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absolutebl · 25 days

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This Week in BL - new entries upset the rankings

Organized, in each category, with ones I'm enjoying most at the top.

April 2024 Wk 2

Ongoing Series - Thai

City of Stars (Fri iQIYI) ep 11 of 12 - Like most Thai BL pulps, this show doesn’t have much story to it. But I'm discovering that what it does have I actually really enjoy. I love that the gay boys got to play matchmaker for a change and I like how just GAY they are. It's nice. Refreshing.

We Are (Weds GMMTV iQIYI) ep 1-2 of 16 - University ensemble BL featuring PondPhuwin, WinnySatang, AouBoom, MarcPawinPoon. I like it. It’s old school Thai BL, but having fun with itself and its tropes. I’m not expecting much, so I don’t mind it waffling. All the couples are comfy. Chemistry is okay. Friendships are nifty. I like Pond's floppy hair. We fine.

Two Worlds (Thurs IQIYI) ep 5 of 10 - What an extremely bloody episode. And bad guy turned out to be very bad indeed. And now pretty much everyone is dead. Nice kiss. Of course.

Deep Night (Thurs iQiyi) ep 6 of 8 - It’s cute, they happy, not a ton happened. Random gratuitous bathing. As you do in BL. And I still think the sides should just end up in a thrupple

Only Boo! (Sun YouTube) ep 2 of 12 - Oh they very cute. Also very silly.

1000 Years Old (Thurs iQIYI) ep 9 of 12 - No. NOT THE GUITAR. YES abandon guitar for the sniff test! Love this for them. And me. My most favorite trope defeated my least favorite trope. VICTORY!!!

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

Unknown (Taiwan Tues YouTube & Viki) ep 8 of 11 - It’s just so good. Baby went away, grew up, and learned how to become a temptation... and a husband.

Gray Shelter AKA Gray Currents (Korea Thurs iQIYI) 1 of 5 eps - SooHyuk, only just surviving, reunites with YoonDae, his (brief) younger stepbrother who feels abandoned. They end up living together. The younger brother is played by Lee Jae Bin of Choco Milk Shake. OMG. STEPBROTHERS TROPE. Lucky me! Two in one season. Yay!!!! It's Korea so great visuals too. I shallow but yeah, this is great.

Living With Him AKA Kare no Iru Seikatsu (Japan Thurs Gaga) ep 1 of 10 - Kindly Ryota goes off to uni only to find his new roommate is his childhood bestie, Kazuhito. Kazuhito doesn’t have a girlfriend and Ryota tries to help him figure out why. Same director as Old Fashion Cupcake. It’s utterly charming. I am charmed. Also the framing is gorgeous (of course). Very stylish.

Love is Better the Second Time Around AKA Koi wo Suru nara Nidome ga Joto (Japan Weds Gaga) ep 6fin - I don’t know. Kind of a flat ending with the leads apart for most of it. I enjoyed this show but it never really hit with me.

Summation

After a teen betrayal and resulting separation a reporter reunites with his first love. That love wants him back. I enjoyed the authenticity of a reunion romance explored in Japan's quintessentially contemplative yet surreal way. The juxtaposition of the tenderness of the sex scenes with this Japanese style of authenticity was oddly elegant but all in all this still fell a little flat for me. There's nothing objectively wrong with it, but in total the narrative felt sluggish and the main couple were just... stiff (in the wrong way). Frankly, I'd rather just rewatch Tokyo in April is. 8/10

Love is like a Cat (Korea Mon Viki) eps 3-4 of 12 - What is going on with this show? No, I get the plot. I just don't get the show or why I’m watching it. Annoying.

It's done, but I suck

What Did You Eat Yesterday Season 2 AKA Kinou Nani Tabeta? Season 2 (Japan Gaga) 10 eps

To Be Continued (Sat C3 Thailand grey) ep 7-8fin - I can't for the life of me find the final 2 episodes. Haven't had a real hunt, but yeah. No dice so far.

It's airing but...

Takumi-kun Series 6: Nagai Nagai Monogatari (Japan Furritsubs) eps 1-? of 10 - I may wait and binge it.

Lady Boy Friends (Thai WeTV grey) 16 eps - reminds me a bit too much of Diary of Tootsies only high school. Not my thing. DNF unless it turns a corner and is truly amazing.

Kiseki Chapter 2 (Sun iQIYI) 6 eps - It’s so boring DNFed at 2.

Close Friend Season 3: Soju Bomb! (Weds iQIYI) 6 - The problem with situational comedy BL is it must be situational, comedic and a BL. This show gets 1 of 3 claims correct. 33% is not a passing grade. Dropped at 3.

Memory in the Letter (Thai WeTV) - only 4 eps, tell me if I should bother?

Next Week Looks Like This:

4/18 At 25:00 in Alaska AKA 25 Ji Akasaka de (Japan Thurs Gaga) 10 eps - Yuki lands his first starring role in a BL drama alongside superstar Asami (previously his senior at uni). Said superstar suggests they form a sham relationship until filming concludes. As they actually begin to fall in love, the spotlight begins to burn. I think I've seen this before (joke) and also the trailer doesn't inspire confidence.

Still to Come in April

4/25 Boys Be Brave! AKA Roommates (Korea Thurs Viki) 8 eps - Trailer Jung Ki Sub is Kim Jin Woo's slacker friend - and secret crush. So when Ki Sub crashes at his place, his heart tingles to be near him everyday. But as the short stay turns into permanent mooch, how long can Jin Woo keep his true feelings under wraps and hold back from confessing?

4/26 My Stand-In (Thai iQIYI) 12 eps - adaptation of Chinese novel "Professional Body Double" by Shui Qiang Cheng. Stars Up (Lovely Writer) and Poom (Bake Me Please) directed by the same team as KP (not a recommendation IMHO - my biggest criticism of that show was the clashing directing styles). This one looks complicated, lemme try: Joe is a stuntman for famous actor Tong. Joe falls in love with Ming but Ming sees Joe as nothing more than a Tong-replacement. After learning this horrible truth, Joe dies. Joe then wakes up in the body of another man also named Joe. He manages to rebuild the same life as before—with the same people eventually re-meeting Ming. Ming wants Joe back but Joe doesn't understand why. But Ming seems to know what's going on and wants to give him some kind of explanation.

I'm exhausted just trying to describe the plot.

Knock-Knock Boys (Thai WeTV) - 4 college friends conspire to help their friend lose his virginity. Familiar faces like Seng (yes, Billy's previous pairing) and Best, news here. But will it actually air this month?

Upcoming BLs for 2024 are listed here. This list is not kept updated, so please leave a comment if you know something new or RP with additions.

NOTE: It looks like one of my personal favorites of last year Unintentional Love Story is getting a spin off!

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENT

Sniff test turning into a make out sesh? Please and thank you. City of Stars

(Last week)

Streaming services are listed by how I (usually) watch, which is with a USA based IP, and often offset by a day because time zones are a bother.

The tag BLigade: @doorajar @solitaryandwandering @my-rose-tinted-glasses @babymbbatinygirl @babymbbatinygirl @isisanna-blog @mmastertheone @pickletrip @aliceisathome @urikawa-miyuki @tokillamonger @rocketturtle4 @blglplus @anythinggoesintheshire @everlightly

If ya wanna be tagged each week leave a comment and I will add you to the template. Easy peesy.

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fandxmslxt69 · 1 month

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CLEM'S BIRTHDAY HANG OUT!!

Hello friends!

As March comes to an end (my birth month wooo) I thought it would be a fun idea to have a little hang out during the last week! So from March 25 - 31 we are PARTYING !

Sort of!

My askbox is open to all sorts of silly dilly fun time! This is my first little hang out so PLEASE BE KIND TO ME i'm just a silly girl who wants to make friends and have some fun! I'm also hoping this might get me back into writing!

Yes, the poster is all Loki NO HE'S NOT THE CENTRE OF ATTENTION!! Here's a little info I guess (I am just winging this as we speak, it is not very thought out):

Rules & Info

The event will run from 03/25 to 03/31 - you can send in as many asks and hang out as much as you would like!!! No I will not kill you if you drop a hello in my askbox start of April - to be honest, I love friends so I won't ever turn anyone away

You can stop by my askbox to say hi, share some thoughts (or thots...) tell me anything, or play a game! (will talk about that in a bit)

Anyyyyoneeee is welcome I don't care if we aren't mutuals or we don't even talk, STOP BY AND SAY HI :D If you are rude or disrespectful in any way, I will kick your butt and break your nose.

This is a positive, fun zone. I just want to have my fun and mind my business, please don't be trying to cause problems. I'm a relatively small blog so thankfully no one really looks my way but I've had some bumps in the past.

THIS IS MY FIRST TIME DOING THIS AND IM LITERALLY GOING TO DIE FROM NERVES SO BE PATIENT WITH ME OKAY

Games:

Fuck, marry, kill - send me any three characters that you want me to decide a fate for....oh my god please don't make me kill anyone I love dearly....

Blurbs!! - send me a little prompt/kink/thought & a character and I will try SOOOOO HARD to put out a little itty bitty something of writing! Like 500 words or so!! Can be fluffy or smutty. Angst is not allowed unless its just a LITTLE sad and with lots of fluffy stuff after

Character Association - tell me about yourself and let me give you a character. This is literally my favourite game ever, and I swear I'm super good at it

Book Recs - tell me your reading vibes/popular tropes you like and I will give you FIVE (not one, not two, but FIVE!!!) book recs because I like talking about books. If you show up talking about non fiction, then sorry but I am not your gal at all.

Chat - Come talk!! Come chat!! Come say hi and giggle with me about anything!! Come be crazy with me over narratives and themes and character arcs!!! Tell me about school or your day, your OCs, latest WIPs or anything currently on your mind!

Okay that's all I could come up with but literally any and all games are free game. I am keeping this as chill and lowkey as possible.

Characters/Fandoms:

You guys already KNOW my vibes and what I'm around and what I'm not, so feel free to send anything! I float around Marvel/DC (just send in any character and if I don't vibe with it I'll just let you know or leave it unanswered), I think it's obviously I'm Oscar Isaac obsessed....um. Pretty much anything. It's free game and I'll put my foot down if I'm down okay with something or don't want to answer :D

I'm..about to tag some friends...if that's okay...

@divine-knight-hand @romanarose @sarahscribbles @lokischambermaid @lokisgoodgirl @sailorholly @in-som-niyah @fictive-sl0th @mischief2sarawr @saturn-rings-writes @superficialdomina @planetwaynez...and I can't remember anyone else now I'm sorry LMAO

KISSES EVERYONE <3

Clem

PS: If you're worried whether I'm comfy or not or familiar with a character or not, just send it in anyway and we'll figure it out from there!

#if i did not tag you its either im going to harass you on discord or i forgot or im worried you'll think im crazy #which i may be a little bit but not entirely #kisses everyone (panicking going to throw up)#clem talks <3 #Clem's Birthday Hang Out #<- NEW TAG !!!!!!!!!!!#when this finishes maybe I'll finally get to updating and revamping my masterlist!!!!!!#jason todd #loki laufeyson #moon knight #dc #dick grayson #marvel #oscar isaac #joel miller

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shittalkcornstalk · 6 months

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“Take One For The Team”

Part 5

A/n: Ahhhhhhhhh sad! Maybe I wasn’t in the best mood while writing this, but what’s a good Buggy narrative without a little angst? I really thought with the themes manipulation I have set up it’d be so much more interesting for the reader to be the one to get hurt by it first! Next chapter is juicy! I will keep writing. As always feel free to let me know if I missed a warning or if I didn’t do the taglist correctly :)

Synopsis: Your self respect and public perception make you question all your feelings for your Captain. Were you ever in control of the situation?

Warnings- xfemreader! 18+ minors dni, angst ,manipulation, slut shaming, harassment, kissing without consent, internalized self hatred, alcohol, eventual smut, power dynamics

Word Count ~3.8k

Taglist- @fluffybunnyu @fanshavegottensotoxic

Chapter 5 “An Audience”

The next week in the small town was a rabid mix of fluttering emotions. It was kind of crazy how quick seeing Captain Buggy in this new light made you change. You used to be so cynical and sarcastic, mocking and berating your friends and the Captain. You remember the sick feeling you got when you first learned about his desires but now, it has been replaced with butterflies. It felt like you’d become a different person, like a sappy teenage girl again, and you loathed it. You protested to Alvida as you walked to the ship after a small girl’s outing.

“It’s fine… I’m fine…I’m completely normal about him, it’s just a bit of attraction is all, a little crush.” You said lying through your teeth. You desperately wanted to underplay how bad you’d fallen. You’d been so impersonal around your fellow crew before, you didn’t need to be seen as weak.

Alvida smirked and snickered. “Yes, you are the utmost of grace and composure, you would be perfectly unfazed by the clown if you saw him right now…”

Feigning a classy confidence you turn your nose up “That’s right-”

“Then it really wouldn’t matter if I pointed out that-” Alvida nods over to Buggy.

He was on the deck in combat with Cabaji, training his knife skills. His overcoat and hat we tossed aside. He lunged towards Cabaji with great force. You saw how his muscular arms contracted and tightened with each movement. His eyes were determined and his teeth bared in aggression.You hadn’t seen him with his hair down often, but his long ponytail felt like something out of a romance novel protagonist.This burning attraction welled up in you. It left you stammering. He was far too caught up in the moment to notice you were across the deck gawking at him.

“Aren’t you the poster child of composure, get your jaw up before you embarrass yourself even more…” Alvida nudges you and laughs at your expense.

“What? No! I barely even looked at his…rippling arms..or his firm chest..or his-” You feel yourself lose focus again at the sight of Buggy.

“Gross, for both our’s sake I’ll stop you right there.” Alvida cuts you off. “So you’ve developed some feelings for the Captain, that is well evident, why don’t you do something about it, save me from having to hear this conversation again... You are well aware of the Captain’s opinion of you, so what’s stopping you? What happened to that flirtatious little minx I schemed with a few weeks ago?” Alvida was exhausted hearing the both of you ramble on like kids about silly crushes. Her impatience with Buggy had well hit it’s breaking point and with you it was getting pretty damn close.

“It’s different now that I actually like him” You half-whine. “I’m worried about looking stupid in front of him”

“Have you met the man?” She spoke flatly. “Honey there’s very little you can do to lose that guy’s image of you, look at him-” She points over to show Buggy has managed to accidentally hoist himself up the mast, tied in a rope, dangling around screaming for someone to cut him down. You would’ve mocked him endlessly in the past for this error but right now all you can do is giggle. He looked so goofy up there.

“You might be a bit right- I’m going to go cut him down…” You walk away from Alvida and approach the dangling Captain. He is flailing around trying to dissect his body in a way that would set him free but with little luck. You call out to him as he makes another attempt. “Hey Buggy do you need some help up there?” You chuckle at the sight.

“Gah y/n! I thought you were out for the afternoon…” He sounds so exposed. You weren’t supposed to see this. The rope contracted one more time before his head popped off at the shock of your sudden appearance. It falls down and you manage to catch him before hitting the ground. His head in your hands he looks up at you with a bright red face.

“Are you alright Captain?’ You look down at him, your fingered just slightly nestled in the back of his head, his hair really is soft.

“Yes, very fine y/n, I actually was just doing a safety demonstration for these idiots about tying down any ropes to avoid this very situation-” He puffed, you didn’t buy it for a second, but you weren’t gonna tell him that.

‘How very conscientious of you Captain Buggy” You say with a smile. “Don’t worry I’ll cut you down-” You take his head into one arm tightly and climb up the mast to the rest of Buggy’s body. Buggy is held tightly as you use your free arm to slash through the ropes. If it were up to him he wouldn’t leave this close encounter. His face buried in your chest taking in all your scents, his forehead pressing very conveniently on your soft exposed skin. It was worth making himself look like a fool for just this. You saw his body reconnect as the ropes dropped, his head lingering for just a moment before popping back in at the neck. You hadn’t clocked just how pressed his face was to you until you noticed a bit of smeared paint on your chest. Buggy saw it almost immediately taking a deep breath.

“Sorry Captain, I didn't realize how tightly I was holding on to your head! I hope your makeup didn’t get ruined…”

“Don’t worry about it…” His voice sounded distant, he was lost in his train of impure thoughts.

“Are you feeling okay Captain, it looks like the blood is rushing to your head…” Some concerned crew members called out.

He walks away a bit dazed. “It's definitely rushing somewhere…” He mumbles to himself as he leaves for his private quarters to save himself from further embarrassment.

You stay behind and help clean up some of the loose rope on the ground walking them to a scrap pile. You feel a pat on your back as two crew men laugh openly.

“Thank god you were here to help the Captain yet again- what would we do without you y/n” He speaks jokingly.

“Yeah could you imagine how much pissier he’d be without you around-” The other remarks.

“Mhm, well I try to be a good crewmate when I can be…” You try to wave off some of the mocking energy in the room. You didn’t love what they were implying about you, even if it was a half truth.

“Well keep it up girly, for all our sake…” The two snicker, one pats you a little too low on your back for your liking.

You’d been accustomed to a pirate’s sense of humor at this point. Well aware of how to joke at another's expense. You’ve had Buggy’s men call you all sorts of demeaning names. You’ve been called a bitch, you’ve had shots taken at your appearance, your intelligence, but this felt different. Maybe because it was a little true. You did keep Buggy entertained and he hired you with that in mind. You were eye candy to the man even if you proved to be a good pirate. You had to learn that, but those two men who barely knew you, already were well aware of your role with the captain. They didn't need to hear your private conversations, they didn't need to be one of his trusted right hand men to know. Buggy had marked you as his from the very beginning to everyone else on the crew while you were none the wiser.

The rest of the week made you hyper aware of how the other men looked at your interactions with Buggy. Mumbled whispers and knowing glances were passed around at meals when you sat next to the Captain. You’d never noticed how front and center you were next to Buggy at dinner, until all those knowing eyes sat on you waiting for you to do your job. You didn’t sit next to him after that. You’d planned to confess to the man at the end of the week and you refused to have an audience.

Buggy's crew celebrated the last night on this island before the dreaded expanse of sea with drinking and partying. Many were trying to get their last chance at some action with any woman they ran into. You’d seen this act before and it was always so pitiful. Usually it was an act of desperation, these men wanted a woman's company so bad, but it never seemed to affect you. Sure you had your private room which avoided any awkward scenarios, but Buggy's men never even really fully acknowledged you beyond being a fellow crewmate for reasons you were now well aware of. You plopped down at the Captain’s booth along with a couple familiar faces and some others who you were less acquainted with. Cabaji and Moji were talking together ignoring whatever tirade the captain was going on about. As he saw you get closer he pulled you in a bit.

"You should’ve seen it y/n monsters the size of ships, twice the size even, and your fearless captain was taking them all down with a butter knife no less!” He obviously added some embellishments, but you still laughed along. He continued with these tales of him as a young pirate, no crew with a rinky dink ship. “ I had to go through it all alone, but it was the only way to do it!” He laughs out and slams his empty beer mug on the table. You’d also finished what you'd been drinking in the time it took for him to finish his stories.

"Why don't I freshen us up?” You smile and grab both glasses.

“Sounds great sweetheart!” He pats you on the back roughly taking the wind out your sails. His eyes follow you to the bar. The men around him start mumbling something but you are too far to hear anything. Buggy looks over to you, cups his hand over his mouth leaning into his audience. Whatever he said got a raucous applause from the crewmates and Buggy leaned back to take it all in.

You headed back over with the drinks and sat yourself back down to the captain’s side. He grabs the beer and sloshes it down. He looks at you, face flushed from what you presumed to be the alcohol running through his system, only proving to be more true when he leaned into and you could smell it on him.

“Beers great but it can’t beat the shit I’ve got back on the ship, you’d love it, remind me to let you try it when we get back- hic -” He leans into you more with his arms moving dangerously low on your back.

“Buggy I think you’ve had plenty” You laugh it off. He's been drunker before, but he’s not usually this handsy. You were hoping this would be a sign to slow down.

“Cmon baby- I know my limits! I was just telling the boys here about the deal I scored in that deal at the weapons and ammunition dealer thanks to my lovely girlfriend~” His arm returns to the small of your back holding you tightly to him. You don’t say anything, that joke was supposed to be just for you two, and he’s shared it to the table with hoots and hollers. “I even got you that pretty little pistol…which I don’t think I’ve been properly thanked for..” He slurs his words and looks at you teasingly.

“Thank you Buggy again, it was a very nice gift.” You feel yourself shrinking.

“Aw what was that! I think I’ve earned a little more than a thank you…” His eyes are indirect, they switch from looking at you and the rest of the people surrounding you. He’s waiting for you. “I know exactly how you can show your appreciation” His gaze darkens as his hand tugs at your chin and your lips meet his. It only lasts for a second, but you can taste the beer and face paint on your lips lingering. He looks back at you and smiles wide. “There, that wasn’t too bad right?” The table bursts into laughter except for a couple people. Cabaji and Moji stare silently realizing the plan has gone too far, and Alvida walks from the scene immediately. You sit there motionless.

In front of people this moment was taken from you, something that was supposed to be special and fulfilling was ripped from your control. It was quick and impersonal, maybe that was for the better, playing it up as a joke.It was your first kiss with the captain and it was to serve what? To let everyone know you were there to give him attention. Maybe you were overthinking it , but seeing a crew's worth of men applaud at your little performance did not sit so right with you. Buggy hired you for this. He hired you to eventually have you and you never really took the time to think about those implications. You took advantage of it and now you even started liking it, but it was a role that was laid out for you from the very beginning. Everyone seemed to know that and Buggy soaked it all up. Gripping your waist tight he looked at you with that stupid big smile. You smile back, but you don't want to. You didn't want to cause a scene so you waited in the moment. Taking it all in the eyes of you you feel your breath quicken. Everything you were doing for him was exposed from the start. You played it up, but the captain wasn't the only one who saw your little outfits and heard your flirty voice. All his men saw that and they had well made up their minds about you. You were there to keep Captain happy, and you did. You did your job. Was this it? You hear the crowd die down and rush for the bathroom.

Looking at yourself it felt different, you felt used and cheap. A toy, a tool, a little dog at his beck and call. Were you ever in control of this? Buggy was your captain and he always got what he wanted, it was only a matter of time before he locked you in too. You hear the door open and rush to a stall to hide, a couple of low ranking men walked into laughing about something..laughing at you.

“Buggy better keep that bitch on a tight leash, gold digging skank is probably gonna jump ship if she finds some deeper pockets-”

“I'm just happy she's actually putting out for him. Tramp was teasing the captain for so long it was giving me blue balls!”

“I'm sure she’s keeping captain plenty taken care of, see they were out all day last week, probably held up in some inn.”

“You're probably right she’s been quiet all night, the poor things throat must be sore!”

The men all toss around these accusations and spit out profanities like it was just all agreed upon knowledge. You were a whore, a gold digger, Buggy’s property. You wanted to be somewhere else, you wanted to be anyone else in this moment, Anyone but his… You hear them leave and make your way to the ship after rushing through the crowds of the bar. Buggy and the others celebrated as if nothing happened. You duck your head down to go unnoticed and leave out the door. Nobody seemed to notice, but Buggy did. Buggy could always spot you in a crowded room.

You stumble through the streets a little dazed and drunk. You looked around at the warmth of light in the passing houses, but bypassed them all to the dark and empty ship. Making your way up to your room you slam the door behind you and see the small constraint space. You see your outfit for the next day lined up, it feels all too much like a costume to you, short and tight with Buggy’s colors. You toss it to the floor and look at yourself. Makeup rushes down the sides of your face and you rip off the outfit you were wearing to throw on a nightgown. Folding yourself into your bed you clung to your pillow and cried.About an hour in you hear a knock at your door. You try to calm yourself and clear your throat.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Buggy…why'd you leave so soon doll, the fun was just getting started?” He chuckled a bit, but his sobering voice still held some concern. “Listen if it was that bad of a kiss, just forget it, it was just a silly joke…”

“It wasn’t a joke to me-” You swung the door open to meet his gaze. He sees your face all puffy and stained. This was new for him, seeing you break like this. It made his stomach churn.

Buggy didn’t know how to respond, he could clearly hear some bite behind your words. Were you that disgusted by him? It had to be that. He walked deeper into your room and kept his eye contact. You gulp his closeness, you hate how he makes you feel.

“Look, I get it, I’m an old, ugly, clown. I won’t make any more moves on you, it was stupid to even think I had a chance-” He turns to leave and you grab his wrist.

He gives up on you so easily. What is he playing at? Is this a way to make you pity him? Is this just another way for him to manipulate the situation?

“Stop that shit right now, you can’t play these little games with my head-” You yell out at him panicked.

“Y/n what do you mean by that…” He looks at you.

“Ugh! You should know! You’re the one who hired me to be your little toy. You are the one who got me all those presents to woo me over, you are the one who’s spent all this time making it so I’d fall for you so I could fulfill every little freaky fantasy you have. I really like you Buggy, but it's hard to know if that's how I feel, or how I'm supposed to feel-”

Buggy takes a step back, he wanted you to like him back for so long, but now you do and he's being confronted for it. He’s not good in these types of situations.

“I don’t want to be relegated to just the Captain’s slut, when you kissed me in front of everyone… who was that for? Me or just another way to flaunt your power-”

“Slut…No it wasn’t meant to be like that, I just got caught up in the moment, giving the crew a little performance, but I have wanted to kiss you for so long, it just seemed like the only time I had the balls to do it, you couldn't reject me that way”

“Buggy I wouldn’t have rejected you if you tried any other time, I just wanted it to be special…I wanted it to be private.” You get a bit quieter and lower your head in embarrassment.

Buggy’s eyes widen and he takes a stepforward seeing your apprehension. He sees your eyes are misty when he lifts your head up in your hands. He wants this argument to end, he wants to forgive him like nothing. Maybe he’s blinded by the fact you just admitted you liked him back he asks you quietly.

“Would you say no if I asked you to kiss me again?”

You did want to kiss him again, you wanted this from the moment you had realized your feelings. Your cheek nuzzled into his warm and calloused hand. It was just the two of you; quiet and personal. He was looking at you, not with impatience or hurt, just longing. His face stood still and didn't get any closer to you. You leaned in and your lips hovered over his, feeling his breath against yours. He closed his eyes, but nothing else moved. His lip slightly trembled with desire, he was waiting for you. You sigh and place your lips upon his. It was gentle, your mouth parted slightly as you deepened it for just a moment. You turned your head and locked in.Buggy melted onto you, still letting you take the lead. Your hands traced along his neck and hair. You’d always imagined a kiss with a swashbuckling pirate captain would be this intense clashing of teeth and yet this was different. It was a warmth that enveloped tightly and made you feel safer. You took a step back to see Buggy’s lashes fluttering open, his paint smeared. Your head clears feeling yourself come down from the volatile state you were in. You catch your breath and speak directly.

“Buggy I want you, but I can’t be with you if you only see me as a toy-”

“I've been obsessed with you since the day I met ya, you are so much more than that. I don’t know who let you believe all that shit you were spitting off. Y/n I want you to want me more than anything, but I can’t force you to do anything. When I first met you, you were so bold, you didn’t let me get to you. And all these months you never waivered, you never let anything phase you, why is this happening all of a sudden?”

“It was nobody just a couple of guys-”

“What the fuck where they saying about you to get you like this? Do you know their names? I’ll rip out their tongues talking about you like that.” Buggy is quick to break the comfortable silence in the room with blame that isn't placed on him.

You laugh a little at his reaction, putting your hand on his face. “I didn’t get a look at their faces, I’m sure they were nobodies..” You knew they were on Buggy’s crew and you didn't need that blood on your hands.

Buggy turns again to look at you, he barely even noticed you were only in your nightgown until now. Coincidentally he left the rest of the crew at the bar, the ship was still and silent as you looked into his wandering eyes. You see his breath quicken and hands shake as one rests itself on your waist.

“I’d hate to push my luck for a thir-“

#buggy #buggy the clown #buggy x reader #buggy x y/n #op buggy #one piece

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see-arcane · 8 months

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Everything is happening so much in today's entry and while the Bloofer Lady bloofing all over the place is meant to be the co-star of the show, alongside the Great Document Exchange of Vampire Lore between Mina and Van Helsing--or, specifically, Mina entrusting Van Helsing with her husband's private diary and a desperate hope that she can trust this man with this and her own turmoil over the subject and that of Lucy--listening to the @re-dracula version kind of veered my focus off track. Hearing the dialogue in action will do that.

And now I'm left fitfully, unhappily re-chewing on some of Van Helsing's least sparkling attributes in the novel. Not the worst! Those are coming, and all of them still very much well-meaning! But the well-meaning does not take away from the fact that a lot of his commentary has and will continue to make me want to grind my teeth into dust.

Now, does the narrative manage to take all his benign sexism/secret keeping from those who need info is best! bullshit in its very sharp teeth and ragdoll it mercilessly with The Consequences of Acting Like This are Very High, Actually repercussions? Yes.

Do I hope with every fiber of my being that, when Certain Events happen, and Van Helsing has to contend with--

SPOILERS BELOW

Jonathan going full ice cold Fuck You, Fuck This, Fuck God for letting this happen and then burning her for it, come October 3rd,

and Mina being the one to take the brain reins of the operation out of his hands,

and Jonathan Blowing Right the Fuck Up at the old man for saying Mina has to come along with him to Castle fucking Dracula, with zero explanation, assuming everyone will just go along with this decision sans explanation, complete with Jonathan cementing himself as Not One of Van Helsing's Ducklings if he, like God, does not start pulling some sound logic and results out of his ass right this fucking second,

--that the Re: Dracula audio hammers home that VH is not only a flawed character rather than the Mega Genius Does-No-Wrong Scholar Vampire Hunter Hero, but has to reconcile with the Harkers existing outside the mold that we'll have come to find the Suitor Squad locking into (and that the Harkers themselves very very grudgingly squeezed into for a time, grating against every minute of it) because the Harkers do in fact have equal or greater intel/ability on their side than he does.

I don't say any of this to crap on the character of Van Helsing. He's honestly a great vessel for all the pluses and minuses of the Elder Generation That Means Well, But Fumbles Details. The man is genuinely self-sacrificing and earnest in all his efforts to help these young people he barely knows, and then works with the tools and people he has on hand to try and root out an unthinkable supernatural peril before it can start drinking the whole country into the grave. We'll see in much later chapters how down he is to throw himself and his life on the line to give someone else better odds. And even if it's only by (still period-accurate sexist) inches, he does learn a little better eventually.

...But god damn, does his quirky sexist/secret keeper/Follow My Orders No Questions Asked, Silly Incapable-of-Understanding Children mannerisms need their fucking teeth kicked in. I sincerely pray that Isabel Young and Ben Galpin get to deliver on flipping the table in audio drama format with all the thematic tune bells and whistles they deserve when the time comes.

#ranting raving rambling #dracula spoilers #but no really I NEED Re: Dracula to deliver on this #please please please #abraham van helsing #mina harker #jonathan harker #dracula #spoilers #re: dracula #dracula daily

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m3nt4llyr4v3d · 2 months

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Gabriel vs Chloe/Lila

I used to frequent the Miraculous subreddit (biggest mistake of my life) to see others opinions on Seasons 4 and 5. One question I would see pop up usually is as follows:

Why do people think Chloe/Lila is worse than Gabriel?

The common answer I’ve seen is that bullying and isolation are issues that the audience can relate to, something that’s more down to earth and closer to a viewer’s potential issues. Gabriel, meanwhile, is a supervillain who makes other ridiculously costumed supervillains when they feel bad, his situation was farther out, less relatable, so hammed up at times (cartoon and all) that people would take it less seriously.

And honestly? I completely understood this answer: many viewers’ overwhelming hatred of Chloe and Lila, from what I’ve seen, stemmed from personal relation to their victims, and their own experiences with bullies. It’s completely understandable why people would feel this way.

But then I thought about it for a second, and while I still understand that reasoning, I don’t understand it in any other context.

I mean, I’ve seen people on there genuinely say that Gabriel had more redeeming qualities than them, which confuses me. Lila I kind of understand, I mean we know literally nothing about this character, and the fandom reason of “she lies for attention because her mother is barely home”, which would give her sympathy, was a little… muddled, when it’s revealed she has 3 moms that she’s somehow lying to about being their daughter (what on earth) and has multiple identities. But Chloe? Season 2-3 was showing that she did have redeeming qualities, that she cared about people (few but regardless), she was even able to suck up her own pride when being a hero! Gabriel… He’s an odd case in which the story goes back and forth on whether he’s an awful irredeemable monster, or flawed but sympathetic dad trying his best, while also flip flopping on when exactly they want you to believe as much. Right now? He’s horrible, but the narrative want you to believe he’s just “trying his best” and thinks that he somehow has the room to ask Marinette to “tell Adrien to remember all the times I was a good father” (Marinette should’ve spat on his statue ngl)

Also, Gabriel is a neglectful, dare I say abusive father! Literally mind controls his son and is trying to control him to have the “destiny” that HE wants, not caring about his son at all. He literally pretends to bond with him at one point in Season 5 just so he could give him an alliance ring and walk off smirking, planning on akumatizing him (never brought up again btw). Like, I get that Hawkmoth is more of a hammy cartoon villain, and a lot of those aspect spill into Gabriel (I mean he had a silly stupid number near the beginning of season 5 that I hate to love). But the Gabriel half is genuinely horrible, and those aspects spill into Hawkmoth. Akumatizing, physically abusing your son, and ruining his relationship to akumatize his girlfriend in Chat Blanc, emotionally manipulating him with his dead mother in both Chat Blanc and Ephemeral, literally any time he causes an akuma on purpose by ruining the life of someone he used to be close with or personally knows (the comedian, Andre, anyone working under him), emotionally manipulating his son AGAIN just so he could plan to akumatize him later, locking him up in a white room and emotionally depriving him of everything, literally everything he does in season 5 actually. I understand that some of his more atrocious actions are supervillain things, and that could be more difficult to relate to real life problems. But come on, “neglectful, abusive, controlling parent” is absolutely a real life issue that people have, and it’s a bit strange I haven’t seen that brought up more often

I’m not saying that Chloe and Lila are saints by any means at all! But I am just saying that’s it’s kind of funny that people will say, with their whole chest, that vindictive bullying is actually worse than terrorism and abusing your child, and the idea that the narrative could agree with this scares me

#ml salt #ml writing critical #ml writing salt #ml fandom salt #not much though it’s just crazy to me #gabriel salt #ml chloe #ml lila

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nkjemisin · 1 year

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Things in my ask box

Hi folks. Every so often I get questions from folks that are good, but which I worry might catch them some flak from my other readers or whoever. Sometimes I answer those people privately, but in general I prefer not to do private replies to asks; for one thing, other people might want to know the answer, and for another, I've had a few awkward situations result from doing so (basically just people going parasocial on me), and I think that sort of thing is less likely when it's clear I'm talking to everyone. So, I'm going to handle these awkward asks by just treating them as Q&A questions -- without showing that person's username and where necessary, altering the question in order to protect their identity. I've got a few of these stored up, but just gonna do two this time for length and time reasons. I'll get to the rest later.

Are you a proshipper?

Yep. Feel free to alter your decision re following me on social media now that you've read that answer. But I believe in "don't like, don't read," and that fiction doesn't indicate what an author really believes (because it's fiction), and that there's no subject matter too immoral to explore on its face (everything depends on the execution), so... yep.

2. I love the Broken Earth trilogy, but I have to say, the middle book really didn't go anywhere, literally. Essun stayed in Castrima and Nassun moved around a little more but mostly stayed in the same place too. It killed a lot of the story momentum for me. Why did you decide to do this?

[spoilers for Broken Earth books, though I'll try to minimize them and will put a "read more" before I get there]

Because I felt like it. I'm not saying that defensively, I'm just noting that the answer to pretty much any question you might ask a writer about why they do a particular thing is... because they felt like it. Period full stop. Sorry that wasn't what you wanted to read! It was, however, the story I wanted to tell.

To elaborate... different people have different expectations of trilogies. That's because there are a lot of different ways to handle them, narratively speaking. Sometimes a trilogy is really a group of shared-universe stories taking place in the same world but not necessarily featuring the same characters, and with unrelated plots. Some are telling a single story, but through different POVs and smaller plot arcs that each have their own terminuses; that's what I did with the Inheritance Trilogy, for example. And sometimes, as I did with the Broken Earth books, the author is just telling one big story broken up into three parts. (There are more ways to do a trilogy than this, but let's keep this brief, lol.)

Now, there are a lot of ways to handle this kind of story, but a pattern that most of us are used to is:

Book One: Introduction to the world and important characters and the apparent stakes;

Book Two: Deep dive into the important characters and world, thus giving the audience a reason to care more; and

Book Three: Now we really know the stakes and shit just got real! Now we care what happens to the characters when EVERYTHING! BLOWS!! UP!!!

(I am feeling very silly today, sorry.)

We're familiar with this pattern because we see it all the time, especially in American media. It's a variation on the three-act structure seen in plays and other narratives. It's the basis of our most popular longform stories! The original Star Wars trilogy did it. The Mass Effect trilogy did it. (Andromeda was a separate story, probably meant to be the start of a new trilogy.) The Lord of the Rings did it, prequeled by the Hobbit and mirrored by the Silmarillion. I mentioned those examples because the middle stories of each all exhibit the same traits: a drastic change of pace or location for the protagonists, putting the protagonists through personal character growth arcs, and poking at minutia or seemingly unimportant aspects of the world (which usually end up pretty important before all is said and done).

Now let's answer your question. Spoiler warning again:

In the Broken Earth, we got introduced to the Stillness and Essun in Book One. There was a lot of physical movement in that book as Essun was on the road for most of it (as were other characters), but the plot itself was relatively simple: A bad thing happened to this person and she needs to go somewhere and find someone, to fix it! And then pretty much the entirety of that book's narrative was "Who is this person, why does the bad thing matter, and how close does she get to finding her missing person?" Then in Book Two, we learned a little more about this person, a lot more about her impact on other characters including the one she's been trying to find, and we spent a while learning about orogeny, the Obelisk Gate, and what the stone eaters have been up to. I cheated a little on this; there wasn't room to do a deep dive into the backstory of one pivotal character, but I did finally reveal that this character is the "secret" narrator of the whole trilogy, and made his agenda clearer. I ended up putting his "deep dive" into Book Three instead, where it was particularly relevant to the STUFF! BLOWING!! UP!!!

The reason a lot of readers complain about "Middle Book Syndrome," I suspect, is because of this pattern -- and because of their expectations. A lot of people come at a middle book expecting Book One Redux. That's what you often get in shared-universe trilogies -- Book One over and over again, roughly the same balance of characters vs events each time, in a familiar setting. We're conditioned to want that, I think, from other episodic works. Comic books, for example: When I was working on FAR SECTOR, my editor at the time explained that I needed to try and have a fight or action scene in most of the issues. I hate fight scenes -- sorry! -- so that was hard for me. TV shows -- the ones that aren't themselves telling a single big story over time -- do this, too. I think of it as the "If You Liked X, Then Try... X!" structure. Absolutely nothing wrong with this structure, by the way. I'm just describing it, not throwing shade. I'm a big fan of stories like this myself.

But even for audience members who were expecting the Three-Act Trilogy structure instead, that middle book is going to be jarring. It's supposed to be jarring. The refugees have survived the first book but stopped to dress their wounds and regroup; the adventurers on a quest have reached an impasse and need to find allies and grind to build up their strength; the stalwart hero has just suffered a massive setback and needs to overcome their own doubt or character flaws. A good way to handle this is to take the characters out of their familiar space, and put them somewhere new, or give them a very different kind of challenge. [Mass Effect and LOTR spoilers] Oh, no, Shepard died and their team broke up! What now? Oh, no, Frodo and Sam are on their own trying to get to Mordor! They're just these little guys! How are they gonna make it? If you got overly attached to Shepard team from ME1, or the Fellowship, you're in for a rough ride in these followups. But the jarring nature of this kind of followup is absolutely necessary. An author who does this knows they're going to lose some readers, when they do it. Clearly I almost lost you! But I stand by that choice, because I think it made the whole trilogy better.

Sidebar: I'm old enough to remember the controversy back when "The Empire Strikes Back" came out. Critics haaaaaated that movie! It was too dark, they said; wasted too much time on unimportant stuff. Too much character work, not enough space battles. Then it became clear that audiences loved the second movie even more than the first, precisely because it was darker and because Luke spent so much time futzing around with Yoda and because there were all these girl cooties romantic moments between Leia and Han. A lot of the critics backpedaled at that point, with some of them even acknowledged that they'd been hoping for Star Wars All Over Again and not What Happens Next That Is Not Star Wars. They'd simply brought the wrong expectations to the story.

This is not to say that you have the wrong expectations, Ask-er. Maybe you were expecting exactly that structure, and you just don't like the way I handled it, or you think I did a poor job. Every reader's experience of a story is different, and not everybody's gonna want to pick up everything I throw down. But you asked why did everyone stay in one place, and this is why: to do a deep dive into the character of the Stillness itself. In a story where the setting was as much a "character" as the people in it, I felt it necessary to show enough of that setting for readers to care about it. Would you care, for example, if the town of Brevard (Damaya and Schaffa spend one night there in Book One) got blown off the map in Book Three? Probably not, because I spent no time on any of its citizens or issues. A lot of people cared about Castrima, though, by the end of Book Two.

Whoo, this got long! Hope it answers your question, Ask-er.

#answered asks #the broken earth #spoilers #things in my ask box

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mattbegins · 1 month

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My 911 7x05/7B predictions

- Eddie and Marisol break up (she’s only had one line and one appearance in the last four episodes and I find it kind of ooc that the reasons Eddie didn’t want to be with Ana wouldn’t also apply to Marisol, there’s been such little build up or even scenes with them to suggest otherwise. That might change this season, but we haven’t seen a successful relationship launched between a recurring character and a newly introduced character since Michael and David (I don’t count madney because even though Maddie was new they’re both mains), so I don’t know how they’d do this for Eddie and Marisol without it being rushed and kind of clumsy)

- Buck and Tommy will have a good run but I don’t think they’ll last to the end of the season. Tim Minear said as much himself and described bucktommy as an important but “sort of the entry-level relationship” as Buck begins to understand his sexuality, but because of Tommy’s redemption arc and the clear joy Buck has about their relationship I don’t think they’ll end because of something bad between them. I’d hope it would either be that Tommy has to move due to some sort of career advancement, or someone realizes feelings between Buck and Eddie and Tommy doesn’t want to be a replacement, and not them killing him off. With that in mind, my genuine theory is that buddie would be what ends bucktommy because Minear hasn’t completed the rest of the season yet and has repeatedly expressed concerns about making sure he doesn’t create anything that messes with ratings and views, so if anything he may have been testing the waters with bucktommy to pave the way for buddie if it was received well- which it was. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’ll happen off-screen like with Natalia.

- There’s going to be some drama or angst surrounding Hen and Karen’s baby (they really deserve a break but they never seem to get one when it comes to their kids and I’m nervous, but they’ll get a lot of support from Chim and Maddie especially and I can see the relationship between these sets of parents getting even stronger)

- The silly Jinx/Cursed type episode this season will involve Chimney’s bachelor party (might be There Goes the Groom) as the 118 boys stumble into some wild shenanigans. For anyone who’s seen Psych 3x04 and 6x02 and/or remembers 911 2x15 Ocean’s 9-1-1, THAT is the kind of chaos I’m looking for where maybe they accidentally get involved in some kind of nonsense and wind up getting interrogated by Athena or get drunk/dosed and have to retrace everything that happened that night (bonus points for the trope of something happening between Eddie and Buck during that time because it would be hilarious timing but honestly not a bad way to get the ball rolling). Anyway, this would explain the ruined suits in the bts photos and I honestly see them just showing up to the wedding all messy and disheveled like John Watson in Game of Shadows and Maddie being shocked but not surprised despite having made them promise nothing will go wrong or something.

- Christopher’s current storyline arc is going to get a wholesome resolution closer to the end of the season as he works through his feelings and trauma from his mom’s death, and I think/hope Eddie and Buck will get to share a proud co-parent moment seeing him go off to a school dance or a date and knowing that he’s in a better place than he was at the beginning. The scene with Shannon’s letter was so beautiful but I think this narrative still hasn’t come full circle yet because we haven’t seen it change his dating behavior, he just put the photo back up, and I think the resolution really has to involve all three of them as a family (in whichever sense that ends up being).

- Whatever grand emergency features in the season finale, I don’t think it will involve the traumatic injury of a main character, I think it’ll be a really personal and emotional type of situation rather than something physical. The three episode premier was so intense and ongoing that I have a sense they might follow the pattern of s3 and s5 which each had a major physically endangering episode in the middle (Fallout and Brawl in Cell Block 9-1-1) and then scattered large emergencies near the end with a finale that provided a lot of closure and personal resolutions for character struggles to carry over into s8. This might be the thing with Chris, or possibly more personal growth for Buck, but I think it has to be Eddie, Chris, or Buck because they have the most loose ends right now. The middle emergency has a good chance of being Ravi if they go with him getting the Albert treatment. Regardless, the hype for the show since being taken up by ABC has been huge so I think the finale will still have some sort of massive implication that’ll hook people in for the next season.

- Bonus minor prediction: Buck and Tommy cross paths at an emergency because I think that would be cute

#911 abc #s7 predictions #these are just my thoughts okay #evan buckley #eddie diaz #tommy kinard #christopher diaz #hen wilson #karen wilson #bobby nash #athena grant #chimney han #maddie buckley #ravi panikkar

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gnomeniche · 1 year

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SO. OKAY. "SILLY SAD DUCK" TALK BECAUSE IT HAS ME IN THE BIRDMANGELION MINES. welcome back to the corner where i spin conspiracy theories about duck.

so, "silly sad duck" was a bonus track from a dhmis album that was sent out to backers of the kickstarter in 2017. so it's pre-pilot and pre-tv show, which is important because i'm interested in this song in the context of the creators' ideas for where they could take dhmis and duck in particular.

this motherfucker's gonna get real fuckin speculative. and rambly. i'm very sorry i need to get all my thoughts out and it's the middle of the night so the structure's loose.

let's start out with some analysis of the song itself and the rest of dhmis surrounding it. the thing that immediately stands out is that this song, which is placed after every other song on the album, is about duck being "sad because he can't find his friends".

first of all. this was the last mental state we saw him in, and his fear of losing his friends keeps coming up in later dhmis media.

second of all. this kind of highlights how different his end was from his friends'?

like red and yellow were alive but isolated in relatively coherent false worlds, but as far as we know, duck just fucking died. and if he didn't, we don't know where he could have been. even the world he woke up in when he was being eaten was ambiguous.

a lot about his final moments were ambiguous. the metaphor is clear but the literal meaning of it is hazy. and he only appeared in the finale due to the machine glitching and bringing him out of... whatever limbo he went to after his consumption. this song's context, too, is ambiguous, and it makes significant use of audio glitches and distortion.

and like. this isn't the only time in post-original-series-dhmis that they've highlighted duck's existence relating oddly to the world's resets and the enforced narrative.

in the pilot he keeps repeating "i've lived in this town my whole life!" for seemingly no reason. this running gag is one of many reminders in the pilot that the three of them were somewhere BEFORE clayhill and they just can't remember. him insistently, dreamily saying it at odd occasions gives off the feeling that something about him has been thrown off. pilot!red gets flashes of awareness, but pilot!duck is strangely and pointedly unaware, as if he had been overwritten a little too forcibly. maybe due to both the shock of his death and how he disrupted the show so badly?

besides that, there's the connection between how he's pulled along by the antagonist of the pilot and how in the tv series he seems the least comfortable with throwing off the narrative. something about resets and death and punishments and replacements (though he's still the same even though he was replaced).

and SPEAKING of the whole replacement-but-does-it-really-matter thing, that's one of the weird interactions between duck's existence and the narrative in the tv show! along with that bit in the "electricity" blackout where there's his headless corpse next to a tv with a clip of him waving out at the screen that we've never seen before. which is another instance of duck in an ambiguous space. hm.

speaking of narrative, what's with the singer? who are they?

the singer acts like a narrator for the audience's benefit and maintains a warm, teacherly tone toward the student. the way they reads their lines gives the impression that they are doing the voice for duck; they inhale before the duck voice speaks its first line of gibberish. the dynamic of being a puppet on a show is extremely visible in this song.

to me, this gives off shades of lesley, our amiable narrator/puppeteer. i feel like this singer might have been some kind of precursor to her character. it could have been an early draft of an in-universe "show host" or "writer" presence, or it could have been a device that they used for this one song that later sparked the idea for the lesley character. but either way i think there's some kind of inspirational connection.

and the phrase "silly sad duck" itself... "silly" and "sad" are both fundamental to duck's character the way i interpret him. silly to deflect fears that may make him sad. however: how does the singer mean it? given how every other teacher in dhmis acts, they could very well be chiding him for being sad. saying that he's silly for grieving his loss? his sadness is silly?

and the singer's way of treating his loss as a cute little children's show (bc there’s a lot of these sweet-style little kids shows where a narrator speaks to an animated character as they do stuff! examples escape me rn though) might also serve to minimize legitimate pain in the characters as insigificant. which is a recurring theme with the authority figures in dhmis but i just wanna note its appearance here.

and the most important question: who IS that over there?

option 1: it's the other two! bc they came back once red pulled the plug and reset the show. he found his friends! the sweetness of this option IS undermined by the ominous deepening distortion of the narrator's voice at the end, but is the ending of dhmis not ALSO ambiguously sweet vs ominous. this does beg the question: is this song an in-universe thing. in the time between between his death and the plug pulling, was duck in some kind of puppet limbo where the meta of the show (where he's a puppet guided by a narrator) was a little thinner? if that's true, it would make sense with the increased meta associations of duck in later dhmis media.

option 2: it's NOT the other two. "who is it then" i don't know. but whatever it is, it can't be good. here's some sub-options:

2a: the audience? duck alludes to an audience a couple of times in a new series, and the clip of him on the tv in the blackout is waving at the screen and thus the watchers.

2b: a replacement? the first time his consciousness got transferred to another one of himself?

2c: another meta "puppeteer" figure like roy or lesley? maybe the featureless figures who are behind the cameras in "computers" and moving the puppets in "electricity"?

2d: a metaphorical thing of him realizing that the singer of the song is a separate person whose existence is weirdly enmeshed with his own? this one's probably too abstract but

so now we get to what i think it might mean regarding how the creators developed their ideas for the dhmis series. obvious disclaimer that i am not the creators and i cannot read their minds. this is just speculation.

this and the pilot are both two of the first pieces of post-original-series dhmis content, and they both show a strong focus on duck. which is very interesting to me. it couldn't have escaped the creators' notice that duck had a strange ending in the original series; both the pilot and the tv show constantly reference it.

this song focuses on duck's fear of being left alone. which is obv drawn from "health" (i've given up on calling it “food” bc the tracklist for the album calls the webseries 5 song "the healthy song"). but this trait keeps coming up in media released after this song was made? in the pilot, it's not explicit, but the way he's so easily able to be lured with the idea of keeping everything in the town secure could relate to this fear. and in the tv series, many of his negative reactions are spurred by his fears for his friends). and though we saw these traits in "health," what's interesting is that this song indicates a decision to keep and commit to this as a part of his character.

given this song's... everything... and how threads of its ideas keep running through the rest of dhmis, i really do feel like the creators have had the vague idea of something they want to do with duck's character development and and the narrative for a long time. in general, i think they've had many fairly consistent ideas for the direction of dhmis that they've been trying to shape across different iterations. like the whole "narrative is manipulating the protagonists and they will have to shatter it" thing

so, it's very interesting to me that duck's consequences of his own death, ambiguous existence within the world, and certain core character traits have seemingly been around for so long that they all come up in this bonus song from 2017.

just to be clear: i am not saying that the creators have had everything about dhmis planned out since the beginning. i truly do not think so. i just think it’s interesting to track the development of their ideas as they figured it out over time n what they decided to keep vs throw out. and i think it’s cool that you can kind of see it in these different stages of the show

anyway (pins all this up on a conspiracy board labeled with the words "get hype for birdmangelion" in huge block letters)

#am.txt #dhmis #dhmis analysis #dhmis theory #dhmis duck #kind of. this is more of a ramble than anything #goodnight i spent too long on this and i think it’s half-incoherent

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creature-wizard · 5 months

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The stuff going on in the Law of Assumption community kinda takes me back to when I was a teenager and desperate to have actual social skills, and being attracted to ugly-duckling-to-swan stories like Gigi and The Princess Diaries. These narratives basically suggested that there was some easy way to transform myself into someone appealing and desirable; all I'd have to do was learn the Proper Etiquette and Curious Little Rules and bam, it could all be mine.

And like, at the time I was too young to really think about whether what the films depicted was really a good thing. I didn't have the context to understand how Mia's princess makeover was pushing certain Eurocentric beauty standards, or that the whole "yeah you can't really be a princess until you ditch the glasses" thing was kinda ableist. Not to mention, y'know, the whole girlboss feminism of it all, and upholding the idea that monarchy is desirable, and y'know, a lot of things that just don't occur to you when you're a teenage girl. (Nonbinary egg in my case, technically, but ya know.)

And today the LOA community is offering a similar thing, a kind of magic formula that'll supposedly allow all of these struggling teenagers sort out their lives, while pushing harmful beauty standards and advocating lifestyles that seem glamorous on the surface, but are actually just... terrible. Like the k-pop industry and modeling industry are horrifically exploitative, and the idea that the rich and famous are all fantastically happy people because they've manifested their best lives falls apart when you examine how much abuse goes on in Hollywood and how people like Donald Trump are incredibly insecure. Meghan Markle was so stressed out from the press that she and her husband left the UK.

And then of course, the LOA community pushes the idea that you can manifest all of these perfect lives that people on social media supposedly have. But the fact is, those social media doesn't show you reality; it shows you what the other person wants you to see. Those gorgeous pictures you see on Instagram are carefully staged and edited. A middle aged vlogger used filters to pass herself off as a young woman. One YouTube influencer decided to play a silly prank and claim that photos of herself taken in an IKEA store were actually taken in Bali - and to her surprise, her followers ate it up. Another influencer led people to think she was living this amazingly glamorous life when in reality, she was living in a filthy apartment. One influencer faked a hiking picture in her own back yard.

The Law of Assumption thrives among people who don't know a lot about the world yet, and don't realize that beautiful facades often conceal mundane to horrific realities. It thrives among people who don't have enough experience to consider that Neville Goddard, like many influencers of our time, might have just been lying.

I remember being that young and naive, and if I had come across something like this I might have been caught up in it. It's absolutely designed in a way that appeals to certain vulnerable young people, and that's what makes the whole thing so insidious.

If you are questioning or trying to get out of the LOA community and need help, please see this post.

#law of assumption #loa #loassumption #neville goddard #loablr #loa community

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askew-d · 1 month

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Can I ask your top 10 fav fics ever (from any fandom, if you don't mind)?

Also, just curious, is there a story behind your name "askew-d "?

hello, there! sorry for the long wait, i forgot to check my notifs :( i will do better next time. thank you for this question! i feel like i’ve waited ages for someone to ask me exactly that, lol. i could talk about well-written fanfics forever!! can i give you a hug? because this is wonderful, really.

let’s go for it! my range of fanfiction that i enjoy vary, but one thing remains: i will adore your fic, no matter the fandom, if it’s written with passion and if it contains good, poetic introspection. i love poetry. for me, if there’s melancholic tropes of any kind i’m into it. immortal character and reincarnation? give me now. supernatural elements or slice of life with doomed narrative? i’ll ignore sleep to read it. angst with happy ending? my endgame, for sure.

however, i also adore silly, comedic, cute pieces of domestic life or otherwise. i had a hard time choosing from my bookmarks for this, and i also reviewed some of my favorites, it was fun. before we continue, here are some of the tags that i don’t dive into for whatever reason: porn without plot (it personally just doesn’t interest me at all), non-con, gore, a/b/o dynamics, soulmates au. sorry if you were hoping for it! i’ll try classify them into an order of what i like most.

1. jellyfish, by mystery twin, for the haikyuu!! fandom — i read this when i was finishing high school and coincidentally the story talks about finishing high school! i have a personal attachment that makes me reread it every year. it’s some sort of tradition at this point. not to mention i love kagehina dearly.

2. teen project to change the world, by animeloverhomura, for the mo dao zu shi fandom — respectfully speaking, i would find this author and give them a big hug. their writing is spetacular! if you've never seen this one and you're into mdzs, know it's a story where the characters get to see every event from the novel and donghua, even the dead characters. they watch wei wuxian journey, can you believe it? so goddamn entertaining. promptly waiting for the next update!

3. a hundred or so hellos, by iwillstillopenthewindow, for the haikyuu!! fandom — remember i said i love melancholic stories? well, this one broke me so hard, i had to mention how i hold it with tenderness (we love things that breaks us, dont we?). this fandom manages to write the cutest, most unhinged things sometimes. even it's an anime about sports. i always get amazed by it.

4. no certainty of doors between us, by betts, for the mo dao zu shi fandom — certainly the most silly little fanfic i've ever seen, it's hilariously sweet. i want everyone to read this masterpiece because, seriously, whoever did this deserves only the best. so, so, cute. it had to be in my top 10!

5. their kindred encounters, by fireflavoredwhiskey, for the untamed rpf fandom (bjyx) — you know those kinds of shows, books, any piece of media, that tears up apart? well, this one was it for me. it's a very famous one that deserves all praise, certainly well-written and enjoyable to the core, with doses of angst, romance and beauty overall.

6. as the clouds part and clear, we finally meet again, by 12262325, for the mo dao zu shi fandom — aaaaa, i was truly torn between putting this in the third or fourth place, but i ended up putting it here. come on, i love an age difference kind of story, especially for wangxian, and this one was perfectly done. sweet and funny. the development? the yearning?? outstanding!! i read this many times already, i'll never get tired.

7. pursuit, by emleewrites, for the haikyuu!! fandom — mystery, romance, lawsuits, poker games, adventure, slice of life, AMAZING depictions and so, so goddamn well-written? that's what you're looking for in any fanfiction. the author dedicated herself entirely for this story, and, like i said, i love stories that are written with passion, you can see it pouring through every paragraph. besides, highly entertaining. i'm not very into long fics, but once i started it off, i couldn't stop. that's how addicting it is.

8. linger by the door (i’ve always been yours), by piecrust, for the mo dao zu shi fandom — epistolary?? have i mentioned how i love it?? some of the phrases in this are gold, in my bookmarks you can check some of them (i ought to make a list of my favorite fic quotes, btw, i will sure do it). through each letter i could comprehend more of wei wuxian's feelings and his internal conflict. i love feeling this connected to a character.

9. all the world is ours to take, by khrys, for the fugou keiji fandom — i have more than one favorite fanfiction for this couple. you know these kinds of developing relationship where the transition from (maybe enemies too) friends to lovers happens so smoothly that it feels like they've been soulmates first and foremost at the end? i don't even know how to explain. i just love how, when they finally are together, it's like they've been together for years. and they just... made it official? i like it. i love my mr. kambe haru.

10. he won’t tell you that he loves you, by hellshandbasket, for the house m.d fandom — i found this to be the most fitting, perfect story for this specific couple. they deserved more stories like this, but we dont see it anymore. i would hightlight the feelings realization in this one, that is so fucking real? haha in any case, it's a fanfic that i enjoyed a great deal.

that's it, i guess! i wanted to add link click fanfics also, however i barely started reading fanfictions from its fandom, i'm drowning in it lately but it's just a start. perhaps very sooon!

oh, i’m gonna finish explaining about the name! in my native language, i’ve heard someone tell me before that ‘life’s a little askew, nothing’s ever perfect’, and that quote remained in every biography of any english website i ever went to. then in literature class someday i had to write about historical women and came across this one named anne askew (i wanted to write about the mostly barely-spoken women). it was the second time i saw this word. i didn’t think of it as a proper name before, but then i had to create a nickname for my ao3 profile and thought, humn, why not just ‘askew’? the quote has been engraved in my heart anyway, so i went for it. we’re all flawed and askew. so, yeah, it just… fit? the ‘d’ here on tumblr it’s only because my surname has a ‘de morais’ in it. i also liked that it resembled ‘alaska’, the john green character i was kinda of obsessed with back in my teenager grunge phase. i don’t like these kinds of books anymore, but i guess some details stay with you. do you think it’s weird? never thought of changing.

thanks for this outstanding ask, it certainly entertained me. and hope you have a nice sleep today, big hugs coming your way! 🤍

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coraniaid · 7 days

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top five buffy characters?

In order (today, anyway):

Buffy

Willow

Faith

Giles

Anya

Can't really put my thoughts on Buffy Summers better than I did last year. As I said then, she's one of my favorite fictional characters in any medium. I just think she's neat.

Big fan of Willow, too, although a little bit less so than I was when I first watched the show as a teenager. As well as the slight derailing of her arc with the whole magic-addiction stuff in Season 6 and the show struggling to find anything for her to do in Season 7, I think on reflection, despite the whole "occasionally I'm callous and strange" line, the Buffy writers sometimes don't actually realize when they've made Willow do something interesting and a little fucked-up. They're just a bit too sympathetic to her. So we never get the pay-off those moments deserved, and maybe we were never going to, because -- like Willow herself -- the writers simply don't think Willow did anything wrong.

Faith is the other character who is an easy fit into my top three. (Yes, not shocking, I know.) It seems a bit silly to claim that a character who appears in less than one full season's worth of episodes is one of my favorite characters, but ... I guess I'm a bit silly. She's a main character in my heart (and in my fanfiction), even if the show writers never quite realized it.

A bit below those three, but above anyone else, is Rupert Giles. I think Giles is a fascinating character, but -- more than almost anyone else in the fandom -- he tends to get flattened into this role of "Buffy's good dad" which simply doesn't reflect his role in the narrative at all. (I think it's telling that the fandom's big take-away from Helpless is "Giles has a father's love for Buffy, which we know for a fact because an evil British man said it", combined with a general indifference about ... the objectively awful things we literally just saw him do.) But canon!Giles is (mostly) much better than the fandom caricature. He kind of sucks. I like him.

That fifth spot is the tricky one and the one that's most liable to change. I don't think there's any character in the show who is consistently as sympathetic and interesting and multi-layered as those other four. Tara is nice and has a surprisingly deep relationship with Buffy, but doesn't really get much in the way of an arc. Dawn only appears in three seasons (and the writers seem to just run out of ideas for things for her to do in the third of them). While I will defend the importance of Joyce to Buffy forever -- I think Buffy's relationship with her mother is one of the key things that makes her who she is, and I think the show would be far less interesting without Joyce Summers in -- Joyce herself isn't ever given enough to do and basically doesn't exist outside of her relationship with Buffy. Xander is kind of like Giles in some ways - a deliberately flawed image of (a certain kind of) masculinity who cares about Buffy enormously but isn't always able to act accordingly because of his own self-loathing and because he has a slightly idealized image of her in his mind -- but he's also a little less interesting and a lot more irritating (and, like Willow, sometimes the writers just don't seem to realize when he's in the wrong). I think most of the Xander detractors on this site are misreading the text, but I don't really want to be a Xander defender either.

There are a whole host of other minor characters I wish the show had done more with or cared about at all: Amy, Jenny, Drusilla, Oz, Kendra, Robin are some names that come to mind. But the truth is that, as they appear on screen, I just can't pretend they were ever more than cyphers. (Even if Oz appeared in far more episodes than Faith ever did; at least Faith had some sort of agency and was central to most of the episodes she appeared in.)

So, who's left?

I think Anya is badly underused in the show throughout her time on it (she's just almost never taken seriously at all, either by the writing or the characters), her backstory has all the consistency of wet papier-mâché and to be honest I don't like Selfless quite as much as most people either. But, well, at least she's reliably funny, and there's definitely the idea of an intriguing character in there. Her death makes me furious too, more so than any other character on the show. So, almost by process of elimation, there she is.

#btvs #asks #thanks!

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saltpepperbeard · 6 months

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Just throwing another spanner into the angst machine because I love your long pots lol.

Do you think Stede doesn't open up to Ed about his traumas because he probably thinks Ed wouldn't love him anymore if he did??

oh, why thank you, darling anon! that's so very sweet of you. but also-

hhhHHHHNGKDFGLJKLFGHDJKLFD. PAIN. PAIN AND SUFFERING LMAO. 🎵EASY LIKE SUNDAY MORNNNING🎵 IS NO LONGER ACCURATE I GUESS.

*laying face down on the ground for the Umpteenth Time* but sure yeah anon let's boogie-

I think that's definitely part of the equation, yes. But I also think a large part of it is the fact that he's basically been conditioned to hide his vulnerability away from a very young age. When he was a child, he was mocked relentlessly for being softer or showing his emotions in a way that was unacceptable/unconventional from a masculinity standpoint. He was even slapped with the nickname "Baby Bonnet" for said vulnerability.

Not only that, but his own father disapproved of his softness too. Calling him "lily-livered" is calling him weak and cowardly. And he had it drilled into his skull that that's "all he would ever be," and that it was a bad thing to show any sort of soft underbelly.

And it didn't even end there! Those phantoms chase him all the way into adulthood. There are so many instances of people making digs at him for crying, or for being "weak," or for being "cowardly." Like lol lord; the pilot lays it all on super thick. He's just constantly surrounded by the narrative that opening up spells pain and suffering for him. There's no safety in opening up.

And so he hides away. Numerous times throughout the series, he isolates himself to cry. Numerous times throughout the series, he shoves his own problems down to address other issues first. He experiences so many situations where it would be more than appropriate for him to react with weepiness or anything equivalent, but he swallows it all down.

Not to mention, that he's very set on helping others. He puts other's needs before his own. And I think that's a classic sign of emotional neglect; giving others the treatment you wish you had gotten. ((...nOT THAT I'D KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT HSDKSHLK))

ALSO, I think that's why he has so many issues with self-worth and his own masculinity. It plays into why he flies off the handle in episode 6 into episode 7. He thinks he has to perform a certain kind of way. He thinks he's not worthy of respect or recognition unless he conforms to those societal standards. He thinks no one will regard him unless he's "strong," or "ruthless," or "hardened." Which, again, is why I think the way he acts in season 2 is very much in-character for him. Heartbreaking, and very difficult to stomach, but in-character all the same. It's not him. It's never been him. But he thinks it should be.

AND YES, it definitely plays into his relationship with Ed too, which makes me want to just start foaming at the mouth and biting at his ankles. Because like...he's so wrapped up in those painful expectations that he's totally blind to the fact that Ed loves him for who he actually is. Ed fell in love with the silly little guy who had so many trinkets, clothes, and books. Ed fell in love with silly little guy who was so different than all the other pirates around them. Ed fell in love with the silly little guy who read his crew bedtime stories, and went on treasure hunts, and swapped out books in raids as opposed to just outright stealing.

Ed loves his sweet, fantastic, simple goldfish. And Stede doesn't even see that yet.

Season 2 makes it very clear that Stede thinks he has to shove all of that down even around Ed. Like, the dream sequence in the first episode? He dreams of himself being masculine, hardened, and ruthless, killing in coldblood and subsequently "winning" Ed. Again, that's who he thinks he has to be, and that's who he thinks Ed wants. Why would Ed want someone who's softer and loves extravagance? Why would Ed want someone who picks flowers and stops to appreciate the simpler things? Why would Ed want someone who sobs about his past?

No one else does.

#Answered #Anons #Stede Bonnet #Gentlebeard #Blackbonnet #OFMD #OFMD Season 2 #Revenge Rambles #Again lol #AGAIN #I AM CRAWLING THROUGH DAVID'S WINDOW AND WAILING FOR STEDE TO GET //HIS// BATHTUB MOMENT #I want him to open up to Ed so so bad #And I don't know if he's ever going to do so #But I really want him to #Like can you even imagine #Can you imagine Stede finally breaking down and showing tears around Ed and being really embarrassed about it #But then Ed just...HOLDS him?#And gives him that safety? Safety he's never had before?#I WOULD JUST LOSE MY ENTIRE MIND

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mdhwrites · 4 months

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I saw a post a while ago lambasting Amphibia for having its characters 'do the most horrendous shit imaginable' for the sake of comedic plots and get off far too easily for it. In their view, Amphibia took slapstick comedy way 'too far' sometimes. I thought this was quite hyperbolic; the protagonists made serious mistakes, but rarely anything I'd call unforgivable, especially since they'd almost always show a level of remorse. But it did make me think about the way immoral acts are portrayed in comedic shows, and how we, as viewers, can tolerate and forgive things we probably wouldn't in real life because of the way these acts are presented to us.

I mean, think about Hop-Pop using mind control on Anne, Sprig and Polly in Children of the Spore. If anything like that happened to you in real life, chances are you wouldn't react to someone violating your body and mind by shrugging your shoulders and going 'well, guess we pushed you pretty far.' You'd probably beat the shit out of HP and never talk to him again. But that episode is kinda self-aware about the awfulness of it all (which I love). Polly flat-out says the old frog crossed all kinds of ethical and moral lines XD

Going back to the whole 'too far' accusation, though, I'm pretty sure we're smart enough to understand the difference between a silly frog show and real-life crimes. I don't think there needs to be super realistic consequences to everything (as the post I mentioned was suggesting) when your focus is on writing a slice-of-life fantastical comedy. I guess the only real argument you could make is 'but it's teaching kids to forgive absolutely atrocious, unforgivable things!' And...maybe? But I'm pretty sure any kid with their head screwed on straight understands not to replicate or forgive immoral behaviour too easily.

I guess what I'm trying to ask is, do you think characters doing awful things for the sake of comedy or plot can go too far, in that they can unintentionally make characters far too heinous to sympathize with, or do you think complaints like those of the post I mentioned above are a result of taking something far too seriously? Is there even such a thing as 'too far' when it comes to slapstick comedy?

So let's talk about intent, tone and framing because these things REALLY matter to a story. It's actually part of the problem with fandoms wanting everything to be realistic, darker, etc. because they're really asking for one thing: For them to all be the same. To not be what they are because, you know, the fact that these are comedy cartoons for kids MATTERS.

But first let's actually shift gears AWAY from cartoons for a second to talk about things being genuinely irredeemable for comedy. MANY people are really against prank style reality tv because it preys so completely on human suffering. Because these people are doing terrible things to just normal people. I personally don't like the premise... But I like Impractical Jokers. That show frames it DEMONSTRABLY more about terrible things happening to these four friends, by these four friends, and usually the worst they do to others is leave them a little confused or a bit uncomfortable. One of the big elements to changing this is that all the challenges are effectively dares. Someone either commits to the bit or if it becomes too much, they dip out but they are ALLOWED to dip out, minus the final jokes which are always pretty much purely at the Joker's expense.

Are these four people bad people? No. But part of why we also know that is because it's television and they're doing it to entertain as part of being comedians. Bizarrely enough, a lot of modern cartoon fandoms seem to want to act like fiction IS reality. It's where you get people going "Oh, you're being so cruel to a 14 year old, nuerodivergent girl!" and me going "I'm being critical of a character in a narrative. Can you please stop telling me, an actual human being in the real world, to kill myself because of a fictional character?"

Because shock of all shocks, PEOPLE CAN TELL REALITY FROM FICTION! In fact, even kids can! The fucking video game industry had to go through this hell HARD to prove that killing people in a video game is not the same as having psychopathic tendencies in the real world. Do you know how many kids play CoD? And those kids are fine. At least most of them.

So with all of that preamble out of the way: When can a morality focused show fuck up?

It's actually incredibly rarely in the terrible things the characters do because the show USUALLY addresses these elements as part of the moral of the day.

For the example given of Hop Pop's mind control, it is shown as... Eerie to put it mildly. Even from go, Hop Pop only enjoys it so long as he doesn't have to interact with it. It is never framed as a positive besides a bit selfishness. However, Hop Pop is a good enough person to show genuine remorse and try to fix this. He puts in a lot of effort, is admonished as the lesson of the day is learned to not try to control people and to potentially compromise and then it MOVES. ON. Because they live in a fantasy world where anyone could die at any second. A day of none thoughts is not actually that big of a deal, especially since it wasn't done out of malice or even really on purpose. It's a part of the fun of the setting and of the fantasy genre as a whole that you can just do these weird concepts like this and move on because magic happens sometimes. You might grumble for a day or two but hey, at least it was your neighbor and not the king, am I right!? Hail King Andrias.

A big part of this though, and why so many morality driven shows can have characters do terrible things without imparting the wrong lessons, is because it's addressed. Pretty much explicitly. It is framed as wrong, addressed as wrong and then fixed because it was WRONG. Even if it gives momentary gain, that gain is almost always also included in being wrong.

It's actually a formula that Amphibia purposefully breaks for an episode, carrying it over from directly the one before, because there genuinely was one crime committed that hadn't been addressed and by the time it was, that sin had grown to a point where it was too reasonable to have a character still be mad to ignore it: The music box. Hop Pop hiding it is actually an AWFUL thing to do because it dooms Anne, it means her parents will never get closure, dooms the rest of Anne's friends, etc. etc. Hop Pop has to be okay with Anne never quite being fully happy because of always wanting to go home while also living with this false hope that he implanted into her. A trust he has not earned because of the lie.

So even after they theoretically have their morality episode about the box, Amphibia takes this time for such a PERSONAL attack on Anne to stick with her for another episode during The First Temple. It actually acknowledges that you don't get over everything immediately. That sometimes you need space. I don't even like that episode but the break in formula is actually meant to make the message more powerful, and does so successfully, especially because the crime was different. It wasn't of indifference or something quickly fixed. It was of long term AGONY and a complete breach in trust that would make one question what relationship they can have with another person. There's pretty much zero other crimes in the show like that besides Sasha/Marcy's betrayals, which aren't treated as easy fixes, and Andrias' betrayal is the heel turn that makes him the primary antagonist. These crimes, these personal, genuinely awful things to do to other people that could be replicated, unlike so much of the fantasy violence, are usually seen as something you do have to work on. It's a great, nuanced take on being a morality one off show while also being able to elevate some issues to being dealt with more seriously and consistently.

Also, quick note from someone on my Discord: They NEED to do bad things in order to teach! They are meant to be the bad example so when their actions lead to things going wrong, you understand not to copy that behavior. This is honestly storytelling 101 for most... Plots. Not just morals but plots. If the characters do NOTHING, nothing happens and nothing will be learned.

You want a show that will teach kids bad lessons and then reinforce there are no consequences for those? WELCOME TO THE OWL HOUSE! Specifically: The show that tells you to lie and keep secrets because your fear justifies keeping them!

I know that sounds shitty but like... Luz is the main character. For half of the show, she is portrayed as the second most moral character in the show behind Willow. She admonishes stealing, cheating, etc. as her contrast with Eda. Then after Yesterday's Lie... She literally can't stop lying and never faces consequences for it.

The closest actually comes in Falls and Follies where Amity at least forces a promise out of Luz to be more open with her. This actually though doesn't fix the problem, it just makes it WAY WORSE because one of the main targets of these lies, that kids can easily replicate, especially because Luz is almost always lying about things that might upset others which is the most common thing kids will lie about, is Amity. So now we have both lying and breaking promises. You know, two of the most basic morals any kids show should impart on the audience!

In Reaching Out though, Amity gets a little mad but then it's excused because of her dad! In Thanks to Them, no one gives a shit that Luz has been keeping secrets and lying for months. Camila makes sure Luz DOESN'T tell her friends the truth either about her plans. You know, Luz's MOM who should want her daughter to be an honest person. The show then constantly keeps cutting Luz off from telling anyone anything because it literally can't without revealing how bullshit what she's doing is until by the end of the show... Luz hasn't been punished in any way and the lies just... Drift away.

Completely unaddressed.

This causes a problem because while the lies theoretically hurt Luz... They hurt less than losing her friends. Hurt less than disappointing a parent. Hurt less than making her look bad. And this is the main character. The one kids are supposed to connect with the most. The one who usually most explicitly defines the morality of a show. And she is never punished or stopped from all. Of. Her. Lies.

(As a note: This is also how you get a lot of guys taking the wrong lessons from anime perverts. Sure, this guy gets smacked but he never loses his friends. Never faces real consequences. In return... He gets way more ass than the main character does, doesn't he? *gags violently*)

THAT is how you impart bad morals. It's not surprising to me that the fandom for TOH hides behind excuses so much for their show because their literal main character was justified, in fiction, to have all of the terrible things she did, all the choices she didn't have to make or the people she discarded, because she ALWAYS had an excuse. And so long as you have an excuse, by what TOH says, you can get away with fucking anything.

And mind you, that last part is NOT Luz specific. Have a bad uncle? Don't worry Hunter, the fact that you literally hunt, oppress and potentially kill wild witches can be entirely forgotten and ignored. Have a mean mommy? Don't worry Amity, we literally never have to properly address the literal years of bullying you did to another character or even how attempting to kill Luz was wrong. Collector? COME ON! You just had bad friends/family so now you just need good ones and we can forget all about you oppressing people for fucking months!

This isn't addressing these problems. These are excuses. And excuses can seem REALLY appealing to people. After all, how many hide awful acts or statements behind: "Come on, it was just a joke." Shields are useful for trying to avoid criticism after all. If you never acknowledge you were in the wrong, you don't have to feel bad for having done something mean, let alone terrible.

Just to bring it back to Amphibia: Sasha tries to do this. She believes she knows best so she feels justified in all she does because it will make everyone the happiest, at least in her own eyes. Then in Turning Point, she realizes the folly of her ways, addresses that she was a terrible person and plants her foot down FIRM. No more acting the part of protector while actually being a tyrant. She will risk her very life in order to right these wrongs. And we see it also in Commander Anne where she is taking the change seriously. These are two half episodes, a single episode in full, that lets us know that her actions were inexcusable and that they were wrong and now she is allowed to be a part of the good guys now that she has made sure the audience knows that they can look to her as an example.

One full episode to ADDRESS the fact that what Sasha did was wrong and to not excuse it but to learn from it.

That's why all these terrible things protagonists do in shows is fine. They learn from it. They genuinely regret their actions. They show the audience why they shouldn't have done it. It's never okay to the show that they did. Not that it can't be forgiven, because people should be allowed the chance to grow, but that it still wasn't okay.

For a kid's show, that is pitch perfect. It's why moral of the day storytelling exists and I can't really think of any huge errors in this department on Amphibia's side. It's pretty damn good at smacking someone over the head when they act like a jackass. At bare minimum, there are WAY worse examples out there.

======+++++======

This is absolutely one of those criticisms that has me look at the person making it and go "Just admit you don't like cartoons. Or children's media in general probably." Admittedly, there's actually plenty of adult stuff just as childish, no one stays mad in Family Guy, so it's probably just "You don't like cartoons." It's the sort of bad faith criticism that just reveals you as not having actually wanted the product but whatever you thought the product should be.

I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead. If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

A Twitter you can follow too

And a Kofi if you like what I do and want to help out with the fact that disability doesn’t pay much.

#amphibia #toh critical #the owl house criticism

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canmom · 2 months

Text

more baldur gate

I think I've gathered most of the party now. time to venture forth

we did find another warlock it turned out. they've got a spin on him as a kind of demon slaying folk hero, which is cute. what's weirder to me is when characters will just casually speak of game mechanical stuff like being a 'warlock'. like, oh yeah i made a pact with an eldritch entity beyond space and comprehension, but it's no biggie, you know? there's one in every neighbourhood. though that is something of the problem of Forgotten Realms, it's such a kitchen-sink setting that it's very hard to figure out any sort of coherent narrative thrust for any of it.

my character seems to be settling by default into the kind of default 'pragmatic, generally prosocial crpg hero' model. most of the other dialogue options just seem needlessly standoffish. they do have certain party members disapprove when you take plot hooks, but honestly that all feels a bit silly to take as a prodding to play a more selfish character because like. what do you want me to do, not engage with the game? occasionally you get to click a 'hey, look, I'm also from baldur's gate!' dialogue option, but it never adds up to much.

it's frustrating in a way, because this being so specifically D&D-based really calls attention to the difference between CRPGs and TTRPGs. at the tabletop, I can give my character a distinctive voice, motivation, general habitas - and other players can respond to that and react appropriately. of course, this is not possible in a CRPG to the same degree, except within the rails laid down by the game writers. since the main character is unvoiced and characters react to dialogue the instant you click it, she is even further diminished from the voiced characters.

something noticeable in this is that it has a similar line reading problem as a lot of Bioware RPGs. characters' lines will sometimes noticeably differ in how they're acted - intonation, force, etc. - and there's that ever-noticeable cut between individual lines of dialogue. it has the feeling that the lines were recorded separately in a studio without much in the way of context.

overall the NPC acting in this game is... well it's that classic modern AAA videogame problem right? the character models and rendering are very lifelike when they're still, but the way the characters move is a bit stiff, a bit broad, a bit unnatural. of course nobody has the money to individually hand-animate every single dialogue line in a CRPG of this sort of scale, so they're leaning on canned animations and procedural blending techniques, and it works sorta well enough. it's got that fuzz of videogame jank to it.

it looks like we're about to run into the Evil Races D&D Problem pretty soon, oh boy! the goblins are attacking the poor tiefling refugees. why? i'm sure it will be given a clear understandable motivation and not just that they're evil by nature, right? this is something that I'm pretty sure the game is inheriting from the OG Baldur's Gate games - I definitely remember venturing into a mine to fight gnolls or something. Minsc was there. I have no doubt Minsc will show up in BG3 as well - he's like the most iconic character in the series.

the contrived nature of the premise is classic D&D shit. "you all meet on a mind flayer spaceship, united by parasites in your brain" is definitely the sort of thing that a human DM would cook up as a campaign starting point. that said, it does feel a little weird that everyone on the mind flayer ship between them cover most of the player classes, each with their own colourful backstory and an identically sized tent that they can pitch in your mysterious extradimensional campsite. I think the fact that the introductions are spread out a bit makes it feel more artificial - I get why they didn't want to frontload it with every single character right at the beginning, but it's like, 'damn, this guy has a player character sort of vibe, i bet he was on the airship' and sure enough, he was...

(speaking of the immersion-breaking camp, the respec guy really seems kinda unnecessary as a diegetic element. just have a menu somewhere, trying to make this skeleton guy make narrative sense just raises way too many questions.)

but I mean I can't complain too much that a videogame is a videogame, right? as I recall, in BG1, the recruitable party members were just random adventurers who you'd run into here and there. this is more of a KotOR II-like scenario, where every character has a thing in common that pushes them together.

the Tactician difficulty level, combined with the squishiness of level 2 characters, is definitely pushing me a bit. I had a fight with some bandits. all of them had names and unique voices, interestingly - really applying the Apocalypse World principles. however they will not like, surrender or anything. don't ask me why I was fighting these people to the death, I don't think they did anything that really did any harm to my character, but I wanted to unlock the respec character and you have to get past them to do it. not that I knew that when I saw hostile characters.

anyway, it was a cool fight because it was a bit of party-vs-party - the enemies were using the same abilities I was, and using the environment to their advantage (read: blowing me up with exploding barrels, the nerve of it). Larian of course have their fancy fluid sim system from the Divinity series, which actually integrates rather well with certain D&D spells like Grease. there's a lot of potentially interesting tactical possibilities, although in the end, it came down to the familiar tactics of 'split them up', 'disable them with debuffs' and 'focus dps'. D&D combat is very swingy - once I took out a couple of that other party, the fight was pretty much decided, but when I'd taken a few downed party members, there wasn't really much reason not to just load the quicksave.

I decided to spec my 'lock as a bladelock - I'm playing a chainlock on tabletop so this seemed like a good way to mix it up. of course then it turned out that Wyll is also a bladelock, so he's probably not gonna get much time in the party ^^' but maybe I should bring him along and we can just be warlock buddies. that said... the 4-person party size is... I can see its necessity as a balancing measure, but it does feel like it pushes me towards the standard healer (shadowheart)/tank (lae'zel)/rogue (astarion)/me structure. since I need someone to unlock doors, I need someone to heal, and I need someone to stop the enemy beating up my poor squishy party members. but now I'm a bladelock, maybe I can take over from Lae'zel as the frontliner and free up a slot for one of the other guys. probably it's a big enough game that there will be room to mix and match parties over the course of it.

one thing I do kinda miss from Bioware's games is the intra-party dialogue triggers. the characters here mostly don't have random conversations, at least so far - maybe they will later in the game. that stuff did a whole lot to add life to your party members and make them feel more like characters.

honestly? this is making me want to go back to various isometric CRPGs like Tyranny. so far, despite spicy elements like the mindflayer thing, I'm not fully hooked by this story. but I will give this one a chance all the same.

#computer games #baldur's gate 3

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justenjoythegossip · 2 months

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THE MIDDLE VOICE OR ANOTHER KIND OF PAID PLANTS/TROLLS

It has been widely discussed how trolls/plants are used in a PR strategy to drive certain narratives. Social platforms such as Tumblr, LSA and so forth are the perfect place to reach a core fandom, which is why they are infiltrated by so many noisy agitators who take as many shapes or forms to cover every profile that could be needed to manipulate fans.

As for Chris and the PR strategy used, it has been pretty apparent that such tactics have been and are still being used to this day. And sidenote , let’s not forget that Chris’ appearance at the Con in NY a few months ago was sponsored by… none other than Tumblr.

The middle voice: their positioning, role, sneakier tactics and more pernicious strategy

In such PR tactics, you do need shippers and haters that are well represented by Team Real & Team PR blogs, there to instigate anger and division and to keep people engaged and drive traffic. They are the loud over-the-top extremist voices. But you do need a voice in the middle, people who are way more measured and that tend to represent a more reasonable voice and opinion.

They are the most difficult ones to spot but they are the most important because they are the ones that are driving people to the place that the PR strategy is trying to reach by the end.

The strategy they use is far more interesting that the one used by their counterparts from “Team” Blogs because it is far more complex, insidious and subtle as they tend to navigate much murkier waters.

They also tend to go back and forth, confusing people as to where they stand on this relationship.

Their end goal and the tools they use

What they are trying to do is to get people excited for all of Chris’ new projects (films, voice work) or any types of old/new content (content you should be grateful for, I should add) while mitigating the very problematic stuff, trivializing it, turning it into a joke, which (I suspect) is supposed to make the fans come to terms with who Abba is, what she stands for and to slowly accept Chris and Abba’s kinda “union”. They are basically clearing the way for people to accept this very disheartening situation. Once it becomes normalized, it is more likely to be accepted by his fandom. Time which is such an essential aspect in a PR strategy works in their favor.

One of the most important tool they use to that effect is try to make Chris look more accessible and relatable. And to that effect, they will discuss profusely the kind of bland food he loves, what he likes to wear , what kind of music he loves, his super minty breath, or fan favorite Dodger… Of course, it is not abnormal for fans/mods to discuss such topics. What is suspicious however is the amount of it in such a very short time period. The timing just before the con is also probably not coincidental. Since it doesn’t look very organic and it’s a little over-the-top, it is very likely staged and manufactured. And as we know, his team has been desperate in their advertising his Con in Seattle. We even have a couple of Medium articles to show for it.

Another topic they bring up constantly in a very inorganic way is how hot Chris is. His looks during the Gray Man premiere were brought up a lot recently and certain mods were so keen on pointing out the fact that he was not wearing any underwear. Isn’t he sexy? Are you still thirsting after him? Are you distracted? What a nice and silly diversion, isn’t? Does it make it make you want to turn a blind eye on the fact that Chris compromised himself irreparably by kinda “marrying” a fat-shaming, racist, antisemitic, white supremacist, Nazi sympathizing troll and by doing so has agreed to clean her image? Chris has aligned himself with the same type of people he used to criticize so vehemently on Twitter, a social platform on which he used to be so vocal and where he no longer has an account. Because, you know hypocrisy and performative political activism!

I want to make it quite clear that I am not criticizing anyone for still thirsting after him. People have a right to want to hold on to their fantasies. Or to their dreams. It’s not only not harming anyone, but also it is quite healthy. And we all need that. And it is really great to see fans be genuinely excited to see and meet Chris at the Con. He is lucky to be able to bring happiness to people, it’s gift that I hope he feels grateful for. What I am trying to denounce here is the underhanded, disingenuous tactics of using people’s fantasy to sweep the very problematic stuff under the rug.

The “middle voice”: Profile and their more varied tones

Some of those mods share the same kind of profile. They are allegedly insiders and work in the industry or are industry-adjacent. Talking about all kinds of stuff happening in the movie industry is a nice distraction indeed and more importantly it provides them with some much needed credibility. Also, it enables them to breadcrumb and troll about Chris’ upcoming projects.

But the trolling doesn’t stop there and extend to all sorts of topics. The ring was heavily discussed last night and I already wrote my thoughts on the subject if people want to check it out… https://www.tumblr.com/justenjoythegossip/743785475697967104/reposting-because-of-course-he-was-wearing-his?source=share

Why would you post an alleged anon ask saying he doesn’t wear the ring without any proof? Isn’t the purpose to get people to tune in and get all excited? (It’s very similar to the trolling they did with the sight of Chris’ doppelganger by the way.)

Why would you find it hilarious (😂emojis anyone?) that he is seen wearing the ring at the Con after Chris, Abba and their team breadcrumbed a possible separation? If you are truly a fan of his, you shouldn’t make light of this unseemly union. The optics are absolutely atrocious on EVERY front.

When it comes to their tone, it’s much more varied than the one used by their Team Blog counterparts. It can be similar in the sense that they can be arrogant as they talk down as they answer anon asks. They sometimes lecture them, criticize them for not being able to let go of the Nazism (which is actually quite healthy in my opinion) or gaslight them. But sometimes, their tone can be quite sweet. Or overly sweet, I should say.

Those mods also tend to mostly interact with one another, which can be quite helpful in spotting and recognizing them. And sometimes they will be attacked or pick a fight with someone from their counterparts from Team PR blogs. When Majorscammer attacks you and questions your credibility (Public releases anyone?), it either means that you are speaking words or truth, which poses a threat to their little shenanigans and you need to be discredited or it means… that you are a colleague there to feed the discourse.

Between the noisy and the quieter agitators, the fandom is as toxic as ever and it is closely mirroring this shitshow: a chaotic mess!

The very suspicious discrediting of classic PR tactics

Another aspect that is quite interesting, a mod who works in PR tried to discredit the nasty tactics used in a PR strategy by saying it doesn’t exist or is very rarely used, which seems kind of odd when you are working in that field. (I am paraphrasing but…) They insisted that their work mostly consisted in writing statements and that mods who were coming up with those convoluted theories had quite the vivid imagination.

And yet, haters, shippers and so forth are frequently used on SM in a PR strategy and there is quite a lot of literature on the subject. The mind games and cheap tricks are not only very real but quite nasty. So why try to discredit what we all know exists? Isn’t it gaslighting at its finest?

Funny sidenote regarding Team PR blogs, their silence and usual distractions…

Team PR blogs have been rather silent after Chris’ appearance at the Con with his ring. Sure they still talk about the precious and about the staged and badly manufactured Lisbon pics from last week as the usual distraction. Repetitive much? It seems like we are stuck in Groundhog Day. But they obviously have to take the loss, or appear like they do since they sold the lie that Chris and Abba were close to be over, that Abba was the one who photoshopped the pics and leaked them to troll, that Chris was mad about it and is this innocent victim in their latest silly stunt. They lied. But more importantly they knew they were lying. But no worries, they will be back at it tomorrow and self-congratulate themselves for being so perspicacious.

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