factsilike

[factsilike]

Nezushi and deftones

[factsilike]

this scene was too funny to me😭😭😭

nezhas having a mental breakdown at the thought of rin dying but girl does not gaf🙏🏼

[factsilike]

Rereading The Burning God and reminded just how much of a condescending asshole, but yet still such a flirt Nezha was in those letters to Rin.

"I mean, knowing you, you've probably had them all thrown in prison. But at least let Minmin and Little Xing back into the kitchens. They make excellent steamed buns. And you like those, don't you?" SIR!

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this is my understanding of the trilogy so far

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Rin and Kitay the most platonic soulmates to ever exist 😭 wdym their relationship is the heart and soul of the story 😭

[factsilike]

another big parallel between rin and kitay is that they both thought they were so above sacrificing their principles for love. rin hated mai’rinnen tearza for killing herself and surrendering because she loved the red emperor. kitay desperately tried to be morally right even in the toughest circumstances and judged those who weren’t. but in the end they both betrayed their principles for each other. kitay couldn’t do the morally right thing and deprive rin of her power because he loved her too much. for someone who was so proud of his moral high ground, he was so loyal to her that he was ready to let her destroy the world. and even though she swore she would never be so weak to surrender and let her people be conquered, the mere thought of hurting kitay to reach her goal stopped her. it was her love for him that made her surrender. and they both kind of became the things they hated the most.

[factsilike]

absolutely genius of rf kuang to elaborate on virtually nothing about speer's culture. the only things said about speer are "speerlies are mindless savages" and "speerlies are most definitely not mindless savages". there are no deep dives, no explanations of their way of life, nothing beyond the glimpses that disproves nikan's belief that they are nothing but a violent group. we saw that they had leaders that cared about their people and children. we saw that they are people who found joy in life. but that's really not much.

this emphasizes the horror of genocide. millenia of culture and history, individual lives filled with love, pain, and passion, just completely wiped away. there were only two surviving speerlies. one of them was too young when he was taken away, and probably doesn't remember much. the things he did remember was also probably buried under years of abuse and drugs people were plying him with. the other one didn't even know she was from speer until the last few months of her life, and there was really no one around to teach her about their culture. and if there was, life as she knows it was falling apart. learning about her dead people's culture probably didn't even cross her mind.

without saying any of these things and by intentionally leaving readers in the dark about what speer was truly like, rf kuang said so much about the horrors of genocide. by not saying anything, she said everything. she did the "show me, don't tell me" tip for writers and it was brilliant.

we will never learn most of speer's culture and history and that was the point.

[factsilike]

This is clearly a book that should be read more than once to be properly comprehended, and I wasn't prepared for the sheer brutality of chapter 21 (shocking, I know, the book titled "War" has themes of war in it) but I kinda thought the school arc would have gone a bit longer (barely 300 pages)... I suspected that the events sounded like they'd been copy pasted from the rape of Nanjing, and I was right 😭

Nezha matured a great deal in a very short amount of time, wow. I just wish it didn't take literal war for him to do so.

[factsilike]

I'm starting the poppy war series, wish me luck ig.... it's fascinating right from the start, in a way few novels are...

[factsilike]

This genocidal war on Gaza has lasted more than 19 months, with half a million of people facing starvation. Israel has killed at least 243 Palestinians on Thursday and Friday alone, making them some of the most deadly days for Gazans. Surrounded by the relentless bombing, Ibrahim (@aburakhiaibrahim) has received a rare piece of good news: his sister Samah, who is in Canada, has applied for family reunification which has just been approved!

Ibrahim has not seen his sister and his family in Canada for 15 years. Now, Ibrahim and his family have the chance to go to Canada, to safety, and reunite with his family there! However, it costs $5000 for a single person to cross the border and exit Gaza, and Ibrahim must collect enough money for his family to make the crossing when it opens! However, the high prices of food means that they are using up their money quickly, and their fundraiser is slow with low funds even though they have been fundraising for more than 14 months! Ibrahim and his family are hungry, but they really cannot miss the chance to go to Canada!

Please, please, please help Ibrahim and his family! This is a valuable opportunity for them to escape, and they absolutely miss the opportunity to get to safety! Ibrahim is sending me messages saying that the bombings are happening right now as I write this. Please donate if you can, and share if you cannot!

Vetted! This fundraiser is vetted by @/gaza-evacuation-funds, #336 on vetted fundraiser list by el-shab-hussein, nabulsi, and MohAyesh, #802 on Butterfly Effect Project vetted list!

You can enter my necklace raffle (2.0) if you donate to this fundraiser!

Tagging for reach~ Please dm me if you want of the mailing list! Thank you!

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[factsilike]

i feel like the captive prince fandom has the best fanfic writers out there no joke

[factsilike]

You implied in a post that Jiang Cheng is partially responsible for orphaning Jin Ling and I wonder what you mean? I can't remember anything he did to cause it

I’m sorry, but do people not realize that Jiang Cheng’s actions led to direct, causal consequences? Jiang Cheng lets his petty insecurities get to him, which leads to:

him publicly abandoning Wei Wuxian, openly declaring him as an enemy to the (orthodox) cultivation world, and withholding why he owed a debt to the Wen siblings because “tired baby is cranky baby,” while at the same time…

not completely cutting off contact but, instead, covertly helping sneak Jiang Yanli to Yiling to show off her wedding gown, giving Wei Wuxian the false impression that he was still conditionally welcomed enough that it would be safe to accept the invitation to Jin Ling’s one-month celebration, and these first two points lead to…

the Jin Clan feeling comfortable enough to ambush him on the way to said one-month celebration, because they were both positive that Wei Wuxian would show up AND assured that no one would be around to defend him. Jin Guangyao takes advantage of this to kill off Jin Zixuan. That’s one parent down, and the consequences of this are…

…now an unjustifiably angry Jiang Cheng, rather than staying behind to comfort his grieving sister and fatherless nephew, attending the murder banquet, showing a united front to all other clans that Wei Wuxian is neither supported nor welcome. He provides no explanations in neither Wei Wuxian nor the Wen siblings’ defenses, and when Wei Wuxian shows up to said murder party, he keeps silent as Wei Wuxian is verbally AND physically attacked, making no attempts at diplomacy or de-escalation because he doesn’t view this battle as affecting him (because correct me if I’m wrong, but Wei Wuxian’s corpses don’t attack the Jiang disciples at this moment). Which leads to…

Jiang Yanli running onto an active battleground to find Wei Wuxian and, eventually, giving her life for him.

Then as a little treat, instead of Jiang Cheng taking responsibility for his hand in how all of these events played out, he instead teaches his orphaned nephew that Wei Wuxian intentionally killed both of his parents in cold blood and that this young child should kill anyone who reminds Jiang Cheng of Wei Wuxian, grooming the kid into his tool of vengeance. Guanyin Temple is the only moment where he drops the facade that this was ever about Jin Ling, when he basically says “You took everything from me and left me with this orphan” pointing directly at Jin Ling and causing the kid to deflate.

This is also what I mean when I say that Jiang Cheng is a follower who wants to be treated like the leader be refuses to be. He wants to play both sides—posturing to the cultivation world that he’s cut all ties with Wei Wuxian with that staged fight but then sneaking Jiang Yanli to him when she asks, siding with the cultivation world wanting to exterminate the Wen remnants and shun Wei Wuxian at the emergency conference but telling Wei Wuxian that he’s there for the latter’s “benefit”—because he never wants to make a decision that can be confidently placed on his own head. He wants the benefit of actions he didn’t take—“why am I not being praised as if I killed the xuanwu of slaughter when I led the search party afterwards?” “I’ll take credit for killing Wei Wuxian even though I literally didn’t.”—while shoving all of the responsibility to others—“you repaid my debt to the Wen siblings, so that’s your bad luck,” “you almost died to save everyone in the cave and now the Wen are knocking on the door, so that’s your bad luck, nevermind that I also tried to kill Ling Wangjiao in that same cave.”

Jc stans are a constant refrain of, “Looks guys, he didn’t repay his debt to the Wen at the cost of everyone else’s ire, that was Wei Wuxian! He didn’t lead the ambush and host the banquet, that was the Jin! He’s just a hapless baby, a widdle guy! He’s only there for numbers! He’s only there for face! Nothing is ever his fault!” when truthfully, most of the events of the story past the war are directly his fault, and that’s why he has not a damn thing to say when Jin Guangyao calls him on it.

[factsilike]

Just made myself so so sad thinking about Aang's marble trick because from a physics perspective, keeping dense spherical objects afloat on an airstream is not trivial, and he's doing it in a tiny little space without moving his hands. Bending is usually very gestural. So. Everyone in the era of the show is, at best, impressed THAT it is airbending. But Aang's an incredibly young master airbender. He wouldn't be acting like this was the bestest trick ever if it didn't take at least some skill; he's a goofy kid but he's also a prodigy. I bet other airbenders were absolutely blown away (pun fully intended) at the level of precision and force and minimalism of movement on display and now there's no one who understands at all why he expects accolades.

[factsilike]

Israel cuts Gaza's final internet line, plunging it into total communication blackout.

Israel bombed the last main fibre route in Gaza, which means that as of June 12, all internet and fixed-line communication services are now completely cut off, further isolating Gaza amidst an ongoing genocide.

I am seeing more and more calls from inside of Gaza for help with eSims as that is currently the only way they can connect internally and with the outside world.

- Buy eSIMs here.

- If you can't afford it, you can donate any amount to this eSIM fund.

- Instructions on how to buy and share eSIMs.

[factsilike]

[factsilike]

I have so so many thoughts about the politics of the new book so far and it really will take forever (and a few more books) for me to fully unpack it. I loved that the original series directly tackled issues with authoritarian governments and the surveillance state, as that was what was most relevant at the time she was writing it. And there is certainly still a place for that discussion in 2025, perhaps even moreso now than in the early 2000s. But after reading chapter 2 a few times and having a couple of months to really absorb everything, I can't help but admire the very straightforward critique of more "liberal" organizational structures like NGOs and the failures of the international and urban development projects they take part in. There isn't really a place in the world of No.6 to tackle something on as large a scale as the IMF/WTO (I would go insane if I could write about this), but had a bit of a discussion on discord about the similarities between the school Tomorrow's Sky is running and the residential schools that were built in Canada during the 19th/20th century and I think that there is something to be said about replacing the role of the church running those schools with a secular organization like an NGO, and how the outcomes and even goals in each situation are not as dissimilar as we would maybe want to believe. Very much looking forward to learning more about this and I hope that we get to see Shion dealing with these issues while he is still in charge of things!

[factsilike]