The early Wyrm catches the book

So today I watched this interview with the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast and they demonstrate the phenomenon "space ship acting"

and they all go

and it just cracks me up, ESPECIALLY Sir Patrick Stewart

National Milk Day on January 11th

annoying as fuck

I think my favorite memes are the ones about insignificant but universally relatable things

This sounds fun. 🏦

my little cousin confidently declared that mother nature had a counterpart named daddy electric and i feel like this concept needs to be explored

Daddy Electric and Mother Nature sounds like a cute 70s act

I feel like I just got rickrolled over dialup.

Rickrolled by telegraph, more like.

Pros of re-reading your own fic

Cons of re-reading your own fic:

recipes will be like "prep time: 5 minutes" beloved it took me 10 just to get out the ingredience dont underestimate me

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

no offense, but what was the point of that cool older lady character in Spirited Away

except, you know, to make me question my sexuality at 12 during midnight rewatches as I looked at her weirdly pretty mouth and had Questions

!!! 

me, falling in love with every woman I see whose purpose is to eat and be pretty:

#her and Ursula from Kiki’s Delivery Service#the archetype is ‘lesbian who accidentally adopted this child’

I mean, I’m pretty sure Lin is supposed to represent what Chihiro’s future might be like if she accepted her role in the bath house and didn’t try to maintain her own identity and values. She’s not a bad person, but she’s hedonistic to exactly the extent that the bath house culture allows her to be as an employee and has no ambition beyond the system of favors, bribes, and petty intimidation between low-level workers. She’s traded her individuality and opportunity to better herself for the security of predictable exploitation and she doesn’t seem to regret it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Lin is the only other major character who looks human throughout the movie - I’m not certain she started out human, but I suspect she may have, and may have fully traded away her humanity. I do think it’s significant that she, unlike Chihiro and Haku, doesn’t reclaim her name at the end of the story.

She doesn’t want her independence or identity back. Her purpose is to eat and look pretty.

Alternate interpretation: I always thought Lin meant to be a comforting presence.

She’s the first bathhouse worker who is kind to Chihiro, helping her get her clothes and navigate her first work assignment and sneak food. One of the core themes of Spirited Away is finding your footing in a new and terrifying place, and Lin and Haku are key allies in Chihiro’s struggle to gain the skills and self-assurance she needs in order to thrive.

Lin’s human appearance helps us and Chihiro feel more sympathetic towards her . Her familiarity with the system of favors and bribes makes her appealing as a role model who can demystify Chihiro’s new environment for her. Unlike the more inhuman occupants of the bathhouse, Lin looks like someone Chihiro could become in the future, and that’s a good thing! She’s living proof that the bathhouse is not such a monstrous and scary place. Because Lin treats the bathhouse like home, Chihiro begins to see it as a home, too.

And once Chihiro starts to think of the bathhouse as her territory, she realizes that she has agency in this place as well. She uses its rules to her own advantage to free Haku and herself.

And that is the point of Chihiro’s journey in Spirited Away: it’s a metaphor for starting over in a new place and overcoming fear of the unfamiliar. After all, the frame story is Chihiro’s family moving to a new city. At the beginning of the movie, Chihiro is despondent, unhappy to be leaving her old friends behind. By the end, after making it through the spirit world, she’s taking a much more active role in helping her parents settle into their new home.

TLDR: Lin is there to be Chihiro’s friend.

These theories coexist really well, I think. Lin has accepted her place within this system, and that’s given her the confidence and experience to be a mentor for Chihiro. Because she knows the system, she can make things a little better for Chihiro.

Because Chihiro has a mentor and friend, she learns how to survive and even do well in the Bathhouse. It’s because of Lin that Chihiro is able to not accept her place within this system and instead fight back, and in the end to make things a little better for everyone.

There’s something there about community, and easing the path for those who come after you. Lin doesn’t regret her choices because they were the best choices she could make, and that’s okay. It’s not a tragedy. She got as far as she could get, and because she did, she’s there to help Chihiro get farther. 

And isn’t that what we’re all here for, in the end? To go as far as we can, and then give a hand up to those coming after us? It’s never a tragedy when children can go farther than their mentors ever could. That’s a triumph.

{ID 1 - 3 - Three gifs of Lin from Spirited Away, being generally cool 4 - reply from @/get-cuboned, “Her purpose is to eat and be pretty” 5 - gif from Sailor Moon of a girl with shining eyes

END ID}

Hey, don’t cry. Free online database of Japanese folk lore

Might I add, free database of mostly European folklore and myths

:0

Thank you!

Personal space? Nope - never heard of it.

Is that…… them

YALL THERES MORE TO THE SERIES

@theslowesthnery

Sooo this happened on tiktok

And the comments are gold

(+Extra)

I'm crying