So emphatically would: Juliette from Beast of Hadingley Hill 💚
@squigg-les She’s delightful as fuck. I would make her thousands of breakfasts and give her too many books about forests, animals, and obscure regional foods.
I also know a very nice hot spring in Costa Rica she’d like. Well, that anyone who enjoys being self-care-soup would like, but all the same. 💦
I’m re-reading the whole thing on Webtoons for like the 4th time. The characters are precious and infuriating and freakishly lovable.
(🥺 now 😚)
It’s beautiful. Please go read it. Quit your job and read it.
I love that everyone has agreed that Logan refuses to call her blind al but will call her Althea instead like we all just agreed he is a gentleman
Al will cuss Wade with every cussword she knows in 4 sentences at 7 in the morning over breakfast, then turn to Logan and give that soft gentle old lady “oh thank you for my coffee dear, you’re such a doll” sweettalk in the same breath
Logan was in that apartment for 5 minutes and she picked a favorite and it was not her Roommate of nearly 10 years
Al and Logan bond HEAVILY over shit talking wade every second of every day to his face and are so nice and polite to each other, they probably play Scrabble and bridge together or watch old reruns of TV shows from 50 years ago or some shit, they’re both old and they both love giving Wade a hard time
Those two are inseparable, Wade made a mistake introducing them, you know I’m right
hey i said this in a group chat earlier and honestly it fucks, so i’m gonna post it here too
Feel disgusted by something? Don’t immediately act on it. Deconstruct your disgust!
Be just a little curious about it. Why do you feel disgusted by something? What is it about the thing that disgusts you? Is it the whole that disgusts you, or just a part? Do you feel disgusted because you’re supposed to? Has someone told you to feel disgusted? Are you just disgusted because something looks unfamiliar to you? Do other people seem disgusted or are there people opposing your disgust (or do they, on the flipside, like it?). Is there a cultural context you might be missing? More importantly, could there be biases like racism, sexism, classism, homo- or trans-phobia at play? Is the object of your digust actually causing harm? Does someone benefit from your disgust politically?
Disgust is a powerful emotion, but one that deserves a lot of self-reflection. It’s easily weaponised and often deeply flawed.
…is this supposed to apply to finding wet moldy produce in the back of the fridge, because I don’t see how, and if it isn’t supposed to apply to that, how are users supposed to tell when to use it?
Mould is an excellent place to go to talk about the application of interrogated disgust. There are a lot of cases were foods are intentionally laced with mould for the flavour it produces. We control rot and mould in a lot of ways in food - kimchi, stilton, sour cream, they’re all produced by allowing things to rot in specific ways. And some ways are more blatently obvious than others! You can look at stilton and see the green penicillin moulds used to create it, whilst you might look at bread and go ‘this isn’t going off’ - but yeasts are creating alcohol and CO2 inside the bread, which is a sort of spoilage.
In relation to food in the back of the fridge, absolutely throw it out. You’re not harming anyone by not wanting to eat food you know is past its best. But there are cultures who ferment foods in ways we might immediately balk at because your brain connects the mould in your fridge and the sensible ‘probably not good to eat’ warning with something harmless, and that’s the danger of disgust.
You might genuinely find them disgusting. Icelanders can do what they want, nothing about kæstur hákarl (fermented greenland shark)* appeals to me and I think I’m fine in saying I’m disgusted by it. All theirs.
But, you can see how this could be weaponised, yeah? There are plenty of cultures and peoples where ‘they’re disgusting, vermin-like’ were used as legitimate reasons to oppress and destroy. In that case, their food - harmless and controlled as the spoilage might be - might be used as evidence to prove their point UNLESS you interrogate your initial gut reaction to their fermented foods.
Back to our questions - Does the person telling you about the fermented foods have an agenda? Yes, they do, bigotry. Is your unfamiliarity playing in? Yeah, you’ve never actually tasted the food, you don’t know what it’s like. Is there cultural context you’re missing? Might be! Again, in the case of kæstur hákarl, Iceland is a hard place to grow food and you make edible what you can. Has someone told you to feel disgusted? Yes! Do other people disagree with the speaker? Yes - the culture that created the food think it’s swell!
In this case, you might want to hold back on acting on your disgust. There’s enough rhetorical evidence here to suggest it might be displaced.
(* I’m using kæstur hákarl as an example because the sort of strongly fermented fish products scandinavians make are a good example of food you might not want to eat that doesn’t have any other strongly anti-Scandinavian things attatched to it. I can discuss a theoretical here in a way that means I don’t have to walk into someone’s pre-existing biases. White Scandinavians don’t have to worry about it, no-one is actually using kæstur hákarl to oppress Icelanders.)
I had things like kink culture, purity culture ect. in my mind when I wrote the original post, and you might be able to see now how weaponised disgust is used against fandom and kinksters. A gut-level disgust is what drives a lot of homophobia and transphobia too, when you scratch down deep enough.
I hope that gives you some more context on why I wrote what I did and how you might apply it to the real world!
It’s a good example of how easy it is to assume “deconstruct” or “interrogate” means “throw out” or “disregard” or even “treat in the opposite way you would otherwise.
…It’s something that I think is both interpreted and intended - a lot of the time, someone will say “you should question X”, but really they mean “You should decisively be against X.” Honestly, it’s kind of rare for someone to say Question and really mean it, like what OP is doing. Refreshing!
he is eating a good brand of vet-approved kitten food, and is simply a little freak who likes licking varying surfaces. other cats suck on blankets, pangur gums at astroturf and (back when she had teeth) would chew on plastic like it was the finest of venison.
I need to be able to post about the silly things my animals do without people pathologizing it and crying abuse.
I think in the same way there’s a 90/10 rule with horror and comedy (horror works best when it’s 90% horror and 10% comedy and vice versa) there’s a 90/10 rule for some relationships in fiction that’s like. Wholesome and fucked up. A good friendship is at its most compelling when it’s also 10% a bit fucked up. Fucked up relationship is at its most compelling when there’s at least 10% of something actually sweet and substantive within. Do you get me
