#obviously there's a fuck ton of nuance in situations like these but
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I’m being completely serious when I say that seeing the entitled, demanding behavior many readers have expressed towards creators such as yourself has reminded me the emphasis I will put on my future children to respect boundaries and practice gratitude both in person and online.
I feel that some of these people feel so brazen to make demands because they do not empathize with someone behind a screen, which is such a dangerous behavior in our technological world.
I hope you and other creators know you are doing a great thing by calling these attitudes out. You should never have to explain that you have a job and responsibilities outside of writing to such people. All they should need to understand is that you are a person, just like themselves, on the other side of the screen and that means you are not beholden to their desires, only your own.
Said my piece, now I wash my hands :)
god, not to sound like a boomer, but the online and in person etiquette i see children display is extremely concerning. there's a lot of reasons for that (sure you could blame parenting, but job culture also plays a lot into it as well as changes in our education system) and it's just so unfortunate to see. i feel like you just get to see a lot more of it online though because everyone has access to you lmao.
but yeah, calling people out feels nice honestly. people need to learn that authors aren't some ai bot that you can put requests and prompts into and get something out of. especially since i'm not being paid to share my shit with y'all either lmfao. i've even been blocking people just to save me some piece of mind and autonomy at this point lmao.
but thank you! glad to see it's a problem we've recognized and that there are people willing to take the steps to correct it!
#core responds#obviously there's a fuck ton of nuance in situations like these but#you guys get my point.
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i wish universal music group a very die
#they pulled all their music from tiktok and i know you guys might be like ''haha serves them tiktok users right''#but personally making edits is my creative outlet and that's the only platform where people are going to see them#i got luckier than some of my edit making mutuals there and only 4 of my videos have lost their audio#but this fucking sucks man. i can't edit to hozier or kim petras or abba or a TON of other artists bc of corporate greed#well. i can but then no one will see the stuff i make#bc no one on this site watches video with sound unless absolutely necessary and edits need the music#leevi talks#they said it's to protect small artist#bitch where do you think they start getting traction from#ok obviously this isnt a nuanced take on the situation and my opinion might change#but i dont think umg and tiktok should control on how that many artists work is used#dont get me wrong i also wish tiktok a very die but this is my being upset about edits moment
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So I heard through the grapevine a bit ago that there's been some certain people with an axe to grind for whatever the hell reason I can't fathom considering I haven't talked to them in multiple years going around saying, 'lol Nevi doesn't know shit, he's basically kin-for-fun, he thinks you can just say you have a kintype because you want to be a thing, how stupid is that.' Like, I must be doing something right if I've got hate-followers letting me live rent free in their head, and given who it was (no I'm not sharing) I'm personally flattered that they dislike me so much. It's a good sign.
And if you thought I was going to refute that, no, fuck the law, you really can just be a thing because you want to be the thing, but there's also a lot more nuance in that than certain people are giving me credit for.
It starts with trusting people, and that includes yourself. You have to trust people to know what they want. You have to trust people to know why they want something. You have to trust them to make accurate statements about themselves in good faith, even if they might later conclude that they were wrong or that their situation has changed. (You also, as a corollary, have to trust that a situation can in fact change, and why wouldn't it? Things change. Identities fluctuate. That's just life.)
Obviously this doesn't include trolls, because they aren't making a factual statement, nor are they acting in good faith. But it does include people whose criteria for judgement may not match yours. It also doesn't mean that you cannot ask constructive questions, or offer other ideas.
I sincerely don't think it's possible for someone to really, wholeheartedly want to be nonhuman if they don't have some kind of connection to the type in question to begin with. Wanting to be a thing is a major symptom of being the thing. You don't claim an identity because you don't see yourself in it, you claim it because you do. And if you feel you're nonhuman enough to say that you're nonhuman, and not be completely lying, congratulations! You're nonhuman. It's literally that simple.
This also doesn't mean that it's impossible to realize you're a kind of nonhuman that you aren't excited about. That happens. I legitimately was not very interested in fae and even now I don't feel much kinship at all with other fae. It's whatever to me. But I still see myself in that as an identity and I still want to say that I'm fae. I can say that I am and I feel truthful, or I can say that I'm not and I feel dishonest. That's literally enough right there.
You also don't have to claim labels that you don't want. Nobody has to be otherkin. That's just a word. Nobody has to subscribe to the entire ideology, and make no mistake, it is a heavily prescribed ideology, with a ton of social and cultural norms. You aren't obligated to follow them if you don't feel like it. You can just not do that. On the flip side, because forcing labels onto people is shitty, nobody is otherkin unless they say they are and actively adopt that label, which hilariously enough makes being otherkin entirely, 100% voluntary. Go figure.
But at the end of the day, if you can say, in good faith, that you are this or that or the other thing? You are. That's it. That's the whole bar you have to step over and it's not high. There's no way to conclusively prove or disprove someone else's entirely internal, subjective experience anyway and that's fine. You can just say you are a thing, and you are the thing. Boom. Easy.
Assuming that I'm out here proclaiming that people are allowed to invent falsehoods for shits and giggles kinda says more about the person making the assumption than it does me. Nobody is saying that, but go off I guess. I'm saying that if someone really, sincerely feels it's true, and they want to assume this identity as a result, then yeah, it's true, because that's all any of us are working with anyway. All the 'proof' in the world amounts to a fuckin' hill of beans, in which the beans are various little thoughts we've decided to see patterns in and assemble in a certain way. That isn't different regardless of if you just got here or if you're the grayest of muzzles. Nobody's got shit over each other, here.
(Also maybe if we haven't spoken in years and I'm still coming up in your conversations as some kind of bogeyman who is simultaneously too stupid to live and yet also somehow menacing your identity with my big smart mouth words, you may be sorely in need of a thing called 'a life.' 'Cause that's kinda sad and I guarantee I'm not thinking about you.)
#otherkin#nonhuman#kin#fictionkin#alterhuman#therian#lol the usual things I say but this time with a lot more words than usual#tickled fucking pink that some certain gross individual(s) is still buttmad about...I'm not even sure what#considering we haven't exchanged words in a fuckin grip or three#but I'm pretty sure the words were something like 'yeah you don't get to tell me what I am fuck off'#so y'know#nothing of value lost there anyway#I waited quite a while to vague#and if you're trying to guess who it's about#you're probably already wrong unless you were in the car for the conversation
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yknow as much as the (deserved) inazuma backlash has clearly changed hoyos writing for the better i do think there v much is one completely wrong lesson theyve taken from it and thats incorporating story quests into the AQ sequence (and specifically how theyve never attempted it again)
the concept itself was Never inherently bad. in fact it unironically has a ton of potential bc you could lessen the need for sudden character specific exposition in the AQ AND pull off way more high-stakes and timeline-specific plotlines in the SQs by ensuring players will experience it at the intended place and time.
the issue was that they introduced a bleak depressing inazuma in the middle of a fucking civil war and then went omg AQ on pause!!! lets go to a festival with ayaka and u will be her first friend ever OwO yoimiyas is at least vastly better written and actually involves the VH and sakoku decrees so its always been a favorite of mine but even then im sure theres things worth criticism in there its just been 2 years so i cant analyze it off the top of my head. but the greatest offender has always been the way ayakas comes with such a complete tonal dissonance it just takes you out of the atmosphere they spent the entire act I building up.
and it rly makes me sad bc i Know hoyo took the backlash about interrupted pacing and disjointed tone as "ok story quests bad as AQ requirements" when its like. no the one you wrote just sucked
AQ incorporated story quests need to have a damn good reason to be mandatory at that specific point and while its far from perfect i DO think yoimiyas fulfills that! but ayakas doesnt! at all! and like im realizing the issue is also in how genshins made it a standard that a character must receive a story quest Instantly on release. so i guess ayakas had to be in between acts I and II for plot reasons but like. that being the case then the story quest itself shouldve focused on a completely different theme as opposed to her very predictable tropey personal problems that werent even explored properly imo. like im sure plenty of depth and nuance in her characterization was lost in translation but i almost cry laughed the first time the restaurant vendor went "oh ayaka is lonely because she is so perfect that no one sees her as a friend but instead an aspiration" like what in the 3rd grader writing mary sue self insert fic tarnation 💀 you couldve worded that exact same concept in 12 different ways to make it actually sound poignant and you did That SHAHSKSJSKDLJH
(and a quick addition before i get accused of being a blind hater hater lmao. here goes: "the burdens of miss ayakas position as the public face of the kamisato make it difficult for her to shed the mask of practiced perfection. i think people struggle to see her as a person whod enjoy simple things in life like friendship just like everyone else when theyre so used to viewing her as an unreachable figurehead." there. now its way more clearly nuanced. this took me 3 minutes and is far from any fluid writing yet. the difference is staggering)
but like. as a result this ambiguous timeline limbo most story quests end up falling into is genuinely a shame bc i do think theres potential in attempting the ayaka n yoi thing again but with characters for whom it makes sense and actually enhances the AQ experience by necessitating it. and yeah yeah ik genshin wants to be casual friendly so they dont want to force ppl to do quests they dont like for AQ so its unrealistic to expect them to ever try it out again but man
as long as they pick the right place and time and characters for it they could massively alleviate the issue of some story quests contents ending up feeling like somewhat empty fluff bc they cant assume what point a player will be in the main plot could be so they lack actually impactful lore and or character beats.
obviously im not a writer at hoyo and idk how much backlash the ayaya/yoi situation got them but like. idk. taking the lesson "never do anything like inazuma again" isnt rly what id consider the full picture. inazuma does suck and has clunky moments throughout but like in 2.0 people were still hype! inazuma had good ideas and concepts and attempted sth that couldve been great the issue isnt inazuma bad on all levels its that they never delivered its potential and 2.1 was an incredible letdown.
#like idk i dont want to assume but. i Daresay of recent quests. neuvillettes SQ will NOT hit the same if its not in between acts 4 and 5#it does SO MUCH to expand on his character and relationship to fontaine and humanity and as a result act 5 emotional climax hits so hard#bc youve literally Been there seeing him retrospect on the way he and the melusines have gone from distrusted outsiders#to beloved members of the community. like hes super well written in the AQ either way but witnessimg that growth does sooo much for him#& adds weight to his ultimate choice to forgive the original sin of fontaines people. but played post act 5 idk if will hit the same at all#its still gonna be good im sure but. it was so scrumptious in between acts 4 and 5#anywau. idk i just think more charaxters could get expanded moments and interesting dynamic stories#if this option of an AQ tied story quest was utilized well#thats all its just my thoughts in here. bouncing in my skull. slappimg together like fish in a barrel#genshin#rambles
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A N T for that alphabet ask game
A - Ships that you currently like a lot. (They don’t have to be OTPs because not everyone has OTPs.) Friendships, pairings, threesomes, etc. are allowed.
okay uuuuh i mean, obviously shadowgast i have only written like 300k of it in the past few years. im also quite the fan of ashrym/dashrym and callowmore (tho i like my callowmore on the platonic side personally). i will happily make the dirt wizards kiss ANYONE i do have a widomauk fic in the works and i have an idea for a caleb/yussa fic percolating and theres that one porny art by newt with c3 era caleb paired with ashton and orym that im just :lasereyes: yes i will one day write something for it i stg. also fun fact my First Ship for cr was beauyasha like, ep one. i got like 30 seconds into their first interaction and immediately texted cherry at like two am like PLEASE TELL ME THEYRE A SHIP and lo, they were cannon fucking incredible
outside of cr.... stucky, my beloved, especially with skinny steve because i love that sickly twink; big brother hobie creating Situations for gwen and miles (its hard being wingman to two people when you want them to kiss each other and also theyre idiots); kylux, obvs; rey/finn/poe/rose in basically any combination (i wish i didnt have One Hyperfixation Only type adhd because i would LOVE to write my rey/finn/rose idea where rey and rose are mechanics and finn is having car trouble and then they double team him in the office dont ask me why they have straps in the filing cabinet this is pwp); with hs at one point i would literally randomly generate pwp ideas. i didn't often finish them but it was a good exercise especially in characterization but i was mostly read davekat, daverose, any combo of erisolkat, and davejohn because i fukken pavlov'd myself into liking the ship lmao
shit this is gonna get long here is a read more
N - Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).
hhhh i am so sorry if this sounds mean but the bulk of why i dont read a ton of cr fic when i was constantly devouring kylux fic largely boils down to two things
1. the technical stuff is eeh and 2. there is just not a ton of nuance in characterization or plot
both results in me being perpetually frustrated whenever i try to read most of what i open. theres been some gems!! theres also been a lot of stuff with promise where i can tell in a couple years the writer will knock it out of the park!!! but theres also a god awful amount where i'm just like that is not how dicks work lmao
i am sure a lot of that is because the cr fandom skews a lot younger than kylux (where folks are like 20-30 on average instead of 35-50 kinda younger) plus cr has a LOT of esl speakers compared to kylux whereas a TON of kyluxers have degrees in literature or library science, so like, it makes sense that there's a difference, but it still drive me bonkers that i cant just open a fic and read it without closing it halfway through because its too one note :I
T - Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?
nope!! i am very ship and let ship in all regards. there are many things i enjoy (like short!essek or the idea that caleb would and probably has made out with all of his friends) that crop up repeatedly across my fic but i'm down for basically any good faith interpretation and i LOVE when someone writes a weird headcannon so well i have to steal it
there are many letters left of this ask meme if anyone else wants to send me a q!! pls enrich the mochi this is fun
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Honestly, my immediate gripe with Duggan’s take on Angelica isn’t even the whole obvious ‘fuck the Avengers’ thing lol, which I mean. Yeah. I’m on board with that, obviously.
But I reeeeeeally hope he doesn’t lean into this idea that Angelica seems to have that the difference between her view of Krakoa/Emma/etc and that of the rest of the mutant community, is because like...Angelica knows her in ways other mutants don’t. Is more familiar with her ‘dark history’ or ‘the real Emma Frost.’
Because just.
No.
That isn’t remotely accurate, and it’ll make Firestar come off as painfully oblivious and self-centered if she truly does believe that the distance she keeps from other mutants is due to like, her having a ‘truer’ understanding of one of their foremost leaders than any of them do.
Because like, let’s be real, Emma is an extremely controversial figure, who has traveled a very long and winding road since her early days. Early days which Angelica had a front row seat to, absolutely!
But like.....so did tons of other mutants?
And the difference between Firestar’s perspective of Emma and things she’s involved in, compared to how other mutants view Emma, ISN’T because Angelica has special insight NONE OF THEM have.
Its because by her own choice, Firestar has just...not been present for any of Emma’s narrative journey SINCE those early days.
And to be clear.....that’s fine! She had every right to want nothing to do with Emma after all that. I am DOWN for Angelica to hold a grudge and be like, no, some things are unforgivable, I don’t owe you a redemption arc in MY story.
By all means! She gets to do that! Its earned. Emma earned that role in Firestar’s life, and that view in her eyes.
But what Angelica DOESN’T get to do, is convince herself that every other mutant’s view of Emma is a rose-tinted glasses situation born of a lack of knowledge of ‘the true Emma Frost’ when no, the reality is, most of them DO know the CURRENT Emma in ways Angelica has never bothered to try - again, with reason, but that doesn’t mean its not TRUE.
The thing I dislike about Angelica’s take on things in that last reblog is like, hey Firestar, you are not the only person familiar with this woman who has been at the center of the mutant community for literal decades. The irony is as much as your experiences with her are absolutely valid and lived, as much as anyone else’s....you still know LESS about Emma and where she sits in most mutants’ eyes, than like....basically every other mutant present at that Gala.
(Ask your alleged good friend Bobby Drake about HIS history with Emma Frost, for example?)
Emma did not stop teaching after Firestar. She didn’t stop manipulating. She didn’t stop reaching out to new mutants, or trying to shape young mutant minds or futures, or being an influential figure in mutant communities.
She’s been doing that all along, ever since Angelica and her paths diverged when the latter was a teenager.
And like......every mutant who has encountered Emma and been involved with her or influenced by her since those days....have lived experiences and perceptions of Emma all their own....which are every bit as valid and as earned and well-informed as Firestar’s herself.
THAT’S the part that bugs.
I’m not always even an Emma fan myself - how she’s written fluctuates WILDLY, from writer to writer, and some writers are just absolutely tone-deaf and incapable of nuance and write her in ways that make me nope right the fuck out of that narrative, like, ‘Dear Ms. Frost, I regret to inform you but I shall not be stanning until a new writer takes over your stories,’ y’know?
But one thing I CAN say is that Emma quite frankly hasn’t bothered trying to hide who she is and what she’s about in literal DECADES. She changed after Firestar’s early mini and Hellion stories, and like, it wasn’t immediately for the better, by any means.....it was still years before she started looking at doing things in a different way from a moral or ethical standpoint....but one thing that DID change pretty immediately, post-Firestar....is Emma stopped playing at being a duplicitous figure with the young mutants she encountered in terms of like, trying to pass herself off as benevolent and all that. Like, no, she gives it to people straight....”I’m gonna be a fucking ASSHOLE about the things I believe in or want, and you can get on board or get out of my way” and in that sense at least, she committed herself to being a hell of a lot more honest about her intentions, than she admittedly was with Firestar.
But that’s like, the ONLY real way in which Angelica knows a side of Emma that most other mutants don’t....because its in part BECAUSE of all that, that Emma just full on stopped playing those specific types of games (she had others to play, after all).
So to me, its just an annoying and mind-numbingly bad take to have Angelica going around acting like she keeps her distance because she has some special insight on the kind of person Emma is, that most other mutants don’t.....because it unintentionally sets Angelica up as being kinda patronizing and self-aggrandizing about why and how she justifies keeping her distance from things Emma’s involved in. And the thing is, she doesn’t need to? She can simply say “yeah that woman was an abusive asshole to me when I was a kid, I want several zip codes between us at all times,” and like....conversation over. Nothing more needs to be said. That is forever valid.
But again, the part that isn’t? Is acting like all other mutants just have blinders on when it comes to Emma when the basic fact is Firestar really knows very little about how other mutants view Emma, and why. Forget Emma herself for a second:
My bigger problem is its a disservice to every mutant Angelica assumes to be dangerously naive, when it comes to Emma and her intentions and schemes.
Its like, no.....they ALL know who Emma is. The good and the bad. You bowed out of mutant affairs for the most part, pretty early on, but everyone else who was there for all the later big Emma storylines.....they have their own reasons for viewing and interacting with her the way they do, and those reasons aren’t yours and they don’t HAVE to be yours.
Just....don’t presume that yours are more valid than all of theirs, just because of the lasting impact your personal interactions with Emma had on YOU.
Its not a LACK of information about Emma or interactions with her, that informs other mutants’ view of Emma, as opposed to Angelica’s view.
Its just DIFFERENT information and interactions.
And for what its worth, MANY of the mutants that side with Emma these days are absolutely ones that Emma fucked over and screwed with, just as much as she did Angelica. What she did to Firestar sucked, but Angelica flat out does NOT have a monopoly on ‘was previously screwed with by Emma and her machinations.’
And again, while Angelica is absolutely one hundred percent understandable and reasonable in saying I’m not over that, I have no interest in giving you a redemption arc in my story....
That doesn’t mean that other mutants that Emma has absolutely ALSO screwed over, are less understandable and reasonable for - due to their own reasons - deciding TO give her that opportunity, to try and make things right or do better by them. And with many of those other mutants, Emma HAS put in the work, to do better by them, when given the opportunity.
Angelica gets to make that decision for herself, absolutely. But so does everyone else. It goes both ways.
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I'm obviously not trying to say there should be more, but it's telling that the only """"""""murder""""""""" to republicans via police/oppressive forces has been that one stupid chick at the Capitol.
Everyone else has been...everyone else, getting murdered as usual, usually over lies and bigotry.
Republican's can't even accept their "martyr" was a mortar of a problem for the entire country had she made it through. The closest to martyr-ism she'll ever get is the fact they scattered like pussies near immedietely after.
Yeah the people that spread shit on the walls and propped their legs up on some desk like they're anything can't even take one (1) death without buckling down and claiming victim. At the very least she's a victim of the Dump Cult, but the very fact the bottom of the barrel of humanity got that far and gave up that quickly is just pathetic and telling.
They were all there TO murder, and upon their only casuality in the front-lines, they ran off. Accomplishing nothing but proving they're domestic terrorists, just not very good ones right now.
Oh wait I remember where a ton of deaths came at the hands of politicians/those above the law! Dump's Covid response! How could I forget, I mean, I didn't really feel much off it, since I was vaccinated, but boy howdy some of them really wanted to test some stupid and found the fuck out.
Maybe that counts? But everyone else isn't and wasn't injecting themselves with bleach to fight airborne viruses so...
It's truly incredible how they'll try to equate 2 dudes kissing or a dude wearing a dress with storming the capitol, kidnapping children, forcing government issued identities they HAVE to follow, banning books and american history, not understanding if the music isn't modern rap or country that the song and artist stand against everything they idiotically choose to believe.
Idunno. Maybe let people have their own identity? They're always going off about religious assaults and the war on christmas this, like...bro. Your entire identity is about corruption or personally percieved status quo, about rigid lifestyles and personalities, likes and dislikes.
The left, really just anything not considered republican, is about personal identity, and when people were literally just asking to be called different names, they broke down, cried, and now the Nazi's are back because in Republican's actual belief system, that's the normal response to someone being themself by themselves.
Could've just went on and misgendered and whatever else honestly. There's always extremists and republicans pretending to be normal people and utterly failing basic advanced biology or general fact checking. But the left and others didn't ever consider bringing nazis back just to ensure personal identity and freedom of expression is illegal.
Like, a republican does in fact know not everyone agrees with them and having policy's that enforce only government issued personalities and perspectives is genuinely retarded right? Of course not. They don't think.
That's the main issue people really need to grasp. It's absolutely disingenuousness, but it's also just simple fact: They're literally at the intellect level of a child.
And that, that is where normal people should change their messaging. Because yes. Even the fucking brat you want to beat up deserves the chance to understand nuanced situations. Even if their first reaction is to turn to the nazis. Why? Because normal people don't leave others behind, not even disturbed individuals.
Just remember if they have an idiot's opinion, you can't change their minds instantly, but you can put voices in their heads for days, even years, maybe decades, if you just approach it right.
Instead of aiming for 100%, aim for layman's terms. Explaining to a Crackhead tier stuff. Anger will result in more anger. Their response will be anger. Don't antagonize, make them feel open to what is being given.
Either way tho, some dumb mother fuckers. They feel like the default growing person's party because they've not just dumbed everything down severely, they've dumbed it down by just lying.
Twitter has shown what matters isn't context, nobody gives a shit that the reason the NASA Furry employee went off on another NASA employee on twitter was because they were harrassed constantly and daily, and the response was genuinely frustrsting given the circumstances. Nobody cares. It's easier and funnier to shit on the furry for being an asshole for absolutely no reason. Despite being a totally understandable situation they resolved regardless.
The left doesn't lie. But it need to leave information out. The hard part with conspiracy theorist republicans is that everything is a conspiracy unless it's republicans. So you have to be selective about what's left out.
You can't just link a website, you have to quote, and make that whole quote clickable. Make it something where if they ask for a source or lie one wasn't given, they look dumb, making them look dumb in a way that is entirely on them will leave them frustrated, but the voice will stick harder.
In general, you can tell there's a stark difference between the two because one instantly reacts and the other considers, at some point, we have to react smartly.
Perhaps we need to start using their own tactics against them, it won't be hard, they do the bare thought minimum with anger making them even dumber. Just gotta infiltrate more and more. Can't force anyone to change their minds, but you can make them think more than they have. And that, that's what needs to happen.
Because they don't think. They don't consider. So make them. Say the right thing. And it will make them finally consider.
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just as a general rule i think westerners - especially white ones - need to really be careful with wanting Gay Rep in stories told from a nonwestern perspective. not in a ‘you shouldnt expect gay rep from these undeveloped cultures :/’ way - obviously every culture on the planet has gay and trans people who have been telling their stories one way or another since antiquity. but more in the sense that every story has a limited scope and needing it to have the sort of politics You are concerned about in order to think it’s worth engaging with is gonna vastly limit the kind of ideas you’re exposed to
like disco elysium has the privilege of being a 1,000,000+ word beast of a thing that is literally About it’s own political worldbuilding. this means there is not only ample space and ability to talk about how race and gay identity intersect with the larger communist ideology that’s the game’s actual Purpose, but that exploring these topics doesn’t feel like a tangent away from the core narrative, just an enriching of it
however, something that ISNT in that spot might have a much more difficult time making space for it and that shouldn’t necessarily be a dealbreaker
like, i’m gonna use encanto as a comparison because even though i probably can’t think of two pieces of media with less in common than encanto and disco elysium it’s just a very recent and very prominent example.
i liked encanto i think it was the best disney movie that’s come out in almost a decade by a pretty significant margin. but i still think it’s pacing was pretty bad. almost nothing that could have been done about this though because the storytelling and character writing it was trying to do had a Lot more nuance than disney films normally do and there was just barely enough space for it in the film’s 90 minute runtime.
some discourse i’ve seen second hand is basically concerns from colombians and other latin american people with the way white gay people are so intent to read the specific sort of Family Isolation some of these characters experience as queercoding or lgbt metaphor without any sort of regard for the larger family dynamics that are the movie’s core premise.
like obviously there are no gay people in encanto because it’s a fucking disney movie and until faux-liberal centricism stops being profitable disney will never make anything truly progressive. but arguably more importantly than that it’s just not really the discussion the movie was trying to have.
any piece of media can be looked at through a queer lens regardless of what representation may or may not exist in it but applying the lens of western queer analysis to media that tells a nonwestern story is a little bit on shaky and voyeuristic ground unless you’re being particularly careful. i don’t think it should be your primary means of engaging with those stories, and i definitely dont think it should be your only means.
like i’ll bet queer colombians have a TON to say about the way this movie resonated with their experiences w/ their own family. and that’s always gonna be a much more coherent and meaningful exploration of any lgbt subtext than a white american person could bring to the table.
like i think just in general we need to get out of the idea that something needs to reach a diversity quota in order to be worth engaging with. no narrative has the time to be about every kind of person. sometimes the person a story is about happens to not be you or anyone even a little bit like you, experiencing situations that you don’t fully understand. and you definitely should engage with these things but saying ‘what if this WAS about me’ isnt really the way to do it.
#@ THE ANON DONT WORRY THIS ISNT ABOUT YOU#IM JUST COMMENTING ON GENERAL TRENDS#[me voice] this got longer than i meant it to
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(inniter neg clarifier) 1/2 so i reread the original post (the one that sparked the discourse) n realized i fucked up and forgot the overall message of the post was inniters mischaracterization of c!tommy and reducing other characters, mainly SBI, to revolving around tommy and not having a role outside that. very very sorry about spreading misinformation. i was pretty tired, although i still should have reread the post first before explaining.
(inniter neg clarifier) 2/2 i highly recommend u read the original post by inniterneg (usually dslur-crossing w/o the censor) u can find it pretty easliy by searching "original post" on his blog. and also possibly read the anons sent to him, to get a full grasp on their overall issue with inniters.
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Context: [Link]
once again, I appreciate the clarification but uh,
I’ve honestly debated whether I should answer this or not, or if I did whether I should censor the original username and not address the original post because there is absolutely nothing about it that is reasonable or worth talking about.
but here’s the post [Link] and here’s an alternate link in case they change their url back [Link]
like anon, there is literally nothing worth while to take from this. op doesn’t like lore analysis and fanfic that comes from inniters so they took that and created an image of a guy in their head to get mad about. this is Literally nothing but “inniters make everything about their blorbo” but longer.
there are some things that are worth talking about that they mention in the post (even things that I’ve talked about before), but it’s not worth engaging with because they don’t have the nuance to start that conversation and they don’t care to, it’s all there to argue that inniters are the scourge of the fandom for having a guy they like that isn’t their guy.
for one Very Brief example, one of the things they called out was inniters getting upset with phil’s “advice” to tommy about not valuing people over objects. you can tell how I feel about that based on the scare quotes alone. here is an entire essay I wrote specifically disproving the idea that tommy has ever valued objects over people [Link] and here’s a post I wrote trying to put into perspective why phil saying he destroyed l’manberg as a “lesson” rubbed me the wrong way on an emotional level [Link]
there are other posts going into the specifics of why the advice wasn’t very good, but those were the essays that I made in response to the situation. it’s a conversation with a ton of nuance, but you wouldn’t know it from what op has to say about it. according to them, c!phil gave advice and it made tommy feel better so everybody should just sit down, shut up, and not think about it because it personally bothers Them to see it criticized.
once again: this is obviously, Obviously, targeted because they don’t like tommy. in the general sense, what they’re getting angry about is true across the board. techno mains are going to write meta and write fic that center techno and in turn they’re probably going to mischaracterize someone they’re less familiar with or present characters in a way that fans of that character don’t like because whatever they’re making exists in service of their favorite character. calling that an “inniter” thing is ridiculous.
“inniters mischaracterize my blorbo in their meta” yeah and I think people mischaracterize tommy when they write meta about him. that’s why I respond to them and write my own meta. wow it looks like we have the same opinion of each other but we’re separated by who it is we fixate on and care about. imagine that.
but really, to say that in a less sarcastic way, they’re angry Both about inniters mischaracterizing their faves in fan discussions and fan content And with inniters being spurred into writing said fan discussions and making said fan content because they feel like tommy is being mischaracterized. They’re allowed to be upset about it, but inniters are expected to lay down and take it because op is obviously the person that inniters should be catering to. it’s hypocritical, just like their blorbos.
the Only thing that can’t be described as them getting angry about something that’s true across the board is their apparent dislike for dark fiction. which wouldn’t be a problem on its own (it’s all about personal preference and keeping yourself safe innit), but tying it to Real morality and insisting that people who make it are being #problematic is. well it’s embarrassing.
dark sbi as a genre doesn’t exist as commentary on the characterization of the dream smp, dark sbi as a genre exists because there are people in the sbi fandom who like horror. and yes, I do mean The Sbi Fandom. I’m a frequent follower of that tag Because I Like Horror, and tommy is not always the victim of said horror. sometimes he’s a scary monster that does the Dark in the sbi like the others. I’ve seen dark sbi fic focused on phil, techno, wilbur, ranboo, tubbo, and even quackity (with the rest of the sbi acting as the source of horror).
of course, there’s different Kinds of dark sbi (less horror focused and more drama focused) but that’s besides the point.
a character with a story that involves heavy themes of horror attracted fans of horror so they made horror content. oh the humanity, won’t someone think of the children, somebody call the police and get these scum out of polite society
.
obviously this person doesn’t deserve harassment, nor do I actually want to engage with them in an argument. but I don’t know why anybody took this seriously. someone made an unpleasant rant that probably should’ve stayed in dms because they like seeing content that’s catered to them and dislike seeing content that isn’t. there’s nothing here that’s Worth considering, not in this context anyways
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numerous issues with “The Aftermath of Seaworld”
When I get time to do so (aka when I’m done with the documentary), I’m likely going to make a video version of this going into the details.
But for right now, I’ve made this. Both as a guideline for me and so everyone can begin to get an idea of the severity of issues involved.
Researching things is time-consuming and can be very difficult - believe me, I know. But I’m of the mind that if you’re making content with the intent of educating people, you have a responsibility to perform a certain level of due diligence. It IS okay to express uncertainty or doubt if you have it. It is NOT okay to confidently assert things that you do not know with certainty.
The video has an anticap slant, and I’m obviously not disagreeing on that front. But again: if you’re gonna go through the trouble of teaching people something. Bare minimum... please make sure it’s actually correct.
***
1) x ‘founded in 1964 and based out of Florida’ - ???? Seaworld definitively began on the west coast, in San Diego, CA. And given that the first park opened in early 1964… things came together before that. Uh?
2) x ‘four people founded Seaworld [...]’ For one… it wasn’t originally conceived as a restaurant, it was originally conceived as an underwater bar/lounge. Two… calling the four guys involved in founding the place “frat brothers” is fucking ridiculous and completely overlooks a) how each was actually involved and b) the overall significance of their contributions to the field as individuals. Hint: like it or not, they were important and did a lot!
3) x If one is going to bring up SWBGCF/rescues while talking about the literal founding of SW, it gives the impression that it’s been around for that duration. It hasn’t.
It’s actually a bit unclear when SW started an organized rescue program, but the Fund itself and all that it did came about much later. The rescue information and how it’s presented is actually INCREDIBLY complex, nuanced, and has a fascinating history (from a “bad company behaving badly” perspective). Oversimplifying this, to this degree and in this misinformative way, does the facts of the situation an INCREDIBLE disservice.
4) x [assertive statement about what the name Shamu means] ….Uh actually there’s several explanations for the name Shamu, and the most likely one IMO seems to be the “she-namu” one, not the “friend of Namu” one(? What is this even based on.)
4b) It’s not quite clear if she’s saying “Namu was the first ever orca to be displayed and perform shows” or or Namu was the first to be displayed and, like Shamu, performed shows. Either way, Moby Doll was the first to truly be displayed to the public, not Namu.
5) x ‘Namu died after one year in captivity and you’d think that this might deter Seaworld from doing the same thing again…’ Seaworld truly had nothing to do with Namu. And they leased/took possession of Shamu before Namu died. ‘Again’? What?
6) x “Now, PETA paints a pretty disturbing picture…” [while showing Okura’s artwork]
This video segment is, and this is putting it nicely, a pile of poorly-researched BULLSHIT.
-Yes, PETA talks about Shamu’s capture, re: the harpooning of her mother. This Youtuber cannot apparently be arsed to look more than 1 Google search into this, as she proceeds to dismiss the information as potentially fabricated. There are two detailed accounts of Shamu’s capture that I’m aware of - in books - and though they have some slight conflicts, it’s absolutely NOT in doubt that the female who was very likely Shamu’s mother was 1) harpooned, 2) died from her injuries and 3) this had been done to make her easier to catch/locate because there was a fucking buoy attached to the harpoon. Which she dragged around for at least 24 hours prior dying.
So maybe don’t dismiss that as PETA hysteria, maybe TRY to determine the truth of the matter, which would inform one that it is both true and completely horrifying.
-In addition, Okura is an awesome individual who has worked very hard to create a variety of informative artwork for our cause. Okura is NOT associated with PETA and it’s borderline libel in my eyes to use their artwork in this dismissive manner when the primary sources of it can be easily identified online, with full explanations and everything.
Do I take special offense to this because of the misuse of artwork? Absolutely. Artists get disrespected enough online. I’m tired of it. This kind of laziness IS NOT acceptable.
7) x ‘timeline is fuzzy about when Shamu died’ …………… it’s…. It’s really not … newspapers are pretty clear about it…..
8) x [complete and utter oversimplification of the lifespan issue, which is not acceptable for anything published in 2020. It just isn’t. If you’re going to bring it up like this, either do the legwork and get into the weeds or stay out.]
8b) [same for reproductive ages. sigh]
9) x if we’re going to talk about when Cornell was involved with Seaworld it’s very important to specify when Cornell was involved with Seaworld and not make it seem like it’s present tense.
10) x “both were rescued by Seaworld” - uh? no. Zero orcas have been rescued by Seaworld. Literally none.
The infected-jaw orca was Sandy, whose story is complex and certainly does not involve Seaworld until much later. And many of the orcas in that time period had bullet wounds, often only identified post-mortem because they didn’t seem to hurt the animals much.
Also, unflinchingly blending 70s captivity ethics with modern ones is also complete nonsense?
11) x [tilikum coming from sealand] inhales I am going to make an entire video centered on this fucking subject because it’s one of the single most profound arguments for Seaworld being garbage as assessed by US government agencies in the 90s yet everyone utterly fails to mention this. Why?!
12) x what on earth is this nonsense re: quoting a quote from Zimmerman’s article - which has already been removed from its original context, so the original context is not available - and then penalizing the quote for existing as if Zimmerman’s article were the context? That is offensively disingenuous.
I honestly don’t know what the original context is, either - but it’s wildly inappropriate to act as if the Zimmerman article is.
13) x this is relatively minor but ‘Paul Sprong’? You literally have his name on the screen. And then mis-reading his age too? While asserting it from a static article published years ago? Effort? Where is it?
14) x ‘another trainer, Peter’ ….. Ken Peters….
15) [weirdly glossing over the widely-available list of orca-trainer injuries/aggressions, despite it being central to the point.]
16) x This pilot whale outrage certainly happened but it was pretty clearly Blackfish that started the cascade of woes for Seaworld. Who has ever asserted this?
17) if you’re gonna just rehash blackfish, tell people to go watch blackfish.
18) x I’ve already gone over the context issue with Seaworld calling out Howard’s statement in Blackfish here (point 23). Which is to say, IN CONTEXT in Blackfish it’s clear what Mr. Garrett is talking about but, divorced from that, it sounds incorrect.
But this Youtuber AMPLIFIES the issue by doubling down on the assertion with “no record of a killer whale doing any harm to anyone in the wild.”
The surfer event should always be mentioned. Yes, there’s absolutely room for doubt. But there’s also a clear demarcation between an accidental attack (eg mistaken identity, as was likely for the surfer) and intentional one (eg the incidents at marine parks.) Why do people kneecap themselves on this point
18b) please stop acting like Luna represents orcas in general.
19) x “Howard, for all of his research…” … while referring to David Duffus’ b-roll and statements. Uh.
20) x Apparently this Youtuber has single-handedly resolved the dorsal fin issue. You know, the thing that hasn’t been properly researched ever, that has been subject to a ton of debate, that isn’t 100% settled for a variety of reasons, and almost everyone talks about in terms of theories and likely possibilities.
21) x Alexis Martinez wasn’t “torn to shreds.” In a space where even moderate exaggerations are often penalized harshly by the opposition, this kind of blatant nonsense is not welcome. Plus, the reality’s bad enough… you don’t have to make anything up!
22) x *sighs. points at own webpage*
23) Talking about the shows stopping without acknowledging how that’s a bit of a farce is something else. In addition to apparently just flipping to buying what Seaworld’s selling re: its ‘improved image.’
***
Tl;dr video is so unrelentingly full of errors ranging from small to egregious it makes me seriously concerned for the veracity of the rest of this person’s content.
The maker of the video provided a list of their sources in their video description, which I will have time to look through in detail later. The above is solely a response to the information they present IN THE VIDEO - which, is very important because let’s be real: a lot of people are not going to look at the list of sources. People don’t even do it when citing papers (no really, you’d be surprised, fml.)
For anyone who wants to whinge that I haven’t linked or asserted any sources of my own for my claims… well, remember what I said about time-consuming and ‘I’m busy’? Yhea. Getting all of that together will be part of making a video. So if you want to shrug loudly at my list here… you can, that’s your prerogative, I’m happy to say I DGAF if that’s your takeaway.
What I hope, is that if there’s anything I’ve made clear over the While of running this blog, it’s that I don’t fuck around when it comes to sources and information and do my best to provide what information exists, all of it, not just cherrypicked bits and bobs.
Anyways. Here’s step 0 at least. Please don’t share that video. Pretty please.
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I had a lot of little errands and things to do today, so I spent a lot of the day watching/listening to Let’s Mosey: A Slow Translation of FF7, done by Tim Rogers, which goes very in depth into a lot of nuance of the Japanese language and exploring how much personality and impact can be pushed into a very short text box in Japanese, while English is so much larger and unwieldy, a lot of stuff is lost in translation.
(Also, the original FF7 localization was famously done by one person in like a week, which is a dreadfully unfair situation to put even a very skilled translator into.)
If you are like me and are a fucking nerd about localization/translation, maybe check it out? Get ready for 4 minutes being spent examining the nuance of a single line of text. But there’s a ton of interesting stuff in it.
youtube
Weirdly my favorite parts are the lines that are obviously mistakenly translated, and Rogers trying to reverse engineer what caused the mistake in understanding. idk its neat. Language and dialect are neat.
#video games#back when i was like 21 i thought i might want to be a localizer#i never successfully learned a language which frustrates me to this day
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Hopefully this clears up what I’m talking about with my parasocial bond flowchart lmfao
The RedLetterMedia guys for Positive Parasocial Friend Effect Bond – most people see them as Cool Dudes I Would Like to Split a Beer With. Sometimes the positive feelings lead to boundary crossing. This is the kind of parasocial bond that gets talked about the most on the internet so I’m not going to waste a ton of time explaining what I mean here
Mitski for Nebulous Hatefollow Bond – people were really willing to believe that bullshit trafficking thing about her, huh? I’m characterizing this sort of bond as, like, not active resentment towards someone, but willingness to believe negative & largely unsubstantiated things about a creator due to pre-existing bias. The Nebulous Hatefollow is distinct from the other negative relationships because it’s usually predicated on some kind of detachment from the figure, hence why seeing them misrepresented will go over this persons head. You could also put lindsay ellis, sarah z, jenny nicholson, or contra in this square. Nebulous Hatefollows are generally women
Nikocado for Lolcow Bond – self-explanatory
Eugenia Cooney for Toxic Bond – parasocial bond characterized by wanting to be an Internet Cop to someone. Sometimes there’s an element of concern trolling involved, especially so in this case. Deplatform Eugenia! Don’t listen to psychologists who urge you to consider that eating disorders thrive in isolation, and that this could make things worse for her! Think of the fucking children! Toxicity bonds have a strong basis in morality (real or imagined) and can sometimes use this moral basis to excuse harassment. This moral basis leads people to prioritize their own assessment of the situation over more solutions-based ones because of the strong emotional element involved. It’s not to say this person has Actually Never Done Anything Wrong, Ever. Onision & Shane Dawson are both good examples of figures on the other end of many Toxicity Bonds that legitimately aren’t good people. But provoking outrage need not be conflated with justified outrage, or justified response.
Gabbi Hanna is our Toxic Lolcow Bond – people generally don’t like her because she’s a mean girl, but you’d probably be lying to yourself if you said you weren’t kinda invested in the car crash element. Much like the Lolcow, people who attract this sort of bond tend to be extensively documented, but unlike the Lolcow, critique is at the forefront while mockery is somewhat obfuscated. The people who form Toxic Lolcow bonds tend to be more progressive, and less willing to outright mock someone, but their critique will have a subtext of mockery to it. For example, someone making a recap of, say, why people don’t like Amberlynn Reid, may preface their video with how they are more concerned with Amberlynn’s dishonesty, but criticizing her for going off Optavia because she was concerned about her intake on that regimen being ~900 calories a day. The subtext here obviously being “who cares if that’s a starvation diet? She’s fat lol”. Many people who are less concerned with optics would consider this figure a Classical Lolcow, if you will. People also will do this with nikocado, and I know that, but the Classical Lolcow’s criticisms will come secondary to The Lulz in most cases. In the case of the Toxic Lolcow, the order of priorities is reversed, but the Lulz are very much still prioritized
Blaire White is our Grifter Bond – Why does Blaire speak out against her own interests? Could it be that she’s looking out for her personal interests at the expense of others like her? Or is it money? This category has a lot of overlap with the Toxicity bond as well, but with a higher emphasis on belief systems and financial gain, and it’s typically applied to political or lifestyle creators. In cases like Ben Shapiro, who have a lot of influence, corporate interests backing them, and contradict themselves a lot, it’s not exactly baseless to conclude that the beliefs they hold might not be entirely represented in what they say. But applied to people without that influence, it’s harder to say where their motivations truly lie. Sometimes this gets conspiratorial when motivation to misrepresent their beliefs cannot be proven – “Hasan is CIA”. Grifter bonds tend to be more speculative, and ignore nuance in exploring why someone is advocating for something in favor of following the money and nothing else.
The caveat to all of this is that one person’s Nebulous Hatefollow could be another person’s Toxic Lolcow, or Grifter, or Positive Parasocial. This is all contingent on the person with the parasocial relationship. There are a few examples I put in here who fall into all six categories, audience member dependent. I’m just writing down engagement trends I’ve observed lol. What do we think?
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One of the reasons I find LITG so compelling as opposed to a lot of other interactive fiction games (and why I keep coming back to their characters) is how realistically nuanced all the personalities are. Gary is a bit superficial but with very important and likable lived experiences, Rocco is hypocritical and fake but with depth, Hope is amazing and confident but with a temper, Shannon is smart and conniving but with little control of her emotions. So I thought I’d make of list of
The Things I Don’t Like in my Favorite LIs
I’ll try to keep these more based in canon than headcanon, and I’ll move in order of how much I adore them. These aren’t gripes I have with how they were written or things I’d want Fusebox to change, they’re aspects of their characters that I dislike.
Noah
God I love Noah. He’s one of my favorite characters… Across most media lol. While I do see his cowardice as a flaw, I don’t dislike it- I lowkey relate to it a lot and think it makes him a really interesting and likable character.
But I do dislike his willingness to take actions he knows are wrong (or let things happen through inaction) when he knows he won’t face the consequences for them. This manifests most obviously in how he reacts to the whole ON situation. He lets Hope attack Priya without admitting to his role in leading her on, and if he and MC kiss he never tells Hope about it. He knows in this case that Hope will direct all her anger onto the girls and that the rest of the villa won’t call him out, so he doesn’t do the right thing and tell the truth. If MC directly calls him out and says he needs to choose between Hope and Priya, he’ll get angry and storm off. He also needles Hope, either intentionally or unintentionally, but not providing reassurance and treating her anger as baseless- basically making it look like she’s being irrational to everyone else. But Noah does openly flirt via glances and faces with other women, and makes comments to Hope he knows will piss her off. The part that bothers me about that is how easily he just doesn’t take responsibility for his role, instead acting like the victim who’s just trying to fix everything.
That tendency to do the thing that will hurt those around him if he knows he won’t get caught extends to his friends too. He leads Priya on when he lowkey knows in his spirit he’s not going to switch to her. I CANNOT find the post for the life of me, please tag me if you find it, but someone posted this whole theory that Noah had to be the one to vote Lottie and Bobby/Gary out, despite him and Lottie being friends. I think it’s pretty canon that Noah’s observant enough to sense which couples were doing ‘well’ in the game, so it would make sense for him to advocate against getting rid of their biggest competition.
Just in general his lack of control of his body language would make me mad irl. I know they had to write him that way because otherwise him liking MC would come out of nowhere, but having someone who’s smart and otherwise loyal making very obvious eyes at other girls, winking and pining after someone else so visibly? Boo boo the fool.
Priya
I love Priya for the same reasons I love Noah- she recognizes that it’s just a game and knows how much mental space to give to occurences (she’s not out to hurt anyone but also knows when drama is dumb), she’s mature and open about her intentions, and she’s witty. My first playthrough, I loved her and Hope the most and wanted every other girl to fuck off. But she’s got a ton of character flaws that bother me.
While she can recognize good strategy in the game and what’s ‘too real’, she’s bad at applying it to herself. For example, when everyone gets mad at her for Operation Nope, she acts like that was totally unforeseen and goes into victim mode. That response always bothered me and I really preferred the moments where she could accept that she was probably unpopular and going to be voted out. She recognizes that taking MC’s man is the best way to cause as few waves as possible in the villa coming in, but then if MC is openly hostile about it she once again goes into victim mode.
She’s vindictive and not good at letting things go when she feels slighted. When Lottie tries to walk away from a confrontation, Priya realizes she’s right and won’t let it go. When Noah leads her on and she realizes he won’t switch to her, she rightfully feels shafted and goes and tells Hope to force Noah to either switch or admit his shitty behavior. This is my least favorite action Priya takes in the season- no one gains anything from her bragging to Hope and the villa that Noah said he might be happier dating Priya. Priya might feel vindicated in the moment, but it hurts both Hope and Noah and it ruins Priya’s long game in the villa.
She’s kind of basic lmao. Like I love her and I love how sincere she is but like… Discovering boy bands in 2020… Alright you do you girl I’m just gonna judge you a little bit. No shade to anyone who loves pop music, cringe culture is dead, I just don’t really think that meshes super well with Priya ‘mature and aloof’ character.
Henrik
He’s very afraid to be the butt of the joke or seen as killing other people’s vibe, so he’ll ignore his own feelings for the sake of others. The scene where his misunderstands the body count thing is a really low-stakes version of that- he gets confused, but instead of embracing that genuine confusion and admitting he was wrong, he plays the whole thing off as an intentional joke. That indicates to me he’d be willing to do the same on a bigger scale- be it him not asking for what he wants in a relationship or communicating his boundaries. This further makes sense with how he says yes to Blake and how if MC dumps him he just gives up and accepts Chelsea despite not really feeling invested in that relationship.
You can have a hobby, that’s great my dude. But for the love of god talk about something else once in a while. I feel like he acknowledges this with the ‘you know I don’t live in a cabin’ joke, but it doesn’t erase how he always defaults to talking about his job in casual settings.
Carl
Carl has very limited unique scenes to him because of the whole post-CA-personality-merge thing that happened to all the CA boys, so there’s not a lot of in-text fiction to base his flaws on (and most are just headcanons) but-
He makes it clear he doesn’t care about the game or drama, which is totally fine. But he doesn’t so much as ask MC how she’s feeling or about it, when it’s clearly very important to her.
His poseeeeee. I hate it. Like he’s kinda cute, but whyyyyy did they give him fuckboy hands.
Marisol
My relationship with Marisol is a lot of ‘I love the thought of you but I need you to be better’, so there’s a LOT that I dislike about her
The constant posturing of needing everyone else to see how Deep (™) and Smart (™) she is. Literally everyone and their mom agree that when playing S2, Marisol’s anaylzing people is annoying as fuck (and not always accurate). She justifies her analysis with basic body language (which is often inaccurate or incorrectly applied) instead of just saying ‘I think Gary likes you’ or ‘Hope and Noah seem fake’. Her need to project intelligence is condescending and not genuine.
An extension of that performativeness is how she stifles the funnier parts of herself. She gets insecure if MC goofs around in the grocery store and treats genuine jokes that she makes as embarrassing (saying the Duck of the Month club is an embarrassing secret and justifies being silly as ‘bobby rubbing off on me’). She’s so scared to seem unintelligent or like a ‘normie’ that she’ll discredit genuine parts of herself.
Her need to firmly tell everyone she’s bisexual while shutting down potential wlw relationships and only aggressively pursuing men. This is a super realistic flaw, I’ve met so many questioning and bisexual women like this, but it doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating to me.
How she insists that she doesn’t want commitment- hopping from boy to boy, not letting relationships develop deeper intimacy- when she clearly wants it. After day 23 with MC, Marisol becomes so intensely loving and physically involved, which contrasts the very hands off approach she took to other, earlier relationships. She’s unable to admit to herself and others that she wants to be emotionally and physically vulnerable with someone. I find the second iteration very endearing as she’s overcome the former, but for most of the season I’d find her ‘no-commitments’ attitude very annoying.
Lol and as a bonus content, here’s Shane. You thought I was gonna leave him off of here just because he’s not in canon? Lol no, I’ve been thinking and writing about him so much recently. I can’t help myself. This blog is for the gremlin who lives inside my head and no one else.
Shane
Even though he calls other people out for having emotional reactions, he’s very motivated by anger and frustration as well. He just is condescending towards those who don’t internalize it like he does, which is unhealthy for him and frustrating for other people.
If he doesn’t like a person, he has no problem being unkind to them. It’s never open bullying or combativeness, but he’ll make them feel left out in group settings or not laugh at their jokes/engage with them out of politeness. It doesn’t take much for him to dislike someone either- if they do a few bad things he disagrees with or one big thing he’ll hold a grudge about it.
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Traditional Writing Advice & RP
I see a lot of people reblogging writing advice posts, and while it pleases me to see people trying to appreciate RP as writing, those pieces of advice don’t always translate from traditional writing to RP writing.
Following the advice for writing a traditional book manuscript you want to have published, you are going to run into some issues if you follow every point of it faithfully in an RP setting.
For one thing, this isn’t just your story, you’re telling it with another writer. In RP, our reading audience and our writing partners are the same. We have to create well-written, engaging stories that are also meant to be picked up by someone else and furthered. For another, even among the most writing proficient RPers, this is a more relaxed style of writing for a reason; we’re writing neither a paper to be graded nor a work to be published, we’re expressing creativity with other people. It can fall flat quickly, to your writing partners and to yourself, if you are writing in an extremely formal manner in RP.
Writing is one of the creative pursuits that has lent itself heavily to what I’m going to politely call snobbery, and that is part of the problem here. The RPC is rather filled with muns who are self-concious, devalue themselves and their work, and can be desperate for the approval of being A Real Writer. If you love writing and you do write, you’re a writer. No, that definitely doesn’t make you a good writer, but following rules not meant for you isn’t going to make you one either.
There is a wrong way to write, actually, there are hundreds of wrong ways to write that make me want to rip my own face off on the regular. The thing is, there is no one-size-fits-all correct way to write any more than there is such a standard in visual art. There are principles that one should know and follow, but your style might be neoclassical or modern or impressionist. Saying that, in my personal opinion, things falling under the heading of modern-style art is horrid, thus inherently wrong and not art, I’d be imposing my personal aesthetics instead of encouraging people to follow appropriate principles, run with their passion and skill, and make art that moves people who are not me. That’s important, in general, but it’s even more important when we’re talking about creative art as a hobby-as a legitimate passion project one isn’t obliged to devote themselves to.
That’s the way we need to be looking at writing as well. Not as an academic and absolute Right Way, but as an art form that has principles, and indeed, literal form. By insisting otherwise, we’ve damaged writing as a hobby and a profession, and it really shows in the RPC where you have a rather stark division of muns who, on the one side, are so ate up with bizarre concepts their professor threw out about never using “said,” forcing the ideology of their personal academic experience on others, and using traditional writing advice as Word of God to shame others and elevate themselves. On the other side, you have a ton of muns who just won’t even bother anymore, and why should they? They’re genuinely not up to par, but working on it means both a process of shaming and killing their own creative experience.
In saying all this, I want to be really clear here: I am in no way saying that shitty writing, an inability to follow basic grammatical principles, being unwilling to use the damn spellcheck that is standard everywhere, and having no concept of things like storytelling, characterization, and word flow is excusable or ideal.
It isn’t. It’s a terribly destructive force in the RPC, and I’m not in the camp of excusing disinterest in learning, improving, and perfecting one’s hobby because it is an unpaid hobby. In my opinion, it’s part of the blight of the current RPC. However, the snobbery and inability to recognize that there is nuance to learning and writing situations has done nothing but worsen this issue.
So, that being said, some items that are 100% good to use traditionally and in RP include:
Grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
We’re not all native English speakers, and grammar is difficult anyway. It can also turn a story bland with expedience when too properly adhered to. Know the basic principles, but also, be asking yourself about both popular works of fiction and your own favorite works. Chances are, they do not strictly adhere to the rules. Experienced, naturally gifted, and learned writers all manipulate those rules to work for their stories, characters, world-building, and so on. It becomes a personalized writing style, and it’s alright if it takes you some practice to find yours.
Just remember, grammar exists for a reason. Removing or mutating too much will leave you with a difficult to read and understand mess that isn’t a style, just a fucking mess.
If you struggle with grammar, the best way to help yourself is to practice. Additionally, seeing what errors you are making can be quite helpful; Grammarly offers a free add on for both Google Chrome and FireFox that will show you spelling and grammar mistakes. It also explains the mistake, while offering you a suggested fix. This way, you can see the mistakes you’re making in action. {Presumably, there are other such resources, but since I have no experience with them, I’m not the one to recommend them.}
As I said above, spellcheckers are standard now, in fucking 2021. This has been standard on devices and browsers for so long that I highly doubt most people on tumblr even remember a time when you had to use additional software to have them.
You make a mistake or misspell, and if it isn’t corrected for you, it’s underlined very obviously for you to tap/click/float over to correct. If the word is so terribly misspelled that no suggestion comes up {not all spellcheckers are created equality; some do not recognize slang or relaxed spellings, archaic word use, myriad, particularly specialized jargon-legal, medical, technical-and so on}, we also live in a time period where we can highlight the word, right-click that bitch, and select from the menu the option to search for the word. If the word was so weirdly misspelled that your checker couldn’t figure it out, it is incredibly rare that Google doesn’t throw out the correct spelling when you search it. If the spelling was correct, but the word-use is slang, jargon, or archaic, Google is also going to tell you that-you’ve confirmed it is correct, and can now decide if you want to use it or pick a possible synonym for it instead.
There is no fucking excuse for egregiously misspelled words anymore. None. I mean...listen, I spell quite terribly myself, but no one reading my RP replies is ever going to know that fact. Having difficulty with spelling is not, and has not been for a very long time now, an impediment to writing.
Furthermore, we all miss a typo here and there, especially if we write lengthy novella. Those aren’t always going to be caught by spellcheck, and we might edit the reply five times without seeing it. That happens, it’s alright when it’s minimal! Anything other than that, though, it’s just a combination of rushing and laziness. You really couldn’t be assed to take your time with that reply, read it over at least once before posting, and/or to click the underlined word.
There. Is. No. Excuse.
Again, not all spellcheckers are the same. If you feel like yours is lacking, try an extension for your browser. Since I said it above, I obviously have Grammarly on my mine. My replies effectively go through three different checkers, actually. I write all drafts outside of my browser where it is initially checked by Pages, then, when I paste it into tumblr, it’s being checked natively and by Grammarly. It wasn’t my intention, I just wanted to be positive I was never losing a draft or cooking my ancient laptop with Google Docs. However, it’s been nice as hell to get the perspective of multiple checkers, and as such, I definitely recommend it. It isn’t like I’m putting any extra effort into this, and I’m not paying for Grammarly, either.
When you refuse to behoove yourselves of the spellchecker natively available to you, at least, you’re seriously telling your writing partners that they were not important enough for you to click a fucking word. It’s inexcusable.
Punctuation being nonexistent isn’t a writing style or aesthetic, neither is a refusal to capitalize anything. If never using a comma is part of your Aesthetic™, please, rethink your fucking life and the hobby you’ve chosen.
Punctuation is a part of grammar, and I understand that there can be complexities present that might be confusing. That is one of the reasons why you should bother to know the basics as regards when and how to use punctuation. It’s also another way in which telling people that they should adhere to advice meant for traditional and academic writing can be a shit idea. Especially in an RPC known to misunderstand shit and go overboard.
When you tell the RPC that writers use too many commas, the RPC stops using them all around. Especially, when you also attach this to the idea of evil “wordiness.” That’s something that the RPC is desperate to avoid anyway, as the majority of people here are allergic to reading and writing; anything you advise that lessens the word count for them is going to be grabbed and erroneously applied. Someone implies that wordiness and commas equals run-on sentences, and the RPC gets not only believes it, it gets this message, “if I take out the commas, it isn’t a run-on sentence.”
You have all fundamentally misunderstood what a god damned run-on sentence is. It’s not a long sentence, it isn’t a proliferation of commas. A run-on sentence is when two, or more, sentences that should be individual are conjoined without proper punctuation {a fucking comma, for example} or a coordinating conjunction.
Run-ons can be surprisingly short, in fact. As in the example I lifted from here, “I love to write papers I would write one every day if I had the time.“
That should be written with a comma, separated into two sentences, or broken with a comma and the conjunction “and.” It’s also what I see incessantly on my dash from this bizarre idea that we shouldn’t be using commas. That a run-on sentence is a very long one separated only by commas. That is literally not what a run-on sentence is.
You absolutely can use too many commas {if you want to read some examples of how to use commas, go here}, but I rarely see anyone doing so to such an extreme. The extreme being that a sentence becomes a nonsensical string of conjoined thoughts, ideas, and descriptions that could have been written better broken up into fully formed sentences. I sometimes see muns who go a little nuts with commas by putting them in wildly incorrect places in this way.
What I see constantly is either muns berating themselves for perfectly normal, readable sentence structure or muns reactively using no punctuation at all.
It is all legitimate run-on sentences or those made so short and blunt that they become nonsensical, change the tone of the writing, or have no flow together.
Which brings me to...
Sentence flow is a thing, and you should be doing it.
Unfortunately, this good writing advice tends to throw people. We’re not talking about the flow that needs to be present in academic sentence structure, or exactly the flow that is present in poetry. Though it may require practice to understand and apply well, it’s an incredibly simple concept.
You want to balance out shorter, blunter sentences with those that are longer and more flowing. It gives the text a pleasant, natural rhythm. However, it isn’t just about length, a thing that the RPC is weirdly fixated on. Rather, it’s about word use within those sentences as well.
It’s always important to write with a tone that works with your scene and, overall, with your muse. For example, in a tense, aggressive scene, or with a muse who is generally this way, it gets the message across to use short sentences and clipped words. We can feel the tension, annoyance, and threat.
Furthermore, the way your muse thinks about and uses words is relevant. A well-educated muse from the 1800′s isn’t going to have the same approach to words that a modern-day high school student does. You should be making that clear in the way they speak, but also, in the way you express their thoughts and actions. If you are only writing your muse’s personality and emotional tone when your muse is speaking, you’re not giving me the tone all the way through. It can feel like a marked delineation in flow.
However, you should be considering the overall flow of your writing as well. Did you just lay down back-to-back eloquently verbose sentences? If so, you may want to either follow them up or space them with a shorter sentence comprised of simpler words.
This is legitimately good writing advice for any manner of writing.
So is...
Show, don’t tell.
Which is another piece of advice that throws people when they try to make it more complex than necessary. That, and it grates up against the RPC’s need for short, quick writing. The idea that anything a mun gives you that your muse cannot react to verbally or with action is filler to be avoided. That idea comes from some principle advice that translates badly to RP; essentially, don’t wax poetic for three pages when it has nothing to do with the plot, characters, scene-setting elements, action, and so on. Don’t be Tolkien describing every tree and rock in excruciating detail on the way to destroy the One Ring, basically.
That isn’t fully appropriate advice in RP, where we’re having to write tiny chapters to each other to add onto. While it still has some merit, the RPC definitely has taken it to mean that you shouldn’t show anything. My muse’s private thoughts, emotions expressed and unexpressed, stirred-up memories, things they planned to say/do, but that were naturally interrupted by the flow of the thread all become Unnecessary. With...no mind to what they are showing and creating.
This particularly erodes writing muses as legitimate feeling people. As in the last example of what my muse intended to say or do that was interrupted. That’s a normal, human experience. It would be difficult and not enjoyable to read every instance of a muse’s broken thoughts and impulses or intentions, but giving one every so many replies in a natural feeling way keeps my muse presenting as a real person having a real person’s experience. Simple things like this go a long way toward your muse being “believable,” and by ignoring them or refusing to do them, you’re not making your muse very realistic. So much of the human experience is private, unknowable to outside parties.
Look...if you only knew me based upon a sterilized version of what I was saying to you or doing purely within the context of single interaction at a time, you wouldn’t know me at all. You’d have no idea what sort of nuance there is in my words, how I am expressing or withholding an opinion or emotion. I may not have any opinions, emotions, or other experiences that you are not contributing to. That’s very unrealistic, I’m not actually a person anymore. I haven’t any personality, I didn’t exist before you interacted with me.
That is the way it is with muses too. By stripping them of their internal experiences, we’re stripping them of more realistic feeling characterization. {It becomes, or adds to, a disastrous domino-effect of projected, cardboard stand-in style muses that are in no way a joy to interact with.} This is bad writing, makes for bad reading and interacting.
No one seems to understand show, don’t tell. Let me put it in a simple example: don’t tell me your muse is a good person, show me. Don’t tell me your muse is upset right now, show me.
Your muse has character traits you feel makes them A Good Person. They are compassionate, selfless, and genuinely interested in others. Don’t just leave that in the muse’s bio, or relegate it to statement-style lines like, “she cared deeply about others.” Show me these traits in action and thought. You don’t require anything dramatic to it, either. A muse like this should be a good listener, proceed with their love language in a way reflects personal involvement and a desire to comfort, be willing to sacrifice time and personal interests {don’t keep it to dramatic and literal self-sacrifice to show “selfless”}, legitimately doesn’t think of themselves first and foremost and may need reminding to care for themselves, and will be troubled by unfairness and cruelty in the world.
Your muse has been in a disagreement with a loved one, they’re not just “upset,” they are sad, angry, disappointed, and maybe even confused or surprised. While those are more descriptive and defining of the type of complex “upset” going on here, don’t leave it at these words. Don’t tell me that she said, angrily. Show me that she is having thoughts based on these emotions, actual emotional turmoil at her expectations of a loved one being devastated. Paint me a picture of the sadness in her features, the anger in her walk, how her words come out unpolished and jumbled in her surprise and turmoil.
This is what it means to show me, not tell me.
It also extends to scenes and recollections.
If your muse is happy sitting in her garden, don’t just tell me this. Show me why she is happy there, and define the sort of happiness in her thoughts, body language, voice, and expressions. Describe the aspects of the garden in tones of the happiness they bring, draw comparisons between this and her outward expression of joy with similar word use. It ties together both seamlessly in a way that we can relate to and feel, even if we hate the outdoors.
If this muse had a traumatic incident in her past, this is going to inconveniently come up, even if only in her mind. Don’t play coy about it and drop shit on your partners like, “she was thinking of things and stuff that was bad again.” No. Even if you are alluding or otherwise keeping the actual event secretive, you need to be describing how the muse is feeling, how she is experiencing the world around her through an overlay of upsetting reminders. Show me how she is having a visceral reaction to triggering stimuli while having to keep working or talking.
Additionally, even when your muse isn’t experiencing the scene you have set directly, you should show me instead of telling me about it.
Since my actual least favorite PSA on how it’s better to just tell people because no one wants to read “all that” deals with rain, we’re going to as well. Because it doesn’t have to be excessively descriptive to fucking show me it’s raining or has rained instead of just stating the fact.
Not, “it was raining.” Not, “it was wet outside.”
“In between her words, the distant, wall-dampened splash of cars driving through puddles.”
“He passed by windows beaded with moisture on his way to the kitchen.”
Wow, that was so complex, really a lot to read to get the idea that it is, or has been, raining outside without me directly telling you this!
There isn’t anything wrong with being more descriptive than this {nor is there anything wrong with using the word “rain,” so long as you’re backing it up with a description}, some of us do like to read and write about things like oil-slicked puddles in the street if our muse is seeing them or it is otherwise relevant. It’s just that you don’t have to do this, or have to do it at all times, to show instead of tell. This is yet another serious misunderstanding.
It isn’t that the description is often really that excessive, it’s more often that it is irrelevant to the extreme of sticking out weirdly. In the puddle thing, if my muse isn’t seeing it and/or I am not using that description to further experience, their mindset, personality, or tying it to an analogy later in the reply, it feels weird.
Some superfluous shit isn’t bad either, and superfluous can be purely subjective. It is, again, when it is to such an extreme as to leave your writing partner feeling oddly about a point in the text that seemed to ring with importance, but then held none. That isn’t an act of showing or telling, and neither is it your partner trying to show off as a gifted writer. For whatever reason, they just saw or felt that moment with such passionate clarity they had to include it immediately instead of waiting until a better moment for it. That’s literally it, there’s no need to project your insecurity in weird ass ways.
There are definitely other pieces of traditional-based writing advice that are great and either do transfer to RP perfectly or can with small amendments, but these are the most basic, commonly seen, and important combinations. They are also easy to better understand and apply!
When reading writing advice posts, please, ask yourself how they fit into RP. If they do at all. Many times, when it comes to the absolute basics of writing coherently and enjoyably, or developing characters, they’re great. It’s when they get into topics of some nuance that they don’t cross over so well and are outright damaging.
These pieces of advice are often being misunderstood or misapplied already, then are being passed around to a community notorious for its lacking application of critical thinking. Severe misunderstanding will happen, and terrible writing “rules” within the RPC develop from them.
Do be interested in writing, don’t separate traditional writing and RP writing into categories like “real writing and RP,” be invested in learning and improving. Just ask yourself how it applies to cooperative storytelling that is often thematic in nature, and proceed with caution and the mindset that writing is an art.
If you have the principles down and both yourself and others are enjoying your writing, you’re not doing it in an inherently wrong way because it wouldn’t be published. You’re not writing RP to have it published, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s just a difference to keep in mind when reading PSA’s about the Rules of Writing Whatever.
#tumblr rp#rp help#rp advice#rph#tumblr rpc#rpbetter#rpb#roleplay better#tumblr rp advice#traditional writing advice and rp#queue
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levels of beholding feeding; aka, will this successfully feed me or the eye?; aka, there are actions that beholding avatars are likely to take that may not constitute life-sustaining feeding; aka, the illuminati food pyramid.
the post where i break down what i personally consider feeding the eye to entail, including things that fall under the eye’s “jurisdiction” ( remember that fears are malleable and bleed into each other, and the eye especially tends to overlap with everything else bc it is a gratuitous voyeuristic sack of fuck, but for the purposes of this post i am going to try to focus on what in and of itself is eye fear and if it overlaps well that’s just fun and sexy isn’t it ) but do not feed it, things that engender beholding behavior but are not in and of itself feeding, things that eye avatars need to do to maintain themselves, and things that make the eye sigh and go “ah yes that was great food.” also this does not detail beholding powers. i’m just talking about the food, man. the gifts the eye grants its avatars is another story.
first and foremost, what qualifies something as feeding the eye? how does the eye “eat”? if something falls under the following categories, it feeds the eye: fear of being watched, fear of being exposed, fear of being followed, or fear of having your secrets known to somebody else. if something falls under the following categories, it is eye-related behavior likely performed by avatars, but is not in and of itself “eye food”: pursuit of knowledge, especially at the cost of one’s own health or sanity. obviously the latter can enable the former if that pursuit of knowledge is at somebody else’s expense, but what separates the two categories for me is that, to keep the eye as an entity from spreading so thin to the point where anything can be construed as capital-b Beholding because it involves observation or information, is holding fast to the eye being a fear entity. i.e., something can technically be in the eye’s territory of knowledge, but it does not become eye-related unless there is an active element of horror. of course, what constitutes “horror” is subjective, but i think that narrows down the options and removes, say, doing a book report from beholding. tma has a tight thesis of beholding being the horror of watching something terrible and doing nothing to intervene, or the inherent evil of inaction when one is witnessing an atrocity.
therefore i’m going to make my grading for eye food the following. ( note that like... there’s grey area in between each level where, by taking a lower level to an extreme, you could slide it up to the next, etc. )
level one: are you watching in an obtrusive way? i.e., is this something you should be seeing? are you an active participant? or are you eavesdropping. things that fall into this category include people watching, listening in on conversations, or reading private correspondence. this is the fear of being watched / known against one’s will at play, but only one person ( the avatar ) knows the secrets, so it’s low-level feeding. just hoarding secrets unto oneself gives the avatar what i’d consider a steady drip of water, necessary for life and remaining active, but after an extended period of time with just water, you’re going to want for food.
something like following someone and making them feel watched as more than just a prickling on the neck for an extended period of time would probably start to actually feed the eye a bit, as was the case with the cursed mirror; someone with a constant and perhaps debilitating fear of being watched, facilitated by the actions of a beholding avatar, would advance to feeding the eye.
institutionalized watching in an obtrusive way, i.e. the lack of privacy afforded to inmates in a place like millbank, ratchets up to full eye feeding. again, the longer and more intense the watching, the more intense the fear produced, the more likely it’s going to drift up into actual feeding territory. but as a casual action, it’s not sustainable.
level two: are you revealing to the person that you know their secrets? to distinguish this from the above category, i’m talking about the situation with elias and daisy / martin / melanie -- digging out someone’s secrets and then throwing them in their face, making them feel the despair of being peeled open for examination. what puts this at a lower level than mass exposure is the fact that it is probably only the beholding avatar who’s getting anything out of this. this is semi-solid food to the eye, like a gelatin or pudding or other soft hospital food. you can sustain yourself on it, but try to go for any extreme period of time just doing this and you’re probably going to suffer from malnutrition ( if you want to talk to me about malnutrition and how it actually works, aka you’re getting plenty of calories but not all of the components you need, and historic examples of mass malnutrition, we can totally do that; but i want to make it clear for those that might think malnutrition is just like starvation lite, it’s not -- you can be eating a ton of food every day and if you have no variety and if it lacks the proper nutrients, you’re still going to suffer the adverse effects; all this detail to say that’s what happens to an eye avatar who only feeds by privately exposing someone’s secrets to their face, a slow and conscious wasting ).
constantly harassing someone about their secrets might make your diet a little more diverse, metaphorically, but this category really doesn’t have the same mobility as the previous one.
level three: are you making other people aware of the information you’ve gleaned? this is fear of exposure, where somebody is going to face the fallout and consequences of having something unsavory put on display for an audience. ( yes, this covers body image fears of people in the public eye, which is imo a flesh fear that the eye can also feed upon, but that’s an intense discussion for another post that needs to be handled with nuance. i only mention it to make it clear that like... it doesn’t even have to be something objectively horrid that’s exposed; if the person who is being put on display has a fear of being seen, that’s enough to put it in this category, because it is producing anxiety or discomfort. ) no need for bullet points! this gets more and more intense the wider the audience and the more people talk about it. this is solid beholding food with good nutrition! you could make a beholding career out of this! i’m certain that elias does some feeding by allowing students in to read the dirty laundry of named statement givers ( in addition to slurping the despair of visitors who aren’t going to be helped at all by the institute ). after all, statement givers frequently express fear of being pegged as “insane” or having experienced the denial, pity, or avoidance of their friends and family after their experiences. judgement cast upon vulnerability? eye food.
level four: taking a statement. this is sort of disconnected from the rest and may exist alongside them rather than above them, but canonically, reading and experiencing ( getting into character, allowing yourself to feel the presented emotions ) a statement feeds the eye. notice how jon works through tons of “statements” a week, documents gathered by the institute, but only reads one true statement a week on average. he “steps into the shoes” of the statement giver and re-experiences the terror, often while learning something about another entity and how it functions, increasing his own knowledge of the fear world. in my opinion, this is where we get into the eye simultaneously feeding on what’s offered and feeding on the avatar. jon is exhausted after reading a statement and needs to rest. multiple people state that it seems to take a lot out of him. he needs them to survive, but he also finds the experiences draining. this is a solid cooked meal, and the eye has the digestion of a snake, so if you get one of these a week? you’re good.
level five: taking a statement directly from another subject, though? that’s just feeding. cutting out the middle man and the mental transportation of reading a literary piece ( or listening to a tape, or watching a recording ) means that you just get to feed off the person’s fear, because you are peeling them open and knowing them. this does relate a bit to level two, which is why i said it’s probably more of a horizontal relationship, but the difference for me is that you are forcing them to give an account of their encounter with a fear, thus accumulating knowledge of a lived experience and of the other deities, and you are making a person feel known and exposed, often ( in canon ) in a way that’s abrupt and uncalled for. willing statement-givers do not seem to have the same reactions as the poor people jon yoinks in public. taking statements seems to be compulsory for archivists in particular. whether or not it impacts administrators ( elias ) in the same way is hard to discern. maybe not, or maybe that’s solved by having the institute function the way it does, because all those statements are technically elias’s. ( i also have opinions on how elias feeds every single day but we’ll get to that later. the fear machine of the institute. ) this is good food. this is gourmet. this is why the eye stans jon. feeding just off of direct statements is going to cause your own power to skyrocket because you are eating so well.
there are probably more examples of ways to feed, and if people wanna shoot me ims or asks like “is this proper eye feeding?” i’d be happy to answer with my own takes on the situation ( because these are my own takes lol you do not need to live or die by this headcanon I Just Think My Theory Is Sound Enough For This Blog ). but now we’ll look at behaviors that may indicate a propensity for beholding, or that keep a beholding avatar in shape without feeding them; the exercise counterpart to a healthy diet. presented in bullet point form because these are not as in-depth as the above.
an inclination towards extensive research. not just looking up what you need for a book report and nothing more, we’re talking about going down a rabbit hole of research frequently out of a desire to know more. because this does not necessarily produce a fear response and does not necessarily deal with witnessing horror, it is not feeding ( i think about the idea of true crime beholding avatars and i get a little woozy because like... could it work and be canon compliant? certainly. is it therefore a valid take? it sure is. is it something i’m willing to get into? no, because it makes me personally uncomfortable sadly, because i feel some kinda way about the glamorization of serial killers and so on, and though i think an interest in true crime can be pursued tastefully, it’s so nuanced and so Not Me in particular that i just don’t want to get into it, even if i acknowledge that it’s something that probably exists in the tma universe because the tma universe is uncomfortable horror! )
being a nosy bitch. are you always involved in other people’s business, especially drama? do you subscribe to tea spill youtube channels? are you prepared to drop a hot tweet about something shady a celebrity did? ( THIS IS NOT A CRITIQUE OF OR COMMENTARY ON CALLOUT CULTURE INB4, PLEASE I BEG YOU. ) you have the beholding inclination to dig and reveal secrets! awesome!
a desire to organize and preserve information. i think often about this one because one of the things about the ceaseless watcher is that it knows but does not comprehend. it is not interested in understanding or exploring the nuance of what it observes, which is what makes it so horrific. it doesn’t care, the only thing it’s invested in is watching fear and accumulating knowledge so that it can “say” it has more information than anybody else. this, i think, is why beholding tends to center itself around academic institutions. the idea of gatekeeping knowledge, of an ivory tower, is so beholding-appropriate because if you think about the implications then yes, it’s bad. hoarding knowledge and not allowing other people to learn is not a good thing, and that’s why beholding is so very into it. HOWEVER, I AM ALSO DEEPLY INVESTED IN THE IDEA THAT THIS IS WHAT SEPARATES THE FEAR GOD BEHOLDING FROM ITS HUMAN AVATARS. because the avatars are painfully human! michael is proof enough of that i think! even if avatars consider themselves a different species, at the very least “formerly-human” categorically, they were humans and still have human flaws and inclinations. one of these, for beholding avatars, is organization. it’s putting the puzzle pieces together ( unless you’re bad at it, i’m so sorry jon you’re really trying and i love you, but in this case i think that has more to do with jon’s tendency to shoot himself in the foot / put himself at a disadvantage because he is afraid than a beholding-wide thing ), because the human brain usually wants to understand things. it wants to draw meaning from things. even elias, probably the least human of the beholding avatars we see, has to organize the information he has and put separate stories together to form a larger picture, because functioning in the human world just necessitates doing that! you want to stop another ritual? you can’t just gather different pieces of information and not relate them to each other, you have to categorize them and draw conclusions. and, imo, this is what separates the human world from the post-apocalyptic world. the post-apocalyptic world does not require analysis or organization, it can simply be; that is reality as warped and controlled by the fear gods.
there’s probably more to this but i have talked so much, i think that’s enough for now. anyways i care so much about beholding and how it functions and this is actually my least academic bullshitty piece on it, so yay for that. usually i’m all “voyeurism and The Gaze and how it functions in society and especially media!” but today? today we just talk about good eats.
#➢ beauty is in the eye of the beholder ( headcanon. )#|| i put in a read more because i love you i really almost posted this without it.#|| i had to scramble back up and slap it on.
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Hey I have a question sorry if its too much but for the pick your own 4 star ticket which girls would you recommend from each element (best water/earth/light/dark/fire girls.) You dont have to answer obviously but I was just wondering which ones are the best options in your opinion
9/3/21: THIS IS AN OLD POST. DO NOT TAKE THESE RECOMMENDATIONS FOR CURRENT MAGIRECO PLS
Sure! These are my recommendations, so take them with a grain of salt– I wouldn’t call myself an expert here. Also, in my opinion the best character to get will always be your favorite one, and not necessarily the most optimal one.
Additionally, the most optimal choice might not be a new character, but a character you already have. More memoria slots are king in this game.
With all of this said, I’m going to say this: when considering PVE, the best two girls to get will be either Madoka Kaname or Mami Tomoe. Both of them are the best picks due to their cheese strategies, but even outside of that they can both carry you hard into content. I’d say that Madoka wins over Mami slightly due to her element and mp connect/magia, but they’re both excellent choices if you’re looking for a character to improve your game play. They will also always be good to list in your support because of said cheese strats. However, neither of them are a good choice for pvp.
Lastly, feel free to check out these following ranking guides:
Gamepress: PVP Mirrors 5-star Rankings
Gamepress: PVE 5-star Rankings
Fandom Wiki: PVP Magical Girl Tier List Note: will contain JP Spoilers
Tier lists can be sort of iffy, but I think they’re very valuable to pay attention to, even just to read their reasonings– this goes for mirrors stuff too. The Fandom Wiki rates Madoka very low, but its explanation also sheds light on how she can be good for PVE. So if you’re looking for more nuance, take some time and look through them.
ANYWAYS:
Light
Available Characters: Madoka Kaname, Kokoro Awane
For PVE, Madoka is much better than Kokoro. Using only two Madokas on a team is a cheese strat commonly called the Double Doka, and it’s amazing for chewing through hard challenge modes– essentially you connect to a Madoka on each turn so they’re always healing each other, gaining MP, and then later on, effectively using magias every turn.
Even outside of that, Madoka is a great unit in any magia-focused team, due to her aforementioned connect. Her magia/doppel doesn’t just give the team more MP, but it also provides defense, which can help against boss fights.
Kokoro is a tank, and fairly good, but in my opinion tanks need at the very least two slots to actually do their intended job (and also the two memoria). Compared to Madoka though, for pve Kokoro just isn’t as versatile or useful enough.
For PVP, Kokoro is better than Madoka, but this is mostly because Madoka is fucking terrible in PVP and you should never use her there.
Dark
Available Characters: Kirika Kure, Ren Isuzu, Tsukuyo Amane
Personally, for PVE I’d say that Ren is better than Kirika or Tsukuyo. However, this answer is a little more nuanced than the answer to the light question, and ultimately I’d split it between Ren and Kirika. Tsukuyo is basically a much worse version than Momoko.
Ren is a really great unit with a weird connect (and magia) that makes her have a myriad of uses and allows for a little more depth in gameplay. Her weaknesses include really low health and defense (although this is also a strength, see her magia) so you’ll need to protect her. However she has great attack stats and is a very solid choice for dark element damage. Her connect makes a puella combo sort of difficult, but it can help you ignore evades (very useful in mirrors) and also attack a boss up to five separate times while providing an evade itself. Her magia does more damage with the less health she has, which can be great for difficult bosses. All in all, she’s an excellent unit worth having and using that you’ll probably want to have eventually anyways.
So, Kirika. She’s the best tank in the game, period, but she’s also a tank. Unless you have multiple slots on her, you’re probably better off using someone else. Additionally, tanks aren’t always needed in PVE; they’re amazing in hard challenges but you can go by without them in more casual content, whereas a character like Ren (or even Tsukuyo) can be useful in almost every situation. For PVP she’s fucking amazing and can tank the hits and keep going while also providing blast discs.
And then… Tsukuyo. Tsukuyo is a charge gorilla, which is already not that great. She’s best used with her sister Tsukasa, but even then… eh. Yeah…
Water
Available Characters: Rena Minami, Konoha Shizumi, Sayaka Miki, Mayu Kozue
I answered this in an earlier ask, seen here. But TLDR: I think Konoha and Rena are your best options for PVE. Rena is more specialized and can help you with magia teams, and Konoha is more versatile and can fit in virtually any team.
Sayaka is a good tank, but she’s still a tank so she needs a few slots to be good. Mayu is sort of like Madoka but worse and also blue.
Forest
Available Characters: Mami Tomoe, Alina Gray, Mito Aino
Mami is, in my opinion, the best option of the three for PVE. However there is still nuance allowed for here. For PVP, I would recommend Alina, but Mito is also amazing if you can slot her a few times.
Mami has the benefit of double Mami cheese strats, where you use only two Mamis and trade off their connects off of every turn, layering the enemy with binds so they can’t ever attack you. This is really useful for challenge fights (unless the team has a resistance to bind…) and can help carry you. Even without that, her damage is amazing and her connect is still useful as fuck. She’s fragile though and her magia makes her even more fragile than normal.
Alina Grey is a great dps and has a solid connect. She’s a great PVP choice, but you’ll have to be careful with her connect’s chance at stun. I don’t think she can carry you as hard in challenge modes like Mami can, but she’s still an excellent choice and you’ll probably want her at some point.
Mito functions as an interesting sort of tank– she’s balanced type, so she brings more damage to the table than most tanks, and her tanking revolves around evade and taunt. Y’all know how I feel about tanks at this point, so I think she needs a few slots to actually fulfill her purpose, but she’s a solid choice and also just flat-out adorable.
Flame
Available Characters: Momoko Togame, Kyoko Sakura, Karin Misono, Himika Mao
For PVP, the clear answer is Kyoko. For PVE… the clear answer is probably Kyoko, but there is a bit of nuance here.
Kyoko is a blast gorilla (3 blast discs) with great stats, so she’s great for both pvp and pve. You know those events where you have a limited number of turns to kill waves of enemies? Perfect choice right here. She’ll mop up fights quickly and effectively. PVP, which is all about blast, is where she really shines, although you have to be a little more careful with all the water girls around.
Karin Misono is an accele gorilla (3 accele discs) and a support type with an excellent connect. She’s not my first choice for fire– If you’re looking for damage, I think Kyoko is much better, and there are other fire accele girls out there (Rika for example), but Karin still fills a good niche. Do not play her in mirrors unless you want to help others with easy wins.
Momoko Togame is well known as a meme spook, but she’s not as bad as others say. Yes, she is a wretched charge gorilla (3 charge discs) but her connect is goddamn amazing and useful. Charge can be pretty bad but it can have it’s uses outside of pvp. She also can fufill a tank role depending on memoria used, but still do decent damage, making her versatile.
Himika… Well, she’s a tank with VERY low attack. We all know the drill with tanks now, right? She does have a really good connect that can increase blast damage while also keeping your character alive, so she’s decent! However. There is one thing you might want to consider with Himika… Her personal memoria has a passive ability TO INCREASE YOUR CC DROP PERCENTAGE. If you’re like me and you’re constantly CC broke then this is clearly the best character in the history of characters released, ever. Her outfit is ugly.
—-
Okay, I think that’s good :’) Hopefully this helps! Sorry that this was so long, but I wanted to explain my reasoning for each unit to help with making your own decision and not just my ranking– you also have to consider your list of girls and what you’re missing/what you need. For example, Madoka is great, but if you have a ton of accele girls and no blast ones, maybe Kyoko is better. ECT
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