#i could rant... don't get me started....

[charmagick]

spiritual "tok" & or witch "tok" make me want to scream.

[emloafs]

we may watch the same show but i watch it gayer

[pleaseinsertwittyurl]

There are always 2 sides.

The discourse around Louis and Lestat being a victim and abuser and nothing more drives me insane.

Something i don't think enough people remember is that the very same reason the fight began in 1×05 (lestat grabbing claudia by the throat when she tries to "take louis away") we see Louis himself do to her in 1×07 when she tries to get Louis to burn Lestat.

They BOTH would harm her rather than live in a world without the other. They are both guilty of abusing her and each other.

There is an implication that a good deal of time passed between Louis and Lestat meeting and the church. Louis expresses that he shares himself with Lestat in a way he only had with Paul. I would assume that goes both ways, to a degree. We know Louis knows at least enough about Nicki to discourage Claudia poking that wound. He also clearly knows that the threat of leaving is his most powerful weapon against Lestat.

Mental abuse is abuse. And Louis abused Lestat mentally for years. Shaming him, ridiculing him, shutting him out, manipulating him into making Claudia (a traumatic moment for him, whether Louis understands the depths of it or not) by promising to give him what he's being denying him, promising to never put him through what he fears the most.

Louis admits to purposely making Lestat suffer. He admits he was warned that Claudia would suffer and he wanted her anyway because he needed to feel redeemed. He is not innocent. He is not a trapped, weak victim. He made choices to hurt both Lestat and Claudia time and time again.

Does this justify Lestat's actions in 1×05? Obviously not. But we now know Louis was not willing to stop the fight. He taunted Lestat the same way he taunted the Alderman. He was unleashing years of frustrations just as Lestat was. His priority was not to protect Claudia, it was to hurt Lestat, consequences be damned.

I hate the drop scene as much as the next person and Lestat has admitted he will never earn forgiveness for what he did. But if you view Louis as some squeaky clean victim who was manipulated, trapped, and abused by Lestat you are missing so much of what this show is conveying.

We will always tend to paint ourselves as the hero of our own story. It is hard to accept your faults or that you hurt people you love. It is much easier to shift that blame on to someone else, to frame them as the villian. But life is not usually that black and white. Claudia had harsh words for them both in her diary, even before they got to Europe, for a reason. They both made hurtful mistakes with her, both treated her like a pawn in their relationship instead of a person, both harmed her, took away her choice, never prioritized her.

That is the great tragedy. That she never had a choice and was not allowed to be her own person. And in the end, they both are responsible for her misery and her death. That's what makes the reunion scene so important. They have been grieving her and carrying that guilt alone, all the while longing for the comfort of the other for 70+ years. Louis has found clarity in his memories, he has accepted his role in their suffering, he has seen Lestat's perspective more fully. Lestat is broken, totally consumed with that guilt and grief. Both know that although they cannot change what they've done, they can forgive the other, even if they can't forgive themselves. They can love each other despite everything they've done to one another because they cannot stop loving each other. But now they can try to rebuild that love from the rubble.

[neilabramjostcns]

i still think that percy should have remembered sally instead of annabeth in son of neptune. don't get me wrong, I like percabeth too and i understand that they had a deep relationship or whatever.

but come on, sally literally put up with gabe for percy, you know the kind of courage that would have required? especially after what she went through previously? she was always the one constant in his life and she should have been acknowledged (grover too should have had a larger role in hoo but that's a whole seperate rant)

look I'm not saying that annabeth isn't important, she is a very big part of percy's life... but sally should have been remembered

[vaguely-concerned]

powerful mental image of lucanis expounding passionately about any given one of his limited but extremely deep areas of interest (the wyvern/knives/coffee/cooking/murder continuum of lucanis dellamorte special interests if you will) while rye lounges around and Beholds him with palpable twink boutta pounce energy

[essektheylyss]

Okay I'm not normally one to comment publicly on ship portmanteaus but we seem nowhere near a consensus and I've been reading basically nothing but taxonomic theory with a side of organizational management for like seven weeks straight so: why is verleth not the default option. It cannot be because it's too close to vexleth when everyone's been using it next to vaxleth for years. Obviously we could go to keyrin, but a) every other Keyleth ship name is [other person]leth, and b) it's going to be annoying as hell with autocorrect for being one letter off of a real word.

But most critical, we cannot use "thelyss" as Verin's part of the portmanteau, on account of the fact that Verin has been on screen for like three minutes, and his older brother, with whom he does still share a second name, has been on screen for like fifteen hours. I know Essek's ship names usually use his title but Verin ALSO is not the most obvious Task Hand (rip Adeen Tasithar, you probably would've loved being a shady bitch in Vasselheim but honestly, I don't actually know well enough to say).

Think of new fans trying to figure out who the fuck is in this ship. Think of the tag wranglers. Think of me, local taxonomy nerd who will one day just lose it and start yelling on the dash about authority controls and the absolute inadequacy of disambiguation by committee.*

[solanumflare]

I am 5 seconds from writing an essay on why till was never actually in love with mizi and he in fact just idolizes her but wasn't able to really tell the difference between those things because every show of love he grew up seeing (mizi and sua, and how ivan acted towards till) was somewhere between romantic feelings and worship so obviously he'd take one look at his own feelings of "I like mizi for all these reasons and think she's great and I want to be near her" and think yes this is romantic attraction. of course. naturally

yeah this is me projecting onto till but also it makes SENSE. like this fucker grew up around mizi literally calling sua her god. why do we think he's going to understand the difference between idolization and worship and actually being in love with someone. he grew up with ivan chasing him and only having eyes for him. why do we think he's going to understand the difference between wanting to be noticed and actually being in love with someone. mizi experiences her love for sua as sua being her god, the center of her life, absolutely everything, someone who owns her heart and is her whole world. and till probably hears her say this. and he decides that because his life centers on mizi (and wanting validation from her), he must be in love too

the way he is about mizi reminds me soooo much of myself when i was younger. I'd pick a person to latch onto and ignore everyone else and want them to look at me and talk to me and treat them saying my name as the best moment of my life and think that was love (it was actually hyperfixating on people and also I don't have romantic attraction)

its also the. the fuckin. the error no better options line in unknown. till needs someone to latch onto, someone to chase, someone to worship. everything sucks. everything absolutely sucks in his life. he needs someone to cling to and mizi is the person his eyes land on

this is getting into a realm where its going further and further from anything that canon has even ever implied but I don't care. full headcanon mode: aromantic till

grabs you by the shoulders please listen to what I am saying. I promise you it makes sense. I promise I'm not insane. till is some flavor of aromantic and he just has decided to call whatever he feels about mizi love because of a series of misinterpretations when really he just thinks she is pretty and cool and wants to be noticed by her. oblivious little fucker. this guy is the butterfly meme but the guy is till and the butterfly is labeled "thinking mizi is really cool and wanting her to notice me" and the caption says "is this romantic attraction?"

like no it's not. lmao

you have to imagine me standing in front of the tedtalk sign as I'm saying all of this by the way

[kudzucraft]

i’ve figured it out. I’ve pegged down my thoughts on TAY and the DS/3D remake of FFIV. They're my prequel trilogy. My Lucas Final Cut.

(yes even though it TAY's events come after FFIV. bear with me. i am going to be Long Posting)

TAY is not bad. It has a lot of genuinely Cool Stuff in it. Kain hanging out with Rosa and Cecil’s kid?? Golbez going on adventures with Rydia, Edge, and Luca? Fighting God and his army of clones in a tricked-out spaceship? That's fun. It's like Count Dooku or Mustafar or whatever. There's also plenty of stuff that rubs me the wrong way--the chronology is weird (why has nobody aged in the last 15 years), the plot drags, the gameplay is meh, and did we really need another alien race showing up in a That's No Moon--but it's fine. It also feels more like an accessory to canon than "true" canon, so you can take it or leave it.

The 3d remakes, however. My fucking. nemesis. i am ahab and those janky little models taunt me with their polygonal shambling. I need a hill to die on and this is my hill. I am launching harpoons with my mind.

There's so much to genuinely like, even love. And I recognize for a lot of people the 3d remakes, the DS remake especially, was their intro to the series. The DS version was accessible, introduced great QOL features, upgraded the mechanics, and (perhaps most importantly) debuted a much-needed new translation that is both beautiful and accurate to the original language. (The first line of the Mysidian prophecy reading "Born from womb of dragon's maw" vs. "Born from a dragon" makes a big difference!) I love the character's thought bubbles and the window into their minds it gives you--like, Kain on the moon feeling Zemus's presence? Holy fuck. 'Tis peak.

but ON THE OTHER HAND. the additions and changes. "Greedo shot first"-ass adjustments. to me. I built my impression of FFIV around the SNES and GBA versions, and if the DS remake were just a graphical and translation update, that would be fine. But it's not.

It adds...a lot. And it changes a lot. Takashi Tokita has discussed this in interviews about the DS remake. Apparently they cut down the original script by as much as 3/4 for the original version of FFIV because of space limits, and the DS remake allowed them, 14 years later, to "add in" some of the stuff that they couldn't have originally. (Takashi Tokita also says that he thinks paring down improved the script :P You can find his interview here.) Much like Lucas later stitching in state-of-the-art effects, it let the creators refresh their work with new ideas.

But in this case I think a lot of it was...artless. A few lines here and there that expand character motivations aren't bad, but there's quite a lot of them in the DS remake, ranging from a few lines to full cutscenes. The first example I can think of is when Cecil is talking to Kain after meeting with the king: the conversation pauses, and we get a flashback to a duel between them on the training grounds.

But I feel like in many places the more simplistic presentation benefited the story, because when you start to explain everything in detail the plot gets shakier. Sort of like a "midichlorians" moment. And a lot of the additional scenes and elements I quite like, or at least like the gist of, but it's kinda. pick and choose. I sure don't know how to feel about the fact that KluYa apparently introduced humans to All Magic, including summoning magic, and also invented airships, and also the Devil's Road. (EDIT i'm bobo the fool. he always was invented airships and the Devil's Road. DS ver. implies he taught the Mysidians magic but says nothing about summoning magic, I can't for the life of me find where I got that impression, it's not in the game scripts.)

Also. the chained flashbacks to Golbez's past, followed by the flashbacks to Cecil's past. The way the story freezes to show us all this is kind of obnoxious. We are still In The Giant Of Babil. Do we need to be shown all of this in such excruciating detail? Could you show-not-tell it, maybe? These retrospectives could have been spread out, or at least implied through a few extra lines between Golbez, Cecil, and FuSoYa. It's not that they're bad on their own, not really--it's just that they feel out of place, and the details are...a little shaky. I am sitting on the Giant of Babil face-to-face with an 8 foot tall Dark Knight, forced to confront the idea that a 10-year-old carried a newborn infant through the devil's road and threw him into the woods, and somehow that baby got found by not just anybody but the King Of Baron, and just by looking at the child the king correctly identified his mother (whom we had not seen in years). And just as I'm getting a little into Flashback Zone, wondering "damn, wonder what's going on with Mr. Corpsefly Born From A Dragon" and how Zemus planned to make use of a 10 year old, it's like OKAY we don't got time for dat. Kain's back. Five lines of dialogue--wait, no, there's more flash backs.

It is still a good game. It makes a lot of genuine improvements on the original. But the cuts and edits and add-ins, even if they are according to the creator's original vision, feel messy! And this is my hill. Just like Star Wars fans getting up in arms about Han Shot First or CG add-ins or the Hayden Christensen force ghost scene, it's the weird additions and changes from the original--even if they fit the story and were intended by the author and smooth out the transition to the new canon--I don't like it. Because I am a curmudgeon and a stick in the mud.

And yes this comparison WAS inspired by Golbez sort of Force Ghost phasing into his younger self when he leaves at the end of the game. at least unlike hayden christensen we actually know who that sassy child is supposed to be at this point

[saline-coelacanth]

I will forever be so upset that the Ice Chapter didn't give us a Kai VS Ice Emperor fight like come OOOON!

And I'm not even coming at this from an oppo angle. Like yeah, I love oppo, everyone knows that, but it just feels like such a missed opportunity to have Kai have to fight Zane and have him be the one to get him to snap out of it. But no, it has to be Lloyd because he's Lloyd.

And another thing that makes me so upset regarding the missed potential here is the fact that in the Fire Chapter, the big bad villain is Aspheera. And at the end of the Fire Chapter, Zane is the one who defeats her, you know, the master of ice. So then in the Ice Chapter, it would make sense that the one to defeat the big bad would be Kai since he's the master of fire and it would make for good parallels or whatever. But no we don't get that.

At the very least we get that awesome, badass scene where Kai defeats Boreal and saves the others. That scene was amazing, I just with we got a little more from Kai, you know?

[angelsdean]

don't know how people multi-fandom. dipped my toe into another one and immediately backed out bc everyone there was insufferable.

[citricacidprince]

“I could never choose a favorite between all the Gravity Falls AUs, I love them all equally!”

[Later]

“I do not care for Reverse Falls.”

[raett97]

the book was a lot better, wasn’t it? I feel like the movie got a lot of the spirit, and was well done, but the book was definitely better.

it absolutely was better, yeah.

i agree that the movie got the spirit, but the book just intensifies everything. the struggle, the humour, the desperation but also the brilliance of everyone and everything.

like. take the scene where the hab depressurised and Watney was cannon-balled out with the airlock. in the movie his suit breached with a crack in his faceshield, which was gut clenching but ultimately easily fixed with some duct tape. in the book his faceshield was shattered and the airlock breached. and it took him like four tries to find and repair the breach, at the end of which he was still IN the airlock, could not EXIT the airlock without dying bc his suit was fucked, but no longer going to suffocate. there was then another whole problem solving scene of getting out of the airlock.

i think it's just. the ingenuity in the book that doesn't come through as well in the movie. like, you find out WHAT went wrong, HOW it went wrong, WHY it went wrong, the CONSEQUENCES of that and THEN what all has to be done to fix it. it looks all cool and flashy on the big screen but it's so much harder to ask and answer those questions for the audience.

That is a part of what makes Weir's choice to write the book as an epistolary so god damn brilliant, which was replicated to a degree in the movie, but that's a whole 'nother rant and this is getting long...

[puppycheesecake]

Hi puppy- have you seen nosferatu? Would you ever wanna make count orlock?👉🏽👈🏽

Oh I saw it alright.

I've made Dracula before (both Bela Lugosi's version and a more book-accurate version), but yeah I'm definitely gonna make Orlok. A+ Dracula design. Ecstatic to see the mustache make a (rightful) return. Absolutely gonna make him a Sim.

[rhaenin-time]

No, House Targaryen is not inherently "doomed" by the very same flaws (and themes) that doomed the civilization that they left.

No, they're not fated to succumb to the Doom that they survived specifically because of the foresight that set them apart from everyone else who perished. Not only would it be terrible, simplistic writing, it would also endorse a terrible, simplistic worldview.

People choosing to make House Targaryen a representation of and thematic successor to not just the civilization that they differentiated themselves from, but the power structure that they chose to leave, literally divested from, and actively worked to prevent from rising again in another form... really rubs me the wrong way.

Why isn't this projection and generalization done for any of the families that come from the cultures that are not coded as other? Why is it only the family that's been separated from their cultural context? Why do the other families each get to be unique, complex manifestations not just of different aspects of their cultures, but of their own specific histories?

Why is the foreign degenerate family both a representation of everything wrong with the culture they come from, and a scapegoat for everything wrong with the system they assimilated into? How is it they represent everything bad about what they left behind, and also everything bad about the land they came to? Even though all those flaws are not only shared by the system as a whole, but are flaws that predate their arrival, that they were punished for resisting, and that they are demonstrated to be incompatible with. Why is it always both?

It just rings so familiar to the way so many people view the other in real life. Because the Targaryens are overtly, and intentionally written as the other. It's the reason so many people identify with them, and it's the very same reason that other people vilify them. They're not just the in-universe other to the 'default' culture established in the text, but they're also given characteristics that we, the reader and audience, can recognize as other and even sometimes anathema to Western Christian culture.

Perhaps the old tales were true, and Dragonstone was built with the stones of hell

A Storm of Swords, Chapter 25, Davos III

I want you to ask yourself: Why is the idea of "fire and brimstone" evil?

To paraphrase the annoying people that love to cite Ramsay when they feel like it: If you look at a morally complex family surrounded by other morally complex families in a morally complex world in a story that's famed for seeking to challenge your underlying assumptions, and think that their association with fire and brimstone is meant to signify their singular satanic evilness, rather than say... challenge that very Eurocentric assumption, you haven't been paying attention.

This vilification mindset where the Targaryens are the singular evil of Westeros is so common to people who seem to want to consume ASoIaF without engaging with the criticisms of the Eurocentric worldview of history at the heart of it. And they end up using the convenient “others” to project all the wrongs of that world onto so they don't need to examine it any deeper.

This is the part where I so often get crucified!

This is the take that so often gets me crucified for "trivializing real world bigotry" in an attempt to "moralize interpretations of fiction" by an onslaught of people with troubling ideologies who then ironically steer the onslaught to moralizing their interpretations of fiction in a way that seeks to either mask or justify their troubling ideologies.

The worldbuilding of ASoIaF is an almost unparalleled projection of the Eurocentric worldview. That's what makes the world feel so rich. That's why GRRM and even the readers and audience are able to craft so many details that feel intuitive. But that also means that how you choose to interpret that world is often driven by underlying biases and ideologies that relate to that worldview — especially if you're not willing to challenge them the way George RR Martin does and encourages you to do.

It means that certain potential biases and ideologies people might balk at outwardly expressing in the real world are recontextualized in a way that feels more comfortable to indulge in.

There are countless examples from countless parts of the narrative. Honestly, you could fill books on the matter. But the one I'll point to right now is how the vilification I pointed out earlier is so emblematic of how the Eurocentric worldview often seeks to project their own flaws onto the other or choose scapegoats for systemic issues.

It comes from the same place with how someone pointed out that the baffling bastardphobia that would have medieval peasants giving the side eye is so often people jumping at the chance to “cosplay” as bigots who base their arguments in misogyny and bio-essentialism. Because it's an acceptable channel to indulge in that mindset in a way that they'd often otherwise question, or at least hold back from expressing out of caution.

And there I go again. "Moralizing fandom" for pointing out that fandom is so often used as a 'safe space' to build communities that share and spread troubling ideologies that you're not allowed to criticize because those ideologies have been 'appropriately' decontextualized from their real-world parallels, even though those parallels are still very much there.

But the problem is that it's impossible to simply 'channel' bigotry and leave it in an 'acceptable' space, because bigotry doesn't work like that. It's not a static object you can carry around in your pocket to play with when you think it's safe to do so. It's a blight. A living poison that feeds and grows and spreads. And if you give it a 'safe space' and continue to feed it with 'acceptable' fuel, it will always find its way out.

[soggy-fishsticks]

guys ive been drawing so much lately I've been starting to actually hate it 🙁

[emloafs]

so when are we gonna talk about how the costuming for the teens in cobra kai is actually heinous