🐱 Oriental Shorthair

📸 Inna Frunze [Otornasse]

🎨 Black

Philipp Pullman's His Dark Materials ...

The majority of people are horny. People are always going to be horny. You cannot stop people from being horny. Throughout history there have been extensive attempts to suppress horniness and they haven’t worked. You can be mad about it all you want but horniness will prevail against any adversity. There will always be an aspect of horniness within society. Sexuality cannot be contained by having missionary sex with your spouse alone in the privacy of a dark bedroom.

Do you guys ever sit down and think about Timeskip Viren ?

Because I do

Je gribouillais innocemment quand soudain Viren s'est retrouvé avec cette tronche.

Monseigneur épousez-moi

Me with Viren. I have so many ideas to make him make more sense.

when a character is written inconsistently because nobody thought about it that hard and you're like it's time for me to get in there.. and think about it that hard

Chomps on him

Viren to Terry.

And Rayla in Dear Callum.

Really I think the biggest problem TDP has is that it wants to wallow in all your classic fantasy tropes. Good kings and evil advisors, dark magic and wise elves, dragons (can’t really blame them there). It wants to be a very simple good vs. evil narrative but realised people like Nuance(tm) in their stories nowadays and decided to shove it in, trying to make a more balanced story about the horrors of history… and then keeps overcorrecting when the scales are too obviously tipped in one way. As a result the whole thing is just an incoherent mess.

This really isn’t helped by having to make the protagonists flawless so we’ll root for them no matter what, leading to the antagonists being the only interesting characters. Even if their writing can be really messy they are at least allowed to make mistakes that have consequences.

Or the fact despite claiming to have Nuance(tm) it has progressively grown more into a show about how conflicts are always because of a few bad apples (and one rotten to the core in specific) rather than anything engaging.

To put it bluntly, the show wants to have its cake and eat it too. Has basically said as much at this point. But the cake is burned on the outside and batter in the middle, all the worse is that the recipe looked promising.

I do find it interesting that ATLA managed to use a very black and white narrative (stop Evil Empire) to tell several character stories with some nuance, while TDP claims it has a nuanced conflict and flattens everything to try and make up for that, ultimately leading to protagonist centred morality more than anything. And if they didn’t want me to compare the two then they should have let go of the ATLA references right away.

you're right and you should say it.

the constant and shoehorned references to ATLA do not really do this show any favors. honestly might be part of the problem (why are there 7 primals with color-coded elves? to follow ATLA's pattern of marketable separable elements. why is it an adventure story with a core crew? because ATLA was like this too. etc etc.)

but anyway. yeah. ATLA had a very simple main conflict to provide a constant source of tension throughout the show (even if they dropped the ball at the last season re: the plot), and this structure allowed for episodes that explore other aspects of the setting and characters while still making everything feel relevant and tied together by said conflict. it's not some arthouse show by any means, but it has good compelling story work into it. genuinely great show.

tdp immediately opens up with the nuance and it never really delves deeper. you'd think that opening with characters being aware of the cycle of violence stuff would be interesting and the show would explore that more, but it just... flatlines there. there's no progression or graduation or exploration of themes as the seasons go on like in ATLA. very rarely are there new questions being asked or arcs that feel sensical.

honestly the main characters having to be perfect in every situation is the biggest problem with tdp. the mains are not allowed to have shortcomings or mistaken judgements or anything to meaningfully interact in any way with the nuanced set-up. they emotionally exist entirely outside it, which ends up making them the Messiahs of Peace Who Can Do No Wrong. good for fandoms i guess, people bitched and whined about bato and the water tribe for years. but it's not very good for storytelling.

and also, they're just bad characters and the writers can't put two and two together while still asking you to take their world very seriously.

anyways i'm just rambling at this point. good observation.

Everyone's talking about their problems with Rayllum in s4 but I'm just here wondering why no one is talking about the

Most confusing and stupid conflicts I have witnessed on screen????

Okay so point by point

Humans are evil for using dark magic (which is basically the same morality of eating meat) because they didn't want to starve and die anymore

They got kicked out of their homeland brutally to a crappy barron land (kinda like what the US did to the Indigenous? Or what the British did to the Irish? Love that) where they continue to suffer famines.

The Dragons guard the boarders from the eViL humans and kill anyone who crosses on sight.

When the humans cross over to save thousands of starving people, the dragon king kills the humans' queens even though he doesn't even know what they're there for??

The humans justly retaliate

Somehow this warrants the elves to send assassins to kill ALL OF THE HUMAN LEADERS AND THEIR CHILDREN?

A couple of rando human princes bring the dragon prince back to the queen, and suddenly she's not racist anymore bc love and peace ✌️

Suddenly the humans are zapped with an evil ray and start invading Xadia. They get yeeted and suddenly Xiadia and humans get along again???? Because it was the evil humans the whole time causing the conflict????? Whatever

We find out in season 4 that actuallyyyyyy it was 1 evil guy thats been manipulating everyone behind the scenes and causing conflicts throughout history????????? And also a human girl exposed him thousands of years ago, so was this before or after humans were ethnically cleansed??? Does anyone care about that anymore? Lol

That whole scene was so dumb cause it basically just excuses everything Xadia did and saying "actually it was this 1 guy teehee"

WHAT DOES AARAVOS HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING BRUH YOU JUST SHOEHORNED HIM IN CAUSE YOU MADE THE XADIANS TOO EVIL LMFAOOOO

Also love how they gave Claudia an elf bf even though it doesn't make any sense for her character and he serves 0 purpose other than being someone's oc

It drives me nuts how they set up this interesting war, where FOR ONCE the humans are justified, and they're too cowardly to stick to it! And instead frame the conflict they came up with as either a both sides thing or the humans' fault??? Everything they wrote in regards to lore points to the Xadians being jerks but they never treat it that way.

Although I love Aaravos, it's obvious they had to come up with a big bad guy to unite Xadia and the human kingdoms because they didn't know what to do with Xadians being the Big Bad.

TLDR the writers have 0 idea what they're doing and are probably making it up as they go because they don't know how to handle the plotlines they set up.

So, dragon society is basically a kratocracy, right?

There's 0 explanation why dragons suddenly decided they needed a king despite living without one for a presumed while but I imagine it went something like this:

SOL REGEM: I am your king. EVERYONE: Well, we didn't vote for you. SOL REGEM: You don't vote for kings. Now do you want to repeat that to the dragon that can bite your face off?

So now dragons have a king, hurrah! But oh no, humans have done a naughty!

LUNA TENEBRIS: I am your queen. HUMANS: Well, we didn't vote for you. LUNA TENEBRIS: You don't vote for queens. Now get the fuck out of my country before this dragon bites your face off.

We know Thunder just straight up brawled for the right to take the throne because LT didn't leave an heir. (Royal bloodlines matter a lot to dragons, don't you know. They're just like us!) Zubeia, my useless angel, can still bring herself to let out the occasional mighty roar or lightning flash to scare others into line. EVERYONE has to listen to these violent lizards who just said "OBEY ME."

Remarkably, we're also supposed to see the dragon monarchy as a good thing that should continue, despite it providing very little benefits as far as I can tell. Most elven societies are self-sustaining and have their own rulers. Dragons are undeserving emperors who -- what? Keep other dragons in line? I haven't seen much evidence of that yet. They also fail to protect drakes from elves, which seems fucked up to me, but hey. The social stratification of that which may loosely all be called dragonkind is not for me to comment on, as it seems like the writers didn't think about it at all.

With all this in mind, when Ezran steps up to ask a bunch of dragons do to do him a solid, are they obeying him simply because the show wants to pretend Xadians have no issue with humans? Because they see the threat as more important than their pride or prejudice? Or because Zubeia is a wrathful queen who shares her husband's propensity for an iron fist, and she's hulking menacingly behind Ezran? Are dragons, Ezran's horrific weapon turned against his own people in season 3, representative of the unquestionable power granted by the divine right of kingship, and thus when he acts in authority, even when intending to be 'diplomatic' and 'peaceful', it is always with implicit threat of violence? Makes ya think!

Seeing people crap on arc two Rayla genuinely makes me sad. I don't think many people truly realize the depth of Rayla's isolation. What happened to all the characters in arc one was horrible (I am not down playing that), Callum and Ezran lost their father, and Soren lost his family, but they all had Katolis to go back to. Their home. Rayla lost EVERYTHING. She lost the assassins who she grew up with and trained her, she lost her home, and worst of all she lost her parents. She lost Runaan and Ethari in one go, only months after her parents. And all she had to remember them by was what they taught her. And they taught her self sacrifice, they taught her to do questionable things in the name of protection and the greater good. Viren threatened everything she loved which WAS Callum and Ezran, and she thought he was still alive. She was stuck in fight or flight mode, she was bathed in trauma. And she had a point in TTM, everyone was just moving on, and didn't take or let her have anytime to truly grieve. She was in such a dark place in TTM and it influenced her decisions. She knows she did something wrong, she knows she hurt Callum. She hasn't brought herself to apologize yet, but why did we stop treating her as human? (Or elf, as it were)

Also hi, I've recently been liberated from TDP reddit

Bonjouur

Friendly reminder que Mevanwi est l'un des meilleurs personnages de Kaamelott : elle a un vrai développement, elle fait avancer l'intrigue et c'est une fine stratège qui sait exactement quoi faire pour s'en sortir, y compris se salir les mains, au même titre que Léodagan, Séli, Élias, Loth, etc. C'est pas plus une grosse mourue que tous les autres que je viens de citer, et l'acharnement de la série (et de certains gros lourds du fandom) contre elle est totallement injustifié 🫠

je suis tjr absolument deg que le père blaise se soit retrouvé chez les méchants sans explication de pk dans kv1 alors qu'il devait être dans les résistants. genre peut-être que si on avait eu kaamelott résistance il aurait fini par changer de camp mais en attendant on a zéro contexte et je trouve que ça colle pas du tout avec son caractère de la série.

Shit man, this wizard war is fucked. I just saw a guy clap his hands together and say "the ten hells" or some similar shit, and every one around him turned inside out, had their tibia explode and then disappeared. The camera didn't even go onto him, that's how common shit like this is. My ass is casting frostbite and level 2 poison. I think I just heard "power word:scrunch" two groups over. I gotta get the fuck outta here.

the fact that we only have “herculean task” and “sisyphean task” feels so limiting. so here’s a few more tasks for your repertoire

icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down

cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)

feel free to chime in i ran out of ideas much faster than i anticipated

That's totally Harrow letting himself get killed, refusing Viren's offer to die for him and insulting him, forcing him to live with the guilt of his best friend's suicide.

Obsessed with the idea of sacrifice in a book being a selfish act rather than a selfless one. Their lover screaming at them: “How dare you leave me in this barren world? How dare you take away my choice to die for you and leave me with this grief?”. They are dead, and their lover is left - a gaping wound - bleeding into the ground. Do they love them so much that they would die for them, or do they love them so much that they forced the other to live without them? Sacrifice as a bitter act. Sacrifice as something wildly violent; something tormentingly cruel — but always, always built on love. Perhaps, they are both martyrs in the end.