Back on my Peril ramblings again guys
Peril is a character with a lot of polarizing opinions. You've got some people who love her to death, while others who, well, don't. The people who dislike her will go about how she's obsessive. Too clingy and relies far too much on Clay. That or go on about how she's just rude, mean, dangerous, and overall kind of a bad person. I...couldn't disagree more if I'll be blunt.
For starters, Peril is in a difficult situation. She was molded and shaped by her childhood. What she is now is a product of being raised as a living weapon. She was seen as being dangerous and a blight on dragon society. A hazard that, at any moment, could kill somebody. She is danger. She is peril.
Scarlet took hold of that. Scarlet manipulated this tiny dragonet that she stole away from her mother and raised her, feeding her lies in order to keep her docile and dependent. She was never alone. Never to act on her own accord. Anything she did was first of all approved by Scarlet, somebody she trusted and loved in a way. All Peril ever knew was hate and fear, so a dragon showing her any other emotions felt like love.
Peril is...unstable to say the very least. Like I just said, she's got a warped sense of relationships due to her upbringing. She has literally nobody outside the walls of the SkyWing palace. She clings to those she deems as friends and loved ones as she knows nothing else. She craves that feeling of love and especially touch. She has never known the love of a mother's hug. She has never felt the wings of a friend comforting her in a time of crisis. She only wants to be held and loved, but she cannot. She was born wrong. She is unlovable in her eyes. That's what everyone tells her at least.
It's when Clay comes along that things change. For once, she's seeing a dragon who, while still kinda scared of her...is respectful. He holds conversations with her. He's nice, friendly, and when she hears that he tried killing his troop, she immediately relates. It's one of those things that I feel Sick about, where in Clay and Peril both are deemed to be monsters since the moment they hatched when in reality they weren't at fault for anything. Clay and Peril are so good when you actually treat them like characters.
The point is that Peril sees herself in Clay. For the first time ever, she finds a dragon like her. A dragon that at the very least tolerates her. After years of abuse and being shunned and seen as nothing more than a monster, it's basically like Clay is giving her a boquete of roses and confessing his undying love.
She becomes obsessed, even more so when she's eventually free from Scarlet, but that comes later. She holds him to such high regards and views him as a dragon she wants to be around. She's easily jealous when other dragons talk to him. She's protective and constantly wants to be near him. She adores him.
Yada yada, the whole fight scene happens between her and Clay. Scarlet notices that Peril is rather fond of Clay and is using her emotions to manipulate her further. Again, Scarlet is extremely manipulative of Peril. She's the one who molded her into this. She's the one who was responsible for this. She's the one who made Peril feel as though all she could ever be in life was a murder machine, and that Scarlet was doing her a favour by letting that be her existence as opposed to killing her. Scarlet made Peril dependent on her.
So when she's gone...Peril feels lost. She feels like she's the blame for one of the very, very few dragons in her life that at least cared about her being gone. Now she's alone and seen once again as a creep. A weirdo. She doesn't belong here, not in the Sky Kingdom. Osprey is dead (another example of Scarlet toying with Peril's emotions cause the one time she acts out she has to suffer for it) and she's just tossed into the world without warning.
She in turn seeks out Scarlet, eventually finding her. Despite all of the abuse and suffering that Scarlet has put her through, she has nobody else. Scarlet's twisted and distorted love is the only thing she knows. She feels guilty for everything that happened to her.
I think it's easy for people to not really understand Peril if they don't really get her situation. What I lay it out, it sounds pretty easy to understand. Peril is a deeply traumatized and abused character who is shaped by her trauma and struggles to exist in this world as she only knows to kill. She's trying to unlearn all of this. She wants to be better. She's trying to be better.
That's what Escaping Peril is all about: Peril's recovery.
Escaping Peril is the conclusion to Peril's arc, with her coming to grips and terms with her trauma and by the end realizing that she is her own person. Over the course of the book, she struggles a lot. She goes back and forth on her feelings with Scarlet, conflicted on whether she loves her or wants to kill her. Perhaps both at the same time. It's messy and she feels lost and hopeless.
The only real thing that seems to be a beacon of light in her life is Clay, whom is basically not even in this book. Clay is her moral compass here. Anything she does has to be something she believes Clay would approve of. She's doing the exact same thing that she's done for years with Scarlet because, yet again, it's literally the only thing she knows. She is a deeply hurt character who struggles with the whole morality thing because ever since she was a dragonet she's been a child solider. She's trying to unlearn it all.
Which is helped significantly with her friends, namely Turtle. She isn't alone. She has a group of dragons who care for her and like her the way she is. Again, the themes of friendship and togetherness is a very strong one in this arc. The Jade Winglet learn how to be themselves and how they don't need to pretend to be somebody they aren't with a group of dragons who love them for who they are.
Peril...learns. She learns. She grows. I cannot emphasize this enough since some of you guys still don't get that part. Her character shifts and changes and develops over the course of this book. She learns that she doesn't need to depend on somebody for her own actions. Hell, by the end of the book, she burns the scroll of her own volition, knowing fully well that Clay would've hated that. She's acting of her own accord. She learns that she's not a monster and doesn't need to have her flamescales be repressed to be liked.
She's a deeply traumatized character who is trying to get better. She has been getting better, and she will only get better with time. She's happy now. She's happy with her friends and loved ones. Everything will be okay.
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Time to develop some story for the cosmic au y'all
Nah 'cause let's be honest to this day this au was just "ooooh look italian man and crazy gremlin with stars and pwetty colors OvO". Besides I promised I was gonna develop on this au's world, so let's get to it :D !
So, in this AU, Peppino and The Noise are beings known as "Cosmic entities", extremly powerful individuals above all laws of physics capable of shaping there environment as they pleases and travel between universes, they're mostly located in their own plain of existence know as the "Cosmic realm".
Cosmic beings are born out of mortal souls (dead people) who've been exposed to a lot cosmic particles and stars*(not stars like giant lumps of flaming gas but in the cosmic entity definition, wich is roughly huge amounts of high emotions)
Peppino and The Noise caused eachothers death. By punching him on the skull, Peppino killed The Noise triggering the "Bye bye italian man" system he placed inside Peppino's kidney, causing a particularly gruesome and unpleasent death. But due to the ABSURDLY high cosmic particles exposure both had as well as insane levels of high emotions (mostly anger), these two became cosmic entities and the newest cosmic duo of the cosmic realm .
Cosmic duos have the immense resposability of making sure that no universe breaks the established laws of physics, for exemple by fixing universes that lacks a law or by stoping beings from that universe to break the laws of physics*(by creating a time machine, a device that travels between universes etc).
Of course neather of them actualy wants to work with eachother, especialy on something as delicate as managing the cosmos itself, but hey they literaly have nothing better to do and they just have to occasionally stitch back the fabric of reality or stop a lunatic trying to stop the flow of time, it's not as if they had much of a choice either unless they want to answer to the cosmic court (and yes cosmic entities have a court, and they look absolutely horrendous, like a lump of eyes and stars, it's awful) wich they rather not.
And so, a newest and one the most unstable cosmic duo was born
This is just a first draft giving out the bases of this AU such as the presence of multiple universes, different plains of existance etc. Sorry it's ATROCIOUSLY wacky due to my lack of skill in basic writting and my latency in english...
But anyway I want to know what YOU think ! Do you like this draft ? Did you expect another kind of story ?
If you have any question on anything I've said so far please feel free to ask I'll be glad to answer any of them ! Okay see ya :D
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So, there's a guy and his friend that I blocked a while back as he was basically an AI art theft apologist claiming that Glaze is just as bad, even worse, than anything human artists that do not want their art stolen can claim about AI. He also kept sidetracking comments on another post in which the question of whether AI being used to replace human therapists to help treat mental illness and trauma was a good idea.
His premise about me was that when he asked what my opinion was on when AI was first developed, I did not answer with the same year that Wikipedia has listed as the beginning of working towards AI development, nor did I answer with the year the term AI was first coined. Essentially, he was incapable of understanding the nuance between opinion and assumed facts written in some history books and on Wikipedia. But no surprise there, black and white thinking and if/else/then statements in programming have a lot in common, and if all you do is work as a machine learning specialist, I suppose getting so lost in the processing of code that you forget how the real world works and how human thoughts and emotions differ from...
[question -> if yes do this, if no do that -> go to next question in the programmed flowchart]
...is fairly inevitable. It's like the transhumanist answer to how to present as 'more efficient', like a single-minded bot.
But, ofc, I was the big 'ol anti-progress, tech-hating dumb-dumb as clearly I was too stupid to know AI is real and the future and going to save humanity. Clearly I've never worked with AI so how could I possibly understand? Mind you, I haven't worked with AI, though I have worked with complex programs and written code, though the reason for this is that AI is not actually intelligent and is certainly not as the cusp of sentience or completely sentient as AI apologists like to claim.
But, hey, what if we asked an expert on the matter? Or better yet, what if an expert already answered the question before it had even been asked in the comments on those 2 Tumblr posts? And what if, as corny as he is in the video, he explains that "AI is BS" (I'm quoting him there)?
May I present this guy as an expert? (I mean he's been teaching machine learning for a while now, so go figure.) Apologies in advance, he was hard for me to watch as well - too many wah-hoos and such.
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Thinking about how I would write an adult Scooby-Doo series, because I think it can be done.
The first thing I’d do is make the characters actually be adults. Still young, but adults, in the mid to late 20s range. Mystery Inc. is a private detective type business that they run together. In this universe, the supernatural/ghosts/etc are real, but not necessarily common, so when they take on a case, the culprit might be a person disguised as a monster, or it might actually be a real ghost. The stakes can be higher; sometimes a bad guy is legitimately trying to kill them. Sometimes the mystery they’re trying to solve is a murder. Sometimes they actually get hurt on their cases.
Fred: the core of Fred’s character should be that he’s incredibly kind. Like, give a stranger the shirt off his back kind. The “Fred can’t talk to potential clients because he might take a case for free and we need to eat” kind. He’s an honest and good person and sometimes gets himself into trouble because he assumes other people are too. While he’s not very good at reading people or noticing ulterior motives, he’s brilliant when it comes to mechanical or engineering type stuff, so he’s the one who keeps the mystery machine running, builds their gadgets, and of course, designs the traps.
Daphne: she comes from old money, and her parents absolutely despise her life choices, to the point where they haven’t officially disowned her, but they have basically cut her off, so she doesn’t actually have access to any family money. Growing up wealthy has granted her a variety of skills, including speaking multiple languages, horseback riding, and fencing. She’s very into fashion and jewelry (even if she can’t afford it anymore) and has extensive knowledge of both that can occasionally provide a vital clue in a case. And even though her parents have cut her off, Daphne still has a wide network of contacts she can ask for favors sometimes, because she’s personable, and people tend to like her. Daphne is also very emotionally intelligent, and is usually the one who can spot when someone is lying to them.
Side note - I ship Fred and Daphne, so I think I would start them off as an established couple for this universe. Dating, engaged, married, I don’t care. They are stupidly in love, ride or die for each other. There’s no will they, won’t they, no worries about cheating. They are in a healthy, happy, loving relationship, and no one (not even Daphne’s disapproving parents) are going to mess that up for them.
Velma: she is the forensics nerd who sometimes gets super excited about the wrong thing at the wrong time (”He was mummified in seconds? That’s so cool!” “Velma! His wife is standing right there!” “Oh. Sorry.”). She’s not purposely insensitive, she just gets laser focused on her work and forgets to filter herself sometimes. She’s also the one who can get so fixated on solving whatever mystery they’re working on, she’s willing to bend or maybe break laws. Is breaking and entering really so bad? Not if it gets them answers.
Shaggy: he is still the comic relief, but he’s the comic relief by being the only person in the group that actually has common sense. He manages the business’s finances, he’s the only one who knows how to cook, and the others tease him for being a coward sometimes, but Shaggy maintains that if a ghost with an axe is coming for you, running is the only sensible option. He should also have a range of random knowledge that sounds useless, but sometimes saves the day (ex ventriloquism, origami, the history of spoons, etc).
Scooby: as this is a universe where supernatural creatures exist, Scooby is an ancient eldritch type being that took a shine to Shaggy when he was a kid, and took the form of a talking dog to befriend and hang out with him. Aside from the talking dog bit and not aging, he never uses his powers in a way that anyone notices. The audience is not told upfront that Scooby is an ancient eldritch being; it should slowly be hinted at throughout the series so the audience put it together, but the characters never realize it. Scooby genuinely considers Shaggy to be his best friend, and cares about the rest of the gang too.
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