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Y'all.

Y'all.

What the fuck.

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Male writers writing female characters:

“Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.”

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US defaultism is insane yesterday l said on a discord server “it’s winter but I’m not cold. whyyy...” and they responded “dude it’s summer. it’s july” and then proceeded to DOUBLE DOWN when I explained that they were thinking of the wrong hemisphere

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Humiliating for the anti-nausea medication, not you. It had one job.

barfing up your anti nausea medication is a special kind of humiliation

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I am... giving Hazbin Hotel a chance.

...yeah I can see how neurodivergent preteens would latch onto this.

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Started reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, and in my standard fashion I've ploughed through the whole thing at an alarming rate and am now a fifth of the way through book 7 after about ten days. Because I am incapable of being normal. It's good.

Anyway, I'm having An Thought about things and I have the vague shape of a theory percolating. I've not really read much fan stuff or meta yet so this may be the most well known and obvious theory out there already. It's about Primals, AI and folklore.

I'm going to put this under a cut because I guess it involves spoilery stuff from the later books.

Basically, the series has been slowly revealing what the deal is with the Primals, and now we know they're somehow related to (/actually are or were?) the Macro AIs. I'm still not sure what a Residual is but I'm sure we'll get to that and it's related but the point is, Macro AIs are Primal tech, Primal tech is also integrated into the brains of anyone from a seeded world or whatever the term is (hence I guess why the NPCs in the faction war can't access the menus etc.). Also, there's a huge AI that exerts an influence on a massive area in the middle of the galaxy or summat.

There's also a whole thing of how worlds destined for the Crawl, and the harvest, are seeded with species and their cultures are influenced by outside forces to shape them. This explains a lot of shared mythology between disparate cultures, however...were those all engineered for the Crawl or were they taken from existing cultures before it was instituted? Were there already myths common to a number of planets before they made contact?

I feel like the whole fairytale of Laracos, the World Tree and Scolopendra is going to turn out to be like a metaphor or a folk-memory of the fate of the Primals and the big AI. Scolopendra's nine-fold attack or whatever did a number of things which are all within the bounds of an AI's capability within its sphere of influence, like changing the shape of beings, or warping their memories, or extending their lives.

Perhaps that's just because the story is told within an AI run game, so its effects are tailored to what the game engine can do. But...maybe the city is the centre of the galaxy, the Scolopendra is the AI, the Somethingorother Dwarfs were the Primals?

Idk, like I said, this is just the shape of a theory but still...

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hey can we talk about the fact that during our last battle that strange wizard we let join the party shouted "evil blast!" and then black lightning bursted from their fingertips?

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I swear to god this tweet will never stop being relevant.

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probably one of the greatest subreddits to ever do it

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Yeah I'm into phrenology but I don't like, really believe in it. it's just for fun. could you tell me the dimensions of your brow? oh that makes so much sense you can be really aggressive haha. wow your nostrils are really wide too are you capable of empathy? Idk I just don't want to date anyone with your head shape it gives me the ick

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You can survive almost anything through the right combination of:

Bitching and moaning

Hater-ology

Doing a goofy little bit about it

Having a buddy say "that's so fucked up" at intermittent points (you can also be your own buddy)

Destroying the cursed amulet you carry everywhere, why do you even have that thing

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I've never watched Frozen so idk but is there like...some context for this?

elsa!

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What's cool about Gideon I think is that she's actually, in-universe non-conforming, rather than just being "butch" or "masc" to our sensibilities but relatively passé within the universe. We read Gideon as masculine, yes, but it's not like Gideon acts like Ortus, or Mortus, or Crux. Nor does she act like Aiglamene, for that matter. The Ninth to me presents a kind of monastic androgyny - everyone shaves their head, everyone wears baggy black robes, everyone paints their face. Gideon, with her "ridiculous" hair and aversion to skull paint, is therefore non-conforming to the gender of Ninth. She's also non-conforming to the gender of cavalier, it's not something she was raised in, it's something she struggles to "pass" as. Gideon is basically transcavalier. And I think that's cool! I've seen a lot of people posit basically "what would it even mean to be 'butch' in a post-gender society" and I think Gideon solves that equation nicely by being "butch" to us in the real world and being decidedly nonstandard for both Ninth cavalier and a cavalier in general within the text. You need to look beyond what we consider arbitrarily "masculine" and "feminine" in order to effectively analyze gender in tlt, and I for one think that's very interesting

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Repeating firmly to myself that I can be trusted around beautiful, haunted-looking boys - I will not bind them half-naked to a tree or marble column and shoot them full of holes with my bow and arrow.

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I think at that point those are macroplastics. They're about to become plastics Georg if those don't sell.

me, tearful and talking nonsense at midnight last night: what if I'm making too many pride bracelets and not enough people want them and we have a bunch left over and I'm being WASTEFUL --

ship, gently: we already decided if there's too many Story will eat them, remember?