She-Ra And Catra By Vero (TheArtofVero)

Sometimes I wonder if there's something to performers in difference to all other art. I wonder why there's that urge to spill all your emotions to a crowd. It's beautiful to see and, as someone who's done it, beautiful to do. But no other art is like that. Sure there's the exhibition to show visual arts or in the intricacies in craft arts but it's such a quiet emotion whose scream is a passive one. I wonder a lot about what drives us to be so public and communal about our messages and stories.

I wonder if we're a type. I grew up with dance girls and I can only remember one trait that united us all, we're all emotional. Not in the cry about every little thing way but we all had this urge to get all our emotions out and to others, maybe this is why gossip is so rampant in our circles. Even the stoic dancers were stoic in spite of their emotions, they even danced with this careful exhale of feeling. I remember us cloggers were definitely a type, we were all energetic and headstrong. I mean, reasons a dance style that's loud, fast, and rural would attract us.

I've been around a lot of theater kids growing up and I think a very similar thing is true. I can't speak as one of them but to a person the ones who performed had this hemorrhaging emotional quality. It was channeled differently and definitely had a different vibe but that feeling was there. I think band kids did this too, again with a completely different feel.

Maybe I'm just witnessing an all artist thing and understanding it as a performer thing but I think visual artists, writers, and other non performance arts don't have. That's not to denigrate those art forms, they do some things way better than us, but I think there's this special quality to us performers that unites us and informs how we are.

What Your Favorite Punk Rock and Gothic Rock Band Says About You except I have surface level knowledge of all of this and I'm mostly going off vibes

Sex Pistols: You where an absolute nightmare sometime between your childhood and 30s. Not just like annoying and stubborn but people were afraid of you and also afraid for you.

Ramones: You're pretty chill despite being very passionate and opinionated on topics that don't really matter. You don't need to yell about your least favorite dog breed ok? You don't need to get your two cents in on everything either.

Dead Kennedys: You have good taste and are true to your values, but you will also defend using racist symbols and words for satire a bit too far.

Siouxsie and the Banshees: The way Siouxsie Sioux spells her name is a sin that I fully blame you for. You love dark and mysterious energy and love just seeing women succeeding and being weird.

The Cure: You're objectively correct, they are the best on this list. However, you're the basic bitch of goth and post-punk and in denial that they made just as much pop music as actual goth.

Depeche Mode: You're either a mentally unstable new wave fan or a mentally stable goth fan. The lyrics aren't as complex as you think they are, sorry.

Joy Division: Please do something about your anxiety.

Dead Boys: You get bored out of your mind to a point that is probably not normal whatever stupid thing you want to do for the adrenaline please don't do it.

The Damned: Same thing as the Dead Boys except you like a slightly classier and darker aesthetic. If you could wear whatever you wanted without being judged you would wear the coolest shit known to man.

Bauhaus: Just admit you're horny. Everyone already knows.

The Clash: Either you need to get out of the house and go do something exiting or you used to need that and this music was a gateway to lots of adventures. You like a lot of other types of music as well.

Black Flag: Straight edge, huh? No the fuck you weren't.

Sisters of Mercy: Congratulations! You're almost as horny as the Bauhaus fans and almost as anxious as the Joy Division fans! Also you were probably raised Christian and resent it.

The Stooges: You pride yourself on being into punk before punk existed but is that really such a good thing? You heard someone screaming "I wanna be your dog" with absolutely no context and no similar or gateway music and decided that this was the band for you. All I'm saying is maybe you need to take some time to unpack that.

Hickies

New poem time:

Another day, pacing four walls

Dreaming to escape away

To trees, the smalls, the talls

Where maybe someone will find me

Waiting

Another night, I hold inanimate

Plush beings in hope they'll heal

Me and before it's too late

And I'll feel safe alone

Waiting

Another morning, I wake to

My breaking mind looking down

Crying to my dying heart who

Neither has answers nor hope for the

Waiting

Another evening, I want to cry

For painkillers for my dying soul

Who can't help but ask why

I'm still here when I'm just

Waiting

Maybe I should go

Waiting

Only hurts more

Waiting

Makes me care less

Waiting

Maybe it's not worth it

I think playing Fallout 3 awakened something in me as a kid. Explains a lot of my bullshit tbh.

Loving a good marauding through abandoned ruined spaces?

Check

Gratuitous Tarantino level bloody messes?

I love it (because it's fun Janice)

Happiest with an open playground with the ability to be a chaotic destructive gremlin?

Oh yeah

Best fallout game and it needs a remaster so bad. I need an elder scrolls level remaster that makes it more beautiful than anyone thought possible. Love that game sm

Detox products are so silly to me, you need to clear your system???

Girl I'm lactose intolerant all I need to detox is a tub of ice cream and a night off of work

“How old are Jessie and James?”

alright i’m making a masterpost because i’m so tired. these never get notes. please give this one notes. i’m going to run through every single parroted argument. i’m going to run through every thought anyone engaged in this discourse has ever had. please give me notes. not because i want clout, i’m just so tired. so many of my posts get notes. i would trade them all for this post to get notes.

How old are Team Rocket?

25. They’re 25. 

But I thought they were teenagers? Lots of people have told me they’re 15/16.

so i’ve heard! i’m pleased to tell you exactly where that comes from.

1. this post, for some reason:

i have been on tumblr for 10 years now, and i never saw anyone debating their ages before this post started circulating. as you can tell by the low res memebase screencap, it was screenshotted and reposted all across social media until it became legend.

the ages you see in this bulbapedia screencap were edited. bulbapedia has either omitted their ages entirely, or put them at 25 for reasons we’ll discuss at the end of this post. 

because i’m a petty bitch, i googled the tumblr username of the person who added that bulbapedia screencap, found what their current URL was, and searched team rocket’s names on their blog. here’s what i discovered.

OP claims it wasn’t them who edited the ages–that they just found it like this. NOT sure i buy that, because I looked into it, and right around the time this post was made (January 8th, 2014) there was a random, unprecedented edit that erroneously put their ages at 15.

this resulted in mods locking the page, because this person was relentless. they would go on team rocket’s pages every day and try to edit the ages back down. again, i can’t prove this is the same person, but these edits happened within 24 hours of them adding to that post. this is, in my professional opinion, the biggest shift i ever saw in people talking about team rocket’s ages. but there are other things people bring up…

2. “Jessie said she was a teenager!”

she does this sometimes. here are the times she does this.

- In episode 218 of the original series, Plant It Now… Diglett Later, the following exchange happens:

This would make Jessie 12. This is a joke. A running gag in the show is younger characters calling Jessie variations on ‘old lady/old bat/old hag,’ and James gets this treatment to a lesser extent. Jessie, however, is incredibly vain and obsessed with youth/beauty, so she often lies to great extent about her age. When Jessie says something like “Oh, I’m 13 years old ;3c” it is meant to carry the same feeling as “Aren’t I the most gorgeous creature walking this very Earth?” To Jessie, calling her old = calling her ugly. Calling herself young = calling herself beautiful. This trope is common with her particular anime archetype–it is more of a Japanese thing, so while I understand it being lost on american audiences, it is NOT proof of her age. 

Right after this, Meowth calls her out on it, asking her where she learned that math, and Jessie angrily threatens him. It’s a joke.

- In episode 56 of the original series, The Ultimate Test, Jessie is in disguise at a Pokemon League qualification exam. When Ash starts giving her the ‘she looks vaguely familiar’ side-eye, she panics and starts muttering information about herself aloud. I will be using the original Japanese line for this one:

This is quoted constantly as proof that Jessie is a teenager–but she is blatantly stating false information about herself here because she’s in disguise and Ash is onto her. This is a false identity she’s crafted, marked even further by “I work as an idol.” That’s an actual profession she’s talking about, one she doesn’t work. Since Japanese Idols weren’t widely unknown to westerners at the time of this dub, her dub line is simply “Age: 17. Profession: Diva.” which makes it a little harder to read that she’s lying about who she is, but she is. The information she’s stating here is that of an alias. It is not her actual age or profession.

3. You literally just posted a screencap of James saying he should get a driver’s license. 

Okay, smart guy, that’s also jokes. The joke isn’t that he’s too young to drive–the joke is that he was a runaway at five years old and had his childhood & all his milestones taken from him because he defected from his abusive family in kindergarten. Also, he’s in the mafia and he just drives his damn balloon everywhere. The joke is that he’s a criminal driving without a license. The joke is breaking the law because he’s James. Its the same as when Jessie will casually say things like “Oh, that’s a good book! I’ve been meaning to shoplift one!” (EP157)

Also, it’s a dub-only line.

“Okay, I guess I see where you’re coming from. But why are you so sure they’re 25?”

Glad you asked!

You might notice the Bulbapedia article up there says “as of M02.″ M02 is the fandom shorthand for the second pokemon movie: Pokemon the Movie: 2000. It’s referring to one scene in particular, one that had its dialogue massively changed in the dub. Here, Jessie and James are addressing Ash & co.:

The subber condensed the point of what James/Kojirou actually says here–his sentence when translated literally is more like:

Jessie: You’re ten years too early.

James: And us, your elders, are five years too late.

this is… a very Japanese expression, but because Ash & co. are 10 years old, Jessie’s basically saying “You really don’t need to be thinking this deeply about romance until you’re 20.” and James is saying “And we’re past our prime at the tender age of 25…”

Some other times this expression has been used, regrettably, is when older men are perving on the female kids in this show–they’ll say things like “I’ll look forward to you in ten years.” Gross, I know, but the point is it’s a thing people say. 20 is considered the age you’re supposed to settle down and marry. 25, especially for women, is considered the age when you’re “off the market”–you missed your window and now no one wants you.

That ties back into Jessie’s thing about youth and beauty and how other characters call her an old lady. What they’re calling her originally is usually some variation on ‘oba-san.’ This term is so widely used in anime that there’s a TVTropes page on it. An english equivalent would be rolling your eyes and sarcastically uttering ‘whatever, grandma’ or, if you really want me to one-shot kill you, ‘ok boomer.’

Another derogatory term you hear in Japan for this age is ‘Christmas Cake.’ Simply put: Delicious to a point, but no one wants it after the 25th.

Yeah.

“That line is still super vague. Their ages could still be ambiguous.”

I regret to inform you that I am very autistic and I have prepared timelines and flowcharts for you.

Allow me to introduce you to The Birth of Mewtwo, an audio drama that released alongside the first movie and was never given an english localization. TBOM (the book of mormon) was about Mewtwo’s Origins that weren’t expanded upon in the movie. But, in order to get to the bottom of Mewtwo, the story had to get to the bottom of how Team Rocket got their hands on Mew’s DNA–and that all started with a Class-A Rocket Agent known simply as ‘Miyamoto.’

if you didn’t know, she’s Jessie’s mom.

TBOM is fully translated and available to listen to in multiple parts on youtube. It opens with Giovanni placing it in the timeline:

Twenty years prior to Pokemon: The First Movie, when this radio drama is said to take place. It then goes into a flashback, where we get to see Jessie’s mom in her pursuit of Mew.

Jessie’s already been born by the time of this flashback, meaning, with 100% certainty, that Jessie is at least 20 years old.

As time passes, Miyamoto stays on her quest to find Mew. Lost in the Andes mountains, she never stops sending reports back to Rocket HQ. Every few years, they trickle back in, detailing her progress. She keeps a picture of Jessie with her, often meandering aloud about what she anticipates Jessie is doing–the milestones Jessie is hitting, the life Jessie might have that her mom was never able to see. The last report she gives says “The daughter I left behind’s an old hag by now…” the word she uses here is, again, ‘oba’–25 years old and unmarried. Again, this is Jessie’s mom. She might be stranded in the mountains with little concept of time, but it’s clear Jessie is the one thing she never truly loses sight of.

“Okay. That sure is a lot of convincing evidence about Jessie. But Team Rocket has another human person in it you’re ignoring.”

Yeah nah I was prepared for that. I actually could’ve just whipped this out at the beginning but I am feeling incredibly spicy so I wanted to lay the law down and not deal with easy arguments about my special interest tonight. Here ya go!

- In episode 87 of the Sun & Moon anime, Filling the Light With Darkness!, Necrozma places an aura across the Alola Region. This blight makes Alolans lethargic, depressed, and unmotivated. This aura also ONLY affects the adults in Alola–leaving the burden on the kids & pokemon to figure out what’s going on. Ash & everyone in his class–including some who can be argued as teenagers–are entirely unaffected. 

Of the afflicted?

“Alright, one last question…why should I care?”

Because ever since that tumblr post started circulating, it’s been Stressful as all hell to be a Rocketblogger. I know that we all had a lot of fun watching the pokemon anime when we were kids, and we probably all have a lot of shared and fond memories of it. But, weirdly enough, because of that shared joy… Pokeani is the only fandom where people who don’t even watch the show anymore will try to explain to members of the fandom what our own lore is. And a lot of the time, they won’t listen to us when we correct them on their misinformation.

The reason this matters is because Rocketbloggers still to this day get called pedophiles & perverts for drawing/writing smutty art of our funny bad people. And when we try to shut them down pulling all this evidence out, people who have seen a handful of episodes of the show but understandably don’t have the time to watch 1100 episodes will pull the doth protest too much card. It’s annoying but more than anything, it’s exhausting.

So this is a masterpost I made with my autistic superpowers. I hope that, in the future, this one gets spread around more than the one claiming them to be kids. And I hope that maybe, if you’re a rocketblogger, when someone comes in your inbox trying to explain your favourite anime to you… you can quietly link them to this post and no longer have to rehash all the arguments we’ve been rehashing for years.

Thank you for reading. Reblog to save a tired Rocketblogger’s life.

CW: Death, Cheating, Grief, Mourning

I'm going to talk to the void cause shit happened among my community and I'm processing (if you know the people in the story, no you don't).

There's a unique parallel between death and the end of a relationship especially when felt in communities. Obviously both are the end of something, but there's more to it. Both are mourned under the conditions of their ending, murder victims are mourned far different than people who pass in their sleep after saying goodbye. Likewise I think that relationships are often mourned the same way.

This becomes especially poignant when it comes to relationships that die by cheating. These relationships ended by the greatest betrayal of hearts that a human can endure, and importantly revolve around the taking of consent. In these instances consent between partners is on the "contract" of being in a relationship. When you have those agreements which you promised to live by there is no guarantee other than trust that it will be upheld. This is why relationships are often scary but rewarding, it's scary to take a leap of faith like that but also deeply rewarding to trust someone that deeply. And when that trust is broken with cheating it breaks that trust and deals a mortal wound to a relationship.

Okay, so how does this relate to murder victims? When a person dies in that way they are denied agency, consent, and the ability to die on their own terms. When these things happen without someone doing this it's a tragedy and hurts more than a peaceful passing but there's extra pain when someone causes that loss.

The reason is trust, when you exist in a community there is a set of agreed upon rules that almost always include not to kill each other, it's about the most universal rule out there. The trust is what gets violated so that not only is a person gone but a deep and fundamental trust is broken. This is why I feel these types of mourning are similar.

The point to making this comparison is this, murders are felt among the whole community. They are mourned with the whole community. When people in your community experience cheating, support them and help them mourn just as you would a person lost because often times they lost the person most dear to them in the process.

I am a lesbian