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song-of-oots · 2 months
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My 4 year old when she realized that David Bowie's Goblin King never was and never will be real.
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song-of-oots · 2 months
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song-of-oots · 2 months
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vampire Willow and slayer Tara would have been such a power couple
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song-of-oots · 3 months
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shoutout to characters that you love dearly but if you dont see them get punched in the face canonically on screen by the time this media is over there will be a problem
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song-of-oots · 3 months
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A New Years Resolution of sorts
I started this blog for many reasons. Primarily because I love thinking and ranting about my favourite stories.
But I also created it as a kind of self-appointed therpeutic tool to help exorcise my social anxiety. The principle being: it's my blog, it's my obsessive interest in fictional stories and how they impact me, and it's relatively anonymous - so I should just talk about whatever I'm interested in talking about and if people want to read it then hey! Bonus.
But that's not really how it's worked out. I still worry about being too weird, or about posting too much at once and getting annoying, or too much on a specific topic etc. etc.
The main reason I don't post a lot is actually because I'm genuinely too busy and/or tired. But. There's still definitely occasions where instead of permitting myself to post the things I want, I'm just getting caught up in a whole ream of internalised self-censorship.
So my goal for this year is to really just: do that less.
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song-of-oots · 4 months
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i do not care if someone learned compassion from a cartoon or a comic or an anime im just glad they're here with us now a better person fighting the good fight. should it have taken something so trivial? maybe not- but it's in the past! and this is the now! and if they're objectively better for it who cares
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song-of-oots · 4 months
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2023.12.02
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song-of-oots · 4 months
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disclaimer: this under the cut has nothing to do with ouat. it’s all order of the stick, baby. please someone else read this comic and talk to me about it i have so few people in my life who do. except if you plan to don’t read this because it’s so spoilery it’s ridiculous.
Keep reading
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song-of-oots · 4 months
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#sabine has had an interesting development alongside rich burlew's own development as a writer#the very start with all the sexism it was like... hnngh maybe stop with all the ''whore'' and ''bitch''#(although haley can absolutely keep ''sneak attack bitch!'')#but as you get to see more of her she becomes far more interesting and yeah her relationship with nale is...#i was gonna say ''ethical non-monogany'' but ''ethical'' is not. not really a great word to describe an Evil succubus who sacrifices people#also to the point about nale's shock - i always read it as shocked at the *timing*#like it's not ''you've had sex with (presumably) four different people?!''#it's ''how did you manage to fuck four people in like three hours?!''#i do want to see her come up before the ending although i'm not really sure in what context she would#she is working for the ifcc so it's possible that when they reappear she will too#regardless to my original point#sabine is a great example of how burlew has grown as a writer and how the characters have become far more complex over the years#i keep trying to tell people - yes there's a lot of casual sexism and homophobia at the start but it was 2003 and that was normal!#it gets better! burlew gets so much better! he even calls himself out on it in a later strip!#these tags have gotten out of hand sorry but i have Feelings about oots and this fandom is like twelve people and a cat (and a dinosaur)#someone scream about oots with me!
@andromeda3116 these tags are raising some very interesting points so I hope you don't mind me reblogging them. I've actually been meaning to respond to this for ages, but then got ludicrously busy.
The slurs Haley throws at Sabine in the early strips didn't bother me so much initially not because I agree with them (I never have), but because I don't like all female protagonists to be heavily sanitised and overly perfect, and unfortunately it is quite possible for women to also perpetuate misogyny. Also my general policy on this sort of thing is to judge the work on its overall messaging, rather than the actions of one specific character. It would have bothered me a lot more if I'd felt that the comic was trying to portray Haley's language as justified, rather than a plausible character flaw - and I think Rich has confirmed that's basically all he intended by it. Having said that, I'm extremely glad that he also made the choice to have Haley move on from that. Not only is there a dearth of female characters in the early part of the story, Haley was the only prominent heroine, and it takes a few hundred strips until we see her with a sustained positive relationship with other women. I can certainly see why many people felt that it's really less than ideal to have your principal female protagonist throwing around that kind of language, particularly in those circumstances (so-called realistic flaws be damned).
This is actually a really good example for why I love Order of the Stick so much in spite of and in some ways because of its flaws - because you get to see that development as a writer, not only in terms of the deeper characterisation, more intricate plot etc. but also in how Rich Burlew grapples with moral/social issues and puts an increasing amount of thought into what messages his work is conveying. No person or piece of work is perfect but progress is possible. It's good to have a concrete demonstration of that.
Another example is the very conscious decision to stop sexualising all his female characters (I don't mind female characters being in sexual situations, but if the vast majority are fulfilling some romantic/sexual function and the men aren't? It's incredibly tiresome). It's so refreshing for an author to just say upfront: "my bad, I'll try to do better in future" and take it seriously, without feeling the need to get defensive and come up with loads of dubious justifications.
Separate point: I think it's pretty likely Sabine will return (for the first time ever in the new art style!) as she's still involved in whatever the IFCC is up to. It'll be very interesting to see how Nale's death has affected her.
A bunch of reasons why I have a soft spot for Sabine:
1) I like her understated comradery with Vaarsuvius.
2) Her interaction with Miko was comedy gold.
3) I hugely enjoy the way she keeps getting used to subvert traditional narratives around women’s attitudes to romance/sex (the revelation in strip 394 that she’s mad that Nale was trying to kill Haley, rather than sleep with her; strip 794 “women like me swoon for a hero, but that’s only because deep down, we think we can change them.”)
4) She may be a self-confessed “incarnation of illicit sex”, but the story isn’t usually interested in condemning her for her sexual proclivities (except for those occasions where she uses vengeful murder as an aphrodisiac, which: fair). The moral condemnation implied by the narrative is generally in reference to all of the aforementioned murder and also literally working for the forces of evil.
5) I also really like Sabine and Nale’s relationship. This isn’t because I’m particularly fond of Nale (I’m really not) but I do think it gives them both a bit of depth. I also like the fact that a non-monogamous relationship is treated as pretty non-sensational and valid (even if it did initially come as quite a shock to Nale; casually announcing you’ve had sex 4 times while off on a business trip and you don’t care who he sleeps with is probably not the best way of handling such things in real life). Anyway, if anything they are closer than ever in Blood Runs in the Family (despite a little insecurity on Nale’s part regarding Sabine’s attraction to Elan and all those edgy “good boys”). The occasionally-sleeping-with-other-people thing doesn’t actually disrupt their emotional bond at all. And basically, as a polyamorous person, it is pretty refreshing to see non-monogamy depicted in a way that doesn’t try to imply it is inherently inferior, and in the context of a relationship that is actually quite healthy (even if the rest of their behavior isn’t).
6) She helped V to thwart Tarquin, which is kind of covered in point 1, but I think it deserves a separate bullet point and quite probably it’s own separate post one day simply because I love the significance of this narratively. (In fact I hope she has a hand in Tarquin’s eventual downfall, though that doesn’t seem overly likely.)
7) She’s hot. (My husband suggested I add this one, and on consideration I realised it probably is a contributory factor so I agreed).
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song-of-oots · 4 months
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Is anyone else going a little bit insane over this exchange or is it just me?
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song-of-oots · 7 months
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I'm really hoping that the Metatron is helping to sow the seeds of his own downfall by telling Muriel to read. At the moment it seems like such an innocuous detail, but I can easily imagine that by Season 3 Muriel will have read half of Aziraphale's bookshop (because of course they will! The Metatron told them that reading is so splendid after all - and then entrusted a whole bookshop to their care!). And I'm not really sure how things will play out, but there's pretty much limitless potential for the impact that reading can have, as a source of knowledge but also by broadening horizons and empathy and nuanced, independent thinking.
So yeah, I don't know how that situation will develop, but I'm sure it'll be interesting.
(It would be such delicious irony after calling them "the dim one" if they just end up essentially swallowing a library and then aiding a revolution against him.)
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song-of-oots · 7 months
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Aziraphale denying/hesitating to call Crowley his friend while Crowley affirms their friendship at every available opportunity ("my best friend" "my only friend")
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Aziraphale never once denying that Crowley is his "boyfriend" (and even smiling at the insinuation when he's in the middle of being threatened by his superiors) while Crowley strenuously insists it's "not like that."
(It would probably blow Crowley's mind to overhear Aziraphale confirming that they're "together" to some random human… Though then again perhaps not. Chances are he'd just assume Aziraphale didn't fully understand the implications.)
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song-of-oots · 7 months
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“If the account given in Genesis is really true, ought we not, after all, to thank this serpent? He was the first schoolmaster, the first advocate of learning, the first enemy of ignorance, the first to whisper in human ears the sacred word liberty, the creator of ambition, the author of modesty, of inquiry, of doubt, of investigation, of progress and of civilization.”
~ Robert Green Ingersoll
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song-of-oots · 8 months
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Yesterday my husband watched the second episode of Good Omens Season 2
(the one with the Job minisode. The one with the
“God’s very proud of the whales. Went into some detail about how great whales are… I think the point was, if you want answers, come back when you can make a whale.”)
Then today he was reading this article about some men who spent 14 days crossing the Atlantic Ocean stowed away on the rudder of a ship, and on day 13 this happened:
The men were entering the phase of hunger and thirst that brings you close to death. In an effort to distract himself, Friday began to sit on the edge of the rudder alone, one leg hanging either side, scanning the ocean in vain for anything to interrupt the long unbroken line of the horizon. What the ocean gave him, on the 13th day of the voyage, was a whale. "The first time in my life I have seen such a thing!" he said, laughing at the memory. "If I told anyone at home I had seen a whale they will say I am lying. But I sat on the rudder and I saw a whale. And I forgot I was hungry and thirsty. I watched the whale and it was like watching creation. A holy moment."
I just... yeah.
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song-of-oots · 8 months
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This post is just so interesting my brain has just been whirring away ever since I read it going over all the parallels between Vaarsuvius and Xykon on the subject of power (and indeed, Xykon’s own approach to power and tactical thinking).
I hope you don’t mind me jumping on the post but there’re just so many Thoughts I want to express following on from this.
(Behind a cut because there are several mentions of Start of Darkness in the analysis)
Firstly, I love the contrast between these 2 statements:
“I squandered its true potential by wielding it like a cudgel.” (Vaarsuvius lamenting after their battle with Xykon) “You can have your finely-crafted watch – give me the sledgehammer to the face any day.” (Xykon gloating during his battle with Dorukan)
Both characters use blunt implements as a metaphor for their magical power, but the tone could not be more different.
In his fight with Dorukan, Xykon tries to claim that there is a level of force beyond which no tactics can succeed. But if Vaarsuvius technically had more power available to them than Xykon, why did they fail to beat him? The answer being because you have to know how to apply that force effectively (i.e. you have to have at least some grasp of tactics and what makes for decent spell selection). Vaarsuvius was completely high on the grand power finally within their clutches (not to mention severely sleep/trance-deprived) and assumed they would win simply on the basis of having more powerful spell slots. For once, they were not thinking tactically enough.
But this got me thinking: how true is Xykon’s statement to Dorukan “I have no interest in strategy or tactics or contingency planning… planning doesn’t matter. Strategy doesn’t matter.”
I’m not trying to claim that Xykon is a particularly deep tactical thinker, but I think he is exaggerating. He’s sick of wizards looking down their noses at him for being a dumb sorcerer who doesn’t think enough about strategy or fine detail, and so he rubs it in Dorukan’s face that he can grind him into the dirt without having to even think about it. And it probably is true that he doesn’t find tactics all that interesting, but if you actually look at Xykon’s behaviour, he does have contingency plans and strategies. He has them because he is interested in 2 things: humiliating his opponents, and staying alive undead. Some examples:
Only two pages after giving this speech to Dorukan, he reveals that he is carrying a magic item that wards him against positive energy attacks. (The full relevance of this in the context of his relationship with Redcloak and his brother is both scarily impressive and utterly despicable. It’s not just battle tactics, it’s psychological warfare, and it definitely requires forward thinking)
He may not want to discuss siege tactics with Redcloak, but he doesn’t just waltz into the Azure City throne room and assume he can win against a legion of paladins: he takes a Symbol of Insanity and incapacitates them all in a couple of rounds.
In the fight with V, he uses Still Meteor Swarm whilst in the clutches of Bixby’s Crushing Hand, but takes no damage – because he crafted a magic item that makes him immune to Meteor Swarms, strongly implying that he has thought about and planned for this specific eventuality.
And these are just a few examples – I could mention several more. I highly doubt Xykon would still be around or as powerful as he is without having at least some grasp of forward planning and strategy. Sure he’s a sorcerer, and stupidly lucky to be very powerful from a young age – but that alone does not an epic lich make. He’s not just riding Redcloak’s coat-tails (although being willing to accept Redcloak’s advice in the middle of battling V is also evidence of good sense and use of power). Xykon is genuinely quite a wily character whose demeanour makes other characters underestimate him – including Redcloak, who really should know better.
But speaking of taking tactical advice from Redcloak, this brings me on to another facet of Xykon’s power which parallels interestingly with Vaarsuvius. In fact I’ll just quote Xykon direct from Start of Darkness for this one:
“It’s not just about raw power, it’s about how far you’re willing to debase yourself before feeling bad. And me? I ripped off my own living flesh so that I wouldn’t have to admit weakness.”
He might grumble about “taking tactical advice from my lackey”, but he still does it because he recognises that Redcloak is making a good point. It might not be cool, but it gets the job done (“in a pinch, style can slide”). The whole reason Xykon gets to swagger around acting all jovial and cool rests on his confidence in being able to easily kill almost everyone he meets, which rests on his ability to debase himself in whatever way is necessary without feeling a shred of shame.
(Also worth mentioning the multiple occasions where Xykon has resorted to hitting his wizardly opponents with blunt objects - a fact viewed with disdain by Eugene Greenhilt, but the first time it saved his life and the second time it ended the soul splice, so what does it matter how inelegant it is?)
In doing the deal with the IFCC, Vaarsuvius also debases themself to acquire power. But they can’t do it without feeling bad, and it has consequences. They try to justify their decisions and dress it up as a noble sacrifice, but they cannot fool themselves forever, and ultimately they have other things that they care about more (the fate of the world, Inkyrius, some sense of themselves as a decent person) and they live to regret it deeply. In fact, V actually loses a significant chunk of the power they bargained for before they even arrive for the fight with Xykon, and why? Because the shock of Inkyrius’ reaction to their appearance causes them to lose their grasp on Haerta, the most powerful of the three souls involved in the splice.
At the end of the day, Vaarsuvius doesn’t have what it takes to be Xykon, but that’s a good thing.
Power Is Power
Thinking about two very similar lines from two very different fantasy series.
First, we have Cersei Lannister's "Power is power."
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Littlefinger crudely alludes to a certain secret that could ruin the Lannisters and says "Knowledge is power". Cersei responds by ordering her guards to (nearly) kill Littlefinger, then do a series of pointless orders. She follows this up by dropping the line "Power is power" and giving Littlefinger an order.
The message here is simple. To Cersei, power is the power to make others follow your commands, and in particular to threaten or inflict violence on others. She says this to deny that Littlefinger's knowledge could have any power, which is odd when you consider that she had Eddard Stark imprisoned to prevent people from learning that very knowledge.
Yeah, this is one of those scenes where David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (aka D&D) had two of their great actors monologue at each other to fill time and generate pseudo-philosophical quotes that sound good out of context.
To their credit, the nature of power is a running theme in Game of Thrones and its source material, and even if the show doesn't seem to realize Cersei is wrong, she's wrong in an in-character way. Sometimes, D&D do two wrongs that make a right.
Speaking of D&D, though, there's a Dungeons and Dragons webcomic which has a very similar line, under very different circumstances. I am, of course, talking about The Order of the Stick and one of Xykon's best monologues.
You seem to have an interest in power, so let me educate you a little while I search for you. It's sort of this thing I like to do sometimes, especially for learned wizards such as yourself. Power, it isn't something that you put on or take off like a jacket. It's something you just ARE. [...] I used to think spells equaled power, too, back when I was alive. I've learned a lot since then. You know what does equal power? Power. Power equals power. Crazy, huh? But the type of power? Doesn't matter as much as you'd think. It turns out, everything is oddly balanced. Weird, but true. For example: Right now, power takes the form of a +8 racial bonus to Listen skill checks.
The biggest difference between the two scenes is that it's hard to discuss this one without spoiling stuff; Rich Burlew puts these character-thesis-statement monologues at plot-critical junctures, you see. But the next-biggest is that it makes sense in context.
Xykon isn't a master manipulator, and he isn't being written by someone who thinks he is; he's a drama king (complete with crown), bragging about his victory to a wizard who arrogantly thought they could beat him.
Said wizard showed up to Xykon's castle with "a big pile of spells"—somewhere around twice what Xykon had, and with access to a greater variety of spells. In terms of pure, violent firepower, the wizard should have won. But they didn't, because firepower isn't the only kind of power. Sometimes power is listening to your allies' advice. Sometimes power is thinking to prepare magic traps or items ahead of time. Sometimes power is a +8 racial bonus to Listen checks.
(That's Perception for you 5e whippersnappers. Back in my day, there were different skills for hearing invisible wizards and spotting silenced rogues.)
I'd say that's the biggest difference between these two scenes. Cersei has overwhelming violence, rejects all other forms of power, and keeps failing upward until rocks fall on her. The wizard tried to do the same thing, using their overwhelming violence to overpower their enemies, only to be defeated after two pages due to a mixture of their hubris and Xykon's unexpected power.
Cersei believes that authority and violence are the only power that matter. Xykon knows power comes in all forms.
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song-of-oots · 9 months
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A bunch of reasons why I have a soft spot for Sabine:
1) I like her understated comradery with Vaarsuvius.
2) Her interaction with Miko was comedy gold.
3) I hugely enjoy the way she keeps getting used to subvert traditional narratives around women's attitudes to romance/sex (the revelation in strip 394 that she's mad that Nale was trying to kill Haley, rather than sleep with her; strip 794 "women like me swoon for a hero, but that's only because deep down, we think we can change them.")
4) She may be a self-confessed "incarnation of illicit sex", but the story isn't usually interested in condemning her for her sexual proclivities (except for those occasions where she uses vengeful murder as an aphrodisiac, which: fair). The moral condemnation implied by the narrative is generally in reference to all of the aforementioned murder and also literally working for the forces of evil.
5) I also really like Sabine and Nale's relationship. This isn't because I'm particularly fond of Nale (I'm really not) but I do think it gives them both a bit of depth. I also like the fact that a non-monogamous relationship is treated as pretty non-sensational and valid (even if it did initially come as quite a shock to Nale; casually announcing you've had sex 4 times while off on a business trip and you don't care who he sleeps with is probably not the best way of handling such things in real life). Anyway, if anything they are closer than ever in Blood Runs in the Family (despite a little insecurity on Nale's part regarding Sabine's attraction to Elan and all those edgy "good boys"). The occasionally-sleeping-with-other-people thing doesn't actually disrupt their emotional bond at all. And basically, as a polyamorous person, it is pretty refreshing to see non-monogamy depicted in a way that doesn’t try to imply it is inherently inferior, and in the context of a relationship that is actually quite healthy (even if the rest of their behavior isn't).
6) She helped V to thwart Tarquin, which is kind of covered in point 1, but I think it deserves a separate bullet point and quite probably it's own separate post one day simply because I love the significance of this narratively. (In fact I hope she has a hand in Tarquin's eventual downfall, though that doesn't seem overly likely.)
7) She’s hot. (My husband suggested I add this one, and on consideration I realised it probably is a contributory factor so I agreed).
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song-of-oots · 9 months
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saw someone say in the tags of a gifset that buffy and willow are the most important relationship in the show "to me". and i'm here to tell this person that it's not just you babe. they literally are the most important relationship in the show. it's the first relationship buffy establishes with anyone in sunnydale. in prophecy girl, she goes to fight the master after she sees how upset willow is. i need to reiterate that; buffy is full-on willing to die for willow, at the end of season 1, after knowing her for maybe four months. willow is the one who resurrects buffy because she literally can't live without her. and then whenever they're in conflict it becomes the season long arc (see seasons 4 and 6). willow and buffy working together is what changes the slayer line forever.
they are the show.
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