whys everyone having a new identity discourse

yearly pride month reminder that infighting is so stupid and will not help us. there are way more important things to worry about right now than which flags are ok or which identities are "valid."

like. in the us where i live it is getting more and more dangerous just to exist. we have bigger things to worry about than flag discourse.

"Trans men treat transfems like shit, trans women are so weird to transmascs-"

hey ive got an idea what if we all shut the fuck up and held hands and realized letting our dysphoria and trauma bleed out into how we treat others is something we all need to work on together and drawing lines in the sand and reinventing boys versus girls Queer Edition isn't gonna help any of us heal from the shit we're all going through in some form or another

hey uh

this whole ‘magic methods of imprisonment are failing’ thing...

what about the primordials almost unleashed by Avalir’s fall?

what does this mean for the Rites of Prime Banishment? 

Pelor was involved in both occasions the Rites were used (direct architect and fighter for one, provided the basic insight and one bead of divinity for the other), and we know from Deanna that his influence is... shaky, compared to usual. Let alone the influence of the Allhammer and Ioun. 

Are the chains that bind Tharizdun and Vecna weakened?

Are we facing down a situation where the over-arching villains of the last two campaigns might either be the first things devoured by Predathos, or play a hand in weakening him if they lash out first? 

Which is worse?

This is either some serious lore or IMDb has some serious explaining to do. What do you mean that Glen Powell is going to play Rooster and Miles Teller is playing Hangman. Did they just switch roles... Who wrote this with all the confidence in the world and no one checked their work. A multi-million dollor movie and people can't keep their actors straight.

since tamsyn's said that there will be a wedding in alecto the ninth...

who do we think is getting married?

leave your guesses/predictions in the tags!

listened to american pie while thinking about the league of villains do NOT fucking talk to me

there's legitimate things to critique wrt araki's writing & how much misogyny informs his stories & character beats but this is also the manga where dio turned a woman into a vampire and made her eat her own baby

david for the wip ask game 👀? if no david then.... wound (like an injury, not a wound tape)

send me a word !

“He meant a lot to you, huh? This ‘guy.’”

Lawrence sighed against pale skin, teeth dragging across a sharp collarbone and hands reaching down to thumb at the edge of David’s threadbare t-shirt as he considered the question. As he thought about his answer.

Not under threat of death could I be made to hate Cordelia. She is literally just a teenage girl

going through my peteyrobotter primer and realizing how much More i know now. slightly embarrassing because i cannot believe i got more unhinged in gathering information about otter and robo in the past year but also v exciting because this means there’s probably gonna be less biographical blind spots when i buckle down and make the robotter primer 

i get slightly annoyed when people make community posts that tell ppl to stop doing xyz and use the phrases "they're a FICTIONAL character, theyre NOT REAL" to justify whatever theyre saying because:

1) everyone knows that already, we're all aware these are blorbos from our media;

2) if someone is genuinely struggling to grasp that because of a delusion or similar, a forceful reality check is only going to cause harm rather than help;

3) it just feels so needlessly patronizing;

4) most of the time whatever I see people complaining about is either smth that I never see anyone doing or if it is smth somebody is doing then the block button is a very quick and effective fix for the issue (or even a quick convo w the person in DMs can resolve issues!)

(granted I keep my following circle very small and probably miss a lot but if i can do that then perhaps... perhaps other people can do it too fhfkdl like just prune back whatever u dont like seeing! unfollow or block as needed!)

personally it's hard to feel excited for snw when it just feels so hollow? im not sure if it's the pacing or what but it feels ungenuine? and beyond that people's characters feel rushed? like i know hemmer had to be replaced but like we could've spent way more time on his character! he was interesting! (i might be biased bc i love the andorians) and not even touching whatevers going on with spock. or chapel. this is the least of my grievances but when they put that black undershirt on pikes green wraparound...hate crime.

yeah, I mean. whatever. I watched it in a single sitting when I was sick and it beat laying in bed looking up at the whitewashed ceiling.

I agree the exposition of characters seem very rushed. It kind of violated the “show, don’t tell” rule, particularly w la’an, who was kind of put in a position that needed her to air her dirty laundry in front of the whole crew. I wish they’d had time to create narratives around past experiences, kind of like they did with Kirk/Tarsus in TOS, in which his participation in a historical event was made relevant by whatever was going on in the ep. (This was kind of(?) done in the Jurassic Park Knockoff Ep they did but not super successfully). I do believe it’s a pacing issue.

That said, I will say that I appreciate it being (more, at least, than the other new treks I’ve seen… which is… only Picard) episodic. I love that they’ve got some new task to handle, some new planet to explore in each ep. In that sense, it’s much more similar to TOS than I could have hoped for, general relationship arcs aside. (But wrt pacing, sometimes I think this works against them bc of how the show is written. They could do a self contained so w a lot of backstory in TOS, but bc of how this show is written, it’s more difficult to accomplish all that in a single ep. Like M’Benga’s daughter? In that specific instance I wish they’d shown him talking about her in previous episodes, and people asking if she was back on earth w his partner or… and him going quiet. Or Hemmer trying to fix the medical transporter in an earlier ep and him freaking out, but not having that immediately resolved… the same goes for discovering Una is… whatever species she is. Would have LOVED to see some xenophobia first—the crew making jokes when they come across some anomaly that it must have been caused by them, or something, and her looking uncomfortable/chastising them/whatever. Or the demonstrated persecution of them broadcast from some federation planet… if we had more context for these stories, if their roots were better established, they’d land harder. But they don’t). So sometimes that episodic formula kind of works against them, but ! like I said. whatever.

frankly, I was ambivalent abt the whole enterprise (la de da) to begin with, so wasn’t expecting much and was pleasantly surprised by it, on the whole. A friend of mine has seen Disco and didn’t think I’d enjoy it, so I haven’t seen that, and I’m not inclined toward watching animation if I can help it so haven’t seen LWD or prodigy, the second of which is literally made for babies but. Yanno. I liked SNW. I didn’t love it, I don’t agree with a lot of decisions they made, but I can see their intentions/where they’re coming from. I LOVE this spock, though think you have to see him as separate from the Spock we see in TOS (like in AOS, you kind of have to appreciate their differences as characters, and learn to love them not as the same person, but as branching extensions from a stem). I also LOVE Pike. I had a lot of hopes about him going into it because I thought the original storyline for him in TOS was done so well in that two part ep that included the original footage from “The Cage”, and I think they did an excellent job tailoring Mount’s Pike to the character laid out there, all the while fleshing him out into a fully fledged captain.

further, I’ve gotta say, I love the antics/shenanigans, and how much everyone seems to like each other. I don’t get the point of rough and tumble, cynical sci fi 24/7. (I do—it has its place, but it shouldn’t be in Star Trek). Even DS9, which as we all know tackled huge narratives abt power dynamics and prejudice and genocide… had episodes where they played baseball. And fishing mini games. Picard, which I’m comparing it to bc, again, it’s the only other trek I’ve seen that’s been produced since AOS (I think), seems similarly jam-packed with shit. Ohh the Borg and here and so are the romulans and Deanna’s son died somehow and the Android suppression as a weird metaphor for ?? Revolution? Workers rights? Idfk? And there’s time travel and fascism and section 31 and corruption at the highest levels of Starfleet which only peepaw and his dog, tintin, can root out. And there’s his mother, for some fucking reason, and-

And it’s all horrible. Everyone’s cynical and mean and/or gratingly stupid/infantile (AGNES!!!!!!). It was refreshing to see something that… wasn’t… that.

real shit lol i’d be talking shit about their team back! isn’t that what it’s all about?. gah lee.

i can’t explain further why this irritates me (as does .. the way a lot of women are sports fans nowadays) without sounding like a man defender or pick me so i won’t lmao

I am not a known system blog but I am just going to throw some shit in here as a treat.

I am not Endo or anti Endo. Because, most importantly. I do not fucking care. None of us do. It's not our fucking Brain so its none of our fucking business.

Y'all wanna try debate me into caring you are welcome to try but y'all's syscourse shit is stupid. We're still working on getting singlets to believ we aren't hateful murderers We don't have time for this shit???

hey so it’s bhm here in the us and i was thinking thoughts earlier. i figured this was a semi-appropriate time to post something like this anyway, so here’s what my brain spat out (in post format!)

my thoughts (as a black person) on that fucking locs wig/headpiece

so. if you’re a fan of malice mizer or are vaguely familiar with them through cultural osmosis of a friend or whomever talking about them, there’s a considerable chance you’ve seen pictures of mana様 wearing this wig*:

yk. the locs.

it goes without saying that this is appropriation of black culture**. my culture. doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.

i’ve seen people (particularly on tiktok, though there have been people in other places) make a big stink over it! and that is valid, for the most part.

however, of the examples i’ve seen of non-black people wearing black cultural styles (and i have seen quite a few), this is probably one of the most tame.

i have seen people try to give themselves “locs”/“dreads” in their own, non afro-textured hair. it has usually turned out to be a matted, unhealthy mess that ultimately has to be cut. that cannot be said of this wig. it is pristine in comparison, which i find to be fascinating! if you look at wigs made to resemble locs, 90% of the time they still look gross and matted. (a common theme… truly peculiar. /sarcasm)

that in particular makes me believe (to a certain extent) that this was not intentionally malicious. so truthfully, it’s hard to demonize it entirely.

with that in mind, i’m not defending this either; trust when i say that i am immensely disappointed to see these things. primarily, that’s because it does bring into question just how safe i am/will be within these fan spaces as a black person. if we cannot call out these things as a community and be in complete understanding with one another about why this is wrong, we cannot progress past it.

however, i find it truly bizarre that people will be frothing at the mouth over this now. it’s been ~20/30 years! beyond that, there’s been no major incidents like this since then!

there is no real reason to continue complaining so frequently about something so old at this point in time, especially when it was not done out of genuine, unadulterated hatred.

sure, we (black fans, in our relatively small number) should maybe be given an apology, but it’s a minor wound at worst, and an apology that is unlikely to happen because of how long ago everything transpired.

i, personally, am more concerned with fans and their issues than mana様 himself. as far as i’m concerned, he’s literally just some guy. he doesn’t even do a lot in the public eye as often as he used to. he just peddles his wares and shit, which is not something i’m worried about.

in essence, yes, 1000%, it’s wrong. yes, we should bring attention to it.

but no, it does not warrant any major action on the part of fans. especially not those who simply wish to white knight and prove they’re “cool” or “woke” for internet brownie points rather than actually ally themselves with the black community on more pressing issues than a 30-year-old wig.

thanks for reading, i guess. happy black history month. actually listen to the black people around you year-round.

***

*(yes, it is a wig/headpiece. i’ve checked multiple times.)

**(i can only speak on my perspective of my culture, but i know others have feelings about other things that mana様 especially has done by way of appropriation.)

***(also, don’t ask me about the braids from early klaha era. i don’t care! re-read the post if you’re that concerned.)