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Daily reminder that we do not actually live in a dystopian movie put the apocalypse down and back away slowly. You know when your cleaning a room and you pull everything out of it's draws to sort through it and you're like "what the fuck have I done I'm never going to be able to tidy all of this" I think that's the stage we're at in the world. Thanks to social media we've pulled out all the messed up shit from the cupboards of the world, it was always there but now we can see it and we're going to have to sort it all out we made this mess and we can fix it. Falling to the floor sobbing will not clean a crusty room. A group of people working systematically (preferably with music in the background) will.

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it's only a headcanon, but i think the seven gods have lost all sense of self by consuming source again and again and again. because the source was coming from the souls - memories, emotions, suffering, the gods absorb it all, all that made one a person. and slowly, they weren't the Seven Lords anymore, clinging onto names devoid of substance. They're gods. They're any face they devoured. Rhalic isn't just a patron god. he is mankind embodied. mankind as its worst. but mankind all the same.

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1 (continue)

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we seriously need to stop conceding to the personhood trap when it comes to abortion rights. is a fetus a person? thats a spiritual question. i dont care about the answer. should another person dictate what someone can do with their body? simple answer: no.

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there's gonna be an Elden Ring live action i wanna kill myself

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Does anyone would like to talk about Beast with me ? I'm trying to understand all the characters, and unfortunately, he's the one I heard the least about

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you know, the four act structure seems ( from what i know, at least ) weird, for me. most of literature can be broken into three or five acts ( for example, french classical drama is known for its five acts )

so, why dos:2 is made of four acts ?

i asked this question to suggest my own theory : the three first acts are divine acts. you discover divinity, fight for divinity, lose your divinity. the gods are destroyed, you have lost. a perfect cycle of defeat.

and the fourth act is like a burst of life - a story not ready to die yet. A story screaming at you - wait. wait. there is something beyond the gods. there is something for you. divinity is a story reintroducing humanity, despite its very name.

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the weird schrödinger's emotion that is "that character death was narratively satisfying and emotionally impactful and ultimately the best way to handle their character arc" simultaneously with "noooo but I wanted them to live :( :( :("

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But… Do the gods love their creations? I am a doll, created by you humans. Would you ever think to love me?

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A wave of caffeine washes over me and carries me out to sea

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Very well-put thoughts and I totally agree that there's some problem about Ifan's characterization. To be honest, I think there's a part of a coward move ( thing unfortunately too present in art these days ) as it feels like the dev's didn't want to push the "bad guy" too much far, fearing that, us, players, wouldn't like him.

The problem resides ( for me ) mostly in the rupture Act I-Act II. Ifan, a so-called selfish man, didn't think twice between his old crew and some folks he fled with. I think Larian forced too quickly the "found family" trope on him, eager to highlight how much he's a good man and how much the world had been too cruel to him. He's a damn fucking cornelian tragic boy and he should have been struck by dilemna, which didn't happen, and that's a loss. The evolution should have a been a slow rise and we were given a sudden rupture - it didn't feel right.

Of course, we also can't ignore that fact that your player character have probably killed tens of people before you arrived here. It's generally a dnd & cie problem, as killing your adversaries often came as the only way to go further. Understandable for gameplay, but narratively, they don't challenge it enough ( I could go on again and again how killing the Seven feels so unrewarding in term of narrative, but that's another story for another time ). So yeah, difficult to actually hold Ifan against his actions when you are yourself a mass murderer.

"Those hands have killed" during the love scene. Both of you have mentioned this quote, and indeed, there is a lot to say. The immediate context isn't off by itself - this duality could have worked if the overall context of the game played along and showed a violent, more ambiguous Ifan. Indeed, and it was great to notice it, more people should be afraid of him.

Ifan should have been a fucking shadow over you. People screeching when seeing him. People running away, going silent right now, refusing to talk to him - a constant reminder that he had killed, and that he was a cruel man, once.

And I think Ifan should have been more violent, or rather he should have tend more to violence. He was a soldier ( and a crusader, and we know from history they weren't the greatest guys in the world ) then a mercenary. Violence should be his initial response - we already see how it drenched his whole quest with vengeance, but he is too tamable. You can stop him whenever you feel like it, and all of that tends to suggest that his violence is "not that big of a deal". It lightens the impact over the player : sometimes, the Lone Wolf card looked more like a bad boy card, and I say that in the meanest way possible.

On the contrary, the idea that you can't totally control him would give him more agency over his own quest, and all the more impactful. Betrayal is indeed a great idea. People should be more afraid of Ifan - in fact, I'd add that the narration should make the player afraid of Ifan. Seeing him ignoring your advices despite you begging him to spare somebody would had have a great impact. He's a wolf - we should have seen him as uncontrollable.

A way of showing you that, sometimes, the leash isn't enough.

And even if he doesn't act violently : the game would have gain to show his hesitation, his contradictions. Ifan's morals are very complex, ( I would even say that he has literaly two wolves fighting in his mind ) and we should have seen more of this inner battle.

Maybe it's my liking for dark fantasy which alter my judgment, but I wouldn't mind for a much darker, somber Ifan ben-Mezd. The man he was ( and still is, at the beginning ) when he was a Lone Wolf. It would have been all the more disturbing to see a friendly man, capable of kindness, being so relentlessly cruel against some.

Im throwing rocks at my own roof here, but unfortunately I'd wish that Ifan's characterization was more consistent in-game. Like yeah I'll play and pretend he's a bad boy for ship reasons but 99% of in-game interactions are him being good-hearted and a kind person.

AND DON'T GET ME WRONG there is nothing I love more than a kind rough man, but that leaves scenes in which the narrator has to verbally remind you that that man is a mercenary, or him casually dropping that he kills people. Sure we see OTHER Lone Wolfs do bad shit; but any in-game violence is either something that the party started; or that they are okay with. So when you get into a romance scene and the narrator reminds you that he is a "dangerous man", it falls a bit flat imo

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the biggest epistemological gap between me & 95% the rest of the world is literally just how much i love to look things up on the internet and how much it baffles me when other people don't like to do this. we live in the information age. like i'll google anything i'll read this bmj paper on the toilet i'll look up words i don't know i'll append pdf free to any possible phrase. i don't know how anybody is voluntarily turning this down. sometimes i get so tired of searchinf for something physically inside a store i pull out my phone and google like silken tofu aldi what fucking aisle while im standing right there. otherwise what is even the point

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academic dishonesty is not something you can spin as moral lol i do not want to share a career field let alone a social sphere with a bunch of chatgpt using ass bitches

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Kim with lungs 🫁

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anyway i know we talk a lot of shit abt this site but i just wanna say that tumblr taught me to romanticize life a little. like where else am i gonna find an essay abt how hands were made to hold other hands or posts with thousands of notes abt how peeling an orange for a loved one can be the purest act of care & love? all the softest, sweetest and kindest ppl on the internet are here and i'm so grateful to be here along with y'all. i love you and please keep romanticizing the smallest things... god knows we need that now more than ever.

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TW: Pedophilia

Teenagers are rarely taught the reason why they can't consent to sex with adults.

And that's because teaching them that would completely unravel our coercion-based society.

It can be difficult to explain in detail the exact reason and all the specifics in a way that they will understand. But the simplest way to phrase it is that in some cases, even when someone agrees to something and even when they appear enthusiastic about it, there's too much of a power imbalance that it's no different than forcing them. Also, having power and being abusive doesn't require a conscious expectation to be obeyed.

Imagine a world in which every teenager understood that and was easily able to call out anyone who tried to convince them otherwise.

They'd know that there's no such thing as an employee consenting to working for a poverty wage, working in unsafe conditions, working long hours, or working without taking breaks. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to paying a bank overdraft fee. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to student loan debt. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to medical bills. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to generating profit for banks or landlords in order to have a place to live and being evicted or foreclosed when you lose your source of income. They'd know that there's no such thing as consenting to a police search. They'd know that there's no such thing as a child who's okay with their parents spanking them. They'd know that being dependent on someone does not mean that you can never criticize them. They'd know that if it's considered abusive to simply play along when someone obeys, then it has to be much more abusive to actively expect to be obeyed, which many adults do to them.

And people who benefit from a society based on coercion masquerading as freedom wouldn't like that.

So instead, teenagers are taught something dismissive. They're taught that what they want doesn't matter. They're taught that they're too young to know what love is. They're taught "it's the law". They're taught things that are insulting to their intelligence, which they'll naturally rebel against.