#I think writers are very similar to this but they have a different way to approach it

[lunarin64art]

That feeling when he can't stand to see you that way, no matter what you do, no matter what you say😩😭💔

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

If youre ok w sharing then i would love to hear your thoughts on lotor........ Hes such a weird guy. Dissecting him like a frog

If i get hate for this, i am blaming you/j but in all honesty i apologize if this kinda messy, as i have said it has beem awhile since i saw any of the episodes about him. Most of it is my personal interpretation and opinions of his character-

First of all i personally hate both "L0tor is evil rapist imperialist who did not have a single redeemable quality" and "L0tor is uwu poor baby who did nothing wrong", because yeah he had good intentions and he seemed to genuinely love Alura and care for Alteans but also he very much did do a lot of things Wrong. I am pretty sure a lot of his actions fall into category of Very Wrong

Lot0r to me is an absolute control freak, he has to be 10 steps ahead of everyone, he needs to be control of the situation no matter what. Whether it be through a silver tongue or by his blade (see N@rti's death, him vs White Lion). This is as much as a ruthless strategy as it is a trauma response. Being raised under Z@rkon, a father who only saw him as inferior half-bred, he had to learn survivor tactics. He will do anything to survive whether it be beg, lie, manipulate, and kill. He is a survivor of some genuinely godawful abuse he suffered for 10,000 years, combined with racism he suffered for being half altean

However this need to be in control extends to his allies and people he cares about. I am sure Lotor may have loved Alura, it doesnt change the fact that he very much abused her trust. Their entire relationship was based on a lie. He knew Alteans were still alive and not only did he not tell Alura about it he leaned into the "last survivors of Altea" for their relationship, which is why it was doomed since the beginning. And if it had not been this, then it would have been something else. Cause lying and manipulation are very much core of his character, that is how we are introduced to him

Like i see people going "Oh Lot0r could have been good if he had therapy and a hug", and i am not really not sure about it, cause like would he? Would he choose to be vulnerable and actually let his feelings out and be truthful in a an unbiased reliable way that will neither serve him in any way nor make him look better nor is a part of some machivilian scheme he cooked up because he doesnt trust the therapist he is paying? No

And thing is he does desire connection. He looks for connection in people who are similar to him. Half galran, altean survivors, Alura these are the people who he chose to get close to. He looks for similarities, people he can relate to, people who he sees as like him, people who he thinks can give him a sense of belonging. He is deeply lonely. However his desperation for control, absolute mistrust in anyone and everyone, and his inability to be actually honest dooms any relationship he'll ever have

Also this is probably just me, but for someone who is this morally complex character he has tendency to see things in black and white? Like it is His dad and empire= bad, alteans=good. He idolizes Altea to the point of seeing it as an Utopia, and this ideal was more important to him than any Alteans who are alive and with him. I also cant remember him ever caring about someone outside of the Dichotomy. Like at most i remember is after he became the emperor Lance pointing out how other planets need to be freed and he just brushed it off

Overall he gives me the "smart people dont always make good decisions, but they are good at justifying their bad ones" vibes. We dont know exactly why he decided to use alteans as batteries but i am choosing to go with my interpretation- "Lottor saw something fucked up in that future showing space whale thingy, decided the only way to solve was altean batteries except in true self fulfilling prophecy greek tragedy way it only made things worse and started a series of event that will cause the thing he saw causing real trouble a few years after his death.

Another thing! I think it should have been him being the focus of Evil Altean episode instead of A//ura. I hate that episode and everything it stands for but like if there Had to be an evil alteans episode then it should be around someone who is you know? Obsessed with Altean culture? Is big on control and manipulation? Is more geared towards big picture and "greater good" over individual? Is worried about turning into just like his galran father and so desperately wants to connect to his idealized version of his altean mother? Yeah

[toytulini]

thinking about my oc Bytte. and. her gender is Aro. her Aromanticism is inextricable from her gender experience.

[astrxealis]

okay rambles but i started creatively writing in like ... 5th grade? and. oh god just a little encouragement to anyone looking to get into writing or insecure or whatnot, but HELLS, maybe it's to he expected with my (obviously) very young age and inexperience with writing then, but my writing was really. yeah. Yeah. but then i'm what... a lot older now, obviously, and my writing has gotten leagues better. i'm probably not a good example for this bcs childhood years development stuff are different etc etc BUT practicing writing more and whatnot really does go a long way :]

[daydreamerdrew]

Speed Comics (1939) #27

[wordstome]

how c.ai works and why it's unethical

Okay, since the AI discourse is happening again, I want to make this very clear, because a few weeks ago I had to explain to a (well meaning) person in the community how AI works. I'm going to be addressing people who are maybe younger or aren't familiar with the latest type of "AI", not people who purposely devalue the work of creatives and/or are shills.

The name "Artificial Intelligence" is a bit misleading when it comes to things like AI chatbots. When you think of AI, you think of a robot, and you might think that by making a chatbot you're simply programming a robot to talk about something you want them to talk about, and it's similar to an rp partner. But with current technology, that's not how AI works. For a breakdown on how AI is programmed, CGP grey made a great video about this several years ago (he updated the title and thumbnail recently)

I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend you watch this because CGP Grey is good at explaining, but the tl;dr for this post is this: bots are made with a metric shit-ton of data. In C.AI's case, the data is writing. Stolen writing, usually scraped fanfiction.

How do we know chatbots are stealing from fanfiction writers? It knows what omegaverse is [SOURCE] (it's a Wired article, put it in incognito mode if it won't let you read it), and when a Reddit user asked a chatbot to write a story about "Steve", it automatically wrote about characters named "Bucky" and "Tony" [SOURCE].

I also said this in the tags of a previous reblog, but when you're talking to C.AI bots, it's also taking your writing and using it in its algorithm: which seems fine until you realize 1. They're using your work uncredited 2. It's not staying private, they're using your work to make their service better, a service they're trying to make money off of.

"But Bucca," you might say. "Human writers work like that too. We read books and other fanfictions and that's how we come up with material for roleplay or fanfiction."

Well, what's the difference between plagiarism and original writing? The answer is that plagiarism is taking what someone else has made and simply editing it or mixing it up to look original. You didn't do any thinking yourself. C.AI doesn't "think" because it's not a brain, it takes all the fanfiction it was taught on, mixes it up with whatever topic you've given it, and generates a response like in old-timey mysteries where somebody cuts a bunch of letters out of magazines and pastes them together to write a letter.

(And might I remind you, people can't monetize their fanfiction the way C.AI is trying to monetize itself. Authors are very lax about fanfiction nowadays: we've come a long way since the Anne Rice days of terror. But this issue is cropping back up again with BookTok complaining that they can't pay someone else for bound copies of fanfiction. Don't do that either.)

Bottom line, here are the problems with using things like C.AI:

It is using material it doesn't have permission to use and doesn't credit anybody. Not only is it ethically wrong, but AI is already beginning to contend with copyright issues.

C.AI sucks at its job anyway. It's not good at basic story structure like building tension, and can't even remember things you've told it. I've also seen many instances of bots saying triggering or disgusting things that deeply upset the user. You don't get that with properly trigger tagged fanworks.

Your work and your time put into the app can be taken away from you at any moment and used to make money for someone else. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people who use AI panic about accidentally deleting a bot that they spent hours conversing with. Your time and effort is so much more stable and well-preserved if you wrote a fanfiction or roleplayed with someone and saved the chatlogs. The company that owns and runs C.AI can not only use whatever you've written as they see fit, they can take your shit away on a whim, either on purpose or by accident due to the nature of the Internet.

DON'T USE C.AI, OR AT THE VERY BARE MINIMUM DO NOT DO THE AI'S WORK FOR IT BY STEALING OTHER PEOPLES' WORK TO PUT INTO IT. Writing fanfiction is a communal labor of love. We share it with each other for free for the love of the original work and ideas we share. Not only can AI not replicate this, but it shouldn't.

(also, this goes without saying, but this entire post also applies to ai art)

[cripplecharacters]

Does Your Scarred Character Have to Hate Themself?

[large text: Does Your Scarred Character Have to Hate Themself?]

(TLDR: no. literally no.)

A frequent topic that shows up around facial differences is the self-hatred, self-disgust, self-insert-negative-emotion that we must surely experience. I want to ask* writers without FDs - why? Why do you feel about us in such a way that that's the most common way of depicting us?

*- rhetorical question. I promise I know the answers, but I'm not sure if writers do.

It's frankly worrying to me. Is it really that common to assume that disabled people have this internal, never-ending hatred for themselves? The overwhelming majority of us don't. We hate inaccessibility, when people stare, or some symptoms when they get in the way, or how expensive being disabled is, but I find the concept of us being so completely disturbed by our own disabilities extremely strange. It’s “tragedy porn” intersecting “most basic ableism”.

“But trauma!”

[large text: “But trauma!”]

Trauma of what! People with facial differences don't have some sort of default trauma that we come with like it’s a factory setting. We are a group of people with tens of thousands of stories and experiences!

“Trauma of experiencing ableism/disfiguremisia” - that's better, at least this means something. If you're writing a story about this, please get a sensitivity reader with a facial difference. You can assume how we feel all you want, but in my experience these assumptions are often bizarre and unrealistic. Or just end up writing the same “disability so sad” sob story that everyone has seen a billion times. If you want to write about disfiguremisia, you need to understand the nuance and have more than just the basic level knowledge (which 99% of people don’t have either). If you can’t do that, don’t write about it. Simple as that.

“Trauma of the accident” - thankfully, the accident is an event and a facial difference is a disability. If you want to connect these two like they're one and the same, you're almost surely going to demonize disability. People with traumatic spinal cord injuries, acquired amputees, people with TBI, people with acquired facial differences - we participate in our communities, we have hobbies, we date, we play with our dogs. Disability isn't a death sentence. Media who make it feel like it is certainly don't help people who do suddenly become disabled, don't you think?

Here's a post by @blindbeta about blind characters becoming blind through trauma that’s better made than anything I could hope to write here. I heavily recommend giving it a read.

And, I can't stress this enough - most of us didn't have “the accident”, most of us are born like this! "Traumatic scars" isn't the only facial difference that exists, far from it, it's only one of thousands. It's 99% of our representation and "representation". If you want to make a character with FD - please consider that we aren't a monolith. Just like not all physical disabilities are "wheelchair user with paralysis", not all facial differences are "traumatic scar with somehow no nerve damage".

The overrepresentation of it is incredibly telling, and sometimes - or very frequently - feels like the writer doesn’t actually even want to deal with us. They want to use our disability as a way to cheap drama, moral metaphors, tragic backstories. Not to represent us as living people who are much more similar to you than you apparently think.

Now, I do have enough awareness to know that that's a big part of the appeal. “Horrific Thing #2456 happens” and boom, instant drama! Of course, it's a reasonable response that they would hide their disability for years, avoid talking about it in any way, and magically change their personality to be mean and reclusive, or at least be constantly soooo sad about how much it sucks to be disabled, right?

Do I really need to say that having your character becoming disabled be the worst thing ever is ableism 101? We have been talking about this for so long at this point. Writing about the process of adapting to a specific disability is better left to people who have actual experience in it.

To give an example that will hopefully resonate more with Tumblr users, I will use the fact that I'm also gay. It's not perfect by any means but probably much more familiar territory.

Imagine, let's say, a character. He's gay. The story he's in is supposedly progressive, certainly not trying to be homophobic. The character has experienced an incident, maybe an act of aggression or a hate crime, that happened because he’s gay, which was traumatic. Happens IRL, sure. So of course the character starts hating being gay. He talks about how gross and disgusting it is, he never lets anyone know that he could be “one of them”, certainly not take a stance against homophobia. You can't mention him without mentioning the accident, they're seemingly fused together. No gay love, joy, even basic happiness, he would actually choose to be straight in a heartbeat if given the option to and complains that he can't. This is shown as a neutral, obvious thing that a gay man would do, no one comments on it. He stays like this the whole time, unless there’s a plot twist in the last 10 pages where the world is now magically perfect ("we fixed discrimination, yay!"). This is the only LGBT character in the story.

Keep in mind that there are people similar to this in real life, living with extreme internalized homophobia.

Is this, in your opinion, realistic and thoughtful representation? How does it feel when written by a cishet writer, versus a gay writer who is recalling his experiences? Do you think that it's reasonable for the majority of media representation to be like this, or very close to it? How would it affect younger gay people who might already be uncomfortable with being queer? Are gay men the target audience, or are they not even considered as a group of people who read books? Is this helping or damaging the general public's idea of how it is to be gay? Why or why not?

The Masterpiece

[large text: The Masterpiece]

From 13 to 19 of May, we are celebrating Face Equality week (what a coincidence!). It’s important to me in general - and I wish it was more important to abled people, but I digress - especially its theme for this year.

“My Face is a Masterpiece”

Great statement, it represents the community well, I do enjoy how bold it is. Very cool stuff, I love the work our advocates are doing!

But why do I bring this up?

Well, to very non-subtly show that we aren’t a self-hating group of people. We are a community, a community saying “our faces are beautiful, look!”, we are saying “treat us equally, and do it now!”. Our activism isn’t about self-disgust. It’s about fighting your-disgust. 

Why can’t writers keep up? Why are you still stuck decades behind?

Is this the only reason I bring it up?

The Call to Celebration

[large text: The Call to Celebration]

FEI, the org behind organizing it, asks a very simple question (emphasis mine):

“Why do we so often see stories about facial difference as a ‘tragedy’, when they should be about triumph?” “Calling all artists, allies, creatives, galleries.  You can rewrite the story to bring about #FaceEquality and celebrate the unique artistry found in every face. Your participation this #FaceEqualityWeek will help to tell the real story, that there is a masterpiece in every face.”

Here. We are calling for you to stop. Directly from the biggest international advocacy alliance group that's out there. If you create, this is for you.

The last argument to not have your character with a facial difference hate themselves? Because we don’t want this. We are tired and frustrated. For me personally, I’m also offended by this kind of assumption. We aren’t tragedies or cheap entertainment for abled people to pity or be horrified by. We are people, and if you can’t internalize that, you have no reason to write about us.

For once, celebrate us. Happy Face Equality Week!

mod Sasza

[misskamelie]

It's very nice to see how certain crafts are being approached by more and more people (ex. Drawing, music, writing, etc), but I hope this won't make people be less suprised by the qualities of the professionals of the field

[siyzuii]

⨳ 　 ʾ apps/sites 4 shifting 　 . 　 ♡

hi! this will be long but i made a list of apps/sites that might be helpful for your shifting journey. reminder that you don't need these to shift but they can be helpful with manifesting, keeping track of stuff, etc.

enjoy! divider cr

NOT SPONSORED BTW LMAO

﹒ 　 ⊹ 　 🝮 　 OO1: NOTION 　 ✩

description:

basically notion is an app for documents and stuff. i have to say this one's relatively known and it's such a huge life saver and i know that probably everyone knows about it already (as they should) but i'm gonna recommend it once again.

useful for:

scripting

dashboards you can add life goals & stuff here you can look up some templates/ideas and see what i mean LOL

cons:

i personally can not think of any major ones because this app is just that good

you do have to make new accounts for the text ai generating feature but i don't know if anyone would use that

additional notes:

i personally love how customizable it is! like you can make each page have a custom icon & header, add widgets, images, and so much more. it is so so so insanely helpful for scripting i'm telling you. or you can just be basic, that works too. there's also a bunch of script templates online including specific ones (like a better cr, fame dr, fantasy dr, fandom-specific drs, bla bla bla) and it's literally the only thing shifttok is good for imo. i'm a big fan of shifterium's templates but there's other people who make them as well and i'm sure you can find some recommendations!

★ 　 ₊ 　 ➲ 　OO2: CANVA

description:

a website + app where you can design stuff from headers down to presentations, posters, covers, etc..

useful for:

album covers for singer/idol drs

book covers for writer drs or something

fake social media posts but there's better apps out there and i'll list them here as well

and much more!

cons:

a lot of things (most of which i think are the good stuff) are paid but you can find similar replicas if you scroll long enough i guess..?? and there's a free trial but i don't know if that helps

additional notes:

definitely my favorite place to go when i need to design something tbh. there's a bunch of templates you can use and the layout is very easy to navigate through! and it's pretty easy to find free alternatives for the paid stuff you do have in there

₍ⁿ⑅..ⁿ₎ 　 ˇ 　 ⩩ 　 OO3: PARROT 　 ❀ 　

description:

parrot is an app where you can record yourself saying literally anything and play it on a continuous loop

useful for:

affirmations (manifesting??)

cons:

i'm pretty sure it's iOS only

additional notes:

personally i haven't used this app (i don't like my voice so i will not be recording myself saying affirmations thank yew) so i can't give it a rating but from the looks of it and based off of recommendations i've seen it's pretty useful. should be a white icon with a pink circle that has a white parrot in it!

≥≤ 　 ﹕ 　 ⤷ 　 OO4: BEHINDTHENAME 　 ◍

description:

a site where you can generate names & even life stories if you choose it (including height, weight, blood type, birthday, nationality and more i think?? at least it gives those for me). you can choose from different cultures and stuff like fantasy & mythology.

useful for:

finding a name & info for your dr self (which is literally you by the way don't forget that!) and potentially other people you'd like to script in

cons:

it really just helps to make a basic profile of a person so the things you can do with it can be a little limited

additional notes:

i prefer using this site for ocs instead but i think it can definitely help with shifting! oddly enough it also shows like a lifespan & cause of death so.. cool i guess!!!!

✦ 　 ﹕ 　 OO5: SOCIAL MAKER/dummy

description:

social maker & social dummy are both apps where you can replicate almost basically anything from the internet from twitter posts to facebook posts, youtube posts, and more!

useful for:

social media stuff especially useful for fame drs, streamer drs, idol/singer drs and so much more

cons:

both apps were deleted so you have to have had installed them before if you want to get them back

social maker is ios only i think?

additional notes:

yeah both apps are deleted but there's alternatives out there like twinote (for twitter) photonote (for instagram) canva (has fake social media templates as i said lol) and others that you can look for (because i personally only use twinote)

⋆ 　 ᶻᶻ 　 　 OO6: HELLOFACE 　 ﹒ 　 ★

description:

basically an app for ai face swapping

useful for:

seeing what your face claim (if you have one) would look like on for example dances, fancams, interviews definitely useful for idol/singer/maybe fame drs

cons:

uses ai (i'm personally not a big fan of ai)

pretty underground so the chances that you might not like it are not low

✭ 　 　 ❒︎ 　 OO7: ROOM PLANNER 　 . 　 ♡

description:

basically what the name says. it's a 3d home designer

useful for:

making your dr room/house

visualizing your dr room/house

cons:

has paid stuff

┊ 　 ‧ 　⬭ 　 OO8: COMBYNE

description:

an app where you can combine items you like from a wide selection of stuff to make outfits!

useful for:

making outfits for your dr

visualizing said outfits

additional notes:

there's other things you can do on the app like challenges where you can compete to make the best outfit i think?? looks pretty fun i might try it HAHAHA

yuh so i got a little lazy here at the end & i know this is prolly not very helpful because most of these apps/sites are pretty well known but maybe just maybe.. i helped someone out...

HAPPY SHIFTING!!!!!

[ambrosia-ghostie]

i don't think people outside the fandom understand what we are actually upset about. plays/films/tv shows have had similar endings for literally ages. at least two of my favorite musicals (once on this island and hadestown) do, in fact. tragedy can be beautiful, if executed correctly. but that's not it. the ending on its own is not why we're upset. we're upset about what came before the credits rolled and all that was lost and not addressed beforehand. dave. ray. sloane. i could go on. that's why we're asking why this season even exists... because it just created more gaping holes in the existing plot while also throwing in a bunch of new unanswered questions - and ooc nonsense - that will never be resolved. not to mention, the conclusion essentially tells us: if you have trauma, the world is better off with you not existing at all... you're broken and you always will be in any timeline. that is a very dangerous message. i was a lost fan, i was a game of thrones fan, but this is different. because of the way the umbrella academy is constructed, the events that unfolded in season 4 taint what came before it. so, i'm pretty on board with pretending it didn't happen because i personally wish it didn't. i don't know if i'll ever emotionally invest in a tv show again, tbh. television is unique in that your life unfolds as the show does year after year. i think the writers/producers/etc. forgot this... by making these characters cease to exist, you also erased a part of all of us. and that's devastating.

your grief right now is valid. don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

[tritoch]

i have seen people be like "if you think what the dawntrail protagonists do in zone six is valid you have to conceded emet's approach/perspective was valid, what you do is basically what he does" and it's like...nah. it's obviously intentionally very similar ("it's like poetry, it rhymes") but there's some key differences:

emet is disgusted by sundered life, which he sees as inhuman, and longs to return to the unrecoverable past. so he does seven(ish) planet-wide genocides. the endless aren't new life, their ability to grow and learn is specifically in question (at the very least they are fundamentally incapable of taking in new sensory experience of certain forms), they're shades from the unrecoverable past, and you are destroying them in favor of those still alive.

also, we aren't disgusted by them nor do we think anything is fundamentally justified if done to them (everyone pretty much no-sells cahciua "we aren't alive so it doesn't matter if you kill us :)," in fact). we don't have like 12,000 years and the most advanced magic known to anyone alive. we are forced by serious exigency to destroy them due to a political impasse with their leadership's policy re: resource extraction. this tonal difference is in fact extremely important.

the endless themselves seem pretty ambivalent about the whole deal. they're bored or they're wary of the way their world keeps shrinking, and it's very explicitly neither a functioning society by any recognizable human terms nor a paradise.

related to the above, basically every named endless turns to the person most relevant to them (cahciua to erenville, krile's parents to her, namikka to wuk lamat, otis to you) and is like, huh, i really appreciate having this moment of grace at the end of my journey to see that it was all worthwhile and to resolve my lasting regrets, but i understand what you're here to do and yeah, it's probably time for us to go. (does the writing put a finger on the scale by doing this? sure, but the writers also designed and built the scales and everything they're weighing on them, so i find it hard to discredit any one aspect for being the writers' invention.)

finally uh no one in the party has kids with the endless or lives a full human lifetime as one of them lol.

it's important to remember that emet was definitely at least somewhat lying about not seeing the sundered as real people. the fact that he has "lived a thousand thousand of your lives . . . broken bread with you, fought with you, grown ill, grown old, sired children and yes, welcomed death’s sweet embrace" makes everything he did soooooo much crazier than what you do. if i managed to convince an endless to fall in love with me and i had a kid with them and i loved that kid so much that their death threw me into a permanent grief spiral then like. yeah i guess i would have to be like "well hats off to emet, folks." but luckily the game doesn't make you do that.

even if you insist everyone in living memory was a full living person that we killed, you're still weighing like a city of people versus 7+ planet-wide mass murders. you do not under any circumstances got to hand it to him.

living memory absolutely is evocative of everything that happens in shadowbringers. but rather than placing us in emet's shoes, it forces us to relive what we already did, to really fully face up to what we have done by promising to remember emet's culture after destroying any chance of its return. after two games going hard on the hope part of the game's central theme of hope arising from grief, now we're doing grief. we are forced to see the past of our memories not as a cold, ghostly art deco cubus-plagued socratic method hellscape but as the most beautiful technicolor theme park where everyone's happy and no one's sad and there's parades every day and your parents are alive and they love you so much. and then the game's conclusion is, yeah, you were still right to let go. in fact, you were and are morally obliged to let go. the living were and are worth more than the dead. our grief in letting go of them may be immense and turns our world to bleak nothingness for a time, and that is important to recognize, but at the end of the day our most pressing duty is to those we can yet save, not those we have lost.

[salvadorbonaparte]

Posting only a snippet to protect the person's identity and because I don't want to attack them personally but comment on the many similar opinions I have seen:

[ID: a screenshot of a tumblr post reading "Don't get me wrong. But translating a poem loses it's meaning and soul."]

No one is as aware of translation loss as translators themselves. No one is as aware of translation gains as translators themselves either.

On tumblr, there are many posts about how reading something in translation "can't make you grasp the original" or how subtitles or dubs are "inaccurate". This is incredibly unkind to translators who work very hard and usually get paid very little to make books or audiovisual media accessible to you at all (not even to mention all the other areas of translation you're not even aware of).

Of course, some translators make mistakes. But writers make typos too and some make it into published books. Of course, there are cases of manipulation or censorship, I wrote my thesis on this, but more often than not these cases were caused by outside forces not the translators themselves. There are bad translations like there are bad novels or films.

I want more people to think of translation as a creative process that has nearly infinite strategies and choices. Translations differ because they are made by humans. They differ because there are as many ways to translate something as there are to write something. A translation will always necessarily differ from its source because, and it sounds really silly saying this out loud, it's in a different language. And at the same time, the translator is in a constant dialogue with the author and audience, trying to bridge a gap between them.

Translation is not meaningless and not soulless. It adds to the original the soul of the translator.

[gardens-dogs-starwars]

Reasons Clone X is Tech:

-his accent is different from the rest-they are trying to conceal it by layering it with a regular clone voice and the helmet modulation but it's there

-he does a "Tech turn" when he lands his ship

-Cross' attempt to look back at one of the Clone X guys in episode 3 and his mournful look down after he says they come out of reconditioning "different." How would he know this unless he knew one of the clones getting reconditioned and watching them get their personality wiped away? How many clones does Cross know personally to notice such a change?

-while he's strangling Cross, Cross taps his shoulder like you would when you were sparring and want to "tap out." This is a similar gesture that Hunter did when Wrecker's chip activated in Season 1 and he was also being strangled. You would think he would hit him or fight harder instead of "tapping out" if he was fighting for his life. Makes you wonder if he doesn't want to hurt the other person...

-why would they go to such lengths to show us scenes we have seen Tech endure before? Such as getting his leg crushed and limping around through the pain, grunting after moving big rocks around, falling over a waterfall and listening to his little gasps/coughs for air...this would have to be some kind of elaborate misdirect if we weren't supposed to think it was Tech.

-there were definitely strains of the Plan 99 theme as Cross and Clone X went over the falls

-lots of other little things like his leg pouches, the definition of his (very shapely) calves, his helmet being a little different and looking a little "friendlier" around the eyes, his inability to follow orders, the way he can anticipate the Batch's moves

I think Cross acts sketchy about these Clone X types because he knows it's Tech and thinks it's permanent/unfixable so he doesn't want his brothers to be hurt over it. I trust him and his redemption arc, he has proven he has changed and is sorry for his previous choices. I could see how him keeping this from the Batch could cause friction between them down the road and I bet the writers would love to mine the angst from this situation.

It is also possible but less likely that he knows it's Tech and Tech is just in deep cover so he doesn't want to blow it? This theory might just be me hoping Tech is ok.

I have never been more convinced this Clone X is Tech. How much is left of him...not sure.

[sparrowlucero]

Even if a creator is a bad person it's still okay to like their work. People need to mind their own business.

Honestly it's not really that sort of situation. I'll actively defend Steven Moffat here.

There was a huge hate movement for him back in the early 2010s - which, in retrospect, formed largely because he was running 2 of the superwholock shows at once, one of which went through extremely long hiatuses* and the other of which was functionally an adaptation of an already well regarded show**, making him subject to a sort of double ire in the eyes of a lot of fandom people. Notably, his co-showrunner, Mark Gatiss, is rarely mentioned and much of his work is still attributed to Moffat (and yes, this includes that Hbomberguy video. Several of "Steven Moffat's bad writing choices" were not actually written by him, they were Gatiss.)

People caricatured the dude into a sort of malicious, arrogant figure who hated women and was deliberately mismanaging these shows to spite fans, to the point where people who never watched them believe this via cultural osmosis. It became very common to take quotes from him out of context to make them look bad***, to cite him as an example of a showrunner who hated his fans, someone who sabotaged his own work just to get at said fans, someone who was too arrogant to take criticism, despite all of this being basically a collective "headcanon" about the guy formed on tumblr. Some if it got especially terrible, like lying about sexual assault (I don't mean people accused him of sexual assault and I think they're making it up, I mean people would say things like "many of his actresses have accused him of sexual assault on set" when no such accusations exist in the first place. This gets passed around en masse and is, in my opinion, absolutely rancid.)

On top of that a ton of the criticism directed at the shows themselves is, personally, just terrible media criticism. So much of it came from assuming a very hostile intent from the writer and just refusing to engage with the text at all past that.

Like some really common threads you see with critique of this writer's work, especially in regards to Doctor Who since that's the one I'm most familiar with:

A general belief that his lead characters were meant to be ever perfect self inserts, and so therefore when they act shitty or arrogant or flawed in any way, that's both reflective of the author and something the show wants you to view as positive or aspirational.

An overarching thesis that his characters are "too important" in the narrative due to the writer's arrogance and self obsession (even though this is a very deliberate theme that's stated several times)

A lot of focus on the writer personally "attacking" the fans or making choices primarily out of spite.

A tendency to treat the show being different to what it's adapting as inherently bad and hostile towards the original.

Just generally very little consideration and engagement with the themes, intent, etc. of the shows

This one's a little more nebulous and doesn't apply to all critique but a lot of it, especially recently, is clearly by people who haven't seen the show in like 10 years and their opinion is largely formed secondhand through like, "discourse nostalgia". Which. you know. bad.

I think these are just weird and nonsensical ways to engage with a work of fiction. I also think it's really sad to see the show boiled down to this because that era of who is, in my opinion, very thematically rich and unique among similar shows, and I'm disappointed that it's often dismissed in such a paltry way.

This isn't to say people aren't allowed to critique Steven Moffat or anything, but the context in which he basically became The Devil™ to a large portion of fandom and is still remembered in a poor light is very tied to this perfect storm of fan culture and I just don't agree with a ton of it.

* I'm sure most people have seen the way long running shows and hiatuses will cause people to fall out with a show, with some former fans turning around and joining a sort of "anti fandom" for it while it's still airing. That happened with both these shows. ** Doctor Who will change it's entire writing staff, crew, and cast every few years, and with that comes a change in style, tone, theme - the old show basically ends and is replaced by a new show under the same title. As Steven Moffat's era was the first of these handovers for the majority of audiences, you can imagine this wasn't a well loved move for many fans. *** I know for a fact most people have not sought out the sources for a lot of these quotes to check that they read the same in context because 1) most of them were deleted years ago and are very difficult to find now and 2) many of them do actually make sense in the context of their respective interviews

[ladyminaofcamelot]

Do you ever think about the contrast in King Lune's parenting and the Tisroc's parenting and go a little insane? Cause here's the thing, Rabbadash and Corin are actually quite similar in some ways (eagerness to fight, quick tempers, and both crown princes, to name a few) but they are so different because they were raised by very different men. The Tisroc tells Rabbadash not to go to war unless there is a certainty of winning. King Lune tells Corin not to pick fights with anyone weaker. The Tisroc is aware he may be sending his son to die in war, and does not care. King Lune sees his son was in the battle and scolds him for it because he could have been hurt, but is also proud of his courage in defending his home. Like just the way you can see the differences in these two rulers and in the family is so artful to me. You can see a similar comparison with Aravis and Susan in Aravis' father vs Edmund. We see Edmund say that if Rabbadash wants Susan against her will it will be over his dead body, but no amount of pleading can pursuade Aravis' father not to marry her off, so she is forced to escape alone in her brother’s armor. A brother who went away to war, like Peter. And while Peter is alive and Aravis' brother is dead, neither of them come into the story except by mention. There are so many little foils and parallels throughout the book (especially with the general theme of twins) and it makes my little writer's heart so happy. I swear I could write a full essay on each one.

[the-modern-typewriter]

Hi

It's been brought to my attention that there are people out there who are sadly plagiarising my work again.

1. This is not okay.

To clarify, while I'm very happy for people to take inspiration from my stories (in the same way you might any book you read from a bookshop), I don't want my work used or reposted without credit.

I'm not going to go into lengths on why it is wrong to plagiarise someone else's writing. I don't think my tumblr post is magically going to change anyone's mind, especially as if you've followed me long enough you know we've done this rodeo before.

So.

2. How to tell when writing is plagiarised

It can be very difficult to tell when something is plagiarised, especially if we have never come across the original work before and have no reason to recognise it.

I don't think it's realistic for everyone to vet everything they come across online for plagiarism, but it's also something I don't see talked about a lot for fiction.

These questions to ask yourself are not foolproof and not applicable to everything. But I think they can be a start.

If the writer has posted more than one story, is there a similarity across them? While writing style can change across an author's different pieces, there is still usually going to be a similar feel across stories if they came from the same person. Writers have voices and quirks and little things that are specific to them. If every piece feels wildly different then it might be coming from different places. This is probably going to come down to gut reaction and instinct in the first instance. But that's okay. Because that gut reaction is just there to make you think twice and maybe investigate more thoroughly.

How much are they posting? Can people churn an extraordinary amount of words out? Yes, sometimes. But...as a general ballpark, no. Writing takes time and effort. If someone is coming out with enormous amounts of writing every day or week or month or whatever, then this can be a hint to look a little closer.

Do you ever see hints of their writing process? Can the writer talk about their characters or what they want out of the story or anything like that? Do they ever post a story organically in response to a request or whatever? Not all writers know in-depth everything about their story or characters or plot, but the main point here is that the finished product is the tip of the iceberg. If someone is a writer than there is more going on beneath the surface of the posted stories.

I hope this helps!