#this isn't very informative

[forgetmenomore]

Does anybody else find the similarities between Li Tianxi and Cheng Xiaoshi eerie?

I picked it up pretty quickly (big brain and big forehead). I also noticed after the s2 finale is that they have another striking similarity: they're both dead, because yippee and why not?

Not to mention the film tapes representing restraint or inability? The tape wraps around Li Tianxi's mouth and eyes for her inability to speak or speak up- especially against her brother's actions (who originally had good intent but oh my gosh that must've been traumatic). Plus, that running scene with Li Tianxi running from the past and Cheng Xiaoshi running towards it?

These two have quite a bunch of similarities. The most striking difference is how one has people to support them while the other doesn't. Let's hope the next difference is that Cheng Xiaoshi lives, because if he doesn't-

*sobbing*

[elene78-blog]

Andrew looks at Kevin after the game against the Trojans.

"How does it feel?" He asks Kevin.

"Losing is not pleasant for anyone," says Kevin.

"Sorry," Andrew says without meaning it at all. "I wanted to say, how does it feel to know that Monsieur Misérable and Mr. Golden Smile are fucking together and have agreed to beat you up?"

Kevin turns to him with a growing bad mood.

"They're not having sex."

"D'Artagnan hit you too hard with the racket. You don't know what you're saying."

"They're not having sex, Andrew!"

"New bet then. I say that France conquers California before the end of the year... In two months if Monsieur Trauma takes care of his shit."

"...Jeremy has never told me he's gay."

Andrew remains silent. He turns his head towards Kevin very very slowly.

"300 dollars."

"We're not going to bet on this..."

"500 dollars."

"Why are you so happy to do this?"

"What do you mean, Kevin? I'm a very happy man."

It's impossible to tell if Andrew is joking with that unflappable expression.

And so the betting returns to the Foxes.

[goldfishinaplasticbag]

jax irl rambles of angel + angel scary hotline voice + probably rich + presumed older than dick = another bruce............

[laly-481]

polychamps wedding dresses LISTEN TO ME

[nattikay]

the constant inner struggle of a Na'vi speaker/teacher browsing Na'vi OCs

[rawliverandgoronspice]

re: sympathetic ganondorf vs evil for evil’s sake ganondorf, i think this is misrepresenting and underselling what’s actually offputting to people

“i’m evil because i’m evil” or “i’m evil because demise is evil” and the associated lust for power simply for its own sake has always been lame and low effort. there’s a reason it’s “shit tier” on the classic “villain motive tiers” thing

“i’m evil but there’s enough nuance to make the player at least somewhat sympathetic to me even if i’m still ultimately a bad guy” is a good thing that people like? i’ve never personally interacted with a zelda player who thinks windwaker ganondorf ruined the character or anything - he’s generally regarded as the gold standard of villain writing both in and out of zelda. this is roughly “high tier” on the tier chart

“actually TWIST i’m not evil at all, it’s the good guys who were evil all along, i’ve done nothing wrong and i’m completely justified in my righteous quest against the status quo, you’re the real secret true villain for being complicit in preserving it” is technically regarded as “elder god tier” on the motive tier chart but i would personally label it as “oscar bait tier”. these things *can* be compelling in conversation with the existing landscape, but often it comes across as a deliberate effort to subvert the audience’s expectations for the sake of being unpredictable (or worse, for the sake of proving you’re the smartest one in the room). in separate works where this conversation/critique is the entire point (eg. Watchmen or The Boys), that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the audience sets their expectations accordingly. in an established, long-running franchise, however, this almost always reads as dripping with contempt for the audience, like walking into a room and going “you morons like this shit? let me, a person much smarter than you, explain what it’s Actually about, because you’re an idiot if you’ve been a fan of this series before now”

on top of that, in the context of a series like zelda, this type of story feels myopic and disrespectful to the future of the series. “welp i burned down the 20+ years of lore behind this character so i could do a deconstruction, good luck using them in any capacity in the future, sounds like a you problem”

all this is to say, i think it’s a bit disingenuous/strawman-y to suggest that people put off by this want ganondorf to have 0 depth at all. there’s a lot of room for different kinds of depth, it’s just that the trend of the last decade has been for “depth” to mean “condescending deconstruction”

Hey!

Thanks for taking the time to write this ask, I think it warrants an interesting conversation. To me, there's like, a lot of things about what you're saying, and tbh I do see where you're coming from --in part.

First thing first... No yeah unfortunately some people Are hostile to even WW Ganondorf. It's been a rising trend in the fandom since TotK was released --people being very against the concept of any additional complexity to the character, either not getting it or considering anything he says pure manipulation that doesn't even warrant a conversation, literally making fun of people who were intrigued by this and wanting more out of this particular thread. This position not only absolutely exists within the fandom --less so on tumblr, I'll agree there-- but it's not even hard to stumble upon as a pretty regular opinion that gets tossed around. I had some interesting asks thrown my way, let's say. The idea that Ganondorf is a remotely interesting character that deserves more thought than what he gets is very much Extremely not the norm, and the very fact that you, as a fan, likes him as a guy is perceived as weird and missing the point by a lot of people. Like a lot a lot of people.

So I'll just... I guess I haven't clarified my position in a while, so I will reclarify my position on our favorite evil dude: I do like him perfectly fine as a villain, I do not want him to be "redeemed" by the narrative, I think he works fantastically as an ongoing threat, I think they could make him even scarier and more offputting and that would be super fun and thrilling... and I also think he already is complex. Like, inherently. Everything Nintendo has been putting into him since his first appearance is complicated --even their attempts at flattening him back in TotK do not fully work because they can't scrub him of the extremely loaded ideas they injected into him from the get-go. Nobody forced Nintendo to do a Mega Orientalism when inventing him, nobody made them write the NPCs to have this super weird antagonistic relationship to the gerudos in OoT, nobody made them have all this lore of the one man born every hundred years, raised by twin witches --and then nobody made them press on that tension point in Wind Waker explicitely, and then, in a more subtle fashion, in TP too. Nobody forced their hand when it came to having the strange "round ear" situation, suggesting (confirmed even, in additional canon) gerudos are born unblessed. The fact of the matter is: everything to make the relationship between Hyrule and the gerudos complicated has been there since 1998. There's no need for a Switcharoo to prove that anyone is smarter than the audience: everything messy has always been baked within the worldbuilding itself. It's in the cartridges already!!

Perspective on it is what could change, though --because, except in Wind Waker, we never get even a hint of a sense that we should think, as an audience, that Hyrule's super weird relationship to the gerudos is maybe questionable. Worth thinking about at least. Which, given the optics, is wild to me that to bring this particular can of worms up is still very largely considered crazy talk within the fandom (that, or the Sheikah situation across the series, also insane in many ways). And yes, it would perhaps lead to themes that are a bit heavier than what Zelda has been overtly dealing with (though, again, Majora's Mask exists --and I do find a lot of unpacked ideas in the Wild Era, like the very unquestionned gerudo bridal pipeline, very uhhh unfortunate already if I'm being honest --even moreso because it is unquestioned). But Zelda, when well handled narratively, can do wonderful things with evocative subtext, open doors never fully crossed, a lynchian pressure on what should feel offputting. We don't even need a sad monologue about it. It doesn't even need to be handled explicitely. But I think the pressure point is just better when understood and incorporated in some form, instead of being denied so hard the world itself start to feel incomplete and unlived.

I do want to say... I get what you mean with the whole "oscar bait" thing. There has been, historically and in recent years, a tendency to be driven by an external, almost panicked sense of morality rather than by the internal drive of a story, its internal thematic logic. I also do think it can feel very corporate, very "Disney looking back at its own movies and scrubbing off everything Buzzfeed deemed problematic in 2014 while making everything glossy and lifeless and awful" and it's not that great!!! and tbh I can't say I would trust Nintendo to handle any appreciation for the fact that the story of an eternal golden kingdom cheering on beating the evil outsiders who want to corrupt everything good and pure and blonde about that perfect inherently good place, is like, extremely not neutral. It absolutely is a delicate thread to weave, and I agree that putting a definitive end to Hyrule is probably not the smartest IP move to do. But, Hyrule doesn't have to be condemned as Bad, it can be merely complicated. And ongoing, regardless. To keep on with the Disney parallel: The Lion King would feel weird if we started to peel off the internal politics of the hyenas, it's just not the right place for it, when everything about this story revolves around the Righteousness of the Divine Right to Rule. But if the Lion King was an ongoing series that had been looping on itself for a while... wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to achieve majesty by studying other angles too, eventually? Is it that strange to suggest the exercise is like, possible? That it can be handled with artistry and soul?

I feel like... Yes, to acknowledge Ganondorf's humanity --not even to coddle it, just to acknowledge it-- implies taking in everything that makes him who he is, and that might rattle some foundational ideas about why this ancestral fight is even happening in the first place. I also do not think it means that he must be Good now. He can still punch a child and cackle maniacally, he can still be unredeemable --he can still destroy himself and others out of the most unconstructive spite ever, and we can still see the purpose in defeating him while basking in the "yea....." left in his wake (Wind Waker did that!!! Wind Waker did that and then we had more Zelda games!! crazy how that happened). This is hardly undoable. It does take some narrative skill, and some commitment to taking a bit of a risk, but Ganondorf is genuinely unmanageable as a character if you insist on your refusal to acknowledge his foundations --and I think it's partially why TotK's story is such a mess. He sells a TON, but you can't have him breathe slightly too loud without risking the entire world falling apart. They did try in TotK, so very hard, and to me they still failed--as insane as he behaves, Hyrule still doesn't come out of this looking good or particularly justified, because the very central core of Ganondorf's character is to be subjugated, and then rebelling in a destructive and brutally selfish, uncompromising manner that ends up robbing him of humanity --and the discomfort of that premise will therefore always haunt the conversation. Nintendo dug themselves into that mess. I feel like a lot of the Ganondorf fans I know merely... point at that. At the mess. And I feel like the longer the games avoid this mess, the more coats of spinach green they slather ontop of his skin, and the more nonsensical characterization they pile up, and the more Ganondorf will become a parody of who he once was, and what made him compelling to begin with.

And to top it all off, as if he wasn't contentious and complicated enough to handle already, they leaned into the internet turning him into a sex symbol for some fucking reason??? Yeah I genuinely have no idea how Nintendo will manage this dude moving forward, because to me, he is, at best, an endless source of (very lucrative) headaches, and at worst a ticking time bomb. I'm not sure how long they can get away with that TotKification strategy, is what I mean.

(Also: I tried to not overdwell on all the incredibly complicated conversation re: race and orientalism, but it's borderline impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging that I have never seen a major pop culture villain receive more pushback against "woobification" than him, and I don't think it's a complete coincidence let's say :) )

[cerulean-fantasy]

Stained with red 🩸

[satanfemme]

just saw a post which was very insistent in an authoritative way that interacting with AI-assisted art in any context even just to mentally find meaning in it before moving on, or even (especially!) if you don't actually realize that it's AI-assisted before interacting, is a moral failing on ur part. and so according to op the only morally correct thing to do from now on for the rest of ur life is to thoroughly research every piece of art you come across, and to thoroughly research the artist of any piece of art you come across, and to - prior to appreciating any art - ensure just in case through thorough research that no AI was used at any point in the process at all, or else it's morally tainted the art forever. and how if you don't do this you, personally, will be partially responsible for the impeding death of art itself. RIP art. born: the dawn of human kind, probably sooner. died: now I guess, because You specifically forgot to ruminate compulsions ruminate compulsions moral purity rumination over it prior to daring to resonate with something someone spent the time and effort to make. aren't you tired. aren't you literally tired.

[llyfrenfys]

See, I personally find this quest to find pagan/pre-Christian elements in Welsh/Irish literature quite unnerving - I don't know about anyone else.

There's something to be said about genuinely discovering pre-Christian elements in a narrative or story and that being where evidence and study has led you. But I see some people on this fruitless quest to find pagan elements in very Christian texts and sometimes it feels like if no pagan elements can be found, people start making stuff up out of whole cloth - and that can be very dangerous for already not-well known texts in minoritised languages!

There's already so much misinformation out there about Irish/Welsh texts and literature in general - so it hurts to see people carelessly adding to the misinformation either out of ignorance or lack of respect for the source material.

I promise you the source material being Christian doesn't ruin it - you can in fact, enjoy these myths without making them into something they're not!

[orions-aether]

just me whenever I eat a new food or something with even a little bit of flavour / variation in texture or also sometimes just when my brain decides that the same plain food I've been eating without issue daily for six months is the most overstimulating and painful thing to ever exist in the history of the universe

I have never felt more seen than I did in "sad, sad fish, sad fish"

[gayofthefae]

"How will they convince people of Mike's feelings" my guy literally all they have to do is have them have a normal conversation then linger looking at each other for just a little too long afterwards.

[elaboration but you can stop here if you should be asleep right now. Yes, you. I caught you. Go to bed.]

It's platonic to look at your friends, and even look at them when they aren't looking, but it is notoriously not platonic for a TV show to SHOW us.

That is literally ALL they did in season 4 with Will btw and you believe him. He literally just looked at Mike. He said a couple of coded things but I would argue still quite deniable until that talk in the junkyard got more specific. The bulk of the weight being pulled was - not even lingering looks, just lingering ON looks. Lingering the shot.

In the sweetest way - and including myself - audiences are dumb. We don't need much, really. Boy look at boy too long when he not looking equal romance. Telling love stories actually is not complicated AT ALL.

[thegreatyin]

deranged apf lore facts without context:

furries are real, but if you can turn into your fursona there is something Wrong With You

elves are not immortal, except for when they are. 100% of the elf population are also birds. except for when they're being a bird wrong. then they're defective

god is canonically into dilfs. this has devastating ramifications on the yaoi industry

the world's strongest man is really really into being suplexed by his spouse

dragons ain't one of the creatures god made

color tv exists, but guns and cars do not

if you go to the desert and dig straight down you'll eventually encounter a giant hollow tomb full of your worst fears. even worse, there's the monarchy

all wizards are freelancers. the pointy hat with a wide brim is a mandatory uniform requirement. it is also the only mandatory uniform requirement.

the other side of the world invented satan, but nobody cares about that rn

Kitty Cat 🐈

[indigo-constellation]

i don't think dankovsky would ever lie to artemy about being dolls seeing as one of his most consistent if not his most consistent character trait is that he does not lie

he does lie actually! He's just really, really bad at it, and prefers not to, for example an earlier post made by the Danko quotes account is him badly lying to try to save Stakh, and he does try to manipulate Artemy a few times during his route. I think that he is a very honest person, but that doesn't stop him from lying to try to defend himself or other people, and exploring that paradox of him being in search of the truth and having to lie about such a massive thing is I think more interesting than making the (incorrect) blanket statement that he doesn't lie.

[jesncin]

Not to cry conspiracy, but I think one of the things about the lack of cultural connection and depth of exploration on new queer characters like Xanthe is...it makes me feel like they're not built to last. They're not built to be a character in their own right, like Batman or Superman or Nightwing get to be. They're built to be thrown on a cover or in a story every couple of months so DC execs can pat themselves on the back and say "look, we did diversity!"

That's not to say someone couldn't still write that depth into the character. There are plenty of comic characters whose most formative stories were not their first ones (e.g, Babs becoming Oracle)! But the fact that characters like Xanthe didn't debut with that strength of story feels deliberate. Like they are being set up to fail on that front, to justify later pushing this character into the background and forgetting about them.

NODDING!!! I've said something really similar before:

"If I could be playfully conspiracy theory-like for a second; I believe Xanthe Zhou was pitched so that DC Comics can buff out their Pride Anthology or AAPI anthology with a new younger character. The company will give this character one limited series, but that’s it. Xanthe will appear in the larger DC universe whenever big magic plots happen, but that’s it. Maybe they’ll get a YA graphic novel. I would love to be proven wrong, but the problems with Xanthe are baked in the dough."

At this point the way Xanthe is written in the main universe, this character just doesn't work on a foundational level. The only way I can see them work is if they were reinvented in an elseworld project like DC's YA/MG graphic novel line, and that's even if they'd be able to get popular enough to warrant a proper solo graphic novel. If another writer were to give Xanthe a proper shot, big changes have to happen. There are just too many plot holes and nonsensically thought out stuff in Xanthe's origin for them to work as is.

A character like Kong Kenan is a far stronger character and has a cultural specificity to him that Xanthe's sorely lacking. But well, Gene Yang wrote and created Kong so that's to be expected :p I highly recommend a comparison of the two. Kong has a strong cast system, solid mythology, and a clear character arc. Meanwhile Xanthe's over here picking the name "blonde" as their chosen name,,,

[danishphoner]

one thing that really fascinates me about alex is his devotion to art – and more specifically, how he chooses to get some inspiration from scientific works of what he aims to implement in his art. every time one gets to examine some of his lyrics, or even how he explains these lyrics in an interview, they can be greeted by some bits of actual scientific information. an example is how he named his taquería on the moon with the term “information-action ratio”, coined by the critic neil postman, and referenced it in the song four out of five, something that might also indicate an interesting articulation with postman's concept. the line “cute new places keep on popping up”, for example, can express his well-known sardonic discontent regarding the flood of information being generated and transmitted over and over and, as much as it seems visually appealing and does give the idea of benefiting from advanced technologies, it doesn't really add anything substantial to the receiver's critical thinking – and worse, it distances the information receiver from the sender in a communication channel, according to postman.

what i'm saying with this interpretation is, it's known that alex is enamoured with the idea of gathering a bunch of references and condensing them into a mixture of metaphors in his writing, but it's so thrilling how, at times, we can find some bits of science inside of it – and it's even more exciting, just like playing a puzzle game, to find these references and analyse them by doing a similar research to what he did to create his works.

[aseuki]

Comes in here with a longass post hello! Been meaning to get around to illustrating some Species Headcanons @humming-fly @alagaesia-overlord and I have been cooking up! Major props to them for helping me write the script hahaha it wouldn't have been possible without them!

This is a little segment I have been wanting to try for a bit, just a nice moment to dispense lore in a fun way! I can't promise that more will be out in a necessarily timely manner, but I can promise that more will be on its way. Someday!

Until then, I hope you all enjoy these fun lil thoughts! 🤗