tachvintlogic:

aviviary:

theo-saurus:

trixree:

homunculus-argument:

homunculus-argument:

I love how both corvids and parrots are in general highly intelligent, but where corvids generally have strict hierarchies, solve disagreements in the pecking order by fighting, and have a strong dislike for anything new or foreign until they figure out how to make use of it, parrots are just here to party.

The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don’t have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.

And then there’s the kea, straight-up titled “clown of the mountains”, that has a specific vocalization for “playtime!”. Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go “great idea, disembodied voice! it’s TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!” and start wrestling.

Imagine working really hard in order to make it into a top university to study astrophysics, making it to your first Very Serious Class, sitting down full of serious determination, and the dude next to you is taking notes without using his hands, with a glitter pen he’s shoved up his nose. And his notes are good.

It’s your first day of Bird University and you already fucking hate this guy.

So there’s this gene in humans called PLXNC1 or “Plexin”, right? So Plexin is associated with increased neuron function and is generally thought to be correlated to human’s increased cognitive ability for the use of language, i.e., “language learning”. Super cool, right?

Humans aren’t the only animals with advanced language learning that have Plexin in their genome. We can actually find homologous plexin between humans and PARROTS!

Using genomic alignment search tools, we can actually break down the sequence of human Plexin and directly compare it to the Plexin found in parrots. (This was actually a project I ran for an upper division genomics class, and running the program literally takes like… ten minutes.) I wanted to see how similar the plexin gene was between humans and parrots, so I queued up the human sequence against all of the available records from parrot genomes and sorted by greatest percent identity (i.e., which bird species had the closest plexin to ours?)

It was this funky dude right here:

THAT’S RIGHT BABY! The kea, notorious for being a straight up motherfucking prank god, carries Plexin with a 79.42% identity comapred to humans’.

THIS LITTLE ASSHOLE HAS A HOMOLOGOUS LANGUAGE LEARNING GENE WITH US!!!! A GENE THAT IS THOUGHT TO BE CORRELATED TO HIGHER LEVEL LEARNING AND INTELLIGENCE!!!!! AND THEY USE THEIR INTELLIGENCE TO WREAK HAVOC ON TOURISTS

Also these guys have been found to literally have predictive reasoning skills, which we consider REALLY FUCKING ADVANCED for a lot of animal species. They pass the Aesop’s fable test with flying colors. They’re so goddamn cool, I love them so much.

The kea really said: “I will use my superior intelligence to have a good fucking time” and that’s so powerful honestly

@todaysbird

Okay but this is kind of crow slander - crows can be super serious a lot of the time, but DO NOT FORGET that crows DO play! A quick Google search will tell you this. They are known for messing with objects for no reason, caching inedible objects just for fun, playing in the snow, 

They goof around too, dangling upside down off shit just ‘cuz!

They prank the SHIT out of other animals in ways that put them in explicit danger but serve no actual purpose

They’ve been seen RIDING other birds???

There are a number of research papers looking into why crows are so playful, so don’t pretend these are some pessimistic passerines that never find time to have fun! They just have a slightly different idea of fun than parrots.

@lucifer-is-a-bag-of-dicks

manywinged:

himbofisher:

britnxyspears:

anatomiau:

littleholmes:

The fact that Dabi is burning himself through his skin and muscles and down to the bone and has been living and burning in spite all these years is just so distressing.

In two weeks we’ll find out more of his backstory, but until then, given what we know about Touya and Shouto, the first and last Todoroki sons, as well as how their father’s actions reverberated throughout the whole Todoroki family, these final panels of 349 not only mark the start of an important chat between two brothers, but illustrate the parallels between Touya and Shouto.

I’ve analyzed the Todoroki family before as someone with Todoroki-esque trauma, but I haven’t really gotten into Shouto and Touya. Shouto and Touya are both, of course, carrying highly visible physical scars to match their emotional ones. However, and I’m sure this has been said, but it’s interesting that Shouto’s scar is smaller compared to the full-body impact of Touya’s because it’s semi-reflective of the pain they carry. This is not to compare their pain, because they both endured very different situations at the hands of the same man, and everyone responds differently to trauma, etc. What I mean is that Shouto’s scar being smaller than Touya’s is interesting in that it symbolizes a few things.

First is the way their father’s behavior impacted them. Shouto’s scar is more localized which is indicative of the way he was isolated from the rest of his family while being his father’s soul focus growing up because was their father’s masterpiece as Touya says. Their father focused exclusively on Shouto, obsessing over him and his path, while neglecting his other children.

Meanwhile, Touya’s body is fully scarred because his father’s focus on him increasingly disappeared with each sibling. More specifically, his scars illustrate the way his pain, from being told he could be a hero to being told he wasn’t good enough again and again with each sibling that was born to basically replace him and make up for his failures, all while being neglected and essentially told by his father to stop trying to get his attention, manifested. His scars stretch across his face and limbs because Touya, whether intentional or not, shouldered not only his own pain and anger, but the pain of each sibling and each subsequent neglect of that sibling. His own pain burned and his anger at his father only grew until it literally began to eat and burn away at him.

Which brings me to the second parallel.

Second is how long the two have lived with the pain. Both Shouto and Touya were isolated from the rest of the family at one point of their lives, and that’s guided how they live with their trauma. While this isn’t the strongest symbolism, it’s worth noting that Shouto is younger—a teen while Touya is in his late twenties—and, though he and Touya have been living with their trauma for roughly the same number of years, he’s had less time to live with it than his big brother who’s been marinating in this for just over two decades.

Furthermore, in this way, Shouto’s seen less of what’s been done to his siblings, especially Dabi, and had a negative reaction to their father’s No. 1 hero expectation because of what he endured (and, sure, his mom too) being his father’s perfect pancake, so to speak. He was isolated, placed in a different bracket of treatment, and has trauma the other siblings don’t. Touya is similar but on the opposite side of this. He has seen his sibling’s pain and was there for all of it, held his father’s No. 1 expectation and had it squashed, and has a negative reaction to their father’s No. 1 expectation because he was the ‘failure’.

Finally, and this is the one that upsets me the most as someone with Todoroki-level trauma, the scars symbolize how they’ve been able to handle their trauma. Shouto has the support system and has been in situations where he’s been able not only acknowledge his pain but, with the help of friends like Izuku and Class 1-A, actually start the long task that is unpacking trauma and working through it. Dabi, as far as we’re aware, hasn’t been able to do this because he’s been alone. Sure, the LOV was there, but he hasn’t exactly had the resources, namely a support system, that Shouto has to work through it. He’s been shouldering it alone, living in this pain, burning through his anger, and it’s literally showing to the point where it can very likely kill him.

Which is why it’s so important that we’re seeing that Shouto understands this, knows that there’s still time for Dabi to have that support system, and is here to offer it to him and try to help his brother address it. It’s also why it’s so important that Dabi is willing to tell Shouto everything.

People call it ‘trauma dumping’ when in reality it’s just a healthy form of reaching out for support and letting it out instead of keeping it bottled in where it can cause even more harm to him. It’s especially important here that he even acknowledged that he’s Shouto’s “big bro”, and the fact that he’s allowing Shouto past the metaphorical fiery fortress he’s built (and literal too in this case) is major.

Idk I’m rambling but Shouto and Touya have two of the strongest quirks in their family, were both isolated, and have physical scars to match their emotional trauma, and only one has been able to process theirs at all. This parallel between the two is fascinating and illustrates the journey and struggles of unpacking and living with trauma. Dabi still has time to process and start healing, and I sincerely hope he’s able to begin doing that and live after this war to continue sorting things out with Shouto.