commissioned by @eglantinian 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👨

part 20 of the missing pages series

June

Summary: 

In which we discover what occassion did Riza Hawkeye wear that pink dress she lent to Winry Rockbell in the FMAB: Son of Dawn game, how Roy and Riza talked about the war before he went to the military academy, and why the Hawkeye family can be *cough* a little helpful without realising it (*glares at Berthold*).

Cue (Il)legal hand-holding, Held Gaze™, and Angsty Pining (what were you expecting with this Author, seriously?????)

Helpful™ Tags: Fluff and Angst, Philosophy, Berthold “Right In Front Of My Steak Seriously?” Hawkeye, General “What Illicit Hand-Holding? It’s LEGAL YOU HEAR” Grumman, Riza “IDK Who These People Are” Hawkeye, Roy “Maybe We Should Have Locked the Door” Mustang, Maes “That’s the First Rule of Marriage How Can You Guys Forget” Hughes, The Author Regrets Everything, Mutual Pining, Mutual Horror

the entire point of winry's character is that you don't need to be a fighter to be strong. and that would be misogynistic if she was the ONLY female character in fma, but considering almost every other woman IS a fighter (and there's a lot of them!), that claim doesnt hold water.

i always loved that about winry, that she sort of serves of an example of how a regular person can change the world. i love that she saw her childhood friends leave and said i refuse to wait at home for those boys like a military wife, i am going to become a better engineer than anyone in the world. she decided that traveling the world kicking ass wasnt her style, that she wanted to improve peoples lives in other ways.

and ed KNOWS that, that's what the whole "your hands weren't made to kill" speech was about. he wasn't saying that because she's a girl - he knows riza, he knows lan fan, he knows izumi, of course he knows women can fight. he said it because it's true, because it's winry, and because she made that decision long ago.

would much like  to point out that the people publishing these articles are trying to needle millennials into treating gen z with the same disgusting vitriol we were treated with.

don’t buy it.

our younger brothers and sisters might eat a tide pod and get us blamed for it, but we have more in common with them than we ever had with boomers or gen x.

they are terrified of the things we can do together. remember that.

ok but legitimately i think the reason why kids aren’t taking internet safety seriously is because the people who are telling us not to put our personal information out seem so out of touch. no one acknowledges the possibility of meeting very real teenaged friends online, they always say that everyone you meet is a 40 year old white man in disguise. because they aren’t acknowledging things we know are true, it becomes a lot easier to dismiss the rest of what they’re saying as well. internet safety lessons absolutely must keep up with the times and acknowledge the internet’s capacity for good if you want kids to take to heart warnings about its capacity for bad.

Some actual safety tips for teenagers:

1. Have proof they're a teenager first. More than just a picture, have a video call with them.

2. If you want to meet up with them, have your parents or a trusted adult come with you. Even if they are a proven teenager, its still good to have supervision in case any issues happen.

3. If you are talking to an adult, and they start being sexual in any way, you run the fuck away. It doesn't matter if they're 40 or 20. An adult inherently has a power dynamic that teenagers do not. And its up to the adult to act responsible about it. There's exceptions of course, if you're 16 and dating an 18 year old, that's not a problem, we're not talking about that.

4. Being in a server with adults or ran by adults is not inherently bad. Talking to adults is not inherently a problem, and will likely happen in any number of Discord servers. It is only an issue when they are acting sexual and show predatory behavior.

5. Look out for grooming behavior. It can be difficult, because at first it seems like innocuous behavior, like complimenting or giving gifts. Especially if you feel lonely and have low self esteem. And groomers actively target people like that.

If they start trying to isolate you, talk sexual with you, state they depend on you for emotional needs, blame you for their own actions, try to be secretive about the relationship- Then you need to talk to people you trust, block the perpetrator, and call the police on them.

6. If this does happen to you, remember this: It is not your fault. Even if you didn't listen to a single thing listed here, it is not your fault. It is the fault of the adults who knew better, and didn't care. It's not your fault.

To my followers: if any of you guys are underaged, please be very VERY careful on here, and don’t fall for any of the tricks the groomer would use on you, just block them and report them.

The idea of english as a mother tongue is so strange to me, in my head english is how ppl communicate when there's no way in common to communicate, so english as a mother tongue sounds a bit like idk email as a mother tongue ykwim? Like english to me feels like the stuff that's used to fill the empty spaces between languages

Ok English is my native language and unfortunatly the only one I know yet, but this reminds me so much of that passage in Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

This is so important. From Daniel Sloss HBO standup special 'X'.

“If you think this does not affect the women in your life, it’s not because it’s not happening to them. It’s because they don’t trust you enough to talk to you about it.”

I remember a guy in my team at work saying "I don't know anyone who..." and I was like, "nah mate, no one trusts you enough to tell you that, cos we know the same people"

When I was in first year at Uni, my friend Jackie met a boy at a fundraising kegger for the school’s rugby team. We went because I was friends with a couple other guys on the team.

A couple weeks later, Jackie and this guy had gone on a couple dates, and one of my friends, Will, came up to me and said, “hey, just so you know, Jackie should not be dating this guy. He’s a creep, he sends snapchat videos of girls when he’s having sex with them, and I know for a fact that at least one of those girls didn’t know he was doing it.” Will told me he’d blocked the guy on snapchat a few months back once he’d found out.

I reached out to my other friend on the team to ask him what he knew about the situation and he said, very casually, “oh he’s just screwing around, he’s not a bad guy.”

guess which one of them I still talk to?