of the table. He gets up and walks across them, he shouts, he draws attention to them, invites the tormenting almost, and i don't think will would have liked the way Eddie was constantly bringing attention to himself and, in turn, hellfire as a whole. Eddie uses dnd to antagonize, to start shit, as a marker of his "fuck it" attitude

Will would not have felt safe in hellfire. Eddie's "forced conformity is killing the kids" monologue is such bullshit. Hellfire would have suffocated will. Not because i think will couldn't stand up for himself or hold his own against Eddie, but Dustin and Mike are so enamored with Eddie, they fall in line and worship the guy, so much so that they are willing to ditch Lucas and his game! Will never would have stood for that. Will would have been at Lucas's game. No DnD party is worth it to him if its not with his party

"But, what if you wanna join another party?"

"Not possible"

Are we all just, collectively forgetting this? Like are we just blacking out here? Now yes, this is very byler, but its not just about Mike. Its about Lucas and Dustin too. Its about El, and now Max. Its about his people.

Eddie actively tore apart the party under the guise of being "dedicated to dnd" but the only thing eddie is dedicated to is himself and serving his best interest. At least he was in hellfire.

and yeah, idk, i feel like this is an unpopular opinion, but these are just my thoughts. feel free to share yours.

I might be overanalyzing this

But why is Bowser smiling?

Like he literally just kidnapped a man he's NEVER SEEN and dominates him TOWERING OVER HIM saying 'yeah I'm gonna rule the World and I want you to tell me who's the man that looks like you'. And what does he do to threaten him? HE CARESSES HIM AND GENTLY PULLS ONE OF HIS HAIR

Like that's the biggest non-scary (don't remember better adjectives to express what I mean) threatening I've seen in the history pf movies. It's not even "because kids are going to watch the movie and the directors don't want to make Bowser look too evil", because those SAME KIDS have seen Bowser pollute the World out of anger (Bowser's Fury which I've only started watching the walkthrough of)

That's all I have to say for today

sing up to this totally legit pyramid scheme- i mean talent show down below, link in the description

It's either "I must do this thing RIGHT NOW or I'm going to lose it" or "the stars and planets aren't in perfect positions so it'll happen when that happens" and nothing in between.

you: i can’t believe the mario movie made bowuigi canon

me, an intellectual:

i hope you guys know defending disabled people's right to exist in public also involves defending disabled people's right to exist in public in ways that others might perceive as annoying, unpleasant, uncomfortable, and inconvenient at times. a blatant example is the "slow walker" thing. someone with tourette's syndrome who has issues with verbally ticcing is likely going to have trouble staying quiet in a public space where they're expected to be. autistic children (and some adults) getting triggered into meltdowns due to an overstimulating environment. people with hearing problems having their phone on speaker while on a phone call. a wheelchair user taking up part of the road/sidewalk/aisle. people with autism, adhd, hearing problems, or other things that affect volume control having loud conversations. someone audibly talking to themselves, which can be attributed to many things. motor tics. dyskinesia. ataxia. pseudobalbar effect. the list goes on. some of thus may even be potentially triggering for your own issues if you're someone who's also mentally and/or physically disabled, but if you're well aware of how you can't help your response to it, you should be equally aware of how others can't help themselves either. people who aren't able to be disabled quietly and conveniently don't deserve to be punished or met with anger (or turned into a spectacle) for not deciding to shut themselves away.

Today, July 22nd 2021, marks ten years since the domestic terrorist attacks in Norway that made not only the whole country stand still, but sent shock waves all over Europe. Eight people died as a result of a bombing in central Oslo, and 69 people were murdered on Utøya, an island west of the capital. The attacks have been considered the most terrible in modern Scandinavian history.

Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian right-wing extremist fuelled by the anti-immigration and white supremacist conspiracy theories he had read online, decided to take matters into his own hands and put a stop to what he saw as an Islamic takeover of European society (“Eurabia”) and the promotion of “Cultural Marxism”. The enemy in his eyes were the ruling party, who he believed were enabling this change through immigration and multiculturalism as well as the disestablishment of a strong patriarchy. Before carrying out his deeds he had compiled a manifesto, spanning over a thousand pages, of mostly stuff he’d found online but also by well-established right-wing authors. This was e-mailed to many people in power some hour before the bomb, hidden inside a car parked near government buildings in Oslo, went off, alarming many citizens and injuring hundreds.

Photo credit: Morten Holm

A bit after five in the afternoon, Breivik arrived at Utøya disguised as a police officer. Utøya is a small island owned and utilised by AUF, the youth offshoot of the Social Democratic Worker’s Party, who were holding their yearly summer camp at the time. Armed with a rifle, Breivik went on a massacre for over an hour before real policemen arrived to arrest him (delayed due to a lack of ways to get to the island), forcing all the summer camp participants to run and hide as their comrades were injured and killed. At least a hundred were physically injured, far more were mentally traumatised by the event. Many of those who died were young, the majority still in their teens.

Discarded clothes after victims having entered the water to escape. Photo credit: Niclas Hammarström

It’s easy to paint Breivik as a lone madman, an unstable individual who is now safely behind bars at a maximum sentence. But through his manifesto we see his many connections to people and movements all over the world. He describes himself as a conservative nationalist, a fascist and a “counter-jihadist”, and cites authors Bat Ye’or (Gisèle Littman) and Robert B. Spencer, the American Tea Party movement, and blogger Fjordman among others as inspirations. He approves of the Hindu nationalist efforts to expel muslims from India, Geert Wilders of the Dutch right-wing Party for Freedom, and Israel waging war on Palestine. How can he be a sole extremist when are many people sharing his views? How can his massacre be an incident, an anomaly, when he himself claims to have been inspired and radicalised by the writing of others? The attacks cannot be separated from the politics that created them. At the time, the Norwegian political discourse was very centred around immigration, with far-right parties gaining more sympathy and other parties pandering to this by also starting to discuss immigration as a “problem”. When nationalism, xenophobia and islamophobia become ever more widespread and legitimised as a “point of view” in society, the more rampant the extreme utterances become. Many right-wing conspiracy theorists speak of genocide as a last step, where government takeovers in order to stop immigration and deporting those of unwanted ethnicities are first on the agenda. Breivik intended to help this cause by murdering members of the ruling party who he believed were bringing on the downfall of Western society. This should have been a warning, but ten years later fascism is still on the rise all over Europe (and the world!). Some places are close to, if not already at the last, horrific step. One terrorist being locked up does not put an end to this development. But it might not be too late to learn from it.

stop making excuses for playing hogwarts legacy.

“the people who worked on the game need to be supported tho 🥺”

the people who worked on the game already got their cut and went home. your money is just going towards jkr and the corporation

“but harry potter was my childhood 🥺”

same. but this isn’t revisiting old media. this is an entirely new product. and you’re allowed to grow out of things and move on when the dead horse gets beaten and your media literacy skills improve.

“but i pirated it 🥺”

playing the game cannot be moralized through piracy because giving money to jk rowling is not the only issue here. the game is violently antisemitic. playing it cannot be evened out through piracy, charity donations, etc. the world doesn’t work like that.

“can’t you just let me have fun? 🥺”

if playing a game made by a racist, transphobic, antisemitic, fatphobic bigot (and a team including at least one alt-right influencer) where the entire plot is to defeat the jews goblins because of white wizard supremacy is fun to you then i think you might need to seriously consider why.

if you are playing hogwarts legacy and/or supporting it online you are choosing to value a video game over the lives of jewish and trans people. you are allying yourself against jewish and trans people. if people hate you for choosing a video game over human lives you have no grounds to be upset.

sometimes doing good things and being an ally is difficult. sometimes it means not doing something that you wanted to do. it’s sucks but that’s life. get over it and shut up.