Also on a side note; y'all really hate fictional ships so much y'all gotta threaten to spread around real csem? There’s so many more morally humane things you could’ve done than do this. Like for example; not even talking to mafu. Acting like mafu exists and moving on with your life, but you just willingly chose one of the worst possible things to do. You talk big on how you want to protect children from the “big scary mean proshippers” but you’re the ones putting them in harm’s way to begin with. The anti movement is therefore not about making kids safe (hell it never was). It’s about scaring and oppressing a group of people they find weird (like the rest of this fucked up society/world). Antis are all sick fucks if they think anyone deserves this because they like 2(or more) fictional characters together as a ship.
What we commonly like to say: “what we like in fiction does not affect our in real life morals.” And hell yeah it’s correct. Antis just showed that. They’re really over here spewing this purity culture BS about fiction while committing real life heinous acts to anyone who disagrees with them.
the thing that strikes me about this latest wave of anti-trans hate and legislation in the U.S. is that it feels like it’s *kind of* about trans people but really about a fear fundamental to all conservatives that a day will one day come when they will no longer be able to completely control their children
american conservatism is a death cult. trump made this incredibly obvious but it’s been trending that way for a while. it is spiteful, bigoted, cruel, morally bankrupt, and all evidence in support of it has either been fabricated, forged, deceptively edited, or disproven. being conservative goes against a fundamental human desire to be kind to those around you and I think on some level conservatives know this, and thus, they know that the only reason children would subscribe to these values is if they are indoctrinated into them with cult-like single-mindedness
Conservatives have been pushing for homeschooling for decades, they’ve been raising concerns about teaching evolution in schools since the early 20th century, they’ve made wedge issues out of sex ed, history textbooks, and now gay and trans teachers. They want a world in which children are taught to be conservative from birth and any attempt to teach them anything else is a literal crime. They want this because they know, deep down inside, that most children would not agree with them unless they were literally brainwashed into it.
also worth pointing out that most child abuse (sexual or otherwise) takes place within a “traditional” family structure or a “traditional” religious institution and I have to wonder if people who want to abuse kids have a fundamental investment in preserving strict hierarchies in which adult men have unquestioned authority over children
Like I’m not saying *every* conservative is like this but perhpas their emphasis on “groomers” is a wee bit of projection
Anyway abolish the family trans rights are human rights institute fully automated luxury gay space communism now
This tweet sums it up pretty well:
This is another big reason why most conservatives bitch about higher education; a lot of younger people (myself included) undo their conservative upbringing brainwashing after being exposed to new ideas, meeting new and diverse people, and getting a higher-quality education when they attend college.
This is also, of course, why conservative lawmakers constantly seek to undermine public education and make it shittier so the kids who go through it are more ignorant. An educated and well-informed populace is the GOP’s worst nightmare.
John Mulaney openly platforms and supports transphobia
Guillermo Del Toro signed a petition calling for a child r*pist to be allowed at a film festival
Chris Pratt is one of the top donors to an ultra homophobic/transphobic mega church
Clint Eastwood is a shameless, violent racist
Lin Manuel Miranda and his family openly support and help fund PROMESA, a federal law that allows the united states to forcibly colonize and gentrify puerto rico to this day
I could spend YEARS listing every shitty garbage celebrity and why theyre so awful, meanwhile I could probably count any “unproblematic faves” on one hand.
Is it okay to like the media these people create/star in? Absolutely. The shale of water is my favorite film. I enjoyed guardians of the galaxy. I think spiderverse is one of the greatest animated movies ever made.
BUT LIKING THE THINGS THESE PEOPLE ARE IN DOES NOT MEAN YOU HAVE TO IDOLIZE THEM!!! im not saying this because im mad at folks for doing it, I just want yall to stop building yourself up to be hurt. Because I was like this too, and finding out stuff about my favorite celebrities used to genuinely upset me. But now I know better and I want yall to too. Because you’ll be happier people once you remember that THESE PEOPLE ARE ALL PIECES OF SHIT AND YOU DO NOT NEED TO LOVE THEM TO LOVE ART THAT INCLUDES THEM.
see my past glimpses at the capri fandom made me think that that iconique TM line “a kingdom or this” would be in some sappy romantic scene where laurent and damen finally realized that they loved each other on equal footing for the first time, blah blah, violin music golden light and shit but. they are literally just fucking. that man said
my kingdom
my people
my duty
my freedom
the chance to ask my beloved brother why he sold me into slavery when ive never done anything to hurt him
vs.
mean blond twink who tortured me but is bottoming for me rn
If you’ve played or watched Metal Gear Solid 4 you’ll know I’m not exaggerating when I say that Hal Emmerich and Naomi Hunter have one of the most painful on-screen romances ever written.
You can chalk this up to the usual; Kojima being terrible at writing women, awkward and cringe-worthy dialogue, forced heterosexual romance… While I do think that these things contribute to the reasons that seemingly no one likes their “romance”, I mostly blame the body language of the characters (which, with motion capture being used to its fullest extent in this game, was anything but unintentional) and the way that they interact.
Metal Gear Solid 4 has a lotgoing on during briefings, mostly due to the fact that unlike the rest of the game, these cutscenes are interactive, and you, the player, are able to control the Mk. II to explore the Nomad’s interior. This means that every character on the aircraft is constantly doing something in the background even if the camera isn’t focused on them. I’ve already made a post showing several of these non-verbal interactions off between Sunny/Snake/Otacon here, and that’s what got me thinking about one specific briefing.
Act 3: Third Sun.
Due to this being a deep dive into the game and Naomi and Otacon’s characters, there will be endgame MGS4 spoilers, as well as MGS2 spoilers. So there’s your warning if you haven’t played or finished the game(s) yet.
Going back to replay this game for my third playthrough, I found myself able to analyze whycertain things were being done instead of just wanting to vomit whenever Naomi grabbed Otacon’s hand. Because if you’ve played through the game, you knowthat Naomi was using Otacon, and that everything she did was deliberate to try and dump the USB stick on him. She’s intentionally being forceful and escalating things fast because she has no time to lose.
So let’s start at the beginning.
Naomi puts her hand over Otacons; he looks to her, pushes his glasses up his nose and then moves his hand away. He moves it to where she can’t possibly reach it again. This is a clear rejection of her advances, and Naomi shifts and tucks her hair behind her ear because she knows that she messed up and made things awkward.
Here, she grabs his hand again. Notice the way he tenses up immediately at the contact and how he won’t look directly at her.
And again, here, he avoids eye contact and slouches over.
This is submissive behavior; Otacon is making himself appear smaller and less imposing. This to me is the biggest indicator of his previous reactions not being due to nervousness alone. When you start to watch the way that Otacon holds himself throughout this cutscene, it becomes apparent that this nervousness is the result of fear, not attraction.
Every reaction to Naomi’s advances has been to reject her physically, but he still can’t verballyspeak up about it. He’s withdrawing into himself and avoiding outright saying that it makes him uncomfortable. We know that Otacon typically deals with his problems by running away, not facing them head on.
The way that the second half of the briefing plays out is set by these important shots. As she stands behind the oblivious Otacon, we see quite plainly what Naomi’s main motivation is.
She’s a femme fatale; she fools unsuspecting men into complying by using her body to get what she wants. She’s got the USB key dangling in her cleavage, in plain sight the whole time.
She’s planning on handing it over to Otacon now that they’re “alone” together, and she’s determined to get her way no matter what she has to do.
And yet she’s being rejected over and over again.
I’ll take a moment here to mention that there are implications in canon that Otacon is a victim of CSA (child sexual abuse) and grooming, and I’ll be discussing that, because I believe it heavily ties into this scene.
You can argue that because his birth year hadn’t yet been retconned (since Peace Walker stated he was born in 1980 instead of the 70s), that his affair with Julie was legal (at the time of MGS4′s release), but even so, the way that he talks about her is far from positive when he recounts the story in MGS2. He specifically says “she seduced me”. He was young, vulnerable, and Julie took advantage of that, regardless of whether or not he was underage at the time.
With Emma’s picture on the monitor, I think the parallels that this specific scene has to Otacon and Julie’s affair were made on purpose. Naomi asks him if Emma is his girlfriend, and he says no, she’s his sister. This is essentially what Emma has asked of him as she lay dying in his arms; to love her romantically. But he’s incapable of thinking of her as anything other than his little sister.
The trauma of his childhood is deeply rooted in him - the guilt he’d felt for abandoning Emma and for what he’d done to his father - no matter how terrible Huey may have been, it doesn’t change the fact that Otacon knowsthat he played a large role in his death (”It was my fault. All my fault.”) He ran away from home because he didn’t know how to deal with the consequences of the affair, which in his mind, were all his fault.
Heknewthat his relationship with Julie was wrong, and he knows that this relationship that Naomi is trying to initiate is wrong.
Naomi is also inserting herself as Sunny’s adoptive mother, filling the maternal role that she was “missing” from growing up without a mother (in case you missed it, there’s a framed picture of Naomi hanging next to Olga in the kitchen at the end of the game to drive the point home). Even the conversation that she and Otacon have about Sunny needing to go outside is extremely parental, with Otacon clearly seeing much of himself in Sunny’s reclusive lifestyle. Unbeknownst to Naomi, she’s putting herself in a position similar to the one Julie had been in.
All the while, Naomi is trying to hide the USB key because she’s realized that her target has shifted to Sunny; she’s the real genius, not Otacon, and so what does she do?
She hides the USB. Casually masks her movements by playing along.
Naomi goes in for the kiss notbecause she’s still trying to get Otacon to trust her, but because it gives her an opportunity to make a smooth getaway without raising suspicion. Just watch her hands as soon as Otacon turns around; it’s immediate. Her face is emotionless, and she barely seems phased by his rejection at this point.
If you watch Otacon in the background, you can see him touching his face and then going to push his glasses up out of habit - even though now they aren’t on his face.
He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, he’s looking for some sort of comforting action to do because he’s panicking and reliving the trauma he experienced as a teen/young adult. The way he keeps reaching for his glasses makes you rethink the action in the first gif of this post. Sure, he seemed a bit nervous in the moment, but now it’s apparent that he’s also experiencing something else, it’s not just a flustered “oh gosh, she grabbed my hand”.
I believe that at this point, Otacon suffers from C-PTSD (complex post traumatic stress disorder) related to the similarities between Naomi and Julie, and he finally recognizes what is going on.
If we also look at his infatuation with Sniper Wolf from MGS1 - which Snake says sounds like Stockholm Syndrome - we can see that Otacon has a history of (at least) borderline-abusive relationships with women.
When a victim of abuse is faced with a similar situation, it’s not uncommon for them to just give in, attempting to try and make it easier on themselves. It’s a defense mechanism that a lot of the time ends up hurting the victim more in the end, but makes it more bearable in the moment. With his past trauma, he’s caught in a pattern that he’s unable to break out of, because that’s all he knows. It’s like seeing a close friend get back together with an abusive ex over and over despite knowing that their partner is abusive. But he’s still desperately trying to avoid it happening again, and that’s why he keeps rejecting Naomi.
The way that Naomi jumps up into his personal space, still desperately trying to “seduce” him shows how desperate she is (and how exasperated she is when he turns away yet again).
It’s this moment where he finally, verballysays no in that “Goodnight.” He closes the door with finality.
And then he’s standing outside the helicopter looking relieved that he managed to navigate the situation without giving in.
Of course, Naomi pulls him into the helicopter right after this, and the scene ends with the implication that she “succeeded” in seducing him, which on top of leaving a bad taste in my mouth for several reasons, is yet another case of Otacon getting taken advantage of and subsequently fucked over.
Naomi then slips away thanks to her calculated “compliment” about him looking better with his glasses off, and then somewhere along the line, the game suddenly acts like their relationship was some run-of-the-mill mutual romance.
Comparing these two to Naked Snake and EVA from MGS3, who have a similar dynamic, we can start to see a few things more clearly. Why does Snake reject EVA? First and foremost, it’s because he’s got a mission to complete. Yeah, he’s also completely oblivious to a lot of it, but it’s not like he doesn’t find her attractive with all the ogling he does. Otacon on the other hand has no real reason to reject Naomi; he’s not out on the field, and he doesn’t suspect that she’s got some sort of hidden agenda.
So then why was he so opposed to her advances? Why did he eventually give in and believe her?
He was mercilessly coerced into believing that she loved him.
If we bring it back to MGS2 again…
Otacon’s entire series arc is about him feeling unloved and neglected, and (as we see time and time again, with Julie, Wolf, you could even argue his job with Armstech and later Philanthropy, with Snake, and finally Naomi herself) he attaches himself to anyone who shows him the love and attention he so desperately craves, no matter how damaging it is to him, and no matter how clear it is that he’s just being used.
Leo has some doubts during a brutal torture session.
Title taken from the song Sick Thoughts by Lewis Blissett.
Prompt 1: Snitches Get Stitches for @amonthofwhump‘s March Madness challenge.
(tw torture, violence, blood, gore, emotional manipulation, flashbacks, sort-of past character death, implied mind control, blink-and-you’ll miss it CSA references)
