listen i know gwen is definitely flawed but all the anti gwen fics i’ve read are like

“she rolled her eyes and scoffed then she talked way too loud and told everyone their feelings didn’t matter and then she punched ianto in the face and then accidentally blew up the hub”

like. bro.

sometimes I think about that guy on amazon who reviewed pride and prejudice and did an entire angry, weirdly math focused rant about how awful darcy is and then ends it all with "I could carve a better man out of a banana"

It probably won’t (it will)

No but deliberately dehumanizing the bad guys, making them look weird or alien to make the violence more palatable, that's. That's not a good thing. Right? That's usually pretty shitty actually

What is he if not Lord of unanswered dreams and hopes?

Honestly, it pains me so much that Dream always fails to recognise his own value. That he knows his meaning to the Dreaming, but can’t he see his worth apart from his function. That killed me in the TV series and it kills me here. How often had somebody said something like “you have to do this” or “you don’t have a saying in this” for him to only believe himself worthy as a king for those who sleep instead for a being that deserves to love and dream as well.

I agree, and it's one of the first things I truly appreciated about his characterisation.

To be honest, it's a question that could be argued in many different ways. Past experiences are the first point that pops into my mind. The idea that all past attempts to have something more, to live for something other than his function, is beyond his grasp. Yet, more often than not, if you analyse Dream's pattern, the relationship is either doomed from the start (and he fails to see it/accept it), or he is entirely incompatible with the individual, to begin with. Dream's own inability to form meaningful change is, arguably, half the issue here, if not most of it.

It's clear that Dream is lonely. That he dearly desires something more but has been burned too many times to try and shoulder the potentially another failure. He has such responsibility placed on him that he instead chooses to - as Corinthian aptly puts it - "feel nothing". I think it's easier for him to focus on his duty because the depth of his own loneliness might undo him. Again, it's not a lack of love or even care. It's too much love. Dream is cold not because he doesn't feel but because he loves too much, too quickly, too intensely.

But he is also oh so proud. All those failed relationships and connections are felt so much deeper, even if he's not verbal about them.

Takasugi Shinsuke was disowned by his birth family. His father kicked him out of his first home, and he found his second one in Shoka Sonjuku with Shoyo, Gintoki, and Katsura.

...Until Gintoki and Katsura declare that they no longer want anything to do with him in Benizakura Arc. To Shinsuke, it's the equivalent of being kicked out of his home, once again.

I love mythic quest bc every single character is like 'there's something so fucking wrong with you' about most of the other characters. And they're ALL right

not "Bruce Wayne is a good and happy, well-adjusted father" or "Bruce is an abusive and cruel father" but a secret third thing

Why is Dark Cacao always the target of the worst mischaracterization I’m so serious. It’s always him being interpreted so incorrectly. Why???? His character genuinely isn’t that difficult to understand idk… cookie run fans are so weird about him. Stop It.

nothing makes me block someone faster than them writing paragraphs about how much they hate odo in the tags on my posts about him

People need to practice minding their own damn business

Don't come into people's inboxes giving unsolicited advice or criticizing their personal stuff. Don't reblog somebody's posts saying how much you hate it and their opinions.

Don't like somebody's characterisation, AUs or the kind of art they post? It might even annoy you?

Okay, cool. Go make your own post. Block them. Be a little hater about it to your friends. It's good for your soul!

But don't be goddamn rude to people. Don't make it their problem.

"I don't like what this artist likes mah mah mah"

Here's a wild idea;

Artists...don't need to cater to you. You are not entitles to their work. Nobody on the internet should coddle you and post only stuff you like.

Shocker, I know.

the pearlrose tag is sure full of takes

Hello.

You and gay-jesus-probably have successfully made me question everything with your view that Tears of the Kingdom is imperialist propaganda, so that's been fun.

Anyway, I decided to share this discussion with the Zelda fans on reddit, and perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of them disagreed. Here is what they said (I'm Alarming_Afternoon44):

So what do you think? Have I and all these other people just been duped by the game's manipulative framing? Or do they actually have a point?

And if you'd rather not answer this, or would prefer if I censored the usernames, just tell me and I'll delete this.

Hey! Thanks a lot for reaching out, and I'm glad it made you think stuff through!!

Honestly, as I mentioned in this post, I am not super interested about in-world conversations about who oppresses who, because what can be assessed from the game is super vague and more vibes-based than evidence-based. Within the text, of course that the Good Zonais are good and the Bad Ganondorf is bad! But that's my whole point! The narrative has been deliberately crafted so that the zonais and Rauru (and Hyrule) are as blameless as possible (and it's not doing a great job at it overall to be frank; we would not be having these conversations about how offputting it all feels for a non-zero number of people if it did do a great job). More importantly, I want to focus on what sort of real-life narrative it all parallels. Because people make stories, and people live in the real world.

Not going after everyone's throat here, gamedev is hard and the hydras that are AAA game production do end up doing super weird stuff, especially since the thematic ramifications are absolutely never prioritized (and it's also always the same kind of people who make the final calls and push out what can and can't be talked about also). And as fans, we tend to have trouble stepping outside the lens of lore and take a look at the bigger picture sometimes; not as an attack on any individual part of that decision-making process but to just pause, stop, and question our standards, our priorities and the kind of reality (or skewing of reality) the stories we tell each other reflect.

Again: do we want to take videogames seriously or not? If we do, then we need to accept they are a vehicle for ideology, just like any other artform. And sometimes, you push out questionable ideology, sometimes without meaning to, because you didn't unpack your own biases as you did. And it's even fine to do it, nobody is perfect, a 300+ people team spread over 6 years certainly will not be that. But that it wasn't prioritized is, in my opinion, a problem. As a narrative designer, I want games (at least the narrative side) to be held to a higher standard than this. It's literally my job to work with the industry so it can hold itself to higher standards of quality --so the whole TotK situation is quite frustrating to witness from a very pragmatic, work perspective where I already spend my days trying to convince people that things mean things. I have a vested interest here in not having the companies I work for being given a free pass by gamers to do literally whatever as long as it's fun, especially when we're talking about a billion-dollars company suing its own fans left and right for any perceived slight. Nintendo are not underdogs here. It's fine to point out they cut corners and maybe promoted messy ideologies, voluntarily or not.

So long story short: no I don't believe anyone here has a point in regards to what I think is actually important, which is why these choices were made in the first place. If you look at an imperialist text expecting the text to tell you that it's imperialist instead of recognizing a framing used for propaganda by yourself, you're never gonna find any imperialist text ever, obviously not!! I'm sorry if I sound a little gngngn here, but I don't know why audiences have, at large, this feeling that lore and story beat decisions materialize themselves already formed and without any human bias, meddling, intervention, internal politics or approximations (it seems that people can only conceptualize this part if they have actual names to attach to the story, but without clear authors it's like there are no authors and so no bias, which is... a very strange bias in itself). I can promise you that it does not work that way in practice: every narrative department on every big game is a battlefield --some nicer than others, but all of them very emotionally draining either way.

So yeah, I guess that on these grounds, I disagree with every point raised here. Sorry Reddit :/

But thank you for the ask and sorry if I didn't go more into details as to why. The big Why I Dislike Rauru Post and the Gerudo Post might have some more specific rebuttals, but I am not super interested in debating small detail stuff tbh. I feel like it's no use if the frame of reference isn't being understood in the first place.

Admittedly I don't know much about the Israel Palestine war but I keep seeing news articles that refer to it as the Israel Hamas war and no it is not. After all Israel has done it gets to be referred to by it's country name and not "terrorists who kill babies and children at the speed of light" but Palestine gets reduced to Hamas?

It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the struggle of the Palestinian people keeps getting reduced to the existence of Hamas, but at no point does the ongoing state violence of Israel define its existence when by all means it should when my understanding is that the creation of Israel was stealing land from Palestinians. Why is Israel's violence ignored while Palestine is defined by the admittedly shit group that only arose out of decades of occupation and imperialism? Those two things are not the same and ignoring Israel's violence to act like Hamas came from nowhere just to hurt the poor Israeli government who acts like they've done nothing wrong is ridiculous to me.

quick thing abt lrb, whenever i rb posts like that there's the unspoken caveat that maybe my F/Os arent perfect like that but they do try hard anyways and if they ever mess up then we figure it out together :] maybe they do think im silly sometimes but then once they learn more they realize that was a shitty thing to think and they grow and learn and we grow closer through mistakes and growing as people together !!!

im listening to the whitestone stuff in campaign 3 and uhhh rip to the people who hated percy over that or thought he was being ooc or whatever the hell the discourse was. but something's deeply wrong with you