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the nastiest fucking people you’ve ever met are always posting stuff like “what radicalized me? probably my basic human empathy”

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One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

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It's the same with the ring.

Nyx puts it on and dies. Because, we are told, you must die if you are not of royal blood and use the ring.

But then Ignis puts it on, and doesn't die. And we get to take a look at the Kings inside, and see how they basically go "we established that non-royals who use the ring must die, but this non-royal here is useful, so let's spare his life and just take his eyes instead."

Turns out that the "you must die" was not so binding after all. They could very well have spared Nyx too, but it was their choice not to.

Likewise, Comrades establishes that the Gods can bring any long-dead person back to life at any time and for no cost. Just snap their godly fingers, and hundreds of violently murdered people came back, good as new. Nyx stays dead though.

Humans defeated the Scourge 2000 years ago, when if you weren't Somnus you had to fight with only horses and swords and nothing else. Humans then kept the Scourge under control for 2000 years, during which it killed very few people and wasn't considered a threat anymore. In fact, humans did such a great job handling the Scourge, that Ardyn had to spend 30 years crippling two armies from the inside and carefully growing it back in secret labs and planning its release as a massive surprise attack from the center of a mayor city, to allow it to take over and become a threat again.

Yet we are supposed to believe that making the Scourge to kill like 90% of humanity over a decade and then sacrifice Noctis was The Only Way(TM) to save the world. We promise, absolutely no other way that massive modern armies with airships and laser snipers and extremely advanced medical science could handle a pathology that had been pushed back to the edge of the world for two millennia.

Surely the fact that Bahamut is literally the God Of War has nothing at all to do with said The Only Way(TM) being incredibly violent and with massive casualties.

After all, a spin-off manga tells us that Bahamut shed a tear for humanity once, when he told Shiva that she was a dumb bitch for caring about genocides, and he gave his favourite family a ring that works by literally sucking on their soul and shortening their lifespan, so that must mean he's a good guy.

Shiva also tells us that he once fought to save the world. In the same speech where she tells us that the gods are incredibly fickle and can routinely go from savior to destroyer and viceversa, and that protecting the world often meant "protecting it from themselves." In the same story where half the Gods Noctis meets try to kill him (in one case, because a god took offense that he begged for help), but they are still considered the good guys.

...

Japanese fans on 2chan were calling out this crap 9 years ago, and to this day I see people try to argue that Bahamut being a dick is a retcon.

I think ff15 would have gone very differently had anyone managed to frame the prophecy not as a divine inevitability but a demand made by the imminent threat to the world and to Noctis that is Bahamut.

Bahamut gets framed as- not benevolent per se, but *good* by the narrative. You’re told that this is the god who created the crystal, the prophecy, the ring. This is the god who has been in your corner from the jump. Don’t question it too hard. Go quietly into that goodnight.

The chessmaster has never once had the best interests of their pawns at heart.

Hold Bahamut up to scrutiny and he is the reason that Noct must die. Who orchestrated the growing darkness? Who demanded sacrifice to stop that same darkness in its tracks?

It is, I maintain, not necessary sacrifice. There exists a world in which the ring of the lucii demands a blood toll- a life for a life- and it goes unpaid. There exists a world that the crystal demands a blood toll- the king for the world- and it too goes unpaid. Still, the sun rises.

So then if Noct’s death is unnecessary, that means Bahamut is demanding the frivolous death of the man Gladio, Ignis, and Prompto swore to defend. That makes Bahamut a threat, just the same as daemons or Nifilheim or Ardyn or Ifrit.

And I think, come hell or high water, that the bros wouldn’t fold to that sort of threat. They’d stand and fight.

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Ornate harp in the shape of Godzilla. Bratislava, Slovakia, 1367,

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I started reading The Wild Robot because I liked the movie, there are more books, and my brain is soup and I need something easy to read.

I love this run

Also this

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Dante is best uncle

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it must suck to do an assassination and have everyone cheering you on and hyping you up cuz you can’t tell anyone you did it. you have to keep that information to yourself.

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Been busy and going thru some health stuff lately but here's a Six

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We don’t talk about Leia killing Jabba enough. Her grandmother and father were born into slavery. Her blood was that of the desert sand and the shackles of bondage. Leia was never more a Skywalker than the day she strangled her slave master with the very chains he used to bind her. The daughter of Anakin Skywalker was the one who killed Tatooine’s most notorious slaver, and I find that really beautiful.

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you know how people say that cats and dogs don’t feel love the way humans do but it’s like. “oh they don’t love you they just associate you with warmth and safety and seek out your company and being near you and spending time with you makes them feel comfortable and secure” bro if that’s not love then what the FUCK do you think love is???

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Goku is really using that one brain cell of his