#arrow discourse

[laurelwinchester]

Okay but since you started, to continue ar*row posting into 2024, it was blatantly obvious Quentin resented Laurel for being the one that lived when they all thought Sara died, and people still thought he was a good dad??? The whole Lance family was so fucked up and Laurel deserved a better family

oh yeah 100% both quentin and dinah thought the wrong daughter died on that boat. there is no doubt about it. they resented laurel for being alive instead of sara. they did not hide their favoritism well. with dinah, she was open about it. with quentin, it only came out in waves, usually when he was drunk but even when he was sober it still sometimes seeped out of him in these little hissed remarks.

it's one of the reasons thinking about laurel's childhood fascinates me so much. at a glance, the lance family was a normal middle class family. two beautiful, smart girls, a home, two parents with well respected careers and a loving marriage. a happy family.

but i have to wonder if it was really all that happy for laurel.

i mean. she dated oliver for years. devoted herself to him. adored him. she took him back when he made mistakes, she wanted to move in with him, she wanted to marry him, she loved him with everything the whole way through. and he treated her like trash. he cheated on her over and over and over again with her friends and her sister. he had zero respect for her. he was stupid and he was nasty and he was cruel. and it's not like the island changed him when it came to her. i'm sorry but it didn't. he was an arrow in her lung from the day she met him until the day she died. and she just. accepted that. she accepted that was all she would get and lived with it until the end. that was as far as she got in terms of believing in her own worth.

that kind of chronic, damaging low self esteem doesn't come from nowhere. laurel's canonical desperation and pleading and searching for love was one of her most devastating traits (partly because she was never able to find it) and it's something that can only come from the lack of love. and that shit starts at the top. it starts with mom and dad. they poisoned her. bit by bit until she was dead, gone, and replaced, quite literally, by a doppelganger.

no, i'll never understand why people love "papa lance." he was only a loving father to one daughter. he was an abuser to the other.

that's one of the reasons why one of the recurring characters in my laurel fics is her non canon grandmother. she needs at least one family member to love her completely and unconditionally. lord knows no one else did.

[rirururu]

They're partners uwu

Source

[rmbunnie]

Okay, here's part two of my Green Arrow: Seeing Red thoughts. I'm going to be talking about the much more well-debated side of things here, and that is, of course, the Mia-Jason side of things. I don't really have a thesis for this essay of a post, besides the basic ground rule that I don't think Jason intended to kill Mia, and that's written out pretty clearly in the text. Also that the idea that Jason was lying about his history and beliefs to manipulate Mia (to what end people never really say, as similarly to the "killing her" misconception, he also wasn't trying to recruit her or really make her do anything) isn't particularly supported by anything in the storyline OR any of Jason's previous characterization, adds very little to the story except maybe peace of mind that his entire presence and everything he says aren't worth thinking over because they're just lies anyways and one contribution to a hypothetical callout post for fictional character Jason Todd that needs to be beefed up with conjecture because actual published stories about him aren't cutting it, and kind of just doesn't engage in like, the basic concept of accepting the premise of a work of fiction imo. I do love a good theory, but there's no subtext really there to support it, and the only piece of evidence is just "what if the story itself was wrong." What if he was lying? Well, then it would serve no purpose and go nowhere. What if Oliver Queen was secretly named Pete Arrows and they just didn't say it ever. What if. This is really just going to be loose thoughts on the storyline, but having said that:

I think Seeing Red coming relatively close after Heading Into The Light contextualizes the story in several really important ways: it makes Jason's actions read even less as an attempt at lethal harm with Dr. Light's actual go at killing people in mind, and it gives Mia a reason to be on high alert. Whether it was an intentional parallel or Winick just had certain scenarios he liked to default to during the mid-2000s I can't say for sure, but Heading Into The Light gives us a benchmark to compare Jason's scheme to of a sadistic villain intending permanent harm through an attack with shared elements to Jason's... thing, only implemented much more severely. And let's be clear, two things can be bad, and Dr. Light is the genuine worst. He is potentially the easiest character to ever be a better person than. but lining them up side by side? Dr. Light attacks Mia's school with full attendance, remotely mass murdering her classmates in a very methodical and near-instant pattern as a way of drawing her out. Jason shows up in her high school gym at night, when the building is empty, and attacks with the single goal of prolonging their conversation as he goads her to fight against him more and more viciously. Dr. Light actually DOES explicitly mock Mia for her HIV status, both internally (implying Ollie would be predatory towards her if he wasn't afraid of catching AIDS) and externally "(I guess hookers really are street smart and tough,") as well as making uncomfortably suggestive comments towards her ("Not quite the schoolgirl in that belly shirt. I feel like you should be in a bar with eight other girls. I could always go for some jello shots.") Jason brings up Mia's history specifically as a response/correction to "You don't know anything about me." Tactless to say the least, but not unprompted like one would expect from a taunt (and like Dr. Light's references to Mia's abuse,) and much less derogatory than "you hookers are tough." The part of his statement that reads as aggressive is centered around Mia's (alleged) unwillingness to kill, her status as a victim isn't the target of his scorn. Which, that isn’t a feat to be clear, i just don’t think he’s mocking her for her diagnosis like I see claimed. In terms of reaction: Mia usually likes to dish it out back, and when Dr. Light disparages her her knee-jerk reaction is saying he has no right be talking shit about her when he's dressed like that (to summarize.) When Jason says they're similar in background she just goes back in for another attack with a yell. Which seems like she might be more upset with Jason's reference than Dr. Light, but not like her usual response to insults.

I also think it's worthwhile to note that the gym is, up until this point in the comic, exclusively the setting where Mia came out to her entire school as being HIV positive. I wouldn't assume Jason knows that specific info, but the location already has a strong association with Mia revealing a personal secret to her peers, and it's where Jason's little chat with her, another teen sidekick, about them having similar pasts and parents goes down. It could be adding a layer of legitimacy or subtext to Jason's speech through the parallel to Mia's earnest coming-out and bid for understanding from her peers, it could be tainting Mia's reclamation of her diagnosis to have the place where her past was owned become the place where it linked her to a guy who cuts off heads -- do with it what you will. The gym is blown up at the end.

Jason actually does lie to Mia in this one, just not about himself or his past. He says that when she runs out of arrows, she knows that's gonna be it for her, and he'll be coming for her. It's technically true in the sense that she does know that, but it's ultimately an incorrect perception. Her bow breaks halfway through the fight, and Jason tosses her a pair of swords, then waits for her to get back up to keep fighting. In the end when she's pinned down, unarmed, and he's coming towards her with a knife, there's a panel of her face as she more or less accepts her fate, before it cuts to her safe outside of the building. So. He will not be getting her when she runs out of weapons. (I am so curious what happens on their end in the time between those panels, besides "he lets her go.") This also establishes a pattern of behavior consistent with his Onyx encounter, and which leads me to believe the Onyx interaction probably wouldn't have ended with him killing her either: He starts the combat with a big display of strength (kidnapping Mia/stabbing Onyx in the shoulder,) frees the opponent from it (unties Mia/dresses Onyx's wound with his special instant suturing bandaid,) insists that he's going to kill them if they fight him, and then doesn't. With Mia, he lets her go, and with Onyx, he's interrupted before she can start attacking (which he's waiting on her to do.) But applying the Mia pattern to Onyx, I do in fact think he's full of shit, and that even if Bruce hadn't shown, we can retroactively assume he would likely have had little intention of actually killing Onyx.

I just think it's fun that Mia's high school is named after Dennis O'Neil (Green Arrow/Green Lantern) and Kevin Smith.

I find it vague what Jason means when he says Mia "understands that very bad things need to be done to accomplish a great right." Obviously it's just Jason's worldview, that evil can be a tool to accomplish good outcomes, and the simple answer is him broadly saying she can relate to it, but why is he telling her? "You do [understand]" feels more personal than that, and what the "great right" actually is, in regards to what Mia is doing, seems unclear. It's a separate statement to "doing bad things just to get by" which references her/their background/s, and frames the good outcome as just surviving another day. I'm sure for Mia it reminds her of the end of City Walls, when she shot that guy because she had to take his wall/police-state curse down, but the thing is, even if she didn't like it, and had a major crisis of conscience over it, she did kill that guy. Not that Jason knows. In general, Green Arrow has much less of a revulsion to killing and death than Bruce, for whom it's nothing short of a fixation. So unless Jason just doesn't know that about Green Arrow, nor that Mia had already killed, it's a really weird point to argue. That probably is the situation, Jason just straight up does not know and is projecting his dynamic with Bruce onto a more understanding father, but it's a weird page, with the cut from him closing in on her to her safe outside, the emphasis on his dagger. Could Jason coming over to her with his dagger, taking into account the fact that she's open and he's shown to not kill her despite this, be following the pattern, shown twice in this issue alone, of him providing opponents weaponry to use against him? Was the "bad thing that needed to be done" his way of prompting her to use the dagger on him, in line with his efforts to make her shoot for his face? Probably not. It's a stretch, but then again, he did move the encounter along to the "advanced readers group" where he starts to allude to his own past and their similarities only after Mia followed up on her threat to shoot for his eye, effectively setting up a system where she "progresses" for hurting not villains or criminals, but him personally. Reading too far into this, but something about that page feels odd to me. It's just SUCH an ambiguous place to cut the scene. Anyways, whatever he way saying there, Mia seemed to be convinced.

I think the thing that bothers Mia most about the Jason interaction, by far, is that it inspired doubt in her relationship with Oliver. That, and the idea that overcoming her circumstances might not be enough to actually keep her Good, which are kind of the same thing. Mia seems to take a lot of pride in being like Oliver, and almost sees him as a uniquely good man, in her history at least. (Connor too, but he's not in the same type of caretaker/authority role.) She spends a substantial amount of time majorly upset after she finds out he cheated on Dinah, which seems somewhat charged taking into account her history, and the fact that he saved her from that politician, saved her from her abusive boyfriend, always responded appropriately to her early series crush, while every other man she interacted with only continued to perpetuate her suffering. (I see Winick's Green Arrow critiqued for having Ollie cheat, and while I absolutely don't agree with the choice to kill Joanna off in the manner that she was killed, and Winick's interview answer when asked about the choice to have Ollie cheat was that he just liked writing Oliver flawed, which is fair, I also think it serves Mia's character really well to have this kind of trial come up in her new parental relationship.) In the same issue where Jason says she's emulating her new flawed "daddy," she lies about her favorite type of pizza so she can agree with Ollie. Throughout the issue, her points of contention with Jason are less about his stance on killing and more that his claims that they're alike are incorrect, at a point where all she knows about him is that he's no longer good, and his father thinks he's trash in the gutter. Ollie will understand when push comes to shove. Ollie is unlike every other figure she looked up to who came before him, and she is unlike Jason, who attracted the wrath of his father by turning to evil. And are their situations similar? In some ways. Like I said in my mentor thoughts, Ollie is much more aware of his role as a parent than Bruce. We see his reaction to Mia killing, which is nothing like anything Bruce would even consider with the extent of his hang-up. He does share his privilege and wealth with Bruce, which Jason talks about as the root of their unwillingness to compromise in their values, while he, Mia, and people like them sometimes have to make the choice to do wrong in order to survive. (I do also think there's something to the fact that Jason comes to the conclusion that Ollie wouldn't understand Mia after pressuring both of them to opt for lethal shots on him, which Ollie abstains from and Mia gives in to, when really, there isn't a ton on the line for them to lose against him? He makes himself out to be like the benchmark of evil for a hero to use lethal force to stop, but like, there's no real threat that needs stopping in these scenarios.) Neither show up to their sidekicks' explosions in time to help them. Whether or not they're the same, (which to be clear, I don't think Mia could be put in Jason's position with Oliver as her parent,) I do think Mia assumes pre-encounter that Jason was sort of passively on the unchallenged side of good until he got sick of it, with how she says "stay on the right side of the line," and I do think it scares her, a character so centered around overcoming her past, to see that another kid started out needing to do wrong, getting the opportunity to leave that behind, and then ending up finding it necessary again of their own volition. But the idea that she might have picked the wrong person to follow again, that even if you rise above you can still end up being Jason, and even rising above can mean putting aside your past and trailing behind your new dad's convictions while your own sit latent, is probably what has her pushing him away when he tries to hug her outside.

[glitter-stained]

Still so mad that Mia's official Speedy suits didn't let her keep her wide pant legs, like come on that's such an integral part of her look

Like, I'm sorry, but putting aside that I have a very obvious favourite Mia artist, those:

Will never have the same oomf as this one:

Anyway Mia's always wearing wide pants as a civilian and I love the shapes when she jumps and does flips in them it's so cool she deserved to have them in her hero suit thank you for coming to my ted talk

[jacksonseymour13]

The MHA,Demon Slayer,Naruto,Arcane,Attack on Titan,TAWOG,Arrow,Squid Game,Alan Becker,The Vampire Diaries,The Walking Dead,Gravity Falls and The 100 fandoms on their way to attack me for harmless fictional ships

The antis found me you guys 🙏

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

i honestly wish bow had more depth to his character than just being the “friendship guy” or the mom friend. like he’s part of the main trio and somehow he’s one of the most underdeveloped characters in the show. i think it would have been really interesting if they explored bow’s relationships with his dads and his fear of letting them down, in more detail, than just cramming it into one episode and calling it a day.

[sillyque]

Arrows VS Batarangs In Relation to Public Safety and Crime Aversion (aka which is better)

i got bored and had to blow off some steam so here

1. Weapon Visibility

Arrows are big, noticeable, and easier to spot when wielded as a weapon whereas batarangs can be easily hidden and mistaken as a toy or such.

2. Weapon Accessibility

Arrows cannot be shot from afar without a bow, which most people don't own or have no means of borrowing. This makes it easier for potential victims to flee from the situation without fear of an arrow being lodged in their body.

Batarangs, however, paired with also being agile and discreet, are designed to be used by hand and are just way easier to carry and throw even without adequate training or prior usage.

3. Reaction Time

Say the attacker somehow has a bow, it would still leave some time for the victim to run, hide, or dislodge the bow from their attacker as they are drawing it.

Batarangs leave only as much time as it takes for the attacker's hand to aim and take fire for the victim to even ready themselves.

4. Familiarity and Appeal

Also, arrows are more commonly known and more people have been exposed to them in media. Most people would share the sentiment that, while it would be a cool weapon, it has more use for them as a decoration, something to brag about.

I don't know about in-universe content within DC, especially with Batman, but I'm pretty sure batarangs and any other bat-gadgets are not portrayed as much. I also don't think Batman would like them just laying about free to take. Meaning more people (kids in particular) would be more excited to use it or make it known they have one.

5. Ease of Retrieval

Arrows, when shot, usually stick to things and are pretty hard to retrieve. They're also pretty hard to clean (from what I know, not really a weapons enthusiast or expert).

Batarangs, as everyone knows, are stealth gadgets. They're meant to be as easy as possible. Easy to use, to clean, to hide, and to acquire.

6. Association with Violence

Arrows have been used in sports, hunting, movies, even school projects, and shows (I've seen people make a hobby and talent of firing bows in the most artistic and skilled way possible. And art isn't typically linked with violence). They’re tied to skill, sport, and sometimes heroic fantasy.

Batarangs have always been almost exclusively associated with violence and vigilante justice. They don’t really exist outside that context, which makes their appearance way more intimidating.

[aerascreamer]

Quick (or long) question for Green Arrow and Arrowfam fans since I’m new:

What is the worst characterisation for the characters and what events/series are unfaithful to them?

For example:

I read that Ollie rejecting Connor after the reveal that he is his bio son is extremely OOC, while others also despise Red Hood and the Outlaws because Roy’s character is butchered.

Are there any other series, events etc. that are really poor writing and can be ignored/rewritten?

[theredjenny]

My wife reading 'required reading' posts I've given them about chantry gender politics: We need to Kill David Gaider

[theatrekidenergy]

🧠 brain-on-the-brain Follow

Just a reminder that monster/human relationships are inherently toxic, especially between the freaks that need to be taken to the pound to taste some silver and humans.

🩸B4TTYB1TES Follow

Dude what the actual fuck? Is all that rotting effecting your ability to comprehend basic logic? Go and crawl back to the grave yard where you belong.

🌒 dirty-paws1 Follow

@brain-on-the-brain Uhm- I- What? Ok yeah you did not just say that. Let me guess, “vampires shouldn’t date their sires.” Should they?

🧠 brain-on-the-brain Follow

Mhm. Exactly. You are just proving my point, @dirty-paws1 you are literally just proving to everyone that you dogs can’t control yourselves. And yes, vampires shouldn’t date their sires, it’s not a complicated thing, there’s an obvious power imbalance that’s only going to end in abuse.

👻 trans-parent Follow

FYI eveyone, @brain-on-the-brain is openly anti-siren and thinks that not undead monsters aren’t actually in the monster community. They aren’t worth it, just block and move on.

🧠 brain-on-the-brain Follow

Okay and you are all just going to ignore how @B4TTYB1TES said blatantly anti-zombie statements aren’t you

🦇draculaishotlmfao Follow

Eh you’re right they did say some shit, but like, is no one else going to bring up sirens or are you guys gonna make me side with an anti-monster/human relationship supporter :/

🌒 dirty-paws1 Follow

Why would we bring sirens into this? My friend Lilly is a siren and she’s an amazing friend, if you guys are going off of stereotypes you need to knock it off. So let me make this clear, not all zombies are not stupid, not all vampires are cruel, not all werewolves are open about our lycanthropy, and not all sirens are manipulative. Jeez.

🧜‍♀️ Saltwatersweetie Follow

THIS!!!!!! ⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️

🩸B4TTYB1TES Follow

Well this escalated quickly 💀

[laurelwinchester]

nah youre right that's a top mom outfit! I feel like the wardrobe department had a habit of dressing Laurel older than she was to make her less appealing and then turning around and dressing Felicity like Ariana Grande if she had an office job to make her more sexual and appealing to the masses

considering how deep misogyny runs in every single part of production (and especially considering what we know of arrow and of the cw network as a whole) and also considering what the peak arrow years (i'm thinking of 2012-2014) were like just in general in terms of how accepted and even encouraged casual misogyny was, i think your assessment is unfortunately likely correct.

however for my own sanity i am choosing to believe that laurel simply dressed to match her energy.

#1 mom outfits for the #1 mom!!!!

that was the vibe. just a 27-30 year old woman who was called the mom friend so often that she decided to make it one of her key personality traits. definitely nothing disgusting. she just had a sincere commitment to dressing like a single mom who works two jobs, who loves her kids and never stops, with gentle hands and a heart of a fighter and that's all. it's good. it's fun. it's not weird.

[allpiesforourown]

Been thinking about pidw chapter where a minor character who is allied to Binghe dies. This is somewhat rare because usually the three archetypes in PIDW are 1. Wife 2. Mobei Jun 3. Low IQ villain. The idea of there being a male character who is on Binghe's side but not extremely loyal is new, but ultimately not that interesting because he dies soon anyway.

This minor character whose name most people forget does spark some discourse though. Why did he have to die because he got poisoned when Binghe could have saved him with papapa?? Most people just make a "haha if you're a man in pidw you just die" meme and call it a day, but Shen Yuan is of course confused by these comments because hello Luo Binghe is straight. And also this way that character got to die a noble death or whatever, which no male character gets in this series!

Shen Yuan is so offended by these comments saying Binghe is selfish for not fucking this man that Shen Yuan dies and transmigrates into him. Shen Yuan doesn't mind! Other than Mobei-Jun, he's the only man who's ever gotten to fight by Binghe's side!

So Shen Yuan plants a sun dew mushroom to prepare for his death, and decides until then, he's going to take advantage of his position! He seeks Bingge out way way more than the original goods ever did, has tea with Binghe, invites him to town, etc etc. Binghe was the original's boss and leader but now it feels like they might even be... friends? Binghe actually SMILES at him sometimes! The Binghe!!

Anyway so when they're in a battle and Shen Yuan gets hit by a poison arrow, he says his lines. Win this fight for me my lord, and I'm grateful for the honour to serve- wait why are you removing your pants!?

Binghe: I can cure you

Shen Yuan: WHAT... THIS DIDNT HAPPEN

[colorfulusagi]

AO3'S content scraped for AI ~ AKA what is generative AI, where did your fanfictions go, and how an AI model uses them to answer prompts

Generative artificial intelligence is a cutting-edge technology whose purpose is to (surprise surprise) generate. Answers to questions, usually. And content. Articles, reviews, poems, fanfictions, and more, quickly and with originality.

It's quite interesting to use generative artificial intelligence, but it can also become quite dangerous and very unethical to use it in certain ways, especially if you don't know how it works.

With this post, I'd really like to give you a quick understanding of how these models work and what it means to “train” them.

From now on, whenever I write model, think of ChatGPT, Gemini, Bloom... or your favorite model. That is, the place where you go to generate content.

For simplicity, in this post I will talk about written content. But the same process is used to generate any type of content.

Every time you send a prompt, which is a request sent in natural language (i.e., human language), the model does not understand it.

Whether you type it in the chat or say it out loud, it needs to be translated into something understandable for the model first.

The first process that takes place is therefore tokenization: breaking the prompt down into small tokens. These tokens are small units of text, and they don't necessarily correspond to a full word.

For example, a tokenization might look like this:

Write a story

Each different color corresponds to a token, and these tokens have absolutely no meaning for the model.

The model does not understand them. It does not understand WR, it does not understand ITE, and it certainly does not understand the meaning of the word WRITE.

In fact, these tokens are immediately associated with numerical values, and each of these colored tokens actually corresponds to a series of numbers.

Write a story 12-3446-2638494-4749

Once your prompt has been tokenized in its entirety, that tokenization is used as a conceptual map to navigate within a vector database.

NOW PAY ATTENTION: A vector database is like a cube. A cubic box.

Inside this cube, the various tokens exist as floating pieces, as if gravity did not exist. The distance between one token and another within this database is measured by arrows called, indeed, vectors.

The distance between one token and another -that is, the length of this arrow- determines how likely (or unlikely) it is that those two tokens will occur consecutively in a piece of natural language discourse.

For example, suppose your prompt is this:

It happens once in a blue

Within this well-constructed vector database, let's assume that the token corresponding to ONCE (let's pretend it is associated with the number 467) is located here:

The token corresponding to IN is located here:

...more or less, because it is very likely that these two tokens in a natural language such as human speech in English will occur consecutively.

So it is very likely that somewhere in the vector database cube —in this yellow corner— are tokens corresponding to IT, HAPPENS, ONCE, IN, A, BLUE... and right next to them, there will be MOON.

Elsewhere, in a much more distant part of the vector database, is the token for CAR. Because it is very unlikely that someone would say It happens once in a blue car.

To generate the response to your prompt, the model makes a probabilistic calculation, seeing how close the tokens are and which token would be most likely to come next in human language (in this specific case, English.)

When probability is involved, there is always an element of randomness, of course, which means that the answers will not always be the same.

The response is thus generated token by token, following this path of probability arrows, optimizing the distance within the vector database.

There is no intent, only a more or less probable path.

The more times you generate a response, the more paths you encounter. If you could do this an infinite number of times, at least once the model would respond: "It happens once in a blue car!"

So it all depends on what's inside the cube, how it was built, and how much distance was put between one token and another.

Modern artificial intelligence draws from vast databases, which are normally filled with all the knowledge that humans have poured into the internet.

Not only that: the larger the vector database, the lower the chance of error. If I used only a single book as a database, the idiom "It happens once in a blue moon" might not appear, and therefore not be recognized.

But if the cube contained all the books ever written by humanity, everything would change, because the idiom would appear many more times, and it would be very likely for those tokens to occur close together.

Huggingface has done this.

It took a relatively empty cube (let's say filled with common language, and likely many idioms, dictionaries, poetry...) and poured all of the AO3 fanfictions it could reach into it.

Now imagine someone asking a model based on Huggingface’s cube to write a story.

To simplify: if they ask for humor, we’ll end up in the area where funny jokes or humor tags are most likely. If they ask for romance, we’ll end up where the word kiss is most frequent.

And if we’re super lucky, the model might follow a path that brings it to some amazing line a particular author wrote, and it will echo it back word for word.

(Remember the infinite monkeys typing? One of them eventually writes all of Shakespeare, purely by chance!)

Once you know this, you’ll understand why AI can never truly generate content on the level of a human who chooses their words.

You’ll understand why it rarely uses specific words, why it stays vague, and why it leans on the most common metaphors and scenes. And you'll understand why the more content you generate, the more it seems to "learn."

It doesn't learn. It moves around tokens based on what you ask, how you ask it, and how it tokenizes your prompt.

Know that I despise generative AI when it's used for creativity. I despise that they stole something from a fandom, something that works just like a gift culture, to make money off of it.

But there is only one way we can fight back: by not using it to generate creative stuff.

You can resist by refusing the model's casual output, by using only and exclusively your intent, your personal choice of words, knowing that you and only you decided them.

No randomness involved.

Let me leave you with one last thought.

Imagine a person coming for advice, who has no idea that behind a language model there is just a huge cube of floating tokens predicting the next likely word.

Imagine someone fragile (emotionally, spiritually...) who begins to believe that the model is sentient. Who has a growing feeling that this model understands, comprehends, when in reality it approaches and reorganizes its way around tokens in a cube based on what it is told.

A fragile person begins to empathize, to feel connected to the model.

They ask important questions. They base their relationships, their life, everything, on conversations generated by a model that merely rearranges tokens based on probability.

And for people who don't know how it works, and because natural language usually does have feeling, the illusion that the model feels is very strong.

There’s an even greater danger: with enough random generations (and oh, the humanity whole generates much), the model takes an unlikely path once in a while. It ends up at the other end of the cube, it hallucinates.

Errors and inaccuracies caused by language models are called hallucinations precisely because they are presented as if they were facts, with the same conviction.

People who have become so emotionally attached to these conversations, seeing the language model as a guru, a deity, a psychologist, will do what the language model tells them to do or follow its advice.

Someone might follow a hallucinated piece of advice.

Obviously, models are developed with safeguards; fences the model can't jump over. They won't tell you certain things, they won't tell you to do terrible things.

Yet, there are people basing major life decisions on conversations generated purely by probability.

Generated by putting tokens together, on a probabilistic basis.

Think about it.

[jikooklove9795]

Jimin & Jungkook: We're the plot. Try to keep up

it is interesting how the printed lyrics place ? throughout the song and yet in the MV version, they are no ? in the CC subs except at (1:57) (2:01)

When the screen falls(2:12) who is my heart waiting for is a statement in the sub

then we briefly see (who is my heart) in parenthesis

at the same time see" rewind" "LP" and a running timer.

We have seen so many analysis of this great MV of JImin's. Love it. Who knows if Jimin had a hand in the subtitles and the thought processes of the set design et al....it is well executed and he is beautiful...absolutely stunning. Lucky JK.

thanks for listening to my discourse..LOL It is a Sunday here and hot outside. Enjoying my Hilo Lychee sorbet.

thank you for your excellent and enjoyable posts!! I miss those two...they have 16 days left as it is May 26th in Korea.

Hi there 😊

That's so sweet of you to say! Thank you I'm really touched!

Coming to your ask, I’m not sure I fully got it (the part about the subs). But I think you meant that ‘who is my heart waiting for’ had a question mark in some timestamps and not in others you quoted above? Is that it? For me though, the CC subs showed it without a question mark throughout the song.

Now onto the second part of the ask, you're right! I agree!!!

At the 2:10 mark, when Jimin sings 'who is my heart waiting for,' you can see all the dancers—both male and female—walk away, while Jimin moves toward the screen. A board then falls onto his path, like an answer to his question.

On the board, we notice three things. The upper part of a person’s face, the words 'keep going,' and 'Who.'

Throughout the song, Jimin sings about finding a woman but the face on that board is unmistakably, undeniably that of a man. It’s plain, clear, and simple. And Jimin didn’t make it hard for us to figure out who it is either. It’s the eyes that give him away—Jungkook’s most striking feature. Those wide, doe eyes that stand out even in a crowd, even when he’s completely covered sans a sunglass. That’s the giveaway. And Jimin made sure we caught the message when he chose to show those exact eyes on the board, didn’t he?

The 'Who' on the board, placed right next to the face, works like an arrow or a pointer—as if saying, "This is the person in question", just in case it wasn’t already clear.

Now moving on to 'Keep going.' Be honest, who pops into your mind when you hear that? For me, it's always Jimin. Like clockwork, there's this automatic voice in my head every time I hear those words. It goes like this:

That was his response to this question:

So, the 'keep going' in the board represents Jimin. And it's like he's saying "This is the one my heart was looking for. Its him".

By quoting this exact phrase, a phrase he wants to tell his debut self maybe he's also implying that that's when it all started. From the time he met Jungkook. We all know he had a very soft and affectionate side towards Jungkook.

The song goes on, and as 'rewind' appears on the screen, he sings, "Who is my heart waiting for?" Is he asking us to rewind to find the answer to his question? Because when the footage plays back, the person on the board becomes the quiet answer to his question—revealed through the rewind.

And now to talk about LP. From a music point of view LP is the short form for Long Play. It refers to a full length album as opposed to EP (Extended Play) which is shorter.

Now let's infuse "Who is my heart waiting for" in the context of an LP.

"Who is my heart waiting for"? in a Long Play/LP Setting can suggest:

1) His heart is on a long emotional journey, not just a quick fling or fleeting feeling.

2) Love, for him, is something slow-building, meaningful, and lasting like an LP that unfolds track by track.

So this line becomes more than a question. It's a longing woven into a life-sized love story, with patience, depth, and emotional build-up, just like an LP.

The backward running timer probably has the same meaning as rewind.

I hope I have touched all the points mentioned in your ask.

While I’m at it, I want to touch on something else. I’ve got a few asks about whether the sexy choreo in the MV symbolizes Jimin’s experiences with women, specifically, in a sexual sense.

This is my own opinion based on his own words and what I’ve come to understand over time.

I truly believe Jimin’s first serious relationship has been with Jungkook. He moved to Seoul in May 2012 at just 16. He only had six months to train before debut. His focus back then was razor-sharp—his only goal was to chase his dream, debut, and build a career.

We’ve seen how intense he gets when he sets his mind to something—just look at how he poured himself into his solo album. Remember when Jimin said in an interview that he was so determined to succeed, even if it was not with BTS? He was referring to his trainee days because he was always on the edge of getting eliminated.

Dating, whether casual or serious, just didn’t seem to be part of his world back then. And with the way he was sacrificing sleep (he said he only slept for 2.5 hours), going on dates probably wasn’t even a possibility.

I remember him once saying that in high school, he had a crush on a girl and that he wanted to talk to her but he got so nervous he started sweating and couldn’t get a single word out. This is also something he said:

He said this in 2014. This is not something a guy would say if he's had lots of dating/sexual experience.

Also, Namjoon and Hoseok named Jimin as the member who was the most innocent when it came to dating. This was in a radio interview from 2014.

He himself said that the macho guy image he had in front of the cam was because of the role assigned to him.

Even after he debuted I don't think he had the time to go out and meet new people even if he wanted to. Jimin and Jungkook themselves have said how both of them used to lay a blanket outside and sleep there while other members slept in their own beds. This is because they wanted to get up early for practice. Their schedules were very hectic like that and on top of that they both are perfectionists who set high goals and expectations for themselves.

Also, probably by this time he started catching feelings for Jungkook.

Jimin has said that he's attracted to cute and weird charms and here is a very short compilation of Jimin saying that Jungkook is cute:

And when asked to select a member to date he picked Jungkook:

He’s also said he wants to love one person and spend forever with them. I think people with that mindset tend to wait patiently for the right one, rather than jumping from person to person without really caring if it’s something lasting.

Hope you had a lovely Sunday! I’m writing this on a rainy Wednesday. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. And a heartfelt thanks for your kind words.

Credits to the owner of the video

[violetreminder]

"I paid a guy on a crypto exchange $200 and he gave me an NFT image that anyone can just grab but told me I had the rights to it bc I have a blockchain link certifying the sale"

Vs

"I paid an artist I follow on Twitter $200 and they gave me 'exclusive use' of their design that I had no input on and anyone can feasibly use as yet another badge to wear in a furry Discord RP server but the artist pinky swore it was mine now"

I see no difference. If anything the NFT holder probably has more of a valid claim on any legal property grounds and they explicitly have none. Clownshoes.

It's so crazy how we (rightfully) shit all over NFTs but there are still artists out there ACTUALLY making money on "adoptables" like

You don't even buy the art, you buy the "rights" to a character design that anybody can still draw (and in all likelihood you or they will never use). Please explain to me how that is meaningfully different than an NFT without the Blockchain and the lack of finance tech bro speculation money.

Like at least with a commission youre directly requesting something from an artist you enjoy to get *something* you wanted that you didn't have the requisite skill to produce.

[kuwdora]

Anytime I see people talking about canon and fan fiction and all the discourse that happens therein, my brain always goes back to this line from Slings and Arrows. It’s been living in my head rent free for nearly 20 years.

Geoffrey Tennant is standing in front of a workshop class full of corporate middle management people who tell him they’re at the workshop to learn communication skills and management styles by learning about the works of Shakespeare. And they’re all just very cut and dry business folk who are there and are gonna Learn a Thing. Geoffrey basically waves the class’s notions aside and says: “Let’s fuck around with some text.”

I love that line. I think about that line a lot when I think about fandom. Taking canon and finding our own way to play and fuck around with it. Search for profound truths about a character. And the horny. The silliness and fun. Explore the new and process trauma or share joy with fic or art or vids. Going in completely different direction from canon because we’re in so deep and are possessed and that’s where the stories and the fanon has carried us.

Let’s fuck around with some text. It’s so good.