Just a head’s up, when meat eaters say things like “I’m glad you’re not like most vegans you’re cool about it” what they really mean is “I’m glad you’re silent about animal cruelty so I can eat animals without having to think about it.”
No actually what they likely mean is “I’m glad you’re not like PETA and compare women’s bodies to beef and pork” or “I’m glad you’re not the type of asshole who blames poor people for not being able to afford healthy vegan foods instead of getting upset at the grocery chains who throw out tons and tons of perfectly good produce”
see also: “im glad youre not one of those vegans who compares the meat industry to the holocaust”. anti-semetic, sexist, racist, and classist rhetoric is unfortunately quite common among vegans and it’s disingenuous as hell to act like having an issue with that is silencing vegans.
Also “I’m glad you aren’t one of those vegans who thinks I should put my health on the line”
“I’m glad you don’t harass me over my life choices because you’re a decent fucking human being who realizes that throwing humans under the bus so you can have an ego trip is a shitty thing to do”
Also: I’m glad you’re not one of those vegans who lies about what’s in food they’re feeding me when I ask about my allergens so that I don’t have to risk literally dying
“i’m glad you’re not literally blaming global climate change on me, personally, for liking cheese while corporations dump pollution directly into the ozone by the ton because it saves them a few dollars”
“i’m glad you’re not getting on a moral high horse about animal cruelty while ignoring the human rights abuses that go into farming your vegan faves like quinoa”
THAT LAST ONE
“I’m glad you’re not one of those vegans who compares the choice to eat meat to the choice to rape someone”
I wish i was fucking lying but two different vegans argued with me why that was okay
“im glad you dont just choose the topic of food as a means to boost your own ego despite the fact that what you eat is the result of even more suffering than the meat industry has since foreign farmers who grow your greens are horribly abused and you think you deserve a soy cookie just because you eat something different.”
One really interesting thing about the TAZ: Balance universe is that the skills you possess are very much linked to how you acquired those skills and especially the person who taught you them. We see this first when Merle loses his battle-axe proficiency, and along with that loses his memories of training with the battle-axe. And it’s presumably why, in losing their Starblaster memories, Magnus, Merle, and Taako go from incredibly proficient to level 1, even though normal logic would dictate that they should only lose the memories of how they learned their magic/fighting/clerical skills, not those skills themselves.
I think this plays really nicely into the theme of bonds being incredibly powerful forces, so much that losing these bonds means losing actual physical abilities that you learned from them. So much that Taako learning a cooking skill (how to make tacos) from somebody else literally helps save the world. Characters in the TAZ: Balance universe aren’t just sheets of paper with their abilities on them; they’re made up of the relationships they have with other people.
In The Stolen Century, the narrator says “Our capacity for love increases with each person we cross paths with throughout our lives” — but it’s not just the capacity for love. It’s literally our ability to do anything that increases the more that we form bonds with peoople.
And oh jeez, that’s pretty sweet.
also some bonds are so strong that they transcend memories and time. think about it, lucrecia gave everyone a home they could be happy while she tried to handle things herself. then during year when she was organizing the bureau of balance for the first time, everyone found each other. Taako, magnus and merle found each other and they even managed to find barry and lup! they had no clue who any of each other were and their stories from what they knew were as different as one could possibly think but they still managed to find each other. bonds beyond memories. bonds beyond space. bonds beyond time. bonds so strong that in the face of resistance and against all odds, they stood strong together.
kinda sucks for Zelda that she went to three sacred springs and heard nothing whereas Link can roll up to any dinky old goddess statue and Hylia’s just like, “oh hey man, what’s good, got any orbs?”
