“I’m not slipping. I’ve just been hiding for too long.”

Thinking about Andor far too much as is the case nowadays, and pondering Kleya’s insistence to meet their contact in Luthen’s stead. I’ve considered two things as regards Luthen: what motivates him to do what he does, and what he knows that is so important that his capture is unthinkable for Kleya. She is obviously concerned that he is getting antsy, a little impatient, that he feels guilty about “hiding” and being “a coward” while others risk their lives out in the open to the extent that he might do something reckless. As we all know, you need someone at the center of things to plan and to organize for a movement to succeed. 

Kleya felt very strongly that Luthen should take the Fondor and get to safety and send her down to meet their ISB informant. I wondered why and given the level of mystery surrounding him, I thought that it must be something equally mysterious. 

Surely Kleya knows a lot and if she were to be captured, they’d get most everything-the shop, her rebel connections, the existence of the network, confirmation of Aldhani, Mon Mothma, and who knows how many people she’s recruited over the years. They’d also get Luthen’s identity, but not Luthen himself, which seems to be the key here. I think it’s obvious why Luthen felt he had to go. He had his suspicions and had to be the one to motivate Lonni to stay with them. As we learn at the end of his impressive monologue, Luthen feels personally responsible for him. 

So what is so important about Luthen? This is not related to who or what he is. I maintain that what motivates him to be so extreme, his hatred for the Empire (or more like his love for whoever and whatever he fights for) and his specific importance are not one and the same thing. Sometimes I think that he acts like one who fears persecution, and at other times, I think he is just rather eloquent and dramatic. But even if he were in hiding because he’s force sensitive which I do not necessarily think he is, despite my looong essay on the subject, that in and of itself is not all that important. It must be about what he knows. Something that Kleya does not know or possess. That is what the Empire must not get hold of or be able to torture out of her. 

I’ve gone over it and it is tricky to say the least because if Kleya has a reason for feeling that Luthen is more important than her, than she knows at least part of the secret herself, even if it is merely that there is one. Is it a person, a group of people, a location?? I thought perhaps that Luthen was trying to find a secret headquarters for the future of the Rebellion, a suitable planet that is out of the way. Perhaps he knows the location and Kleya does not. It would be kind of cool if he found Yavin 4 and started to get things ready, but purposely compartmentalized this and other things so that Kleya could not reveal it against her will were she apprehended. 

Also intrigued by the fact that Saw Gerrera who has been around forever, been fighting since Onderon, seen things rise and fall, lost his sister, lost probably everything over and over does not know who or what Luthen is, cannot suss it out. That’s impressive. Saw may not have his sister’s leadership abilities or sense of direction, but he is sharp. He notices things. He may be a little paranoid, but he is also an astute judge of character. And he is not the same man that we see in Rogue One who trusts next to no one and is suspicious of everything. He parsed out the galaxy and everyone who has any stake in fighting the Empire and categorized them all very colorfully and yet he can’t nail down Luthen’s operating principles? Interesting. 

We’re definitely meant to draw a comparison between Luthen and Saw. And not just because Luthen favors cooperation and Saw thinks that it’s more or less pointless. Saw’s strategy is what Luthen describes to Cassian in Episode 4 in their conversation aboard the Fondor, “carving off useless pieces until there’s nothing left”. I love Saw and I mean no disrespect. But he’s lost too much and seen too much and his rage fuels him to the extent that while he may have “clarity of purpose”, intelligence and charisma, he isn’t as strategic as Luthen. And as we see in Rogue One, by the time he is based on Jedha, there is less of the man that he was, in every sense of the word. 

Kleya gets results. She is practical, direct, unflinching, efficient. She does what is necessary. And she seemed very uneasy about him risking his safety to go in her stead. Is he hiding something vital to the Rebellion? Or are we just too trained to think in those terms? Could it be that what Luthen possesses is neither specific knowledge nor anything tangible? 

Could it be that he’s just eloquent and charismatic to a degree that is rare and without that, it all falls apart? It would further explain his guilt, his reflections on ego, if the idea of one person being more important than so many others is repugnant to him. I also like it because it fits in nicely with the theme of Andor.  

Even Cassian Andor himself, the titular character is shown to be more of a supporting character, a helper, someone who can rally people to fight rather than being overarchingly significant on his own. He’s charming, intelligent and passionate.  He gives Kino Loy the tools to lead everybody out of the prison. He’s special because he cares and he participates not because he’s the the leading voice. 

Perhaps that is all that it is, Kleya knows that as good as she is, Luthen is the persuasive one, the one with the gift to motivate people and to keep everything going. She may be an important piece in this game, but without the King, it’s game over. 

***************************************************************************************************

I guess the other motivation for this post is, while I think Luthen having some secret identity would be interesting, it would merely be an added layer that explains part of his drive, not the most significant facet of his character. I hope that going forward we get more deep dives into the motivations and feelings of characters in Star Wars, more slow builds. it’s not that we haven’t before Andor, but not on this scale and with this consistency, the scale that a show of this length and variety allows. It feels like a particularly good expanded universe novel in the way that even minor characters are fleshed out. 

I basically want everything done to the same level of detail and care as Andor. I am greedy like that. I want larger than life ordinary heroes protecting what they love and would-be space wizards who live seemingly mundane lives but whose inner worlds are extraordinary. I want a force sensitive person who works in an office and has to hide the fact that they are a little too good at reading their coworkers or awfully skilled at getting the plants on their desk to grow. 

Andor is so rich and well-thought out. I’m addicted. I want every show to go this hard now. 

Me making this instead of Uni work

So, have we talked enough about the line of succession thing and how, maybe, it doesn´t need to make sense?

It´s just something I´ve been thinking about and I´d seen some posts about it early on, so.

To me it looks like the queen knows and banks on how desperate August is and indeed manipulates August further into his guilt and gratitude for the opportunity to redeem himself (summoning him to the palace like that? What a Move!) So, in that state and in that room he certainly won´t question if this path makes any sense. He probably doesn´t even ~want to question it later on, even if he develops doubts.

So, if this is just another ploy to try to get Wille in line and keep August close and under control at the same time, that means at least for the moment, as a strategic game move, it doesn´t need to be based in actual formal court rules, right?

We as an audience can absolutely question the logic, of course, because our perspective is so much wider than August´s and Wille´s.

Neither Wille nor August at this point in their lives seem even able to question much of anything, since they´re both too busy dodging hits (sorry, Wille) and living through emotional highs and lows while being teenagers.

The queen on the other hand has the advantage of absolute stone-cold strategic thinking and years of experience. (Chess, anyone. Being 6-7 moves ahead, anyone. The fact that she does miscalculate in regards to Wille, well. She might be the queen, but she´s got her blind spots. Emotions being one of them, ironically, but not surprisingly.)

And even if the court introduces August as a more prominent part of the royal family, that could still make sense years down the line, it´s not like they´re publicly announcing anything has changed at all right now. August has been part of official court pictures since S1 ep 1, too.

Like, it might be that the court actually considers keeping both doors open in their attempt at damage control, which is their daily job anyway, and intentionally push both Wille and August to were they want them, maybe even where they keep each other in check for a while.

(I also wouldn´t put it past them that there are at least three other contingency plans in place, cooked up in that war room we see in 2x1.)

In general, I´d take whatever the queen says at any given moment with a grain of royal salt since she is the royal family personified, never just mom to Wille or much family at all to August. I feel like we´ve long moved past just believing whatever she says and especially what she says to her heir(s?) that she needs to keep the institution going.

And why would we want to believe her anyway? Is it because she seems rational and unemotional, so we naturally want to treat her like an authority on the truth?

In S 1 she asks her son if love is worth it and tells him it´s not the most important thing in life, putting strategy (of dealing with the video fallout) and emotion in opposition, and we´re with Wille, right? We cheer when he gives a speech on how her ways are not the way forward. Love wins. Stone-cold strategy and secret-keeping to uphold tradition is not the truth for him anymore.)

Like, if this was a daily soap I wouldn´t be poking holes into this plot line at all, but this is a well-thought out, many-layered show that likes to turn the screws this way and that so we have to turn our heads a little at times and suddenly find meaning behind meaning.

I think it´s a plausible thought that we´re not meant to take at face value everything she´s telling August and Wille. That we can say wait a minute, I know her now, I´ve seen the damage. That we, by now, recognize the wider context of her ways that those two teens can´t (yet) and we can just. Refuse.

I just think we shouldn´t accept her words just like that, unqualified, and rather keep in mind that there´s moves she makes and untold truths that she likes to keep in the dark to keep things moving the way she/the court want. I mean, come on, Wille doesn´t want us to just accept things.

Do it for Wille. Question the queen.

finishing an essay is really nice until you realize you have another one to write

get this boy out of the magnus institute NOW

Idk a lot of the backlash to broadening who falls under what terms comes from the need to distinctly fall under the specific label you worked towards…but distance from adjacent labels only limits your allies and puts you in a rigid box you can’t come back out of either.

Saw a post by a trans woman horrified by the concept of having overlapping experience with femboys because “fuck you I am a woman.” You are. A woman with a lot of overlapping experience with a GNC man. You’re not a GNC man. He’s not a woman. And the gap between you two is not a chasm.

“How dare you say trans men are similar to butch lesbians. Trans men are men.” Yeah, men with similar experiences to butch lesbians. The butch lesbian isn’t a man. You aren’t a woman. And the gap between you is not a chasm.

This mindset doesn’t even account for GNC men who also ID as women, trans men who use the label of lesbian. Butch can be a label for a person of either AGAB.

Binary trans people wanna separate themselves from each other and from nonbinary people sooo bad. Now it makes eggs feel like the jump from GNC woman to man is an insurmountable journey. A femboy gets told he’s making a mockery of trans women’s experiences. A transmasc femboy is seen as just a faker. A butch trans lesbian is seen as a faker.

These labels are all just plots on the map, not one side or the other. You journey to the farthest edges and you find twinks and lesbians who look and act identical despite being supposed opposites. It’s all made up, we’re all queer.

AU where Zuko doesn't practice helmet safety

i saw someone point out the frequency with which liberals back social justice movements... how, for instance, when ferguson happened under obama it was not popular and there were many, many liberals who found the blm movement, in a sense, "in violation of [liberal] sensibilities" (when liberalism as a rule does not challenge the status quo, only maintains it and sees any call for revolution or real change as disruptive or 'bad for optics' and therefore not acceptable) but then when trump became president and he opposed blm a lot more liberals decided that the blm movement had merit because they viewed it from a team-sports perspective rather than a worldview based on morals and an understanding of the systems in place in the U.S. - that it was more comfortable for them to operate from a "trump bad" basis rather than "the american justice system and the police are inherently white supremacist, which are inherently, automatically, and always violent"

+ that, if trump was president while israel is carrying out its genocide, liberals would have NO problem denouncing israel and demanding for a ceasefire because they're comfortable operating from the 2-party system basis, NOT from a framework based on material conditions or factors or any acknowledgement or analysis of imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism. but because biden is a democrat, and democrats are supposed to be "the decent party" "the lesser evil" "more respectable" when, in functionality - in real practice, they don't want to disrupt the status quo. (internally, maintaining systems of white supremacy and capitalism; externally, furthering U.S. imperialism by maintaining hegemony and continuing the practice of exploitation and extraction of labor+capital+resources from the global south)

which is why we're here, a month into a genocide, and liberals are so cowardly and gutless that, in the face of our democrat president allowing and funding the genocide of palestinians in order for the U.S. to maintain its military base in the middle east, liberals IMMEDIATELY jump to "well, you HAVE to vote for him still, because trump will be worse!" and go "well im powerless there's nothing i can do", immediately folding like a wet paper bag in the face of the american empire rearing its ugly head in the most blatant, naked way in years, instead of thinking "this is unacceptable, i should pressure my elected officials and do everything i can - be it combating propaganda, contacting my congresspeople or senators, protesting, or engaging in direct action - to ensure this stops as quickly as possible".

there are liberals STILL IN MY NOTIFICATIONS who go "well you'll be electing a fascist if you vote for trump" not realizing that YOU CAN'T SIMPLY VOTE FASCISM AWAY. (which is not to say you should vote for republicans; that's not what i'm saying. none of us have said it.) we're pretty much already there. it's 2003 all over again, with the patriot act and all. the american war machine is pumping out racist, orientalist, pro-colonial, pro-genocide propaganda on behalf of the ethno-state america and its allies have backed since the so-called state's inception. people are being doxxed, fired, harassed, and attacked for visibly supporting palestine/opposing israel. islamophobic hate crimes are on the rise; a 6 year old boy was murdered not one month ago, an arab doctor in texas was stabbed to death. antisemitism is on the rise as well, thanks to the conflation of antisemitism with anti-zionism (which nazis have and will attempt to co-op in order to 'justify' + then act on their antisemitism, racism, and genocidal worldviews). our government is silencing people, brutalizing protestors, and arming and funding an ethno-state committing genocide - everything that would have been called fascist if it was under trump. but because it's a *democrat* liberals place "vote blue no matter who" and "optics" over the extremely basic moral stance that "genocide is wrong and people have the right to self-determination, autonomy, and life". arabs and muslims are already so dehumanized in the west that liberals (whether they consider themselves liberals or not) consider it an inconvenience to talk about the ongoing genocide that is happening with the blessing of OUR government. in this they expose their selfishness, the shallowness of their morals, their chauvinism, and their racism/orientalism/islamophobia/et cetera.

for example, if you see israeli troops waving a gay pride flag and the israeli state touting its support of gay people while said iof soldiers are murdering men, women, and children en masse every single day and you somehow????? think that because gay people are the ones doing the killing or a state claims to support gay people is doing the killing is ok then 1) you have fallen for pinkwashing propaganda and 2) that you find the murder of palestinians, or any people, permissible by a colonial force that uses causes liberals may genuinely care about in order to disguise, whitewash, or "lessen" the severity of the injustices it does unto usually black and brown people outside of the U.S., then you are just as bloodthirsty and depraved as anyone you would personally assign those descriptors of.

once again, it goes back to resorting to a team-sport understanding of the world rather than approaching it from a material one.

in case anyone's wondering how neopets has been doing lately

when a lovely flame dies, smoke gets in your eyes

OR: what were we supposed to take away from episode 4 if not ‘bucky is a war widow’

you ship ryomina because ryoji is a disaster of a bisexual. I ship ryomina because of the beauty of a suicidal boy that can love life enough that death can agree.

I think that the one thing that I will always absolutely loathe the movies for (other than single handedly screwing up the whole plot of the story) is for making up that bullshit rule about Zeus declaring that no god can have any kind of contact with their children. That’s completely not true but now a huge chunk of people in the fandom believe that rule as canon( because most like to pick and chose what is canon and what is not, and sell head canons as being canon to the books ).

The only rules that are stated in the books relating to demigods and their parents is that 1). Gods cannot blatantly and outwardly help their demigod children during a basic quest (such as help them fight monsters or help them travel somewhere for the quest). 2). That as of the time right after WW2 the big 3 gods are not to sire any demigod children as part of their oath that they made on the River Styx (which Zeus and Poseidon definitely didn’t break ). Gods are still able to spend time with their demigod children and mortal lovers on times out side of quests. However, it’s seen as taboo mainly because the other gods use them having to much to do, and too many demigod children as an excuse to just not do anything for them. Not send them a birthday card, not a visit, and not even being claimed in most cases.

That’s giving the gods too much slack! People like to say "well, they’re gods. They’re trying their best." No they’re not! And this is what Luke’s character blatantly points out!

Hermes not even bothering to visit every once and a while? Hermes not trying to help in even any little way with Luke and May's situation? It’s a main reason why Luke becomes so angry at the gods and even thinks about saying yes to Kronos’ proposal.

And who is the example of what could’ve happened if Hermes would’ve done literally anything? Anything at all? Percy.

Percy didn’t like the gods and Poseidon very much in the beginning ( he doesn’t really like them much now but, you know) but Poseidon at least helps Percy in little ways that can fly under the radar of Zeus and the others. The Pearls to help Percy escape from the underworld? Tyson? Poseidon even crashes Percy’s birthday party ffs! Sure Poseidon isn’t there every time Percy scrapes his knee or fights a monster, but he still shows Percy that he somewhat cares about him.

All Hermes does is tell others how much he cares for Luke and "really truly loves him", but does nothing to prove to Luke that he truly cares. But it’s not just Hermes who does this, almost all of the gods do this! Why? Because they know that they can just say "oh, well I was busy and I tried my best" and others will just believe them and carry on. Or worse, they’ll take what the gods say to heart and demonize anyone who would try to oppose the gods so that it’s seen as a bad thing to hold the Gods accountable for the way they act.

And this is a clear example of the overarching theme that the gods are actually just an oppressive establishment that won’t ever really change unless it’s destroyed or overthrown.

In this essay I will…

Tfw you saw this and went "oh silly Lestat with his silly god complex lol"

But then your mind gave your war flashbacks to:

And you remembered this tiny detail from their bedroom:

Then you realized who came when Louis confessed and asked for God's help :

And it's not funny anymore 🥲

The reason I took interest in AI as an art medium is that I've always been interested in experimenting with novel and unconventional art media - I started incorporating power tools into a lot of my physical processes younger than most people were even allowed to breathe near them, and I took to digital art like a duck to water when it was the big, relatively new, controversial thing too, so really this just seems like the logical next step. More than that, it's exciting - it's not every day that we just invent an entirely new never-before-seen art medium! I have always been one to go fucking wild for that shit.

Which is, ironically, a huge part of why I almost reflexively recoil at how it's used in the corporate world: because the world of business, particularly the entertainment industry, has what often seems like less than zero interest in appreciating it as a novel medium.

And I often wonder how much less that would be the case - and, by extension, how much less vitriolic the discussion around it would be, and how many fewer well-meaning people would be falling for reactionary mythologies about where exactly the problems lie - if it hadn't reached the point of...at least an illusion of commercial viability, at exactly the moment it did.

See, the groundwork was laid in 2020, back during covid lockdowns, when we saw a massive spike in people relying on TV, games, books, movies, etc. to compensate for the lack of outdoor, physical, social entertainment. This was, seemingly, wonderful for the whole industry - but under late-stage capitalism, it was as much of a curse as it was a gift. When industries are run by people whose sole brain process is "line-go-up", tiny factors like "we're not going to be in lockdown forever" don't matter. CEOs got dollar signs in their eyes. Shareholders demanded not only perpetual growth, but perpetual growth at this rate or better. Even though everyone with an ounce of common sense was screaming "this is an aberration, this is not sustainable" - it didn't matter. The business bros refused to believe it. This was their new normal, they were determined to prove -

And they, predictably, failed to prove it.

So now the business bros are in a pickle. They're beholden to the shareholders to do everything within their power to maintain the infinite growth they promised, in a world with finite resources. In fact, by precedent, they're beholden to this by law. Fiduciary duty has been interpreted in court to mean that, given the choice between offering a better product and ensuring maximum returns for shareholders, the latter MUST be a higher priority; reinvesting too much in the business instead of trying to make the share value increase as much as possible, as fast as possible, can result in a lawsuit - that a board member or CEO can lose, and have lost before - because it's not acting in the best interest of shareholders. If that unsustainable explosive growth was promised forever, all the more so.

And now, 2-3-4 years on, that impossibility hangs like a sword of Damocles over the heads of these media company CEOs. The market is fully saturated; the number of new potential customers left to onboard is negligible. Some companies began trying to "solve" this "problem" by violating consumer privacy and charging per household member, which (also predictably) backfired because those of us who live in reality and not statsland were not exactly thrilled about the concept of being told we couldn't watch TV with our own families. Shareholders are getting antsy, because their (however predictably impossible) infinite lockdown-level profits...aren't coming, and someone's gotta make up for that, right? So they had already started enshittifying, making excuses for layoffs, for cutting employee pay, for duty creep, for increasing crunch, for lean-staffing, for tightening turnarounds-

And that was when we got the first iterations of AI image generation that were actually somewhat useful for things like rapid first drafts, moodboards, and conceptualizing.

Lo! A savior! It might as well have been the digital messiah to the business bros, and their eyes turned back into dollar signs. More than that, they were being promised that this...both was, and wasn't art at the same time. It was good enough for their final product, or if not it would be within a year or two, but it required no skill whatsoever to make! Soon, you could fire ALL your creatives and just have Susan from accounting write your scripts and make your concept art with all the effort that it takes to get lunch from a Star Trek replicator!

This is every bit as much bullshit as the promise of infinite lockdown-level growth, of course, but with shareholders clamoring for the money they were recklessly promised, executives are looking for anything, even the slightest glimmer of a new possibility, that just might work as a life raft from this sinking ship.

So where are we now? Well, we're exiting the "fucking around" phase and entering "finding out". According to anecdotes I've read, companies are, allegedly, already hiring prompt engineers (or "prompters" - can't give them a job title that implies there's skill or thought involved, now can we, that just might imply they deserve enough money to survive!)...and most of them not only lack the skill to manually post-process their works, but don't even know how (or perhaps aren't given access) to fully use the software they specialize in, being blissfully unaware of (or perhaps not able/allowed to use) features such as inpainting or img2img. It has been observed many times that LLMs are being used to flood once-reputable information outlets with hallucinated garbage. I can verify - as can nearly everyone who was online in the aftermath of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Dashcon Experience - that the results are often outright comically bad.

To anyone who was paying attention to anything other than please-line-go-up-faster-please-line-go-please (or buying so heavily into reactionary mythologies about why AI can be dangerous in industry that they bought the tech companies' false promises too and just thought it was a bad thing), this was entirely predictable. Unfortunately for everyone in the blast radius, common sense has never been an executive's strong suit when so much money is on the line.

Much like CGI before it, what we have here is a whole new medium that is seldom being treated as a new medium with its own unique strengths, but more often being used as a replacement for more expensive labor, no matter how bad the result may be - nor, for that matter, how unjust it may be that the labor is so much cheaper.

And it's all because of timing. It's all because it came about in the perfect moment to look like a life raft in a moment of late-stage capitalist panic. Any port in a storm, after all - even if that port is a non-Euclidean labyrinth of soggy, rotten botshit garbage.

Any port in a storm, right? ...right?

All images generated using Simple Stable, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

it’s just me and this essay by hanif abdurraqib against the world

Something I really like about Raph and Leo’s relationship is that Raph noticeably doesn’t hold back with Leo nearly as much as he does with Donnie and Mikey, and it’s really nice to see that from him.

Leo too would frequently fall into a natural strategist and second-in-command role of sorts, often actually giving his worries and thoughts to Raph where he wouldn’t normally.

Then the Shredder happens and this dynamic is thrown into a loop where they both stay solidly in their own camps of “we’re heroes, it’s our duty” and “we’re teens, who cares?” And during this, Raph not holding back from Leo is cranked up to an eleven and Leo flips around to mask more with Raph than he ever had before and deliberately riles Raph up so that fights are all but guaranteed.

Post-invasion, it’s clear they’re (mostly) back to how they were before for the most part, with an added level of respect and maturity (and trauma) there too, and it’s great to see because they’re an amazing duo when they’re on the same wavelength.