Sometimes I get too in my head with my writing. Especially about my smut. I reread every last word with the most critical of eyes and think, Ooh is that cringe? Will that be too graphic? Will this word or phrase take people out of the scene?
And then I read a book. A published, hardcover, NYT bestsellers list book and…
Did you get that?
Someone looked at this sentence (likely more than one someone, tbh) and was like, ‘Yeah. We’ll print that.’
So the moral of the story, my fellow heathen smut writers, is that we’re fine.
As a matter of fact, we’re actually fucking amazing.
Spy x Family season 2 is here, so I’m gonna make Dylan’s magic peanut butter cookies (1984) to celebrate (since peanuts are Anya’s favorite food after all 🥜)
[audio transcription: So I’m sure we’ve all seen the videos recently of these things *squeezes the honking chicken several times* little chickens. Um. Well, so I discovered recently that if you pull the head off and then pull the noisemaker out it’s the right size that you can stick it in the end of a trombone mouthpiece. And then *deep breath* *the loudest, most horrible blatting noises* Yeah.]
Has science gone too far
At black mesa we say: “science will never go far enough” so to me no not yet
The reason “We (USamericans) should reduce our personal consumption of resources to save the planet!” won’t change anything, is that there is no “we.”
The average American does X amount of unnecessary shopping, but collapsing the wide range of wealth inequality into an average creates a vague call to action that sufficiently motivates 0 people.
Poor people feel guilty about buying stuff already. Even essential stuff. They have very little ability to adjust the amount they consume, and any adjustments that are possible would be almost negligible.
The moderately affluent and up vastly overestimate the impact of small adjustments to their lifestyle, and think of denying themselves any indulgence as extreme frugality. This is often the group that uses the “we” pronoun in the statement “We should consume less.”
Most of the USA’s carbon emissions come from heating and cooling and from cars. Since homelessness is treated as a crime, houses are not made sustainably or constructed smaller than a certain size, and it is virtually impossible to work or obtain basic needs without a car, there is a very solid and nearly impenetrable bottom to the scale of individual consumption.
So much consumption is near 100% impossible to opt out of, which means of course that the money that goes to it is never really yours, it just happens to pass through you on its way to its true destination.
This is obscured by the fact that the more privileged can ride a cushioned elevator below that bottom, play for as long as it takes for them to feel good about themselves, and take the elevator back up, and then write an article saying “See! I lived on 3 cents a day/lived in a 100sqft house/didn’t use electricity for a week, and here’s what I learned!”
Sure, you tried living a frugal life for a while. But you never doubted that the elevator would be there to take you back when you were tired of playing. You never felt the Fear. That’s why you learned nothing.
I have two additions that are personal anecdotes that fundamentally changed how I view this discussion.
I worked in a small, locally owned bookstore for a while. I created more garbage every single day at that job than I did in a week or more as a person outside of it. Books would usually come in recyclable cardboard boxes, but shrink wrapped together or using “recyclable” plastic bubble wrap (so much plastic is not actually recyclable, even if it has a recycle symbol on it). Toys and little gift items sold at the counter would almost ALL come in individually wrapped plastic that would be removed before display. Many items would come in a plastic wrap or shell made for display but were shipped in ANOTHER layer of plastic that keeps them clean during shipping (?? for no other discernable reason was the extra plastic on any of these things). Even products made of wood or other natural materials marketed as “sustainable” were most often shipped with plastic. There was ONE company we ordered from that shipped with all compostable/recyclable materials. It didn’t matter if I, personally, lived a literally zero waste life, I had to go to work and throw out a 15 gallon bag of trash every day.
A different job I had, I worked directly under someone who had both familial and personal wealth. He would regularly take business or personal trips and forget to bring something because he liked to pack light. He would always just buy a new one wherever he was or have amazon ship it directly to his hotel. Clothes, toothbrush, sunscreen, normal stuff you might forget and could easily still be used when you come home. Not that he would bring half of it home, he’d just throw it out. Also laptop and phone chargers, new luggage because he bought some souvenir that was too big, shoes, a whole ass new laptop. The worst was when he went to Burning Man and basically bought everything to decorate a tiny apartment - numerous pillows, blankets, lights, decor, plus camping mattress and equipment. I know he didn’t bring any of it home with him, I can only hope he dropped it all at a goodwill and not a dumpster. I had never met someone who consumed so conspicuously. There are absolutely people who could benefit from being beat over the head with “conspicuous consumption” messaging, but if they’ll even listen, they’ll only hang their head and feel bad and do a week-long zero waste challenge and then go right back to how they lived before. I can’t help but think they would benefit most from simply being taxed into a more middle class existence.
I couldn’t have asked for a better addition.
Like yes this is exactly it! Some people DO need the message that they should stop consuming and wasting so much goddamn STUFF, but the people who genuinely are going out and buying ‘fast fashion’ by the cartload every other week, or who have a closet with 150 pairs of shoes or who install giant TVs in every room of their house or who go on vacation in an expensive resort 4 times a year, appear totally invulnerable to actually transformative self-reflection. Responsibility on behalf of humanity rolls off them like water off a duck.
These people are, however, INCREDIBLY comfortable with “”“realizing”“” that there’s a problem with what they value and the way they live, if they pretend that the problem is universal and the responsibility is collective.
This strategy is ingenious: it makes them come out looking better than everyone else because in the fantasy world it constructs, everyone is compulsively buying and throwing away prodigious heaps of junk, and they are the noble person who has reflected on themselves enough to own up.
So they love to say “We, as Americans, consume and waste too much,” even though they would rather be burned alive than say “I consume and waste too much.”
See, I don’t usually like to think that Hashirama would’ve killed Tobirama if Madara hadn’t given the choice between Tobirama and Hashirama, because those kinds of thoughts usually only come from the anti Hashirama side of the fandom which I could not agree less with if I tried.
But.
The fact remains that Hashirama at some point went from “I will protect my last brother at any cost” to “I will kill anyone who threatens Konoha, even if it were my brother or even my own children” and it’s never fucking shown when that change exactly happened.
Was it when he reached adulthood and he realized for himself that the bigger picture—in his case, peace—matters more than anything else? Was it after Konoha was built and he became Hokage and his responsibilities grew? Was it after Madara left and his heart grew cold?
I imagine it must’ve been a mixture of being Hokage and therefore having more people to protect besides his direct family, and Madara’s betrayal that must’ve struck him pretty badly that he let his heart grow so cold to the point he’d rather kill his best friend/brother/child if they in any way threatened the village resp. peace as a whole than attempting to talk with them first.
But the question remains: What would have Hashirama done if Madara had demanded Tobirama’s life with no other option? I don’t like to imagine that he actually would’ve killed Tobirama, but as much as I devour fics in which Hashirama goes absolutely batshit after his brother dies with relish, canonically speaking, peace would always be Hashirama’s biggest goal. And it’s driving me utterly nuts that I cannot for the life of me say how Hashirama would’ve reacted in this scenario.
Anyway, Idk where I was going with this, I just had to think once again about this and what a fascinating character Hashirama actually is and how little we know about him at the end of the day…
I have a headcanon that Hashirama & Tobirama's mother was a Hatake, so if Hashi&Tobi could somehow see/jump through time and meet Kakashi, they'd be so proud of their baby cousin. So... Draw something relating to that?
HAhaha yes…. YES….!! Rant ahead, and it’s not lightly that I use the r-word btw, but this is a real one. not edited, not coherent, just words i typed while eating rice <3
one aspect about them i love
Stone Cold Bitch Badass. Nobody did it like Madara, and no one ever will again.
one aspect i wish more people understood about them
i actually ended up talking to myself about this bulletpoint for like 3 days straight, which is why this ask took longer to answer (thanks for your patience!).
So, Hashirama and Madara’s friendship symbolizes being able to make common ground and establish peace with one’s enemy, and (more importantly) one’s kin’s enemies.
Both of them stand for the Konoha Founding Principle of standing up for and protecting your precious people, even at the cost of your own life.
Often known as the Will of Fire.
Both of them had to become vulnerable with each other, and “expose their guts” in both a literal and kinda figurative way, in order to create this common ground of trust and mutual understanding. In other words, a “bond.”
In keeping with the tradition for Ashura’s line, this all works out rather well for Hashirama. He loses brothers to the war, but is able to replant seeds of love and trust. His grief hurts but does not consume him.
And in keeping with tradition for Indra’s line, this does not work out so nicely for Madara. He too loses brothers, all of them. He attempts to renew those bonds and seeds of love and trust with others in the Village, but finds himself unable to do so. His grief and trauma are so deep, they eventually overshadow everything else and consume his life purpose, even to the point where he decides to go to war with and try to kill his replacement pseudo-brother, Hashirama.
Hashirama’s main symbol/metaphor is plants. When part of a plant dies, in most cases, the rest of the plant continues to live. The fundamental thing that plant needs in order to survive is for the health and safety of the roots to be protected and maintained. In Konoha shinobi/Will of Fire terms, this is akin to saying “It doesn’t matter if we individual soldiers die on a mission, so long as the people we’re protecting back home survive.”
Madara’s main symbol/metaphor is a flame. No matter how large or small it is, if a flame is extinguished, that’s it. There’s no “root” of a flame that still needs to be protected. It’s done. It’s all over. It’s just a wet soggy mess of ash, and a continuously painful memory of lost and irrecoverable warmth.
For the Ashura-type, there’s always more sunshine, more plants. More life, more laughter, more renewal. Even after deep and painful loss. The future has uncertainty in it, and there may be some things happening down underground in the dirt and soil that these types don’t know about, and don’t want to know about, but life will go on.
For the Indra-type, there is only fleetingness and loss. Flames so big and bright that they scare off others. Moonlight that is always being overshadowed as soon as it reaches its brightness reaches its peak. The only thing constant is the return of the dark.
These two types are fundamentally different. Not incompatible, but oppositional, more often than not.
The Konoha “Will of Fire” calculus that we see characters using over and over in the show (“I will never let my comrades die!” “That’s my ninja way!” “Protect the King,” “The hole in your heart can be filled by other people,”) is an intentionally vague, fill-in-the-blank moral code. Whatever the heroic character needs to tell himself in order to win is what is ‘right,’ under this ethos.
Or that’s how Madara sees it, anyway. And his type.
And all those promises sound so offensively empty and hollow in a graveyard full of your closest kin.
If Hashirama or any of his inheritors had understood that about Madara, they wouldn’t have had so many irreconcilable clashes. The fundamental problem of both the Will of Fire and of Konoha in general is that they tried to build a village of sunlight.
But what happens when the sun goes down, and the moon comes up, and dark, difficult decisions must be made?
Anyway, I think Madara should have been created and been put in charge of Konoha’s elite ROOT ANBU division from day one. He would have been pretty brutal, but effective. He had a very strong moral conscience of his own, and didn’t need the patriotic truisms that other shinobi relied on. Hashirama should never have offered him the position of Hokage. Madara should have run the shadow side of Konoha, and Tobirama should have succeeded him. Somebody else should have become the second Hokage, preferably an Uchiha like perhaps Kagami.
If this had happened, Madara might not have left, and Danzo sure wouldn’t have ended up in charge of ROOT, and Itachi wouldn’t have happened, and oh, by the way, Obito/Tobi wouldn’t have happened either.
So that’s why I think the show is fundamentally complete without the use of aliens, and Black Zetsu should have remained an embodiment of the “Will of Madara,” and there couldn’t have been a better way to close the loop than by forcing a final confrontation between the “Will of Fire” (Naruto’s ninja way of forgiveness and common-ground-seeking with enemies) and the “Will of Madara” (Sasuke’s ninja way of justice and retribution for the dead). Both of them are right and both of them are wrong, and it’s been that way since before the start of the Village, and the only way to close the division between the two is to recognize that the real danger is in adhering blindly to an ideology, rather than finding a way to honor both sides.
The show was actually almost there, during the part where Naruto learns the names of the tailed beasts and their jinchuuriki. What Kurama hated most was being a slave to Madara’s will, which fits since what the Ninetails symbolized since literally the first episode was the untamed spirit of vengeance and hatred, and so to really come full circle on this, all Kishimoto really needed to do was write a scene between Naruto, Madara, Hashirama, Sasuke, and Kurama, (and these five people only) where Naruto does his Talk no Jutsu on all four of them and explains to Hashirama that Hashirama never really understood Madara’s guts, not the way that Naruto understands Sasuke’s, for example, because if he had, then he would have recognized how hot that fire of hatred and vengeance burned, it was literally Kurama’s internal engine for decades, but look, even Kurama is more than the sum of his hatred, he’s a living being just like one of your plants, but his roots need tending under the surface, the painful place where he experienced rejection and loss and grief needs recognition and tending, as do all of ours, even if the Indra-type don’t show it on the surface, and even if they don’t even know it themselves, and yeah… where was i going with this
God, is any of this long rant even making sense, idk, but a lightbulb went off in my head while I was bike-riding and thinking abotu what i wish people knew about madara, and the plant imagery around grief and being able to move on was so strong, but basically hashirama is a plant and can regrow limbs but madara is a misunderstood little moonbeam who never did anything wrong, kinda, and maybe one day i’ll figure out how to write this out in a coherent and interesting way
one (or more) headcanon(s) i have about this character
Mama’s boy.
Would probably be a professional athlete, in a modern AU. Or a CEO of a major corporation.
Very efficient and independent thinker. Never ever late, ever, anywhere, no matter how small the appointment.
one character i love seeing them interact with
Hashirama. Their friendship is so sweet and (for a time) gives the impression of being invincible.
one character i wish they would interact with/interact with more
Kurama. Just love this duo.
one (or more) headcanon(s) i have that involve them and one other character
Was sexually and romantically attracted to Hashirama since day one, but lived in a society where he would never be allowed to acknowledge or act on those feelings.
Things would have gone better if he had, though. A lot better. For everyone.
