In which Thor is oblivious to all the awkward in the room… [x]
broke: thor doesn’t notice the awkward
woke: thor is so strong and cheerful that he believes he can just steamroller over all the awkward and make it go away
bespoke: thor is perfectly aware of the awkward and very much enjoying it
You can’t convince me that Thor isn’t perfectly aware of the awkward
Thor milking this moment for all the Awkward he can get out of it because he’s that extra is a Good Take
People constantly think that Thor is kinda clueless, but he always knows what he’s doing
anyone who thinks Thor isn’t fully aware of exactly what he’s doing is someone who’s never been an elder sibling out to absolutely mortify a younger sibling and knowing exactly how to go about doing it to best and greatest effect
here’s a hard pill to swallow: abuse does not just exclusively occur in romantic or family relationships. friends can be just as toxic to your physical and mental wellbeing as a partner or a family member. also, the aftermath of being in an abusive friendship can be just as traumatizing as any other abusive relationship. don’t boo me i’m right
for some reason people don't know this but toxic friends can mirror all the same behaviors as seen in an abusive romantic partner. i will use my own story of my ex-high school best friend who abused me for several years. signs of abuse include but are not limited to:
Humiliating or embarrassing you - my ex-best friend LOVED to try and make me squirm in any way possible to see my reaction. once she went up to a guy and told him i had a crush on him to watch me struggle to explain myself
Unreasonable jealousy - if i so much as went to hang out with any of my other friends i would have to let my ex-best friend know beforehand. i pretty much had to get her permission to see other people or she would be convinced that i was ‘ditching her forever’
Refusing to communicate - if she was ever angry with me or upset she would never tell me that so we could talk about it. instead, she would ignore me or respond to all my texts with ‘k’ or ‘ya’ and i would have to struggle for hours to get her to tell me what was wrong
Ignoring or excluding you - she would ignore me for weeks at a time as a ‘punishment’ knowing that it would eat me up inside wondering what i did wrong. i still remember spending nights wide awake crying in bed because i didn’t know what to do
Mean jokes or constantly making fun of you - she would constantly poke fun at my appearance and personality to where my self-confidence plummeted. god help me if i ever said anything about her though
Saying things like “If you don’t _____, I will_____.” - she would constantly threaten to kill herself if i didn't do what she wanted
Guilt trips - she never apologized once to me in our seven-plus years of being friends. not once. every time we argued i would be the one who apologized in the end. once when i stood up to her and called her out on treating me like crap she would make up a story of how her life was miserable and that i was making things worse
Isolating you from friends and family - been mentioned before but she was extremely jealous of all my other relationships and would override my plans with other people on purpose and would guilt trip me if i still went to see them
Domination and control - also mentioned before but i needed her permission on everything. if i joined any group or extracurricular activity without her knowing she would be furious
Extreme moodiness - after ignoring me for weeks she would contact me out of the blue and act as if nothing happened. she would also refuse to talk about why she ignored me for so long and did not care if my mental health suffered from it
anyway, abusive friendships need to be acknowledged more because they are not only extremely common but also very damaging to someone’s mental health. i personally had to go through years of therapy to unlearn the guilt and self-hatred that my ex-friend helped instill in me. stay safe yall
reblogging mostly for the tag essay – not that the first part isn’t important, but that the latter part really hits on something I see that’s frustrating
because as much as abuse is a problem in friendships as well as other relationships, the one time vs continuing nature of harms vs abuses also applies for other relationships!
people on this site, and in general, tend to go from zero to DTMFA/cut off your family forever at the first sign of smoke. in fictional narratives, where we only see one five-minute slice of a person’s life and have to extrapolate the rest of the relationship as being more of that, I suppose this makes sense – they wouldn’t show us this instance of the person doing harm without a narrative reason, right?
But it does seem to lead people to conflating the one with the many. If a person was capable of doing this once, the reasoning seems to be, then what’s stopping them from doing it all the time? And not every harm we see in a narrative is meant to be part of a pattern – sometimes it’s a one-off, a bad judgment or a mistake or just unluckiness. because conflict happens in stories, indeed it’s difficult for stories to happen without any.
And I also think that people tend to mistake the signals of a thing for a thing itself. I’ve seen it genuinely argued that apologizing for having harmed someone, and saying I won’t do it again, marks a person or character as an abuser. Because that’s what abusers always say, right? I’ll change, I won’t do it again. But “sorry” and “I won’t do it again” are the right ways to apologize for harming someone. It isn’t saying “I won’t do it again” that makes someone an abuser. It’s that when they say it, they lie.
