"Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good."

– Ernest Becker 

no offense but i genuinely fear that their potential dynamic will go severely underutilized

look. not to be too mean on main. the rightful heir thing. if you don't care about the intricacies of property law or legal writs and just want to focus on characterization and other aspects of storytelling, fine.

but it truly does look very goofy when you start "debating" this while lacking historical context and methodological tools. sometimes a constitutional crisis (that was already resolved in the 12th century and whose results you can always look up) can't just be settled by appealing to one's anachronistic opinion and accusing those who disagree of misogyny.

there's a difference between suggesting how things should be (i.e. prescriptive, i.e. women should never inherit the throne) and analysing how things were for a myriad of socio-political reasons.

also, trust me, the Dance being fictional is not the gotcha people think it is. it's plenty obvious. i'm sorry to say but the premise is so flimsy it would never have happened like that irl.

final idea: likewise, perhaps being condescending about people who do take the time to criticise the premise is veering a little bit towards anti-intellectualism. 'idc about succession laws ergo i'm more enlightened bc i've unlocked an edgelord-y way to enjoy fiction'. a medievalesque fantasy setting is going to attract commentators who are interested in medieval history or at least aspects of it. they may find copy-paste scenarios from real history and think it interesting to compare and contrast. it's not immediately equivalent to treating aegon and rhaenyra like your ballot choices next election, and, equally, they're not discussions without merit.

comparative analysis is a transferable skill! if someone doesn't want to partake, fine, but i think this attitude of turning one's nose at it is a tad coarse. there are many fans who take the time to write informative posts and contextualise this fictionalised universe and it's a shame to automatically write-off what is ultimately a rich tradition in internet asoiaf spaces

i like this guy

I loveloveloveLOVE watching old doctor who and seeing all the little line flubs, when the actors talk over each other, the times they almost fall over a piece of set or fumble a prop because you just know they didn't have enough film to do another take it's truly my favourite thing in the world

Everyday I'm so sad knowing not many people share my headcanon that Starlo and Ed are exes.

Tempted to be the person to make this a thing.

i've been ruminating a lot on it because i think i'm bad at putting my thoughts into words but i need y'all to understand that while there are absolutely a lot of Not Good Things about the finals being held in saudi arabia for three years...the way people seem to treat is as morally black and white is shortsighted and unhelpful.

realistically the players traveling there will be protected. it may be uncomfortable, it's certainly not ideal, but they will travel there for a few weeks, play their tennis, then leave. there are a lot of women, a lot of queer people who actually live in saudi arabia who cannot just leave, who are actually subjected to laws and social climates...and to me it just seems very disrespectful to that actual lived experience, for everybody to sort of turn their noses up and get on their high horses. of course, if the players wish to opt out, that is their choice, but that is their choice to make. that's their judgement. not ours.

and then, what about a tournament like miami? florida is literally experiencing one of the worst active regressions that i've seen in the us (granted i'm young). things like critical race theory and lgbtq+ ed are being removed from curriculums, rights for trans youth, trans healthcare, etc. are going backwards. abortion rights? gun violence? and yes i know that the laws and climate in saudi arabia are different gravy, i understand that, but my point is, no one would ever DREAM of arguing against hosting a tournament in miami despite all of these issues. and we can extend this to a lot of other tournaments! i mean, all the outrage about fifa hosting a world cup in qatar, but we don't have any of these sentiments about doha? i've seen other people bring up that the finals were hosted in singapore when gay marriage was still illegal there. we've already talked about italy's fascist prime minister. and i could go on and on and on about the war crimes of countries like the us or the uk - is the us not participating actively in genocide right now? where is the standard? if you argue against hosting the finals in saudi arabia for the reason of human rights, to me it seems you have to uphold that standard for the location you do land on. and i can guarantee, you will not find a single country in the world with clean hands.

i want to be clear i am not arguing that hosting the finals in saudi arabia is a good thing, especially for three years, especially because it's definitely going there because of money, and not for any of the "good" reasons i think some people want us to believe about "improving the region" (which is very weirdly white savior-esque anyway). i don't really have an official "conclusion" to this discussion.

what i am arguing is that i think a lot of the protests against saudi arabiahosting the finals are more an example of implicit anti-arab bias and islamophobia, rather than genuine discussion. key word implicit: i don't think most people are purposefully trying to be anti-arab/islamophobic. or at least, i'd like to believe nobody is. but i also think, particularly in the west, there is already so much of this xenophobic sentiment ingrained. and this is why i think it's really really REALLY important to check ourselves when we talk about it instead of just jumping straight to the human rights conversation without a second thought.

i'll say it plainly: i don't think the finals should be held in saudi arabia. but for me, it has more to do with sportswashing, with the dangers of the way money is thrown around in sports, and because i think it's more evidence that the wta doesn't care about player welfare but rather about making a profit (what else is new). human rights are absolutely a concern of mine, but how is it fair to hold saudi arabia to a standard that we don't seem to care about for literally anybody else?

literally look at the us's ugly ugly history, past and present, and tell me why we deserve to host a tennis tournament.

i cannot fucking overstate how much i love fcg’s reasoning for helping the gods btw. they don’t want to save them because they believe in them, though they do—they want to save them because, deep down, the purpose they’ve always had, always wanted to have, is to help. he wants to save the gods because they’ve asked for his help, and in turn, he believes that they’ll be able to help more people across exandria. he believes that if he helps, the gods will pay that favor back and help others too. and i just. dear god i love that. fcg recklessly and relentlessly chooses kindness and seems to have come back even more determined to do so after their detour in wildemount and i absolutely cannot wait to see it

(Crossposted to DW)

The thing is I have sooooo many things to say about Dark Place Casey but I find myself tripping on step one -- which is that trenchcoat Casey, the Casey from the Echoes, the Casey of Yötön Yö -- that's not actually Casey, our Casey, that's just Alan again. It's Alan, filtered through the lens of Casey, filtered through the lens of Alan.

Because everything that makes Casey recognisably himself is just... good character writing. The affect, the character voice, the opinions, the way he reasons through circumstances, all of those are the result of Alan's familiarity with the version of Casey he thinks is his. We're already seeing one layer down because of the way Echoes work, but even that top layer, Casey in the text, is Alan's creation.

Which makes it fucking fascinating that Casey is in the text identified in a role that is removed from the roles hierarchy of the horror story. He is "the detective". And if you've read enough detective fiction, you know that the detective rarely is the hero of the story. They're not someone who has skin in the game. They're rarely personally involved, their character arc rarely tied to the mystery itself. The detective may be the protagonist, but most of the time their role is to be a witness -- an observer, a collaborator, the window into a broader, impersonal perspective and, when necessary, the hand of the author acting on the plot.

An outsider to Alan's mental landscape with the face and the voice of a stranger.

apparently doing my own Strahdtober and I am very late so it’s my entry for day#12

Keeping up the fake illustrations ft M. Vampire himself. As I still haven't decided on a design for him ( I can't find myself to settle on a design, it's awful ) ... I doodled things.

I don't have context except my players sure needs to find a way to stop that fucker from respawning because they won't appreciate why I have planned for the post-campaign in case the BBEG wins.

Adding this to the pile of “things I’d have to draw correctly in the future and do real illustrations of”. I’ll polish these piles of wips one day ._.

Well I started before october began, so actually this is kinda the 19th illustration, I guess I'm not that late. .w.

In addition to the 'Jesus, son of a carpenter' post, do you guys ever think about the fact Jesus was but a child who had hopes and dreams? That maybe he wanted to grow up and grow old and be a carpenter just like Joseph?

Just thinking about Jesus, a man, barely twenty, sent to the cross begging divinity for just a little bit longer, knowing it is fruitless, but he still begs because he is human.

You ever think he wanted to hold his mother's hand one more time?

The thing about Crowley is that he already tried fighting* the system and the end result was his fellow rebels making a new system suspiciously similar to the old system with torture pits and demotivational posters in place of the aggressive hypocrisy and kardashiancore interior decorating. And then after that he decided to fight the apocalypse and the apocalypse thwarted itself with minimal involvement required from him. His biggest contribution was fucking up a simple handoff completely accidentally. His apparent belief that it'll all sort itself out without him or it won't and either way his involvement will be largely irrelevant to everyone but himself is pretty well founded. I'm sure by the end of season three he'll have learned a valuable lesson about how admitting that you want to make positive contributions to the world is something you can do on your own terms and not simply an exercise in opening yourself up to god's preordained judgement and hell's torture pits and but he's old and tired and has probably never been kissed let him have a very specific vision for his retirement.

*ok his version of fighting was probably just asking a lot of very annoying questions and then semi-accidentally joining a rebellion.

for like 3 weeks i was wondering why i was sleeping so much and felt listless. and just now I managed to email 3 people and responded to a month old message in the span of an hour because I got back to TAKING MY FUCKIN MEDS..........

one problem with getting into Fiction Franchises like, oh let's say the MCU, long after they started is that 1) there are things that refer back to things I don't know about and 2) i don't know what i don't know about, and in a way that latter is more of a problem at least for me.

i managed an episode of wandavision and was left thinking "this seems like it's good, but i have no clue what's going on here so it's not going to work for me is it?" and i am reliably told it's supposed to be Mysterious Mindfuckery but i, a noob, was unable to work out without external clarification what i wasn't supposed to know. if you see what i mean.

i notice the mcu movies (at least as it progresses?) don't have numbers on them, and we know when they're direct sequels because there's a subtitle. and if you come at these later you need to get a chart to work out whether you should watch thor: ragnarok before or after thor: the dark world. which is easily done if i am determined to get things in the right order, but any effort is too much for someone.

so while i am willing to consider the idea that the later mcu films/shows are just Less Good than the early ones (personally Doubt so far but I'm not opposed to the idea) it's very easy inside a fandom to lose sight of what your thing looks like to the casuals who make up most of an audience, and frankly the mcu is currently Very Large and confusing.

who are all these Mrs/Captain/Miss/etc Marvel ladies and which of them have already been in films I might or might not have seen? how many ant men are there prior to this one? am i supposed to know who the baddy in this or that film is? which of these side-characters are from something else?

doesn't-seem-related-but-it-is: i was surprised to discover that the general mcu fandom view of the loki series was not that it was some sort of AU situation that could be thought of an entirely separate from the main series of films. because that was pretty much why it was the one to hook me, i think - it explained the relevant backstory with clips and yet also this is a different loki so if i don't want to go and watch however many films he was in i don't have to. i would expect him to be to some extent "out of character" because it carefully explained to me that this is not really the same character as that identical guy with the same name who was in some number of films. there's a woman one and an alligator one but don't worry they're all from AUs anyway.

every day I lose sympathy for other trans men. Suffer in silence until you can be normal you stupid bitches

In light of recent events.

(Inspo under cut)