Okay so I'm not generally a sports person but I can't stop thinking about all the ways the foxes revolutionized exy. For example, the way their tiny team structure made them focus on endurance and coordination rather than brute force? Amazing. And related to that, the way that they adapted by training players to fill multiple positions? That must have had huge implications for how they understood other players needs and allowed for flexibility of they needed someone's specialty in a different position (see the final game). BUT ALSO the way Kevin and Neil specifically shook up the game was insane. Kevin being ambidextrous and using it to make his moves unpredictable. Using heavyweight racquets to put more strength behind their shots. Communicating only in French so opponents don't get any warning but they're still in sync with each other. I'll bet you anything other teams were scrambling to catch up and figure out how to play like the foxes did

for real WHERE does the idea that [utdr humans] are nongendered so that "you can project on them" come from. their literal character arcs are about NOT being a blank slate to be filled in by the audience

i think i understand the assumption on some level for undertale, because there is a very intentional effort to make you identify with the "player character" in order to make your choices feel like your own (the beating heart of undertale's metanarrative lies in giving you an alternative path to violence against its enemies after all, and whether you're still willing to persue it for your own selfish reasons. YOUR agency is crucial).

of course, the cardinal plot twist of the main ending sweeps the rug from under your feet on that in every way, and frisk's individuality becomes, in turn, a tool to further UT's OTHER main theme: completionism as a form of diegetic violence within the story. replaying the game would steal frisk's life and happy ending from them for our own perverse sentimentality, emotionally forcing our hand away from the reset button.

i think their neutrality absolutely aids in that immersion. but also, there's this weird attitude by (mostly) cis fans where it being functional within the story makes it... somehow "editable" and "up to the player" as well? which is gross and shows their ass on how they approach gender neutrality in general lol.

but also like. there's plenty of neutral, non PCharacters in undertale and deltarune. even when undertale was just an earthbound fangame and the player immersion metanarrative was completely absent, toby still described frisk as a "young, androgynous person". sometimes characters are just neutral by design. it's not that hard to understand lol.

anyone who makes this argument for kris deltarune is braindead. nothing else to say about it.

Man its been weeks and I’m still soured by the conclusion to Fontaine’s main story. I'll just rant here

There were a lot of things I didn’t like about it (Arlecchino's altruism being played straight, Traveler being out of character, the lore exposition ass-pull with the prophecy slates, the weird logic about how destroying a Gnosis could potentially wake up the Heavenly Principles but not fucking destroying an Archon Throne when Celestia forced everyone to fight a GODDAMN WAR TO ESTABLISH THEM-) but the biggest offense to me was how Furina was handled. This was marketed as the grand finale of the arc, the climax with Furina at the center of it all. And she got shafted. Big time. Furina had no agency in the plot whatsoever, nothing she did had any effect on how things turned out, and she didn’t even have the dignity of fully understanding why it all had to happen that way.

(Also I will preface this with yes Furina and Focalors are technically the same person with the same origin, but after the split Furina lost all her memories as Focalors. They are two separate consciousnesses with different experiences, and therefore I will treat their individual choices as their own)

I’ve seen people try to argue that no, she chose to take on this role knowing she would suffer, that she didn't HAVE to go along with it. And she was even working by herself to solve the prophecy without relying on Focalors, she wasn’t a puppet/pawn! But the thing is she was essentially in a hostage situation. If she didn’t do things exactly as dictated by Focalors people would DIE. Like there is a reason why criminal punishments are lighter when it’s found the perpetrator was coerced into it! And her researching how to avoid the prophecy changed nothing about the outcome, she could have sat around eating cake and the story would have word for word turned out exactly the same. All that information served to do was highlight her suffering and draw the audience’s sympathy. That's what I mean about her not having agency, it's not about her ability to act as an individual but how her actions had an effect on the overall plot. None of her choices outside of the role designated by Focalors did anything to change the situation for better or worse.

And to top it all off she didn’t even understand WHY this all had to happen. Why do people dissolve in the Primordial water? How does her pretending to be an Archon play into solving the issue? Why can’t she confide in anyone? What the hell is Focalors even doing? She doesn’t learn the answers to any of these until after everything was over, and not even from Focalors’ own mouth, it was relayed to her by Neuvillette.

Speaking of Neuvillette, I’m not gonna lie I’m sorta annoyed at his existence because it felt like Furina was shafted for him. Everything is very tilted in Neuvillette's favor. He gets his powers back, full control over Pneuma/Ousia, final say in trials, the ability to hand out Visions, and just straight up the ability to manipulate life itself. And okay all these things were his to begin with lore-wise, whatever, but he also becomes the "lore important" character after this at Furina's expense. Furina doesn't have her memories as Focalors, she can't tell us anything about how the world works, about Celestia, about what happened 500 years ago. Even though other Archons didn't give us much either for one reason or another, they at least HAVE that knowledge, and are therefore guaranteed to have involvement in future events with the Abyss and Celestia. Furina at the moment, doesn't. Neuvillette has it now. And all that talk about Focalors judging Celestia? Also Neuvillette's job now. And it feels like it was all stolen from Furina from a story-telling perspective because again, she didn't know of the plan to return his powers. She didn't even get to explicitly agree with her other self that he should have them back. The writers really seemed to go out of their way to place him on a pedestal at Furina's expense, which irks the hell out of me.

There are some opportunity for future interludes to turn the current state around, and they probably will since Furina is still being marketed as an Archon, but as it stands I want Fontaine to be over so we can move on to the next disappointment.

i leave myself notes in my wips

watched hi nanna today and it was so good!

the female lead talking about not wanting to get married or have kids AND not being ridiculed for it was not smth i expected to watch in a telugu movie but it gave me exactly that!

my first favourite scene in the movie was the one where yashna breaks down after finding about their daughter's condition and she starts taking it out on viraj and he tries his best to hug her and they end up on the floor with him holding her down. i just loved everything about it! the acting was honestly amazing. mrunal did a fantastic job and even the way it was shot was just,,, beautiful

my second favourite scene was the one where viraj talks about having kids and yashna freaks out and they argue about it and viraj goes out the door saying he wished he never married her but immediately comes back in and hugs her and they make up

ALSO i love that the movie still has that lil bit of silliness that most telugu rom coms do!

i'm really not sure how i feel about the ending tho bc i didn't like it after finishing the movie bc i thought viraj deserved someone better than yashna?? hated that she blamed him for their daughter's condition but now that i think about it.... i feel like viraj should've been more understanding about her stance on kids so he shouldn't have brought up kids so suddenly in the first place and now i've finally come to the conclusion that it kinda makes sense lol

another favourite thing about the movie is yashna's character! she's a woman who's scared of getting married bc of her parents own broken marriage and doesn't want to have kids bc what if her marriage fails too? she doesn't want to put her kids through what she'd experienced and it's such a valid fear for someone like her. and sure, she gets over her fear of marriage bc of viraj but it's not easy for her to change the way she thinks about kids and so she tells viraj that she's worried that if they have kids and their marriage ends up failing, then it's gonna hit the kids the hardest and she doesn't want that which, again, makes so much sense for someone who grew up the way she did but viraj did not grow the way she did and so he hates that she thinks so pessimistically about their marriage and they have a fight about it

and after they end up having a daughter who's diagnosed at birth with a fatal pulmonary condition, yashna freaks out bc her worst fear has come true in a way she did not expect it to. she has to put her daughter through so much trouble but not bc of why she thought it would be that way

and and and the fact that the three of them don't together until after yashna gets better is amazing! might not work for everyone but it worked for them haha

my favourite part of Death Note is that it's an excellent critique of how ridiculous and horrible police/policing ideology/punitive justice is when taken to its natural conclusion/extreme, but the old man writing it absolutely did not have that in mind -- as evidenced by the fact that he had the Good Normal Police take down This Unhinged Freak Who Thinks We Should Kill Criminals (tho tbf I do think it's a pointed critique of the death penalty - "it's still murder even if they're death row criminals" like it's not spelled out but it's pretty obvious the death penalty is murder too then. But the author kinda gives up on acknowledging the normal "justice" system isn't aren't 100% prefect by the end). like I'm not 100% certain but I do think Light's dad was just made a policeman for plot convenience & possibly to explain why criminals take up so much space in Light's head, not because the Kira's ideology could only be developed by the child of a cop. (L would have used that as evidence it was the case.) Also the author said Mr. Cop Father is good.

you know if we do accept the last epilogue-esque sequence as a sort of dream/wish of ted's and therefore not necessarily canon, very funny if we then simply go "yeah, trent's book is called 'the lasso way' actually. he didn't change that. nope."

This is a personal post.

watching my sister outwardly preach morality and right vs wrong, not only to me in arguments about things that have nothing to do with her, but also on her social media page where she is very aggressive and vicious towards people who don't share her views or who she perceives to be inherently malicious, and rather than treat them with kindness she treats them with aggression.

meanwhile she has never done a deep reflection on what right vs wrong is, and clearly has a very black and white mentality about it that is inherently distorted because nothing is black and white.

and i refuse to even engage with it anymore because i'm not going to stand there and let someone scream at me and tell me she hopes i die for merely trying to point out her own hypocrisy.

like pick up a book on philosophy i beg of thee. and just sit with it. don't take it as a metric to lead your life by but take it as a theory to mull with and play with. for fucks sake watch The Good Place or The 100 if reading philosophy isn't your thing. or read the Vicious duology by V.E. Schwab, or read Tokyo Ghoul by Sui Ishida. or No Longer Human by Dazi or read anything that remotely discusses the complexities of feeling like a monster or being alienated in society/media about good vs evil. (my examples in media are thin, despite it being my favorite narrative device because i genuinely am blanking)

like learn that right and wrong is fluid and to not condemn people because they do something you personally wouldn't do. it is not your place to dictate how others live, and if you want people to grow to share your opinion you can't force them with vitriol and you most definitely won't be the deciding factor in why someone might come around to your belief system.

I'm so sick and feverish and guess what I'm thinking about? lesbian sex.

Oh my god. I actually have a nemesis. It's the scholar who wrote one of the best articles on my thesis topic where they perform a lot of truly spectacular close readings yet somehow end up reaching the exact opposite conclusion that I do, to the point where one of their quotes summarizes half of my thesis but in the exact opposite way of what they meant by it

Can I ask when the last time “dick worshipper”, etc. has actually been used by a radblr woman? Not a black-pill orbiter; they’re awful to everyone and don’t tend to last long here. I mean from someone in radblr, claiming to be a radical feminist or supporting radical feminism. I know it used to be fairly common years ago. So did political lesbianism, which pissed everyone off for different reasons. Most of those people either left or just don’t show up in my circles anymore, and those that do again don’t last long. So where is this coming from? I see it referenced but no recent examples. I am seeing a hell of a lot of recent homophobia from women in radblr though. Every woman I’ve seen addressing the homophobia has stated the misogynistic terms aren’t okay, again, even though from what I’ve seen it hasn’t happened for a long time. Whereas I’m seeing a ton of defensiveness and doubling down in regards to the homophobia. And there seems to be this demand of all lesbians and non-lesbian pro-separatist women to denounce the “dick worshipper” type comments, and it’s like, A) they already have and B) if they’re not the ones who said it can you stop conflating pro-separatist arguments with that shit? Again, this is just what I’ve seen. Maybe the “dick-worshipper” comments are all over some areas of radblr, but they’re not from anyone I follow or have seen on my dash for years. I’d say for the last four or five years the only time I’ve seen it is from women asking not to be called that--which, I agree, I don’t want to be called that and I don’t want to see other women called that. It’s just, I haven’t been called it or seen it for a long time, so something’s not adding up.

Thinking about the implications of Louis using his cane again in 1.06 for the first time since the first episode i think. When he was human he used it as a protection and as a literal and figurative crutch to feel stronger and appear threatening. When he became vampire he didn't need that anymore. Except now he feels he does again because of Lestat

GOD THIS PERSON GETS IT!!!

No need to worry, the screams of fury emanating from her room are just because she made the terrible decision to read someone else’s list of the ‘100 Best Classic Fiction Works in English’

Thinking thoughts ab this messed up family again and thinking again about Garp wanting for Ace and Luffy to become strong - strongest - marines as form of protection because to him that's their best shot at staying alive.

While Dragon on the other hand was significantly different, I do think he was unexpected, because frankly Garp was and is not fit to be a parent ( having had no parental figure growing up ) nor do I think he would've really wanted a child. But he still loved his son and tried his best with what support he had from his peers and friends. He still wanted Dragon to be a marine, of course, but without the same kind of pressuring need as there'd been with Ace or Luffy, he'd be far more inclined towards letting things progress at a more natural pace.

He was still strict, more knowledged on being a soldier than father, but more lienient and more present in Dragon's early life. Present enough to complain and rant about restrictions and his anger towards the government and celestial dragons to or where his son could hear.