#kind of baiting at that point

[condenhorn]

i hate when people don’t outright say that the fic is fem reader and then i have to find out the hard way while reading it 🥲

[secretagentspydetectiveninja]

I keep thinking about how Maki says she joined the assassin cult to protect her childhood friend from being the one to go through it instead, but like... what if they were just manipulating her? Pretending to target the friend and hoping Maki would take the bait, with her being their real target all along? Because if the friend really was as kindhearted and emotional as Maki describes, those aren't good traits for an assassin, regardless of how strong you are, and surely the scouts would know that. They're experts, they'd be able to tell when someone doesn't have the emotional aptitude for a life of killing, never mind if they're athletic.

Also, Maki says that during the training they tried to break her, but her memories of her friend kept her going. What if that was the point? The assassin training was torturous and horrific, and the kids are about 10 or 11 when being put through that -- they would break if they didn't have some reason to hold on. Assassins are an expensive investment, and I doubt the cult would want their kids dying before making it out of training and carrying out some hits. Maki sees it as herself managing to resist somewhat, like a small "win", but perhaps the cult were banking on that, they were using her love for her friend against her to inspire her to survive the training and become a better assassin. Maybe they realised that if there was a way to give these mangled, messed up kids a sliver of positive reinforcement, the tiniest flickers of motivation, but in a way that the cult could fully control, then they'd end up with more resilient assassins. And with Maki this method was a roaring success.

And then what if they were the ones who had the friend killed off once she'd outlived her usefulness, and they needed Maki not to have any distractions from her work now that training was over... And they made it look like an accident, with the friend heroically saving a child, so that Maki would retain those good memories and use it to keep herself going, as opposed to breaking down and giving up now that her entire reason for doing all this was gone. She says it herself: "the memories of her I keep inside me have kept me alive till now." So maybe they were manipulating her and using her all along, letting her believe it, letting her keep this tiny sense of self in order to make sure their star assassin stayed alive and didn't give up entirely... I mean, we already know they're manipulating her by using her care for the orphanage, right? The better she does, the more funding the orphanage gets. They're already using that against her. It is a stretch to believe they'd use the person she loves most in the world against her too?

If that was the case, the worst part is that it happens all over again. She saw her protection of her friend as a personal victory, none the wiser to the fact that it's exactly what the cult wanted... and then here she is in the killing game, seeing her character development as another personal victory... only for that to be exactly what Team Danganronpa wanted, too. She could finally stop hating herself, start accepting that she too deserves happiness, that she can have friends again if she wants, only for none of it to supposedly be real. It's just "good TV". And the entire assassin backstory might not even be real, either. Maybe I'm just falling into the same trap by finding it so interesting and obsessing over it when it was all fake anyway. We'll never really know. Lies within lies, manipulation within manipulation...

But regardless, it DID keep her alive until now. And she does survive in the end. At least that much is real, so does it matter if the rest of it wasn't? Why do I stay up at night thinking about this??

[basket-of-radiants]

Well, my public library hold on Wind and Truth just came through, I suppose we're doing this.

[luvstruckmutt]

gwrting my tattoo tomorrowwww😏😏

[idontwantrobyntodie]

uuh passed my thesis defense??

[the-worms-in-your-bones]

I know I complain about it a lot but doctor who tiktok really is somewhat of a cesspit

[anothermonikan]

I'm having fun with the Breaking Bad switch and bait stream but I do think. there's some things to be said. about the uh. like. implications of streamers doing this. No one should harass the creators over it ofc but people in chat being dickheads about people feeling disappointed and tricked and saying that 'They're not owed anything'. It just kinda makes me. hm.

[enderon]

There's no greater show of the more negative changes that the anime adaptation of Kyo Kara Moa made than the change of who gets nearly mortally injured and causes Yuuri to lose himself in one of his very few violent outbursts of power, changing it from Wolfram in the original novel to Sara in the anime.b

[moon-jellie]

Okay it's official I'm legitimately starting to hate myself a little bit👍

[corviiids]

also my copy of the labb murder case book finally arrived so i got to read it but it took longer than normal because i kept pausing to take notes so i could solve it first

[termagax]

seeing some people's reaction to weird gamer men oversexualizing kiriko is "mauga is right there, half naked, with serveral pin-up sprays" and while i do agree to an extent, i do feel like alot of people are kind of ignoring like. the racial element of mauga's sexualization, like i like mauga, he's hot, but the second i saw him in the short story, i wasn't a big fan of the whole "big savage brown indigenious guy" and it feels like very few people are pointing that out.

RIGHT LIKE. we cannot fix "gamer men fixate on fictional asian girls to a violent degree, usually in a racist way or enabling racist tropes already present in the character" with "gamer girls fixate on fictional brown men to a violent degree in a racist way or enabling racist tropes present in the character" like you guys are part of the same problemmmmmmm youre doing the same thinggg its not better because youre doing it to men like.

i think some people only want to see the kiriko problem as misogyny and while im not going to even pretend that ISNT a massive part of it, theres still like. a reason kiriko and d.va and mei are fascinations for these dudes. there is a pointed difference between the way these three get spoken about compared to their white counterparts (and their dark-skinned counterparts too - look at the responses to illari for a really easy comparison to how kiriko is treated). their ~exoticism~ as asian women is part of the appeal. even if you dont just wanna take the way dudes online treat them (like making a joke that shes "obvious pornbait" for speaking japanese and using JSL) as evidence of that, look at their marketing. kirikos whole thing is atheleisure traditional, shes got her Mystical Japanese Spiritualism Ninja Powers and her magic doggy and they constantly put her in japanese and korean fashion, and dva has been constantly crossing over with korean merch companies. i cant help but notice theres no brazilian IP crossovers or merch launches for lucio, or any attempt to Sell Peru To Gamers for illari. they couldnt even pick a town in Samoa to name maugas map after. these people wouldn't buy that stuff because it's not fetishized in the same way asia is.

but like. a lot of the people trying to Gotcha these racist dudes with an asian fetish just whip out their favourite racist tropes instead and its a really bad look. like you guys dont wanna examine how your examples of The Characters Its Okay To Hypersexualize are all brown? even the people who wanna fuck cassidy dont talk about him like this. or like. fuck if you want a good comparison for mauga lets look at roadhog. big half-naked tank who theyve been playing up a sexual energy/comic relief duology on since day one with racially insensitive cosmetic options. nobody treats it like its completely normal to talk about him that way. the dev team isnt pushing pinups of him out. he isnt flexing his boobs in trailers. hes a white dude*, so he gets the bare minimum dignity of being treated normally. incidentially hot, maybe, but for the most part his character is sold on being cool , funny and scary. mauga is being sold 50% on being a Sexy Rogue Love Interest and 50% on. releasing late. they put in so little effort for him to be anything else despite hyping him up as suuuper significant to the lore and a major gamechanger its almost embarrassing to watch. (this is why that short annoyed me so much for anyone keeping track).

[wild-at-mind]

In all seriousness, when I was in my 20s I spent way too much time reading tumblr and trying to figure out the right opinions to have on everything. It was pretty soul destroying now that I look back.

[cunthui]

Im gonna say it, i think all the critiques ive been seeing about saltburn are dumb

[mikkeneko]

Or to use a more modern idiom, "Why pit two bad bitches against each other?"

[asexual-levia-tan]

"they choose people who have committed acts more heinous than indiscriminate murder" what on earth did roommate do

[p0tat0-g0ddess]

Hey guys let me tell you about advance fee scams

I hope y'all are familiar with these in this day and age, especially my artists out there, because they're incredibly common.

TL:DR: ANY kind of structure where you supposedly get money but have to give some of it back to someone should twig your scam radar, frankly. (re: @elljayvee)

About half an hour ago I posted a drawing and tagged it #artists on tumblr, and very quickly received this comment.

My scam radar went off immediately, due to the generic blog name and lack of any emotion in the comment, but I decided it might be an entertaining venture so I dmed them. They asked for a drawing "of these", and sent me a random selfie. I got the details and told them it would be $15, and they promptly offered me $300. At this point I know it's a scam, but I play along for funsies and give them my paypal. Shortly, they send me this image for "confirmation" (I blocked out my email)

And they began to insist that I checked my email. I looked in my spam folder and found the following email.

This is fake. This is not a thing. And the "you're to refund the $200.00 back" is the scam. They send vaguely official-looking emails at you to "prove" that they sent you the money, then have you send them $200 (or however much the scam is for). Then, surprise surprise, you're out $200.

I continued to play along for a bit, and in the second email "Paypal" told me that I had to refund the $200 before they could "credit the $300 to my account", along with these lovely threats.

And yeah, it's silly. But it's not silly if you don't know and get scammed. So. Spread, please! And thank you very much to @mlaurel for the opportunity to get these screenshots.

Anyone can be scammed, police, doctors, professors, cynics. The only thing they have in common is that they dont believe they could be scammed because they're too smart or savvy. ALL it takes is the right bait at the right time. (re: @evercaptor)