Source:

Homelander from the boys is the worst person ever, he's a monster (idk if you watch the show), i can't even begin to explain it. But at the same time, he's one of the best and most interesting characters in the whole show.

I agree with you, like, a bad person can still be a """good""" and interesting character. Let's take the r*apist for example, May started working at dispatch, bc of the actions of said character. And I love May's storyline at dispatch. Even Jonah was an interesting character, I remember all the theories about him, it was fun trying to figure it all out.

I do not watch the show, it’s very much in the Not For Me category, but I know the most basic premise, so I get what you’re saying!

I personally didn’t like the Jeffrey storyline in s5 because I thought it focused way too much on him instead of keeping the focus on Athena and her recovery and I don’t think we needed the whole escape thing or Athena killing him (though the kidnapping for Harry was a nice moment for the actor to shine for a bit and he did a great job so at least there’s that), HOWEVER, I get what they were trying to do with him, and while it’s tough for me to watch, I DID like the season 3 arc because it focused more on Athena and he was just there to move her story along instead of getting the spotlight, and it did lead to things like May making a career path change!

Characters don’t even have to be fully evil and committing war crimes to be a character you don’t like because of their actions, but that also doesn’t always mean that they are a bad/badly written character! I personally don’t like Shannon, but we’re not really supposed to! I DO however like watching the arc with her because it’s there to contrast her and Eddie’s approaches to Chris, how they learn and grow (or don’t), and I think it’s all interesting and correctly focused on Eddie and Chris as they are the main characters. I don’t like Ana either, and I think there was some fumbling of that arc in a couple places, but she served a purpose for the story and I don’t mind too much watching through that arc because for the most part it’s narratively satisfyingly. Contrast that with tay kay who it didn’t really make sense to bring back and who they never really addressed her previous actions and whose arc drug on far too long and wasn’t nearly as narratively satisfyingly in it’s ending because of those issues. It’s harder to enjoy that arc because it wasn’t done particularly well 🤷🏻‍♀️ And the same is true of L. They cut so much of her stuff that she didn’t end up serving any purpose at all, which actually is probably the best thing that could have happened honestly. In case we need to be reminded, KR’s plan was to have Buck being miserable and having that conversation about trapping his gf in his apartment, while actively “flirting” and “poking” with another woman at work making him feel “alive again” for the entirety of 5b. That’s what we would have been in for. Either way, it’s bad! And people are allowed to think it’s bad, and have feelings about it being bad, and talk about those feelings on their own blogs!*

Clearly people who dislike L are talking about her narrative arc and purpose, not saying she's a worse person in her actions than Jonah or Jeffrey, and acting like they are is purposefully, willfully misinterpreting what a lot of people with legitimate complaints about her purpose on the show are saying in order to be able to feel superior and make posts filled with righteous indignation. 🤷🏻‍♀️

*Friendly reminder that I do not think going to any actor’s personal page is the place to talk about those feelings, but fighting with people who do just encourages them

This is truly stiff competition for the worst case of willful false equivalence we've ever seen.

So, for those not aware: Ongoing embarrassment to gamers and the gaming industry, Mark Kern (former lead on FireFall), has been desperately trying to get Gamergate 2 going on X/Twitter... well after others have given up. If you need to get caught up on Mark, I recommend this video by documentary maker and experienced game developer, Dead Domain:

One of the latest fiascos in this mix has been the comparison of responses to character designs from Hades 2 (Aphrodite, left) and Stellar Blade (protagonist Eve, right). The post isn't by Mark, but is part of the general harassment campaign he's trying to lead.

If you're somehow not familiar with Aphrodite, she's the Ancient Greek goddess of love, lust and hot girl shit. It is absolutely perfect characterization for her to show up to a battle (or anything else) nude but for her hair teasingly covering the intimate parts of her body. But the buried lede here is, you don't fight her in Hades and nothing about Hades 2 indicates she'll fight there either, she just likes the aesthetic and has no reason not to indulge.

Stellar Blade will release on 26 April 2024, so we can't really give an informed discussion of her character. But what we do know is the studio head is the illustrator from Blade & Soul, Eve is described as being a member of "the 7th Airborne Squad" engaged in an "operation to reclaim the planet from the Naytiba", and the promotion material promises "an enthralling narrative filled with mature themes, mystery and revelation. Embrace the relentless pace, with no time to pause between moments where critical, story-changing decisions are made."

It's to be compared to games like Nier: Automata, Devil May Cry 5, Jedi: Fallen Order and Sekiro. And the screenshots look like this:

And yeah, unlike Bayonetta she's not supposed to be an unstoppable force of nature (and fashion) who is immune to self-doubt, she's supposed to be the scrappy underdog last survivor of her team.

Weird they gave her a costume that conveys... the opposite of literally everything they're supposed to be trying to tell you about her.

-wincenworks

guys. okay. rubs my temples.

i have blacklisted every word u can Possibly think of to block posts i do not want to see and somehow keep seeing them. so Please know that this is not a shit-starting post. hence why it's unrebloggable. because i legitimately just want to communicate to people in my immediate sphere.

it is... Not Acceptable Or Appropriate... to make/reblog posts referring to a collective of "jews" or "jewish people" in response to israel's genocide of palestine.

what i mean by this are posts along the lines of "what jews don't realize is-" "i wish american jews knew-" "can't wait to watch jewish bloggers come up with the worst takes imaginable-" etc etc etc.

it is similarly Not Acceptable Or Appropriate to refer to rabbis, synagogues, jewish practice, and other aspects of judaism/jewish culture as a monolithic hivemind that's loyal to israel. this includes "you're all being brainwashed by your rabbis/synagogues" "synagogues are zionist institutions" "stop speaking hebrew until your people stop committing war crimes" etc etc etc.

your kneejerk reaction (if u are a leftist goy) will likely be along the lines of: but it's simply like referring to a collective of british people or american people wrt imperialism, colonialism, and war crimes. you don't mean LITERALLY all jews, just like you don't mean literally all brits or americans.

this is unfortunately a false equivalence because of the antisemitic history and violence behind the idea of Monolithic Jews and Dual Loyalties. there is a quick overview of some of The Problems here; jewish scholarship and discussion of this is incredibly broad and varied... because jewish people are incredibly broad and varied.

like i'm fucking begging. you have Got to knock it off. i was gonna say something snide about how it's telling that i'm seeing a lot more posts About The Jews than about the fundamentalist christians who fanatically support israel's right-wing fascist govt, but like.... god i don't care i don't care i don't want to be writing this. It Just Sucks.

That's It. It Just Sucks

while i'm here, since i don't plan to talk about this anymore unless i have important resources to share: ACTUAL helpful things you can do are to keep an eye on the news and communicate with your own governments. for americans (just bc i am american) -- the biden administration has pledged to work with israel to allow humanitarian aid into gaza. it's important that the public pressure for that to happen continues & that the documentation of what's happening in palestine continues.

the more you guys turn your issue into an issue with "the jews" or "jewish people," the more time we're going to waste explaining why this is not acceptable or appropriate. which is frustrating because there is shit out there that Matters A Whole Lot Fucking More Right Now.

so keep talking about what matters. and please please PLEASE think for two seconds before you make any posts referencing jewish people.

Propaganda mediatic around Tallien and french revolution

I fully understand that certain figures of the French Revolution are preferred over others who are less liked. It's a matter of preference. I myself have a very cultured friend who is a fan of certain royalists from this period like Olympe de Gouges, although I also admire the character in a certain way and deplore the sexism of that era which excluded her (such as the fact that she totally defends Louis XVI), but I've always enjoyed debating with this person, who is so respectful of others' opinions, very knowledgeable, and well-versed in the subject. Of course, the difficulty lies in not trying to defend the golden legend or the black legend.

It's another thing entirely to invent completely grotesque or even false facts to glorify one figure of the French Revolution and destroy another. In the grotesque episode of "Les Femmes de la Révolution Française" from "Secret d'Histoire," which was actually sexist (I" love" the fact that in this show, which claims to want to glorify women, they talked about the term "demi-mondaine" for women, when will there be an equivalent term for men, or the way paternalistic that someone call Olympe de Gouges the "little" Gouges ), there were also very serious errors or lies, take your pick.

To insinuate that Marat was a dictator when he was simply a deputy who was elected by universal suffrage, a journalist whose recommendations were not heeded, and who was arrested and brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal though acquitted according to the rules, what a funny dictator, I've never seen anything like that from a dictator before.

Furthermore, under what conditions would he have pulled off his coup d'état? The story continues in the next episode, I suppose, even though so far no historian has found any trace of Marat's coup d'état. I imagine the show will clarify that (or not). Under these conditions, I will address Tallien. They try to present him as heroic in the face of Thermidor when in reality everything was prepared for the theater of Thermidor, which was actually more anti-democratic than they let on and not out of the courage of this individual. They say it was Theresia's letter that motivated him to enact Thermidor when in reality it's because Fouché and his gang, of which he was a part, committed the worst atrocities during the French Revolution, and he wanted to escape the punishment that would rightly fall upon him and his friends and try to regain political "purity" by pinning everything on those who were to be executed (he later demanded the head of Billaud Varennes to further absolve himself). There are other motives regarding Thermidor that have nothing to do with the Convention wanting to get rid of a tyrant (Robespierre has faults but not those of a dictator or tyrant) or that they were fed up with the guillotine (the guillotine continued to function after Thermidor and the Convention had voted overwhelmingly for the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, arrests, the Law of Suspects). One day I'll write a more detailed piece on what I think because it's very complex, but you can watch "Robespierre: la Terreur et la Vertu" with English subtitles, it gives a better understanding of these events.

Tallien engaged in lucrative business, arresting the richest in Bordeaux so they would hand over all their money to him for personal use. Clearly not an upright man, but very serious. His lucrative business leads me to see two possibilities. Either he plundered honest people in difficult times under the pretext that they were rich and risked ending up with nothing for his personal profit, all while abusing his position, which is generalized extortion. Or he knowingly let suspicious individuals escape in exchange for money (should we recall that some suspicious Frenchmen betrayed France by handing it over to Toulon or Dumouriez), and imposed dechristianization not out of anger like Momoro, for example, but for his political career and to flatter himself, which is worse (sorry for comparing a man like Momoro to an individual like Tallien, they are truly incomparable). Later, he joined the muscadins, among other merry groups.

In any case, it's very serious, and whatever one might say about Robespierre, he had every right to be angry. Tallien is a political turncoat and bloody as Barras (I hate Ridley Scott's Napoleon for destroying the French Revolution and glorifying Barras, among others). The difference between Tallien, Barras, and Fouché is that Tallien completely failed, and an unpopular opinion perhaps, but I'm glad to see he suffered so much; it's well-deserved karma for all the wrong he did.

P.S: I love that the show "Secret d'Histoire" shows Thermidor as a great day for prisoners, as if they don't care about arbitrary arrests after this event (including the arrests of Albertine Marat, Simone Evard, Thuillier found mysteriously hanged, the fact that some political prisoners had to wait a few months after Thermidor to be released).

The worst thing about Wolfstar is that Remus’ mediocrity and negligence is blamed on Sirius to facilitate a false equivalence that hinges entirely on Remus having Sirius’ personality and Sirius having no personality.

In the last few days, I've now had two run-ins with people on this site regarding the idea of a TTRPG's mechanics and rules impacting the roleplay aspect of said game. And from what I can tell, these people - and people like them - have the whole concept backwards.

I think people who only ever played D&D and games like it, people who never played a Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark system, or any other system with narratively-minded mechanics, are under one false impression:

Mechanics exist to restrict.

Seeing how these people argue, what exactly they say, how they reason why "mechanics shouldn't get in the way of roleplaying," that seems to be their core idea: Rules and mechanics are necessary evils that exist solely to "balance" the game by restricting the things both players and GMs can do. The only reasons why someone would want to use mechanics in their RPG is to keep it from devolving into

"I shot you, you're dead!" "No, I'm wearing bulletproof armor!" "I didn't shoot bullets, I shot a laser!" "Well, the armor's also laserproof!" "Nuh-uh, my lasers are so hot that they melt any armor!" "My armor's a material that can't melt!" And so on. Because we have rules, the players can't just say "we beat this challenge", and neither can the GM say "you haven't beaten this challenge." Because the rules are clear, the rules are obvious, the rules tell you what you can and can't do, and that's it.

So obviously, when the idea of mechanics directly interacting with the roleplay - generally seen as the most free and creative part of a TTRPG - seems at best counterintuitive, at worst absolutely wrong. Hearing this idea, people might be inclined to think of a player saying "I'm gonna do X", just for the evil, restrictive mechanics to come in and say "no, you can't just do X! you first have to roll a Do X check! But you also did Y earlier, so you have to roll the Did Y Penalty Die, and if that one comes up higher than your Do X die, you have to look at this table and roll for your Doing X If You Previously Did Y Penalty! But, if you roll double on that roll..."

But like... that's not how it works. Roleplay-oriented mechanics don't exist to restrict people from roleplaying, they're there to encourage people to roleplay!

Let's go with a really good example for this: The flashback mechanic from Blades in the Dark (and games based on Blades in the Dark).

In BitD, you can declare a flashback to an earlier point in time. Could be five minutes ago, could be fifty years ago, doesn't matter. You declare a flashback, you describe the scene, you take some stress (the equivalent of damage) and now you have some kind of edge in the present, justified by what happened in the flashback. For example, in the Steeplechase campaign of the Adventure Zone podcast, there was a scene where the PCs confronted a character who ended up making a scandalous confession. One of the players declared a flashback, establishing that, just before they walked in, his character had pressed the record button on a portable recording device hidden in his inner coat pocket. Boom, now they have a recording of the confession.

How many times have you done something like this in a D&D game? How many times did your DM let you do this? I think for most players, that number is pretty low. And for two reasons:

The first, admittedly, has to do with restrictions. If you could just declare that your character actually stole the key to the door you're in front of in an off-screen moment earlier, that would be pretty bonkers. Insanely powerful. But, because BitD has specific mechanics built around flashbacks, there are restrictions to it, so it's a viable option without being overpowered.

But secondly, I think the far more prevalent reason as to why players in games without bespoke flashback mechanics don't utilize flashbacks is because they simply don't even think of them as an option. And that's another thing mechanics can do: Tell players what they (or their characters) can do!

Like, it's generally accepted that the players only control what their characters do, and the GM has power over everything else. That's a base assumption, so most players would never think of establishing facts about the larger world, the NPCs, etc. But there are games that have explicit mechanics for that!

Let's take Fabula Ultima as another example: In that game, you can get "Fabula Points" through certain means. They can then spend those points to do a variety of things. What's literally the first thing on the list of things Fabula Points let you do? "Alter the Story - Alter an existing element or add a new element." I've heard people use this to decide that one of the enemies their group was just about to fight was actually their character's relative, which allowed them to resolve the situation peacefully. I again ask: In your average D&D session, how likely is it that a player would just say "that guy is my cousin"? And if they did, how likely is it that the GM accepts that? But thanks to the Fabula Point mechanic making this an explicit option, thanks to rules explicitly saying "players are allowed to do this", it opens up so many possibilities for story developments that simply would not happen if the GM was the only one allowed to do these things.

And it's only possible because the mechanics say it is. Just how your wizard casting fireball is only possible because the mechanics say it is.

Lily and the Wonderful World of False Equivalency!

I've been stewing on this a while, and when focusing specifically on her self-appointed career, it's probably one of the worst things she does. (Because peeping at the larger whole has us gazing down the barrel of sexual abuse, grooming, and several other vile things Lily has perpetuated over the years.) But before this, context.

HBomberguy has two videos, one about Fallout 3, the other about Sherlock, both about how they are garbage. Now, this might come as a shock to some that he doesn't bring up other properties in his take downs. In the Fallout 3 video, he doesn't talk about anything other than Fallouts 1-3. In Sherlock, he does branch out, but only into Moffat's other projects and the original Sherlock Holmes story's. Both videos are very tightly focused and worth the watch for it.

Now, those who have had the major lapse in judgment that I had in 2016 watch the infamous Steven Universe video and probably remember that nearly 30 minute long diatribe about Kotor... The comparison doesn't really work on many levels, but the big one the little problems all lead to is that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a rated T role-playing game that will have infinitely less restrictions compared a primarily children focused show on a major television network. Leave light sith, dark jedi, gems being tools, and anything about the diamonds at the damn door. despite passing similarities, they are vastly different beasts in execution.

Then more recently we had her compare Laios and his quest to save his sister to an episode of Digimon where Tai is upset his sister got sick and there isn't more he can do to help her. Leave alone questions of morale, preparedness, and general dispositions. Lily Orchard compared the entirety of what will be a 30+ episode adult anime that already existed as a near 100 chapter Manga to just 1 episode of Digimon. Are you out of your fucking mind woman??? I hate to break it to you but Tai doesn't explain why he's upset just because he's at wits end! HE DOES IT FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE SINGLE DIGIT AGE CHILDREN THE SHOW IS MADE FOR!!!

It's such a shitty way to bolster weak points because it leaves no room for nuance. Kotor and SU both involve space colonization, but that's about where the comparison ends. Any nuance from there on out can just be explained by how vastly different they are and the vastly different circumstances of their creation. Steven talks the diamonds down for many reasons, but key amongst it all is that it's a children's show. Like how being a light side sith can have nuance for many reasons, but key amongst it all being the expectation that you aren't a child and are fully aware of the consequences of your actions and the actions made around you.

It can't be anything other than shallow mud slinging because the only way it works at all is by that single vague thread. By this logic, I can say, oh let's see... "Anything about creating personas to strike fear into certain people is the same." And it doesn't sound like I don't have a point until you are tasked with acknowledging that the SAW movies, Persona 5, and Scooby-Doo have no meaningful differences. Sure you can pontificate a bit on it, but I'd raise you the fact that the rpg elements of Saw are dogshit. The fact that anybody gives Lily a pass on this let, leave alone her general hostility or the mountains of evidence of just how vile of a person she is, it's as laughable as it is depressing.

She's a terrible critic, a garbage writer, and a truly despicable person. And this has been one of many snippets of exactly why.

The choice to use "Genocide" seems to be a deliberate one. It ties in into thw Holocaust Inversion antisemitism trope. It's used to point out to show hoe Israel Ilyas "failed" since it, either, "forgot what it means evwn though it happened to you to", or to say "You are the Nazis on this equation, you became the monster yourselves". It's about hurting where it hurts most, to saw doubt and frustration.

Yeah they definitely use the most emotive words purposefully to try get a negative reaction out of Israeli supporters, and to play with peoples emotions by using such strong language and comparisons to get neutral people into putting themselves into the Palestine category, then the more posts they like, the more indoctrination, they start believing every Pro-Palestine post they see online, liking them all, making their own posts, all of which can happen in a few days without a single bit of research into the conflict whatsoever. It's the modern equivalent of the propaganda you'd see in Soviet-era countries, lying about profits, showing images of successful rich people when 99% of them lived in poverty, like the fake cities built in North Korea to make it seem better than it is. It's a new age of false information and trickery, being used to get people to believe certain things, and the worst part is, because of how easy it is to do, most of the Palestine supporters don't even know what they're doing, the internet just makes it so easy to show mass and mass posts supporting one side, pressuring people to do the same, and eventually you're down a rabbit hole of claims and accusations that have no evidence, and it's polarising society and pushing people against each other, and pushing some people to the extremes. Calling Israeli's nazis is completely ridiculous, because I've seen a handful of Pro-Palestine protesters holding signs scarily similar to the kinds of things neo-nazis say about Jewish people. It's frightening how if you put a very far left Palestine supporter, and a far right nationalist who dislikes Jews in the same room, they'd agree on a scary amount of things. Be careful what you believe, cause a majority of posts have some kind of incorrect illogical claim in them, or an opinion based on false information.

Something that a lot of people should get more comfortable with is the idea that none of the factions in a conflict is really praiseworthy, though I acknowledge that sometimes people try to collapse the moral distance between two sides and treat them as equivalent when one is clearly worse than the other. This is not about that.

What I want to criticize is when people start acting like one side is morally impeccable and any contrary information has been manufactured by The Enemy. That is just very damaging to one's credibility and ability to think critically. It makes one biased at best, kind of culty at worst.

It reminds me of when my mother claimed El Mozote was a communist false flag to undermine support for the military. It's an embarrassing display of simplistic, fanatical thinking.

As always, "No idea is above scrutiny, no people are below dignity" is a good approach.

Carmy and Claire... ooof

I’m just gonna get into it. 

She tried to be Carmy’s Pete

I feel like Claire is supposed to be Carmy’s Pete, but it doesn’t work because Carmy is not Sugar. I was searching for a parallel to how they were trying to show Claire as a balancing force for Carmy. Which I get. Opposites attract. You see that with Nat and Pete but for some reason it doesn’t work with Carmy because he is so much more ill adjusted than Sugar. Claire, despite being super understanding, also never saw the worst of Carmy. He reserved the worst for the restaurant and used her as an escape. He reserved the worst for Sydney. So Claire was never truly tested or trusted to see it all so of course she easily loved him. They never argued. I did like the softness and gentleness we saw. Carmy needs that, but it just wasn’t totally honest because they were in the honeymoon phase and he was on best behavior just for her. What if she was struggling at some point, would he be able to be there for her in the same way? No. I think this was a perfect example of a woman thinking she can fix a man. The problem is she never saw how deeply he is broken. 

Carmy created a love bubble

Carmy never set boundaries and said this is what I can give while I’m on this new project. So she got a false sense of what his world really is and what his priorities needed to be. She has a busy job too but it seemed he accommodated her so in a sense she never really saw the actual reality of them both working like crazy and him coming home stressed. He created a bubble of perfection with her at the center that was never going to be sustainable. 

The whole portrayal was lame. 

Not gonna lie, I did like seeing romantic Carmy, for personal reasons. If my one positive takeaway is yes he wants to fuck women, yes he can be gentle, that’s a win for me. BUT the overall tone just wasn't hitting. Which gets to a bigger gripe about the tone of most of the episodes not hitting for me. It felt very primetime drama for me with the dialogue equivalent to a teen show. They even went to what looked like a frat party. Her lines were very, “I’m the perfect, quirky, understanding girl with no problems of my own,” and he got throwaways like, “She’s so great it scares me.” Just really mediocre compared to dialogue we’ve seen written for this show. And the fireworks kiss? Come on! I was expecting running in the rain to happen at any moment. I couldn’t tell if the writers wanted me to be invested in them or not. I guess maybe they were trying to make a reliving of Carmy’s lost youth, quite literally? I dunno. It felt sweet at times but also just super corny and out of place on this show. 

Is she a pick me? 

I actually hate this term. I feel it’s used so flippantly and can be hurled at any woman like a slur. But saying it defines what I mean so forgive me. Claire got the red flag literally from day one. He gave her the wrong number but she still pursued him. She questioned him on it a few times until she got a real answer but his answer was kind of bland. He just said I like you so much and don’t want to mess up. I dunno, when I’ve heard that from a man in the past, they usually do mess the fuck up, big time. This is their way of letting you know. She obviously didn’t ask to define the relationship. Carmy works it out with the crew so they never had the conversation with each other. The whole girlfriend/girl who is a friend thing was so lame for a grown adult man to need to ask about. Sydney was right to punk him and be like which is it? Exactly how important is this? So was Claire never questioning what they were this whole time? She said I love you to him first, I think? She said it on the voice message, which I thought was a bit bizarre. He said he loved her to other people but we never saw him say it to her face. I think it was just really strange that we never got a scene of them saying it to each other. Sorry, I’m old fashioned, the man needs to say it first, to a woman’s face. I feel this is one step away from a woman proposing to a man which is also a no for me. 

I didn’t understand the family connection 

They all know her yet we hear nothing about her from them and Carmy has been home quite awhile at this point. Fak has her number? They call her Claire Bear? They don’t call anyone not immediate family Bear so why does she get that? Because it rhymes? Eeek. She is supposedly so close with them all but we never see them interact with her until she dates Carmy? Sugar never mentioned her. Did he have a crush in high school or did he just wish they were friends before? When Mikey, Richie, and Fak try to push her on him at Christmas he seems really disinterested. Was it just a self esteem thing, that he was put on the spot, he didn’t want a relationship, or just didn’t have a crush on her like that? It’s really unclear what that was about. And then she knows about The Bear name but he says he wishes she talked to him more. So when was this conversation? It’s just really sloppy and none of the details align. Everyone treats her like she was so close to the family but there’s no real evidence of that from the past that makes any sense. I’ve seen some fans say Carmy connected her with his family trauma and that’s why it can’t work. I don’t really get that. Maybe that’s what they tried to write but I’m not getting how when it seems the family connection is just them trying to set him up with her. Am I missing something?

Will they explore this again?

I think it’s hard to tell. It is interesting that they started in the refrigerated section and it ended because Carmy was trapped in a fridge. Cold, literally. The use of the blue light when they were in bed and the blue light when Carmy was trapped was interesting. Does it mean finality? I don’t know. She didn’t even get a last name. They didn’t really end it face to face. Would they explore it again if Carmy is more stable? At this point I have no idea what they intend but I can’t conclude it’s done, done. Overall, the fan reactions have been negative. I’m not sure if the show cares or not. If I were her I would stay away. Repeat relationships rarely work out because trust is broken. How would she be able to trust Carmy again? Even if feelings are still there I would feel duped if I were her. 

Thoughts?

One way to understand the latest round of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians—to distinguish it from previous rounds—is to see it through the lens of historical trauma. For both sides, the events of the past 10 days have evoked memories of their worst national suffering. For Israelis and Palestinians, this war has surfaced fears, always lurking just under the skin, that history could possibly repeat itself.

Let’s start with Israelis, of which I am one. For many of us, the first reports of the slaughter taking place near the Gaza border on the morning of Oct. 7 came from Israelis barricaded in their rooms with their children. One mother phoned a television anchor and pleaded for help on a live broadcast. Others made similar appeals on social media. Many of these conversations were played and replayed on television and radio in the hours and days to come, as the death toll rose: first to scores and then hundreds.

Pundits quickly dubbed the Hamas attack Israel’s 9/11. The total number killed, more than 1,300, is the population equivalent of more than 40,000 Americans. Israelis have our own library of trauma: the battles near those same kibbutzim around Gaza during the 1948 war; the tense weeks leading up to the 1967 war; the surprise attack in the 1973 war.

But for many Israelis, the Hamas attack evoked the most chilling memory of all: the Holocaust. It was reflected in the images of armed men going door to door to kill Jews, of parents cowering over their children to keep them silent, of families pleading for help and getting no response. Part of Israel’s creation story is the idea that Jews would no longer find themselves defenseless, that a modern state and a strong military would act as a guarantee against further exterminations. For many long hours on Oct. 7, the guarantor seemed to be missing in action.

To be sure, historical analogies are risky. Plenty of Israelis leaders have invoked the Holocaust to justify misplaced political goals, cheapening its significance. But Israelis weren’t the only ones to see parallels. A few days after the Hamas attack, U.S. President Joe Biden said: “This attack has brought to the surface painful memories and the scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and genocide of the Jewish people.”

Palestinians have their own trauma, beginning with the Nakba—the catastrophe that coincided with Israel’s founding in 1948 and was intertwined with it. Approximately 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes and became refugees, many forcibly displaced by the nascent Israeli army. Most Palestinians in Gaza today are the descendants of those refugees.

Last week, when Israel ordered more than 1 million Palestinians to move to the southern part of Gaza ahead of an Israeli invasion, what the world saw was a humanitarian crisis in the making. But for Palestinians, it was also an echo of that historical trauma—and, quite possibly, the harbinger of a new Nakba. Israel pledged to allow Palestinians to return to their homes once troops routed Hamas in the north. (Already, some 3,000 Palestinians have died in bombardments.) But the promise would surely have rung false to anyone steeped in the memory of 1948.

I’ve witnessed the way in which the Nakba is a live issue in the Palestinian consciousness—not just a historical event—while working for years to prevent the eviction of Palestinian refugee families from Sheikh Jarrah and other neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, by government-backed settlers. Initially, individual families were targeted. More recently, entire communities with hundreds of families have become at risk of displacement.

The issue came to a head in 2021, after Itamar Ben-Gvir, then a lawmaker from Israel’s far-right (and currently minister of national security), opened a parliamentary office in the neighborhood. That May, violence erupted between Israel and Gaza, spreading to East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Israel itself, where Palestinian citizens of Israel clashed with Jewish neighbors in several cities and towns.

The force of the Palestinian reaction surprised me. Never before had pending evictions in East Jerusalem sparked violence. Why had the issue of Sheikh Jarrah suddenly become so pivotal?

The answer quickly became evident. When individual Palestinian families were targeted for eviction, it was perceived as a violation of international law and a humanitarian outrage. But when an entire Palestinian community was targeted, as in the case of Sheikh Jarrah, it reopened the most painful wounds in the Palestinian consciousness.

Sheikh Jarrah is not an isolated case. Palestinians are facing forced displacement in other parts of East Jerusalem and in a growing number of communities in the occupied West Bank.

For years I had been told by Palestinian colleagues that the Nakba was not just an event but an ongoing process. It took the convulsive violence of 2021, and the increasingly blatant expulsions in the West Bank, for me to realize how close to the surface it was for many Palestinians. The Nakba is not the exclusive trauma of the 1948 refugees and their descendants. Like the Holocaust for Jews, it is the emotional inheritance of all Palestinians.

On the morning of Oct. 7, many Israelis, briefly but powerfully, came face to face with the unspeakable horrors endured by their parents and grandparents in the Holocaust. Days later, Palestinians in Gaza packed their most precious belongings and fled their homes, much as an earlier generation fled the war in 1948 that started all this.

Can either side recognize the other’s historical trauma? Even in ordinary times, Israelis and Palestinians have found it excruciatingly difficult.

For years, it was virtually a consensus in Israel that the Nakba never took place. Israelis accused the Palestinians of weaponizing this fiction in order to delegitimize Israel. Only recently has mainstream Israel begun to acknowledge the incontrovertible facts of the Nakba. This latest war will surely set back the effort.

Among some Palestinians, there is a trend to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, to claim that it never happened. For those Palestinians who acknowledge the horrific crimes of the Nazis, many feel that the creation of Israel was an attempt to redress those crimes at their expense. Israelis largely view these claims as a polemical construct designed to delegitimize Israel and a manifestation of Palestinian antisemitism.

So that’s where Israelis and Palestinians are as this war enters another week—triggered by our own traumas and reluctant to recognize the other side’s. When this war comes to an end, the chasm of mutual denial between us will be wider than ever.

So here’s the thing: I’m not sure if Lisa Ambjörn and the YR Powers That Be intended for us as viewers to understand and interrogate August from a safe position of moral certainty about his ultimate fate.

Of course, authorial intent only matters so much, and the author can’t tell you how to engage with their story. This we know from many years of being in fandom and doing whatever we please with canon.

That said, when analyzing the show, I can’t ignore the choices that Lisa et al made when constructing the Young Royals world, and how that plays out in everything from the craft elements involved in writing the scripts to the camera angles to the set design. The YR creative team has done everything they can to present a universe with a complex moral framework, where characters are nuanced and influenced by the systems they live in, where some characters may do more harm than others but everyone is capable of both good deeds and bad ones. Young Royals is constructed very differently than something like Disney’s Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, and deliberately so. It is meant to make us ask larger questions about justice and morality.

I think August is meant to be uncomfortable for us, in a way where we can’t just easily divide into binary teams of “Lock August in a dungeon for a thousand years and never mention him again” and “Malte is pretty so I guess August isn’t that bad and should get away with everything.” (Does the latter team exist? I have heard of such things existing in an uncharted-by-me corner of the internet, but I have never encountered them with my own eyes.)

I think August is meant to make us ask complicated questions. Questions like:

If someone has harmed other people, do they still deserve to heal from their own trauma once separated from those they harmed? If so, who is responsible for that healing? Is it the state? Someone else?

To what extent does the age of the perpetrator of a crime impact the legal process around that crime? (Sweden and my own country have different answers to that question. It’s likely that neither answer is perfect.)

What makes meaningful consequences for someone who has committed harm? Who gets to decide what those consequences are?

How do we reconcile the positives a person has brought to our life with the negative things a person has done? How do we sit in that place of emotional dissonance? A question for Sara, and for anyone else with a loved one who has done harmful or abusive things.

To what extent is it worth interrogating the widespread culture of voyeurism that enabled the spread of the video after August released it? (This is not to draw a false moral equivalence between releasing the video and watching the video, because those things aren’t morally equivalent. But I do think the show is asking is to think about this culture of voyeurism and the ways in which we are complicit. Think about the internet comments we see flashing on the screen after the video is released, and the fact that we get the curtains closing so decisively in 2.5. August is an engaging character in part because he plays upon our own voyeurism as viewers—in season 1 he’s constantly leading Wille into new secret layers of the Hillerska world, and we follow Wille into that, wanting to know more.)

Do we trust a legal system that would take down August, knowing those in that legal system could use the same tools to prosecute Simon and Wilhelm?

To what extent can a person’s actions also be an indictment of the system? Even if August faces consequences for his actions, can we really rest easy knowing the systems that created his worst traits are continuing to operate as usual?

And the thing about asking these questions is that I think they are more likely to yield additional questions than grant us simple answers. That can be a valuable thing, and fiction that encourages us to ask these questions is worth engaging with. I also think that you can condemn August’s actions and advocate for him facing consequences while still asking yourself these questions and not always coming to a place where everything feels resolved. August is written that way on purpose. He is meant to make us feel conflicting emotions.

(And if you don’t feel conflict and have a set opinion of him, that’s good and valid too. See what I said before about the author’s intentions only going so far. We all engage with characters in the way that’s right for us.)

I also want to make it clear that engaging in these questions around a work of fiction and a fictional character does not mean that we are condoning revenge porn and blackmail in real life and letting perpetrators of such get away with it. In real life, these things should be condemned and prosecuted. And in real life, sometimes the people who do these things are people close to us or in our general circle. Sometimes people end up thinking through these questions anyway as a result of just being a human on this earth.

Anyway, I’m hitting a crucial part of August’s arc right now in the fic I’m writing, and I find myself bumping up against these questions constantly. It’s an emotionally meaningful part of the process for me, being able to sit in that and write about it and dramatize it. And I want to offer discussion space for those in fandom who want to have that conversation—I feel like I’m always creating space for people to have that conversation in smaller group settings, but it can be harder to have a conversation like that on my public dash, because of the way discussion plays out on tumblr.

I also reserve the right to change my mind after season 3 drops. Developments could happen there that make me feel differently, but for now I just wanted to state my piece.

As much as we long for the sword of justice to cut cleanly, it almost never does. Sometimes it’s good to have stories that wrestle with that. I’m really glad that YR does.

Book Review 44 – The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

Alright, first full novel I’ve read entirely due to it getting a Hugo nomination. In retrospect that fact that there was absolutely no wait list for it at the library was perhaps a sign I should have paid attention to. I’m not sure it’s a bad book, exactly, but my god is it just chock full of little things that grated on me (which more or less tracks with my very vague memories of casually perusing The Calculating Stars when it first came out, so probably just a sign Kowal’s not for me, really.)

The story’s set in a fairly grounded space age future, on an ultra-lux cruise liner taking its passengers from Earth to Mars in speed and style. Tesla Crane, heiress, celebrity, and generally incredibly famous and unfathomably wealthy, has booked one of the nicest suites in the earth-gravity section of the ship under a false name to enjoy some anonymity on her much anticipated honeymoon cruise. Things of course take a drastic turn as a woman is murdered outside their sweet, and her spouse is framed for the crime. The shipboard security is obstructive and suspicious, bodies keep piling up, and it’s largely up to Tesla to solve the murder and clear his good name.

So first off – this is largely a style thing that grates on me far more than it should, and it probably effects my overall reading experience to an entirely unjustified degree, but – the standard etiquette in the story’s future is for everyone to use the gender neutral Mx. Using gendered terms like wife, husband, sir, m’am, or similar is also called out as being somewhere between archaic and offensively retrograde. Also, it is totally standard courtesy to list someone’s pronouns in any case where you’d their full name. In which case what is the point of taking so much care to be gender neutral of everything else. (In a sense this actually inspired worldbuilding, insofar as it’s exactly the sort of stupid language games high aristocracy or its equivalent tends to love, but the reading experience kind of grated).

The society’s generally very consciously progressive in a way that kind of calls attention to itself. It really wasn’t a surprise to see in the acknowledgement’s section that all the mentions of courtesy masks being a thing were edited in as covid happened. This is all mostly just background noise though, as far as narrative focus the only things that really occupy the story’s attention are its portrayal of disability and its bizarre class politics.

So, a key point of her backstory is that some years before the story, a lab disaster (during a demonstration of a personal assistance mech, which is actually some incredibly bitter dramatic irony I’m surprised the story doesn’t call any attention to?) killed six people and left Tesla with permanent spinal damage, chronic pain, and PTSD. Medical science doesn’t seem to have made many innovations on a cane or breathing exercises as far as mobility aids and PTSD treatment goes, but it does provide the absolutely incredible wish fulfillment device of a switch in your brain that lets you turn your pain sensitivity up or down at will. Tesla’s disability is a recurring thing throughout the book and generally the portrayal seemed fine to me? A couple conversations that bled into ‘giving the reader an important message’ territory, but only slightly and hardly the worst in the book.

The book’s attitude to class and wealth though, woof. Like, okay, the story is clearly a bit of a pastiche, a sanguine attitude to vast inequality and social hierarchy are necessary for the whole fantasy to work, but my god in that case please stop calling attention to it. The book so badly wants to simultaneously be progressive and have Tesla’s life be as maximally glamorous and exalted as possible that it gets twisted into this incredibly awkward spirals showing that she’s a good hyper-elite oligarch which really only call attention to the issue without doing anything to resolve it. Her internal monologue including some variation of the line ‘normally I hate just using money as a bludgeon to get what I want, but” happens a few too many times for it to not make un less likeable than an aristocrat who owns it.

Like, this is potentially uncharitable, but the book seems to take it as read that I find the idea of demanding to speak to a manager and having them grovel and apologize for how I’ve been disrespect far more alluring than I do? Not being that customer is a subject Tesla ruminates on at some length, and at the same time calling up her high priced lawyer and threatening to bury the whole cruise line in lawsuits while they rush to provide apology gifts is definitely portrayed as this thrilling power fantasy. It all left me actively rooting against her, at least a bit.

The actual mystery itself honestly wasn’t much to write home about – a bit confused, red herring introduced blatantly and too late, the obviously suspicious and personally unlikable character was the villain – but in a similar vein it did seem…telling, that the guy who’d been positioned as the unlikable asshole oligarch in opposition to Crane was secretly a murderous gold-digging imposter all along! Also, the fact that this was proven by a photo showing the oligarch to have been a dog guy, and the imposter being quite literally the only character in the entire book who didn’t adore Tesla’s emotional support dog. Like, c’mon.

Speaking of the dog – the book had a few recurring beats which I’m sure I’m supposed to have found funny or endearing but just overstayed their welcome with me several times over. The entire cast’s brains leaking out whenever they saw Tesla’s westie like it was some sort of platonic ideal of canine cuteness was one of them, along with like, Tesla and her spouse making out at a moment’s notice because a plot point meant that their encrypted tele-chat required skin-to-skin contact, and the book doubling as a cocktail guide. All things that if I’d liked the book I could have easily overlooked, but as is were just extra straws on the proverbial camel’s back.

Anyway, yeah, didn’t work for me.

made an fc for iron leaguer a long while back! meet ollie: the skateboardin' star!

shoutout to @odybramm and @gayelectro for givin' me the motivation to finally post this dude after being nervous about it for so long!! it really means a lot!!! :D

i came up with...QUITE the story for this dude lmao, a very long (and tbh maybe kinda mid-) one though. it was very fun to come up with tho! if you're interested in that, read below! here's some fun facts otherwise

ollie's wheels are retractable! that means he can both walk around as well as skate around without a board quite casually

apart from his cap, another spot where his old team logo can be found is on the bottom of his skateboard! it's a bit more visible, showing a trophy in the middle of a ramp

speaking of his skateboard, it's actually the one he always had ever since his old league days! he just gave it a custom do-over

this mf drinks the oil equivalent of monster energy

Ollie was once part of a formidable skateboarding team, and he took great pride in his teammates. Unfortunately, a win over a Dark Sports team sealed their fate, as they got screwed over by the corrupt organization. He was then sent to the scrap heap, where he'd eventually meet an abandoned Topjoy. The two became "oil brothers" (robo equivalent of blood brothers, shoutout to my bf for that idea), sharing an unbreakable bond and helping each other out. However, the duo had been separated once the basketball leaguer was picked up by Section X, leaving Ollie to worry about any further attachments. This caused Ollie's insistence on independence as he rose to stardom in the Iron League by himself.

Following the events of the Stray Leaguer Arc, Silver Castle came across the skatepark Ollie frequents, and the skateboarder was quickly able to recognize to his long lost friend, excitedly shouting "TJ?!" as he ran to him for a hug. Ollie is rather surprised by Topjoy's new team while his friend is shocked that Ollie had been alone for so long. While Ollie was quick to introduce himself to the team, so was the unfolding conflict. Some of the teammates found Ollie to be arrogant while some believed he truly was content by himself, and some thought he did yearn for a team once again. After someone (imagine whoever wkfnwj-) briefly points out Ollie's newfound "overconfidence", tension rises. This escalates to Ollie challenging Silver Castle to a 7v1 at a large, abandoned skateboarding arena. After heading off, Magnum is quick to notice a worn off logo on the back of Ollie's cap, recognizing it as an old team logo. While Windy has his doubts about Ollie, he learned better than to instantly assume the worst regarding others after what happened with Topjoy and Gold Mask (nods to episodes 9 and 23 respectively). Despite the earlier tension, Ollie still assists the team with custom boards and practice, refusing to accept that he truly enjoyed their company (apart from his oil brother's, of course, that he genuinely did). From there, the team came to realize that behind Ollie's false bravado, he did actually want a team again; what held him back is his fear of losing one yet again.

The match at the arena, formerly known as The Crossbone, finally took place once Silver Castle was ready to face Ollie. My idea here is that skateboarding matches are like the Iron League's equivalent of Beyblade: eliminate opponents out of the arena for the win. Sometimes matches were one vs one, team vs team, or (in this case, the most extreme matchup) many vs one. The team worked together to eliminate him from the rink, subtly showing him what good a team can do. Eventually, this led to Ollie saving someone from injury mid-match (again, you can imagine whoever tbh!!), which made him remember not only how his oil brother helped him out of a situation at the scrap heap but also what a team truly meant to him. A team wasn't a group of people that were only good for stardom's sake, which was a belief he self-deluded himself with to avoid the pain of losing another team; it was a group of people one could always depend on through times good and bad, win or lose. Silver Castle came out victorious, and after having been eliminated from the arena, Ollie heartily laughed, enjoying himself in a match after what felt like forever. He thanks Silver Castle for helping his best friend as well as himself. Before going their own ways, Ollie wishes them luck on the world championship and even invites them for a rematch once he finds a team. After all, they were "almost as good as the best", making a small nod at how him and his friend both referred to themselves at the best in their respective sports. Having learned the true value of companionship from a team, he promises to kickstart a new era for skateboard leaguers, both current and aspiring ones.

Your URL is factually incorrect, but if it was, you realize tumblr is the “mentally ill people are still human and aren’t exempt from kindness” website, right?

It's telling that you seem to think that "kindness" is synonymous with lying to people. That I should be silent and not point out how obviously false religions are. Like, obviously.

A god who is both good and inscrutable is self-refuting. A god who knows all and grants free will is self-refuting. A god who is both perfect and needs worship is self-refuting. Such gods not just don't exist, but cannot exist, by definition.

I don't need to facilitate or endorse people's delusions. Any first-year psych course would teach you that affirming people's mental disturbances, that they're true and correct and right for them to believe, is absolute the worst thing of all.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power outage may panic and think she is going to die. That frightening experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia. If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators. But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a process known as exposure therapy. You might start by asking the woman to merely look at an elevator from a distance—standing in a building lobby, perhaps—until her apprehension begins to subside. If nothing bad happens while she’s standing in the lobby—if the fear is not “reinforced”—then she will begin to learn a new association: elevators are not dangerous. (This reduction in fear during exposure is called habituation.) Then, on subsequent days, you might ask her to get closer, and on later days to push the call button, and eventually to step in and go up one floor. This is how the amygdala can get rewired again to associate a previously feared situation with safety or normalcy.

You don't tell someone with paranoia that yes, the neighbor's cat really is listening in and reporting to the government how many times a day you open your fridge.

You don't tell someone who believes an invisible man follows them around awarding gold stars ⭐️ and flames 🔥 for every good and bad thing you do, that yes, that man really does exist. Even if that man lives up in the sky and has a 1700 year old book of magic and myth written about him, that changes nothing.

It's not kindness to protect people from figuring out they made a mistake; that's the emotional equivalent of foot-binding - you're protecting them from growing.

It's not kindness to help people live in a false reality, one that doesn't function the way they think it does. And it doesn't help the rest of us to be surrounded by people who don't understand how the world works.

I'm the person who will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. A person who does the latter is called a sycophant. And they probably want something from you. Someone who wants you to believe something that's false has their own agenda. That's basically the definition of a scammer.

The idea that we have to be "kind" rather than truthful belongs in the trash.

If your priority is to be "kind," then you're not being truthful. I do not suffer from that malady.