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I was worried that ‘is X movie/show AI generated?’ would become the new shorthand for ‘thing I don’t like’ when it got pretty widely used as a criticism of Wish. Like… no? It’s half baked and very eh outside a couple songs but that was likely due to the strict deadline for the 100th anniversary and everything else going on with disney at the time.

People just call everything AI generated now, it’s annoying. Wish doesn’t even look remotely like AI, it just looks janky and unpolished

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Source

A huge win for NYC! A better world is still possible

Next stop: general election

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STOP CENSORING YOURSELF ON THIS WEBSITE. FUCK SHIT SEX MURDER ALCOHOL DRUGS FAGGOT DYKE QUEER TRANS BITCH SLUT WHORE SEX SEX SEX SEX!!!!!!!!!!!

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Hot take apparently but being lgbtq+ is not a choice, which means that it should not have to be a political statement.

This means that bigoted right wingers need to stop trying to politicize the existence of people that they don’t like

And it also means that lgbtq+ people need to stop acting surprised and betrayed when other lgbtq+ people are just lgbtq+ and would like to exist in peace and free from bigotry, and don’t want to burn down liberal democracies and replace them with the Soviet Union 2.0

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I think people let JK Rowling's transphobia define her too much, we need to acknowledge her other aspects.

She's also a racist, antisemitic, and a Holocaust denier, we can't forget that!

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Reductress really taking no prisoners today

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i hope luigi mangione is proven innocent & gets to sue a ton of companies for slander and win & i hope he gets enough money to rebuild his life and get any help for his chronic pain that he needs & i hope he’s able to disappear from the public eye entirely if that’s what he wants

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Everything is like “QUEER history” and “List of QUEER young adult books” or “Top 10 QUEER movies” and queer this and queer that and for the love of god please just say LGBT.

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Psycho Analysis: Shou Tucker

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOI... Oh, who the fuck am I kidding, you already know what this guy did.)

Even if you have never watched a single second of either adaptation of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist, you know this man. You have seen this man, and you know what he’s done. You know this because what he does is the single joke that Fullmetal Alchemist fans have, and they have been milking that one joke for the past two decades.

But is there more to this guy than the jokes? Is he really just the guy who used Polymerization on his daughter and dog, or is there something else to Shou Tucker that makes him so memorable?

Motivation/Goals: Tucker really likes having money, and really likes being an alchemist. Unfortunately, they’ll only keep him employed so long as he can provide useful work for them, so he sets about creating chimeras that can understand human language. This earned him his State Alchemist Certification, and boy oh boy was he gonna keep that by any means necessary. And by any means, well… I think you know the price he was willing to pay.

In the 2003 anime, though, he’s a bit different; he’s a delusional mad scientist here, and seems to genuinely be thinking, “Dude, what would happen?” while he commits crimes against God. Eventually he does come to regret what he did to his daughter, and desperately seeks a way to bring her back.

Performance: Prolific anime voice actor Chuck Huber plays him in both the 2003 series and Brotherhood. I think he nails Tucker both times, though honestly I think he has the edge in 2003 since he actually gets more to do there, what with Tucker coming back later in the series as a hulking monstrosity.

Final Fate: In the manga and Brotherhood, Ed and Al find out the truth of his experiments because Tucker thought it was a great idea to show the chimera that understands human speech to the two people his daughter and dog actually befriended, which leads to her recognizing them. Tucker is then arrested and set to be punished by the government. I do like the implication the government wasn’t necessarily punishing him because of what he did, but more because this is he same shit he already did before—thus proving to them he wasn’t a useful asset to them. Of course, that’s not good enough for my man Scar, as he sends this motherfucker to Hell personally.

In the 2003 anime, he actually comes back as a chimera and is cast in a more tragic light. Ultimately, he does survive the series, but he’s a big ugly monster and has definitely lost his mind. Not an undeserved fate, but kind of depressing.

Evilness: Hey. Hey guys. I don’t know if you know this, cuz it’s a bit of an obscure little factoid about the series, but Shou Tucker… he fuses his daughter… and his dog! Clearly a 5/5 monster, right?

I think that only works when you take everything at face value, honestly. Yes, in Brotherhood and the manga he’s clearly a self-centered nutjob who tossed aside his family for his own selfish benefit. But in the 2003 anime that popularized him, this isn’t the case; he’s well aware transmuting his daughter into a chimera will cause him to fall from grace, and does it just for the scientific benefit. And then when he himself returns later as a chimera himself, he genuinely expresses regret and is trying to bring her back in some way. Does this in any way, shape, or form excuse what he did to his own family? No! But I don’t think this version of him is a completely heartless monster. A monster, yes, but not a heartless one.

Something else about him that I feel is overlooked a lot is that he turned his wife into a chimera. People focus on Nina because she’s an adorable and sweet little girl, but I feel like people are more upset about the dog getting fused than the fact he used his own wife as a science experiment. More and more it is becoming a pet peeve of mine when people put importance on the lives of fictional non-sentient animals over fictional humans; in real life, if a man killed his wife and kid and also the dog too, I would not give one shit about the loss of the dog beyond “Wow, that’s fucked up and shows just how cruel this guy is.” Abusing animals is evil and disgusting, but their lives are never going to be worth more to me than a human life.

All that being said, I get it. We don’t get to know his wife like Nina, and the fact she, who we got to know personally, is fused with the dog is what is making things so much more tragic here and not necessarily the fact that the dog is being fused too. And it’s not like Tucker is scoring low either way; his 2003 version, while tragic, is still pretty goddamn bad and gets a 4/5, while the Brotherhood/manga version… I think he’s a 4.5/5. And that’s really because he’s just a wholly amoral mad scientist in a setting where almost every other villain is a war criminal complicit in genocide, so by comparison within the setting his evil is relatively tame.

Best Episode: While he certainly gets some interesting developments thanks to surviving his canonical death, Tucker’s still at his best in episode 7 of the original anime, “Night of the Chimera’s Cry.” While I still prefer Brotherhood overall since it’s more faithful to Arakawa’s vision, I have to say that this episode does Tucker better because it really builds up to that cruel twist ending. I get why Brotherhood got this over with quickly—the Tucker situation was a single manga chapter and they were trying to be the canonical, faithful adaptation—but I think this is one of the benefits the 2003 series had when it came to its slower pacing (and ultimately one of the reasons why it’s still worth watching).

Final Thoughts & Score: Shou Tucker walked so that Huey Emmerich could drown in a pool like a bitch.

Tucker is one of the single greatest hate sinks ever devised by a human being, and he might actually be the most famous in all of anime. You post a picture of this guy and everyone knows him. However, I feel like him becoming such a big meme has made it so that people overlook the rest of his character (something that happens with Huey as well, honestly).

This is a man driven mad in his pursuit of science, someone who decided to toss away everything of value for a cushy job and loads of cash. He’s utterly incapable of seeing how what he’s doing is different than what Ed and Al did when they tried to get their mom back, as he seems to think that two scared and desperate children who want their mom back without realizing the danger of what they’re doing is literally the same as a grown ass man fully able to understand right and wrong fusing his daughter with a dog so he can continue to collect government paychecks. And in the original anime, the horror of his actions is compounded because he’s not just some soulless glory hound there, he truly was just a desperate man doing everything in pursuit of science and tries his best to atone… and of course fails horribly because he just can’t grasp that he cannot undo the evil he’s done.

Yeah, I wish the fans would joke about something other than what a sick fuck this guy is, but at the same time can I blame them? I don’t even disagree! I love to hate this guy as much as anyone! Hell, he really does feel like the blueprint for Huey “I’m gonna use my son to power a Metal Gear” Emmerich, and feels like a nice companion to fellow Square Enix mad scientist and equally horrible father Professor Hojo. On the Mt. Rushmore of awful fictional fathers, this dude definitely deserves a place despite being an incredibly minor character. In a story filled with some of the most memorable antagonists around, it is truly impressive a one-shot sociopathic alchemist like Tucker manages to stand out.

So what score do I give him? Honestly—and I can’t believe this because I did not think I’d give him this going in—he gets an 11/10. This is the score I give for villains with massive impacts on culture, you know, Darth Vader, Orlok, Dracula, fucking Satan. And while I don’t think Tucker has changed the face of pop culture to the same degree, the fact that he is one of the single most recognizable anime characters ever despite being a minor character who is solely remembered for his actions in one episode from two decades prior is just… That’s fucking nuts, right? There are major villains who wish they had this sort of impact! I will say it’s a very light 11/10, much closer to a 10.5 if I’m being honest, but I think the sheer fact that so many people probably know about him before they even watch the show says a lot. And hey, maybe some of the people introduced to Fullmetal Alchemist through him sit down and read or watched peak fiction, so that’s even more of a plus! He is the definitive hate sink, and one which all others need to be measured to.

Whatever the case, and I say this with my whole heart: Fuck you, Shou Tucker. You are a reprehensible piece of shit like no other, and I love you for it. I’m glad you’re canonically burning in Hell (and is apparently the only character Arakawa drew there).

Get fucked, Tucker.

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men are so privileged they dont even realized how oppressed they really are

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sure are a lot of ostensible Very Serious Feminist Critiques to the effect of "misogyny comes from straight women being too slutty"

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you cannot talk about the homophobic murder of jonathan joss without including in the conversation that he is indigenous.

american indian men are at the 2nd highest risk of death by murder compared to all other ethnic groups. in their lifetimes, 82% of native men report having experienced domestic violence. yet the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are non-natives (88% of native men and 92% of native women who reported violence said their attacker was non-native). what’s more, tribal governments are often stymied in their attempts to bring justice against non-natives, meaning that many of these cases go unresolved.

this was an intersectional attack. the fact that he is indigenous matters, even if the motivation was homophobic, because it made him even more vulnerable and disposable in the eyes of his killer.

as always, look into MMIWP to learn more, and speak up for us. miigwetch, take care

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i feel like so many people misunderstand redemption arcs. they’re not about forgiving past actions. they’re not about softening previous behavior. redemption arcs are about realizing past behavior was heinous and resolving to be better, do better. that’s why so many redemption arcs fall apart upon close scrutiny.

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the tragedy of tumblr is you will inevitably meet people who you should be having a sleepover with. you should be rolling around on their floor and rummaging through their fridge and watching shitty movies with. you should be shopping with should be going out to a cafe with should be wandering through the aquarium with. people who you should be experiencing quotidian joys with... and you cannot! because they live one million miles away

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