#Source Code Plagiarism

[codedetect]

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[felixcloud6288]

The most audacious thing I ever did in my academic career happened in a computer security class. We were given an assignment to pull a phishing attack on our professor and then write up a report about our research on him, reason for our attack, etc.

I decided to send him an email claiming to be Advil offering a mail-in service for pain meds. I then stole the source code from Advil's front page, edited the code to remove links to other pages, created a section where he could put in his information, and sent the modified code to the professor.

In my writeup, I admitted to stealing a company's code and that I committed multiple acts that broke the school's academic integrity rules including plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark infringement. I also told him he should ignore this because the assignment's main goal was to commit a crime so why should I care about other felonies I commit along the way.

I got an A+.

[yourfavoritehouseplant]

I watched James Somerton's final video, and all I got was this 6 page document

As soon as I learned his final unreleased video was on Revolutionary Girl Utena, I knew I had to hate watch it. I didn't know that I'd spend the following 4 hours making a comprehensive doc on everything I hated about it. But here we are.

The TLDR (is this too long to be a TLDR?)

The intro section, as well as Part 2, are directly plagiarized from wikipedia. The rest is unclear.

He makes a “haha this show is so weird right guys” joke 10 different times

He reads Anthy as so emotionally stunted she literally has to be taught how to think for herself, and believes that being the rose bride makes her feel good

He says that his reading is ‘vastly different” from the rest of the community, before boldly stating that this is because he sees it as a “deeply allegorical and symbolic story”

He sees the sexual abuse as “not to be taken literally”

Insists that the show be separated into parts that are strictly literal and strictly allegorical for the entirety of parts 3 and 4, before making the contradictory move of analyzing characters as allegories during part 5

The only characters that get dedicated sections are Akio and Dios, who he doesn’t believe are the same person. 

He says Dios gets his powers by “deflowering women”

He calls Akio, known child predator, a chaotic bisexual

Uses 14 year old SA survivor Anthy’s passive personality to make a joke about her being a bottom

His final point is that Utena was the real prince all along

There are no citations

Anyway, full version for people who hate themselves under the cut. With time codes, because I cite my sources.

Part 1: Intro

This entire section is almost exclusively quoted from the Wikipedia article for Revolutionary Girl Utena. Words have been changed, but the order at which certain topics come up is not. Highlights include:

0:56 In his introduction of Be-Papas, lists the founding members in literally the exact same order as Wikipedia.

1:40-2:00 His list of Be-Papas previous works is lifted entirely from wikipedia, only with the words changed. This leads to a strange moment at 1:52 where he claims Be-papas ‘lent their talents to’ Neon Genesis Evangelion, a show which started production at least a year before Be-papas was founded. On the wikipedia article for Utena, this is instead referring to the previous work of Shinya Hasegawa and Yōji Enokido

4:23 he uses a quote by Yūichirō Oguro describing the production as a “tug of war”. He seems to have lifted this in its entirety from Wikipedia, as he does not cite the actual source it is from (the box set companion book, btw)

As for James Somerton originals, at 0:44 he claims that out of all magical girl series,��none to my knowledge have been more discussed and dissected than the 1997 series Revolutionary Girl Utena” He will go back on this at 5:05, where he states that “Sailor Moon takes the lion’s share of discussion” in regard to influential magical girl anime

Part 2: Part 1

(At least I know I’m not funny, unlike James Somerton)

Speaking of which. Here is every single time he makes a “wow this show is sooooo weird you guys” joke: 6:00, 8:50, 10:40, 10:58, 13:46, 17:07, 24:16, 30:34, 41:19, 48:01

Here’s every time the punchline to the joke is the existence of Nanami, a character who he otherwise completely disregards: 10:56, 12:05, 16:22, 42:40

6:16 Claims that the “Apocalypse saga” and “Akio Ohtori saga’ are two names for the same several episodes, depending on the release. This is untrue. Instead, different releases either only have the Apocalypse saga, or split the episodes into an Akio Ohtori saga and then the Apocalypse saga. 

7:58 Claims Utena intervening on Anthy’s behalf begins the first duel. While this happens in the movie, Touga intervenes in the scene he uses clips from (like literally right after the shot he uses in the video). Utena only gets drawn into the duels when Wakaba’s love note to Saionji is posted. Youtuber Noralities’ Utena video also gets this wrong, which makes me wonder if this was copied.

9:09 Claims Akio’s “End of the World” moniker is actually more closely translated to “Apocalypse”. In reality, the translation moves away from a more apocalyptic reading, with 世界の果て (Sekai no hate) apparently translating closer to “the furthest reach of a known world” or “edge of the world”. (Love the implications of this translation, but I digress)

9:10 As can be assumed from the previous point, this means I can’t find any sources that point to them not using the title “apocalypse” for religious reasons

10:10 Uses Anthy’s extreme passivity under her Rose bride persona to make a top/bottom joke. I’m gonna repeat this in case you’re just skimming. He uses a trait that likely stems from years of abuse, (possibly exaggerated by the persona Anthy uses to manipulate people), and uses it to call her a bottom. 

He also just doesn’t seem to understand how the whole point of Utena constantly telling Anthy that she's just a normal girl who should make more friends is framed as Utena imposing her will on Anthy, just as much as the previous Engaged have done. 

11:54 Apologies in advance for my most “um, actually!” point yet, but technically his statement that Anthy stops being host to the Sword of Dios is wrong. Akio literally pulls a sword out of her chest in the final duel. It's a more evil-looking sword of Dios, granted.

13:02 !!! CANTARELLA SCENE ALERT !!! He interprets it as them fighting over Akio?? Which like. I will allow people to have their own interpretations of vague and symbolic scenes. I will. I swear. This is not technically incorrect. It just makes me want to eat my own intestines.

14:44 Bad Anthy take #1: He states Anthy “is emotionally stunted to the point where she needs people to make decisions for her because she does not know how to think for herself” This ignores several moments of Anthy clearly making her own choices throughout the show, including the suicide attempt Somerton mentions about a minute prior. This also strips Anthy of what little agency she has throughout the story, usually exerted through messing with Utena or Nanami. (The fact that she repeatedly makes choices that contribute to her own abuse is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting parts of her character, and it's a shame that Summerton’s ‘reading’ of the story completely disregards that)

Additionally, he once again reads Utena ‘urging Anthy to think for herself” in the first arc as an unambiguously good move, and not as something critiqued in the show.

14:52 Summerton reads the Swords of hatred as symbolizing men’s hatred specifically. Again, I’m trying not to completely disregard differing interpretations to a show like Utena, but this feels very simplistic, especially considering the harm we see aimed towards Anthy by other women

16:42 Here he claims that his reading of the story seems to be “vastly different” from the bulk of Utena discourse. What is this reading? That the show shouldn’t be read literally. Or, in his words, “[we can interpret] Revolutionary Girl Utena as a deeply allegorical and symbolic story about the struggles of coming of age amidst widespread institutional corruption in a high school and which describes a passive culture of inaction in regard to brazen instances of domestic exploitation in which there is not only a question about the caporeality of the events transpiring but also which events can be taken for granted and which events are meant to signify abstract sociological institutions.” The idea that he believes this is in any way a new reading of the material honestly baffles me.

Part 3: Part 2

17:48 through 18:50 differently quotes the Wikipedia article for postmodernism. He even makes a joke at 17:55 about Wikipedia. Please kill me. 

The first three themes he lists at 19:11 are just the three main themes listed on the Revolutionary Girl Utena Wikipedia page. What was that about a “vastly different” reading, James?

You’re gonna have to take my word for it, but this section is so short because it's just him talking about the various ways the story can’t be taken literally. He does, ironically, call this a hot take.

Part 4: Part 3

Here’s where the reading falls apart folks

At 23:15, he states that some things in Utena are allegorically coded, while others are to be taken literally. This is true. However, he seems to take this to mean that some parts of the show are Strictly Literal, while others are Strictly Allegorical for things going on in the Literal World. 

This is apparently why he prefers the Anime to the Movie, where there basically is no separation between the Literal and Allegorical

This take is bizarre to me for several reasons, but here is my favorite. At several points, he mentions how Revolutionary Girl Utena is a work of Magical Realism. Magical Realism is literally defined by its blending of the “literal” and “allegorical”, the mix of fantastical elements in a mundane, realistic setting. This idea of the impossibility of a blurred line, that Utena must either have lore where the magic is all real and means nothing, or dedicated allegory segments quarantined from the rest of the story, is contrary to the very idea of Magical Realism.

I can’t help but wonder if Somerton took his mentions of Magical realism from a previous work, due to how little it is consistent with his final argument. Either way, this section suggests a great lack of creativity in his analysis, a shame for such a creative work.

24:36: Shiori slander, for those who care

After this he gets really worked up about people assuming symbolism in everything, even when the author ‘doesn’t make it clear something is symbolic’. He shuts down a reading of a shot in the Lord of the Rings. Miley Cyrus is there? Very The Curtains Were Blue of him. 

28:22 Claims that Wakaba is the key to telling where the Strictly Literal segments end and the Strictly Allegorical segments begin. He states that, under this lens, deeply personal moments of character suffering such as all of the sexual abuse and Anthy’s suicide attempt (which he literally cites) should be read as symbolic and be “approached with uncertainty rather than confusion”. (28:24-29:13)

This also somewhat falls apart when you consider Wakaba is the jeep in the movie's car chase

And then he rants about people not liking his Attack on Titan video for a bit. Since its potential symbolism also doesn't follow hard enough rules to be symbolism. Once again, the separation of “fact vs allegory” I haven’t watched AOT, so that's all I’ll say.

Part 5: Part 4

Thank god this part is short. Much like Dios’ on-screen presence.

32:55 Makes the extremely bold claim that Dios is not Akio. As in, never even became Akio. because Dios is Strictly Allegorical.

Just to be a pedant, this is pretty explicitly disproven in the show

Confusingly, both earlier and later he will address these two as the same character. 

33:04 he also explains the root of Akio’s name in a tone that suggests this is supplemental information and not like. Literally something he explains out loud in the show?

Part 6: Part 5

This section is nearly entirely about Akio Ohtori. I would like to note that him and Dios are the only characters with dedicated segments.

38:30 The part where he states that Dios gets his powers from deflowering women.

38:46 Claims, once again, that Akio’s abuse of Anthy “may not be literal”. 

38:59 “the instance of exploitation here is used because assault has deep roots as indicating that akio's gender is the source of his imbalance”  THE ASSAULT IS ABOUT AKIO NOW???

39:45 Bad Anthy take #2: “Anthy’s conformity to the Rose bride is based around the fact that she feels good being subservient because this is the only thing in her life that has ever brought her any kind of positive reward”. This is a direct quote. Anyway, I can’t think of any instances in the show where Anthy’s subservience gives her a positive reward, except maybe when she’s intentionally using it to manipulate others. As for her feeling good being the rose bride. She tries to commit suicide. Dude.

Side tangent, but isn’t this exactly what Akio says during the final 2 episodes? That Anthy enjoys being a witch? Is the main villain, who consistently says things during that very episode that are blatantly false, our source of information for this take? I guess so, since this is the dedicated Akio section.

At 40:20 he decides to introduce the concept of Anthy, Akio, and Utena as stand-ins for wider concepts, which is antithetical to his approach in analysis beforehand

Part 7: Part 6

42:40 he finally acknowledges that he’s been spending too much time talking about Akio, and literally no time on characters like Nanami

46:10 states that Utena’s exclusive motivation “is to protect Anthy from the predatorial intentions of the other dualists”, which disregards the fact, which she states herself, that she was largely participating in the duels and protecting Anthy to feel like a prince

48:04 The part where he says that Akio has ‘chaotic Bi vibes’ in regards to him sleeping with Touga, who is 17 and implied to be a long-term victim

Part 8: Part 7

54:01: His concluding point is that Utena was the real prince all along. 

In true Somerton fashion, the video then ends over a scrolling wall of patrons, with not a single citation in sight.

[crazy-pages]

I'm going to throw my two cents in to the conversation about why James Somerton didn't get caught earlier. Part of the answer is of course that he did get caught, he just bullied and lied to get away with it for a while, but I know a lot of people still express confusion. And of course he went out of his way to make sure his audience didn't know about other queer history sources other than himself. But still. How could he have so many viewers of his videos and none of them had seen X source material?

Well. To be blunt, most of his videos were pretty basic. He tended to copy the highlights of what he was plagiarizing, not the really advanced stuff. And insofar as he copied the advanced stuff, he had a tendency to chop it up and serve it out of context alongside other plagiarized work. The material he was presenting was revolutionary to an audience unfamiliar with queer history, but like. I'm guessing 'Disney villains are queer coded' is not exactly a new concept to the kind of people who read multiple books about queer coding in film.

Now I'm not a film studies person, I'm a physicist. But you know what I do when I get a video in my YouTube recommendations about some fairly basic physics concept?

I skip it. No shade to the creator, but like. I hit that topic a decade ago and I've added literally thousands of hours of studying and research to my brain since. I'm just going to give it a pass, all right?

These kinds of videos self-select for an audience which isn't going to be familiar with the source material. The people who know it are unlikely to keep listening after the first minute or so.

And you've got to remember how much of this content the experts have consumed! With very few exceptions for weird little things that stuck in my head after all these years, I would probably not notice a physics explanation plagiarized from one of my textbooks! Not because I wasn't intimately acquainted with the textbook, but because I was intimately acquainted with many such textbooks. Spend enough time learning this stuff and it all blurs together a little bit. Does this explanation sound familiar because you've heard it before, or because you've just read books which cover this specific topic seven different times? And does that wording or that example ring a bell because it's plagiarized, or because it's common to the field?

Catching this kind of plagiarism requires having the kind of people who are already familiar with these sources, and therefore uninterested in video summaries on the topic, to watch the video. And among those people who do, it requires them to match Somerton's words to one specific source on the topic out of many, that they probably read quite some time ago. And then you have the filter of how many of those subject matter experts have the source on hand to check, to turn a vague "...hmm" into something solid.

If you know enough about queer history to say that some of his plagiarism was obvious, now that you've watched the video, then you should remember that there is a reason you probably weren't one of the people watching his videos! And because YouTube promotes videos through algorithmic engagement, none of this stuff has to pass the sniff test for any other expert in the field before it gets released. No experts have to like it for it to get published or for it to get good reviews or for it to get a recommendation in, I don't know, the New York Times.

The only people who have to like the videos for them to get traction are people who are just trying to learn introductory queer history and film theory. The exact people who aren't going to notice this. And for those of you who to whom it is obvious, ask yourself. When was the last time you watched a basic level queer history introduction on YouTube?

[jungkoode]

I know I don't owe anyone explanations—but I do feel a kind of emotional responsibility, especially since I know this space is a source of comfort for some of you. So just in case I seem a little more quiet than usual from now on:

I recently got some really heavy news about a family member's health. I'm still processing it. Still figuring out how to exist around it.

I might be less active for a while. Slower. Quieter. But I'm still here, just moving through it softly.

Thanks for holding space for that. Please take care of yourselves and each other. ♥︎

JOIN KIKI NATION HERE!

And gain your spot to vote on the occasional polls. <3

masterlist : if you want to check out my fanfics taglist request : if you want to be notified when i post a certain fic about me : if you want to know a little more about me! commissions: if you want me to write something personal for you! tags : how i tag stuff in my blog work organization / guide: to understand where everything is and how it’s organized in my blog ask the characters: in the post linked playlists and moodboards for all fics

things to keep in mind!

i write extremely slow-paced slowburns. that means you might be 300k words in before a feeling gets acknowledged. if that’s not your thing, that’s okay! no hard feelings—but my stories simply aren’t built for fast payoffs or casual reading.

my stories are not easy to read. they’re very detailed and you have to pay a lot of attention and dissect everything. more about this is explained in my FAQ. if you can’t digest that type of stories, that’s okay, but please let people who like that enjoy it.

all of my stories are written in limited point of view. you are reading from inside the character’s head—their thoughts, their feelings, their assumptions. that means unreliable narration. they will misinterpret things, make flawed judgments, and romanticize behaviors they shouldn’t. that is on purpose. you are expected to separate character perspective from authorial intent.

i have zero tolerance for bad faith, hostility, or discourse bait. if you come here to stir conflict, guilt-trip, or manufacture outrage—especially by willfully misinterpreting posts or fic content—you will be blocked. if your engagement isn’t in good faith, you’re not part of this community—and I’m not obligated to make room for that energy.

supporting plagiarism is a choice. if you make that choice in any way (be it comments, reblogs or hype) kindly show yourself out. this space values originality and respect the work that goes into it.

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this blog is diehard ot7. negativity toward any member will not be tolerated and will be removed.

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ask away, but read FAQ first ❤︎︎

— if you disregard FAQ, your ask will be disregarded too.

LATEST FⵊC UPDATES

Fuck Me Up | FMU — chapter 24

The 25th Hour | 25H — chapter 10

Kkangpae | KGP — chapter 19

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We Grew Up somewhere along the way | WGU — chapter 1

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i don’t have any other accs. if you see anybody impersonating me, let me know.

[milgram-en]

PSA: Regarding Terms of Use and Plagiarism

milgram-en explicitly states its terms of usage at the beginning of every translation. "If using/reuploading/reposting this translation, do not remove the translator's notes and do not change the translations. Credit and link if using. " Screenshots of translations fall under "usage". Using translations for theories or other derivative works also falls under "usage".

milgram-en has also been made aware of a translation by Tiramisu0117 (Twitter) that contains far too many similar translation styles (ex. formatting) and translation notes to where it can no longer be considered coincidences and there exists the possibility of plagiarism.

Assuming that the similarity of the deliberate, active choice of including and writing Translation Notes especially for a dialogue that off-handedly listed off other characters that are mentioned once in Mikoto's Voice Drama especially about something as trivial as umbrellas happened to be a "pure coincidence", deriving works from milgram-en's translations due to being influenced also falls under "usage".

Plagiarism means using someone else's work without giving them proper credit. In academic writing, plagiarizing involves using words, ideas, or information from a source without citing it correctly. (Scribbr)

Being "influenced" by someone's work and thoughts falls under "using words, ideas or information from a source", and, without proper citation, Tiramisu's translation is plagiarism. Assuming that the Translation Notes are not a coincidence, Translation Notes are the only times translators can input their own thoughts, the only times translators can directly interact with the community as themself and not just be the vessel of communication between communities. This is known as original works of authorship.

Regarding another similar Translation Note:

Japanese dictionaries only contain entries for 郷に入っては郷に従え (gou ni itte wa gou ni shitagae) or 郷に入っては郷に従う (gou ni itte wa gou ni shitagau) which means, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". There are no dictionary entries for 郷に従うよ (gou ni shitagae yo) as claimed. 郷に従うよ (gou ni shitagau yo) is a clipping of the full 郷に入っては郷に従う (gou ni itte wa gou ni shitagau) into: 郷に従う (gou ni shitagau) + the emphasis particle よ (yo). The clipping omits the 郷に入っては (gou ni itte wa) "When enter[ing] Rome" part and only preserves the 郷に従う (gou ni shitagau) "In it, do as the Romans do". Even if it was a translation choice to keep the full "When in Rome, do as the Romans do", it is an irresponsible translation that ignores Yamanaka's deliberate writing choices by adding something that does not exist or contribute an understanding to his story. Assuming that a JP-CN dictionary was used as Tiramisu uses CN translations:

JP-CN dictionaries only show entries for 郷に入っては郷に従え (gou ni itte wa gou ni shitagae), not 郷に従うよ (gou ni shitagau yo) as claimed. Thus, that brings the question: Is this Translation Note an echo of an existing Translation Note or a deliberate, active choice by the translator?

Regarding Tiramisu's Translation Style:

Tiramisu has a distinct translation style in which character names are color-coded and there is a distinct lack of side-by-side text-and-translation formatting, opting for English-only translations.

"I've known this person to do all their own translations many times. They're often one of the first people I contact for translations after releases. But I've not known them to previously do translation notes or they've been very minimal, not in the same format at all. I've never seen them include the original jp text along with the translation. Inclusion of the jp [scriptbook] text is throwing me off too. The format of the doc itself is also very similar. [The change in formatting] was unnecessary considering their style is typically unique anyways." (Anonymous)

Attestations to their unique translation style was also noted by a long-time reader of theirs, who also pointed out the sudden similarities of their translation to milgram-en's translation style. Edit: Screenshots of the original texts have been taken down due to the individual's request. Instead, it has been rephrased/paraphrased in place as per the individual's request.

milgram-en's translation style restricts itself to a duo-color theme: Black and a color. As shown, this John Doe VD from a translator who already has an established unique-style creates the question: Why the sudden change in translation style? milgram-en's translation style also provides the text for the sake of making MILGRAM accessible to people, to allow greater freedom in understanding through being able to vet translations on their own as well as derive their own understandings.

Do remember that translation is an art, an intellectual property protected by copyright.

All milgram-en is asking for is to be fairly acknowledged for the work and effort that has been put into translation efforts.

[fiamat12]

What do you think of Chatgpt? Here's a link that explains how it's generated and it's limitations. I like it for some things, it's like a group think but nothing replaces all of us OGs who have sat through the Lukola saga and understand the nuances of being there.

https://guides.library.txstate.edu/c.php?g=1321038&p=9718369#:~:text=to%20human%20conversation.-,How%20does%20chat%20GPT%20work?,describe%20them%20in%20natural%20language.

Well, there's a reason robots haven't replaced humans yet lol. Nothing can substitute for the human experience. I saw a Chapgpt on Lukola using A for PR and it didn't allow for two truths - like using her to divert attention (like when N gave birth to BN) since Luke had to do the NDA obligations anyway. Or N's PR team posting on Polin day and using a Lukola coded pic; Netflix Queue used a WT pic. so why not use that to their advantage? It's killing two birds w/ one stone or for A, making lemonade out of lemons.

So, I use it as additional support for a theory or Ask but not as my primary source of info. My primary source is all the critical thinking I've done w/ my partner and all the other Lukola OGs over the past year. Indeed, Anon, nothing can replace that! 🙌

N's PR team Polin Day post ⏬️

The article Anon links ⬇️

[cheritzteam]

[The Ssum] Always Honest 💜Teo’s💜Birthday Event Announcement

Hello, dear lab participant.

The Forbidden Lab sends you news on events in celebration of Teo’s birthday.

July 7th is our sweet and Puppy-like Teo`s birthday!🎉

Teo, who always approaches lab participant honestly, without hiding his affection! It is said that he can’t hide his heart racing for his birthday with you, lab participant🤭

< ① City of Free Men : Celebratory Lab >

For the following period, a Celebratory Lab📚 celebrating Teo’s birthday 2024 will open in the City of Free Men.

With the other lab participants celebrate Teo’s birthday and

become the best lab participant or the lucky lab participant (5 each in each language) and win 200 Aurora batteries! *If you have won an in-game event within the past 3 months, you will be excluded from the raffle for this event.

Q&A Q. How can I go to the Infinite Universe? A. If you go to the Main Menu and check all the menu icons, the “Forbidden Lab” will open on the left. Tap the Spiral Galaxy Button at the bottom left to enter the Infinite Universe!

♥Bonus Event��

Use both dedicated hashtags #TheSsum #TheSsum_HappyBirthday_Teo on X(Twitter), Tumblr, Instagram, or Tik and share a screenshot of your study post on social media!

10 lucky winners will receive 100 Aurora Batteries🎁

Event Period: July 4th, 2024 (Thu) 9 AM ~ July 25th, 2024 (Thu) 9 AM KST* Winner Announcement: August 8th, 2024 (Thu) KST *Posts will not disappear after the open period, but you will not be able to write new posts.

※Disclaimer※ * Bonus event prizes will be sent to the Lab Code displayed on your screenshot. * For Instagram users - you should DM us a link to your post via our official account(@thessum_official) to ensure that your post is noticed. * Posts should be set to public until the winner announcement, and plagiarism is prohibited.

< ② Seasonal Content >

Teo, who knows the joy of being together better than anyone else, is waiting for you!

Press the Happy Birthday🎂 button under the Day display to make a special call📞 and receive a memorable photo📸 of your Ssumone.

You will also earn an exclusive Trivial Feature for Teo’s birthday 2024 to add to your collection.

Seasonal Content open on:  July 7th, 2024 (Based on your time zone) Seasonal Content includes: Commemorative Call + Photo Memento + Trivial Feature *The Celebratory Calls and Photo Mementos for Teo and Harry are the same as last year’s. *Commemorative Calls and Photo Mementos can be revisited at any time after unlocking in your Milky Way calendar and Gallery.

Also, don't forget to collect game-access rewards that will be available throughout the birthday event period🎁

Game-Access Rewards available through: July 4th, 2024 (Thu) 9 AM ~ July 25th, 2024 (Thu) 9 AM KST In-Game Access Reward: 10 Aurora Batteries + 3 Hearty Meal

< ③ What Teo Said >

Archive of Sentences has all kinds of sentences in its collection📑

To celebrate Teo's birthday, look back on the loving conversations you had with him!

What were his words that gently stirred your heart during the time you shared with him?

Turn your Teo’s sweet sentiments into bookmarks🔖 in the Infinite Universe’s Archive of Sentences!

Event winners receive Aurora Batteries🎁

How to Participate 1. Tap the pencil button on the bottom-right corner on the Archive of Sentences 2. Tick “Unknown” as the source and tap “Enter” to change it to your Teo 3. Tick the event checkbox before auditing your sentence

TIP! Tick the event checkbox on the top bar of Sentence Studio to view only event posts.

Event Period: July 4th, 2024 (Thu) 9 AM ~ July 25th, 2024 (Thu) 9 AM KST* Winner Announcement: August 8th, 2024 (Thu) KST *The general participation reward will be distributed on winner announcement day. 

Q&A Q. How can I go to the Infinite Universe? A. If you go to the Main Menu and check all the menu icons, the “Forbidden Lab” will open on the left. Tap the Spiral Galaxy Button at the bottom left to enter the Infinite Universe!

Q. Archive of Sentences is not in the Infinite Universe! A. Go to the Emotion Incubator and produce 20 Realizations to unlock the Root of Desire. If your Incubator is not accessible yet, go to the Infinite Universe and tap the Flask Button!  

♥Bonus Event♥

With the hashtags #TheSsum #TheSsum_What_Teo_Said please share a screenshot of your Registration Certificate on X(Twitter), Tumblr, Instagram!

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Cheritz

[artsluna]

RP character template {#002} made by @artsluna ⋯ MURDER MYSTERY ⋯ get it check out my ko-fi, i always post content there first • plagiarism is a crime, think before you act • you can edit the contents of the file as much as you'd like to fill your needs. Some photoshop knowledge is suggested. • fonts used: source code pro | blackcraft | scream blood | hey comic • credit is not necessary but appreciated • like/reblog if useful

[physalian]

I Asked ChatGPT to convince a skeptic (me) to use it (for science)

In my ongoing strain with my pro-ai parent who is all over this shit, I would not put it past them to ask the magic conch how to conquer the argument with me for good. So I asked ChatGPT myself, and here’s what it said.

Much of this first point is what AI should be used for: Making sense of a lot of complicated information. The goal should be to leave the menial, repetitive tasks to robots so we have more room for creativity. Coding and summarizing articles, or reframing abstract subjects into something grounded  (so long nothing gets subject to bias, which is not guaranteed) are useful tools.

However, it loses the plot immediately.

If you can’t write an email, who are you and what rock do you live under? It’s 2025.

We have been taking and studying for exams for centuries. What could AI possibly provide for you that is somehow more effective and more efficient than tried and true study methods?

If you need a robot to communicate with your customers, you are failing to properly connect with those customers and damaging your reputation with your base. We all know when we’re talking to a chatbot. If you can’t afford to pay sufficient support staff, cut your own greedy paycheck and hire more.

Brainstorming is for your brain. Not a machine. If you’re drawing a blank, there have always been other methods to fix that not that far off from feeding the machine. Need help figuring out a science fair project? Go to a .edu website for suggestions, give them the traffic they deserve, and not the plagiarism bot. Otherwise, take a walk, take a nap, eat food, circle back to it later. If you never let yourself be stumped, you will never exercise that muscle, and it will atrophy.

Funny how this first point is lost entirely when people take AI’s word for absolutely everything with zero critical thinking. But it’s worth mentioning that Chat knows it’s fallible

Once again, this point is lost in all their relentless advertising campaigns, and the people who use it the most do treat it like a final authority

Real time info translation: Scraped and stolen information from hardworking and authentic sources

Point one: yet.

Point two: for now.

Point three: Full disclosure I don’t know enough about the business angle to comment on this, but this is part of their privacy argument nonetheless

Funny how in their ethical concerns portion, they don’t mention at all that they steal and plagiarize art and information

And that AI scraping can be so damaging to websites by overloading their servers with millions of pings a second that these websites cannot function for the real human beings trying to use them.

Chat hasn’t explained why AI isn’t perfect, and even if ethical considerations are being addressed, real and irreversible damage is being done while bureaucracy shuffles its way to the courts

If I may quote Ian Malcom: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”. We all know that the lowest hanging fruit of AI is misinformation, and we see it everywhere. They were either naïve in thinking their product wouldn’t be used for evil, or monumentally, malignantly stupid.

This actually is what we all thought it would be, however Chat doesn’t have some “low power mode” that’s “just for fun” it uses the same computing power and the same resources whether you’re joking or taking it seriously.

More to the point, creation is an innate human quality. I don’t need a robot to write a poem about my dog, I can write my own and I should enjoy doing so.

Except AI isn’t a human expert, it’s a distillation of information from thousands of sources, all of which treated with equal weight as 1s and 0s by the misinformation machine that cannot think critically about what it’s spitting out, only that, statistically speaking, it’s the answer that’s given by majority rule, so it’s probably correct

Many things, AI can’t do any of them. Do my dishes, gas up my car, cook dinner, fold laundry, clean the cat litter. All shit I’m doing instead of being creative.

Yes, all the time, so I go and I write something else and I come back to it later like everyone else in the history of humanity

Of course, but a second opinion from a real human being who can think critically and takes all context into account. Shockingly, many things are already summarized for you. Academic papers being one of them, summarized specifically by the person who wrote it with the intent of detailing the most important information.

So then it asked me if I wanted a custom pitch to convince this skeptic to use Chat. So I said yes, and here was its response:

AI is not Photoshop. The whole “Nobody complained when calculators were invented” argument is bullshit and even their defenders know it.

Photoshop’s non-ai tools (and you can turn those off) are tools. Photoshop does nothing for me that I cannot do, very slowly, on my own. It is a digital editing software, not a generation machine, it only adds or removes from an image what you decide should be there or deleted. Adobe is a shit company but we're ignoring that for a second.

Could I paint on canvas? Yes, and I do. Photoshop hasn’t replaced physical paintings, it is a different format of painting. I can do things on canvas that I lack the finesse to do digitally, and I can do digitally many things that I can’t do on canvas. Digital art is no less impressive a skill than physical media, it’s just different.

Photoshop, and all digital art programs, are not comparable to Chat or gen-ai in any way.

Chat’s assertions that it can “write better artists statements” is a gross insult to artists everywhere. I’m not sure whether it’s implying an inability to make a statement about your own creation, or an inability to make a statement about someone else’s creation, but either way it’s an insult to intelligence.

Even if you’re a better painter than orator, what you have to say in your own organic words is part of your finished piece. Don’t let AI prey on this weird obsession with perfectionism and insecurities like we cannot be flawed in our creations and we must all be amazing at every single ambition, because AI just makes things so much better and isn’t that the point?

And if you can’t look at a painting and figure out something to say about it, the robot won’t make it any easier for you to do it the next time you need to. AI isn’t training wheels on a bike, it’s the pole spearing through the horse on a merry-go-round.

And even if knowing how to use AI being beneficial on the job market is true: Knowing how to use AI is no different and actually easier than the far more useful skill of knowing how to properly research. How to use Boolean searches in an archive, how to use keywords, how to sort useful info from fluff, how to navigate an archive, how to understand archiving methods and systems and why things are organized the way that they are.

And lastly: “Just try it once” are some ominous slippery-slope words. I have tried it, and AI has done nothing for me that a quick google search can’t give—and google isn’t much better but we’re not talking about google here—AI’s biggest proponents don’t want you to guide it.

They want you to sit back in your Wall-E hoverchair endlessly consuming information that you did not struggle to earn and cannot properly contextualize or think critically about because thinking critically is antithetical to them making endless money.

[codedetect]

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[girl-in-the-mirrorbluenight]

Okay I've been thinking about this pretty much all day since I saw the hbomberguy and then todd in the shadows video i just have so many thoughts. While I wouldn't necessarily call myself a Video Essayist™ (I've only made a few over the years) as a youtuber and someone who has made video essays i definitely have more experience than the average person. There are so many things that stand out to me about this whole debacle i dont even know where to start.

First I want to just give a little insight into the process for making video essays from people who've never given it a shot and just how absurd it is to do the type of plagiarizing James has done. Video essays take a fuckton of research, even for pretty simple topics, but on top that you also have to make them with the medium of video in mind. it's really not enough to just take an essay you would write for a class and read it out loud. the flow is different, you have to have accompanying visuals, often background music, etc. They're a beast to make. My Twisted video for which i used literally two sources for my research (Sondheim's books and the musical Twisted) still took days of thorough reading, note taking, watching the musical, watching the musical again, watching the musical and taking notes, cross-referencing my notes, etc. For videos that synthesize multiple sources or are covering multiple pieces of media, that time goes up exponentially. Then there's writing, recording, gathering clips (often one of the most difficult parts depending on how obscure what you're talking about is), and editing. Even for a silly video like my Glee video, I still had to do a ton of research to make sure I was getting things correct, and that was a funny tier list about freaking Glee! There is just no way you could come up with a thorough analysis by just copying and pasting. Which brings me to my next point.

I think James may have thought (or more likely rationalized) what he was doing as analysis based on like the vaguest definition. When you do any kind of analysis, what you're doing is taking research from multiple different places (news articles, primary sources, existing analysis, etc.) and coming to your own conclusions, whether that's a synthesis of those different sources, or applying it to a specific thing like a movie. Really simple example is my Twisted video where I take Sondheim's writing and apply it to a specific piece of media (in this case Twisted). I'm using existing work but coming to my own conclusion. In the Spies Are Forever video, I took existing research about the Lavender Scare and the Hays Code, including primary sources from the time period, and applied it to the musical Spies are Forever. What James seem to do is take a bunch of existing scholarship, copy and paste it all together and then come to a "conclusion" that was not actually his own original thoughts but either "facts" he completely made up or something that didn't do anything to actually link his other "sources" together. I can see why it has the veneer of analysis, but making up a random "fact" you think might be true is not the same as a drawing a conclusion based on research.

I also think Todd made a really good point in the part about England's propaganda campaign against Italy around 9:30 that it's just really bad video making to not include examples of images from this so called propaganda campaign. I have a ton of examples of news clips, government reports, etc. in my SaF video about the Lavender Scare because...it was a real historic thing that happened! If something was supposedly so widespread and not even that long ago, you can probably find evidence of it somewhere. Kaz Rowe (who is also linked in the queer creators playlist on hbomberguy's vid) talked about this a lot in their video about tiktok misinfo where people often make these outrageous claims but the thing is if something so outrageous happened (like people constantly shitting on the floors of versailles), other people at the time would probably be talking about it somewhere. It's a big red flag when someone makes such bold claims and has no evidence to back it up.

Putting this last section under the cut because I go talk about WWII, Nazis, and HIV/AIDS a bit (watch Todd's video for some more context) so if you don't want to see that post is over here.

Lastly I wanted to talk about something else Kaz brings up in a lot of their videos when talking about historical topics and that is the tendency to dehumanize people of the past, often as unwashed, unintelligent masses who would just do any ridiculous disgusting thing because they were so stupid and disgusting. There are a lot of things to criticize about the people of the past and their actions obviously, but we cannot forgot that they were in fact, people. Real individual people with their own lives and dreams and ambitions and individual opinions and they have never been and never will be a monolith. Claiming anything is broadly true of "the victorians" or "the ancient egyptians" or whatever other vague historical group you want to talk about is usually a lot more nuanced than "they all thought or acted in this one particular way". I'm certainly not a historian and i've only done one history focused video but James Somerton seemed to make a lot of broad historical claims in his videos that I think fall into this trap.

The one that stood out most to me in Todd's video was the claim about Nazi body standards which is a whole mess in general that Todd goes into for a while, but the way he talks about WWII soldiers was just like...weird. Besides the fact that a lot of his claims about Nazis seem to be bordering on glorifying them and their aesthetics (gross), I think we should remember that WWII was less than a century ago. There are still over 100,000 surviving WWII vets in the US. My grandfather who was in the Army during WWII (he didn't serve overseas but he was an enlisted soldier I can literally look up his enlistment records in the national archives online) was a real person who I obviously knew personally and who died fairly recently. To think he enlisted because he was jealous of German fitness or whatever and wanted to prove how tough Americans are is an absolutely hilarious thing to think if you knew him. I'm sure there are as many reasons for enlisting as there were enlisted soldiers. When James talks about even as relatively narrow of a group as "WWII American soldiers," he's still talking about a very large group of real and diverse people and to make such broad claims that "most" or even "a lot" of them were just so taken in by strong german physiques or whatever is frankly insulting. I haven't watched the entirety of James video so maybe he does address this at some point, but from the clips I've seen it seems very generalized and implies some level of racism when WWII soldiers in fact included a lot of racially diverse people. IDK, i think if you're a supposed historical researcher and you're making a video about WWII and you don't know about groups like the Tuskegee Airmen or the Navajo Code Talkers, that's on you. I don't want to discount some of the really horrible shit that American (and obviously other countries) soldier's did in the war and how many of them held disgusting views (even my grandpa who I love dearly was not the most politically correct person to put it lightly) but Jame's claims are not criticizing any real ideology or the consequences of them, they're oversimplifying complex and harmful historical ideas and attributing them to something he pretty much made up. I'll also give you a little hint about something. When people fall into Nazi ideology, it's because they ultimately agree with the ideology, not for some surface level aesthetic reason of "fitness" or whatever. They are antisemitic, they are racist, they are eugenicists, plain and simple. They don't just think the Nazis are cool except for all their beliefs. I also think (and again I could be missing a part of the video here) the hyper focus on the Germans and the Soviets and not mentioning Italy is at the very least an oversight too. Mussolini, like Hitler and Stalin, had a pretty big campaign of promoting an ideal strong race which he tied to ancient Romans. Like this was also a country controlled by a fascist dictator that American soldiers fought in idk it just seems weird to me to leave it out. (okay edit i looked up the transcript and he does talk about Italian fascism a little bit but only about how Mussolini rose to power, nothing about his ideologies or anything really related to the main topic of body image).

And one more thing on that note that bothered me a lot. I think his claims about HIV/AIDS is probably the most well-known here on tumblr and has been pretty thoroughly destroyed by this point, but I do just want to say one more thing about it which is that AIDS isn't gone! I feel like they way he talks about it from what I've seen of this video makes HIV/AIDS sound like a problem of the past now that we have drugs for it, but that is just not the truth. There are still tens of thousands of new infections in the US each year and way more globally and yes, people do still die from it. I just don't like when people talk about AIDS as if it's this problem of the distant past, a separate era that people went through in the 80s rather than an ongoing epidemic that still does not have a cure. Safer sex, clean needle usage, and getting tested are just as important now as they were in the 80s and 90s and don't forget that.

[sexhaver]

Hi hi. I think when people are talking about AI art and stealing by scraping the Internet, I’m not sure I’ve heard about compensation as much as I’ve heard about credit and the idea of plagiarism as stealing.

I think from what I’ve seen from my artist friends - and obvs I could totally be wrong that’s why I’m asking and curious about your take - a lot of the debate is sorta analogous to derivative works. Like, if I scraped all of Github for the code there and I used all these different libraries and bits of source code in my own code without crediting anyone to make my Ultimate Application:tm:, that runs foul of copyright even under some of the most open licenses. Now, this isn’t necessarily me endorsing our copyright system, but people see credit as important and that’s the sort of mindset I think a lot have with the idea of stealing and AI art. Citing your sources - if every bit of art used in DALL-E was instead a quote, people would be upset if you didn’t have a bibliography, right?

What do you think?

i think this is a very silly idea that falls apart as soon as you start considering how you would possibly isolate the specific works being fed into the generated output. also the hypothetical code-writing AI you mentioned literally exists and does not have a biliography. so.

[girderednerve]

okay i said that i watch a lot of youtube & sadly this is true. i want to write about youtuber drama

okay the thing i am actually referring to is whatever weird thing is going on with gamers nexus & linus tech tips. the background summary is that linus (of tech tips) is a guy who managed to get pretty big on youtube talking about various computer-y topics, many of them gaming-focused, & parlayed this success into owning a company based in vancouver that employs more than 70 people to make videos & merchandise & so on; steve, of gamers nexus, is a guy who has done pretty well on youtube talking about various computer-y topics, mostly related to gaming, & now has like four employees in north carolina. linus tech tips does videos about a bunch of stuff; he has a boring podcast, & the channel does a bunch of product reviews & bad idea youtube bait videos (we got the biggest tv! kind of stuff), & so on. steve gamersnexus mostly does tech news & product reviews, but they really do well when some company messes up & then he can do outraged coverage about how consumers have been taken advantage of; he would really like to be thought of as a journalist who covers consumers' issues. last year he got mad at linus techtips because of how he handled a review product from a small company & also the warranty on one of the backpacks that linus sells; linus tech tips went into crisis mode last year, made some structural changes & adjusted some things, & apologized (clearly with the assistance of a crisis comms firm, lol). steve gamersnexus doubled down on being mad, then realized he sounded like a jerk & pulled that video, and then all was quiet.

until this year! there's a big stupid scandal going on about honey, a browser extension owned by paypal, that a lot of youtube influencers shilled for; honey is supposed to automatically find discount codes when you're online shopping, but it only looks at discount codes that merchants have shared with it (so not necessarily the best ones, or any at all) & also enters paypal as the affiliate referrer, which means that whatever youtuber affiliate link you might've clicked to buy whatever you're buying, that youtuber gets $0 & paypal gets the commission instead. linus techtips noticed that this was happening years ago & stopped shilling for honey, but didn't generously inform the whole community about it, so now steve gamersnexus is mad at him for that.

i don't care about these details in particular & i mostly find the whole 'creator'/'influencer' economy like, distasteful. everything is marketing now & i guess i read culturejammers stuff at a formative age but i don't like it. the thing i think is interesting is that these two people are in a public fight about what they're doing here on youtube; what are the community rules & expectations? what job are they doing? this is related to what i thought about the long hbomberguy youtube plagiarism callout video, too. is steve gamersnexus doing journalism? what does that entail? if you're a journalist, you're obliged to interact with your sources in a certain way, following a well-established set of ethical guidelines. linus techtips points this out & says that steve gamersnexus didn't operate that way, which appears to be true; steve gamersnexus has a long list of ethical principles on his website, but he's more or less written them from personal conviction (perhaps, less generously, what he thinks will play well), not derived them from j-school curricula. i'm not standing here saying, oh legacy journalism had this all figured out, i don't think that, but there was a generally agreed upon model for how to behave as a journalist. it's interesting to me because i think the 'big youtuber' or 'content creator' or 'influencer' or whatever is a fundamentally different job that leaves you with different audience expectations & personal pressures than working for like, a newspaper, and nobody has actually arrived at a consistent or articulable idea about what ethical behavior there looks like. youtubers copy each other, but then most of them are amateurs; does it matter? journalists shouldn't get into online slapfights, but journalists also usually don't have to shill t-shirts with zingy one-liners they said last week on them.

one major, obvious point here is that gamersnexus does better when there is some kind of thing to be mad about. this isn't unique at all, that's why there's a whole genre of youtube drama that is clearly designed to do well with audiences, because individual videos are monetized. but if you want to be a serious journalist, then you can't operate that way, right? you're not supposed to churn out SEO clickbait, because that's exactly the kind of shit that is easy to produce with an LLM, it contributes very little of value to anyone except advertisers. at the same time, you're running a business, more or less on your online persona, your face. journalists, actors, & so on all rely on professional reputation to have a career to some degree, but that's not the same thing; you don't need people to imagine that the wall street journal is their friend who speaks up for the little guy. so there are competing pressures & we can't decide what the right thing to do is, what exactly our responsibilities to one another are.

all this to say my favorite moment in linus techtips' latest crisis comms monologue is when he calls steve gamersnexus an influencer, because this isn't strictly an insult but is surely meant & received as one, despite being, i think, true. there's just a weird churning cultural problem around what media production should look like & who gets to be taken seriously & how, and i think it's a charged, usually unproductive conversation. relevant also that linus techtips has never claimed to be doing journalism, & has a different, vaguer model of integrity, which involves not lying in product reviews & being transparent about sponsored content. i think this is probably the way the wind blows, but it's easier to pick & choose when you're already doing well, & again this whole approach is pretty loose.

[expelliarmus444]

So apparently there is a lawsuit going around because an author has alleged that the author of "Crave" plagiarized her. One of the similarities she claims she found between her story and Crave is that there is a scene with a marble room lit with sconces.

Now I know what you're thinking....."Riri, what does this have to do with Hogwarts Legacy?"

And the answer is in my HL fanfic, Quest of Heart's Code, I too have scene where the characters enter a marble room filled with sconces. I have never read Crave or the other source material in my life.

LOL

Maybe it wasn't plagiarism after all??? Idk. Such an original idea that I just ｡ﾟ• made it up in my living room one night • ｡ﾟ

idk it was just a funny coincidence I had to share. dw y'all if i catch u writing about sconces i won't try to sue you.

oh and I'm updated QoHC btw, either tn or tmrw when I have better wifi. stay tuned

[rythmicjea]

On the last day of summer vacation... The Writer and His Muse

Full disclosure, I wrote another version of this last night. It was... factually correct. But it just wasn't good. So I saved it and took a few steps away and realized what I was supposed to be writing. I apologize now this is going to be long.

When I came up with the idea to write this series, I wasn't sure of the structure. If I'm honest, I still don't know lol. And after being called the "Riverdale Analysis Auteur" (thank you @storkmuffin ❤️), I promise to do the utmost to put forth only my best for you. There isn't going to be an uploading schedule so follow the tag "Code Word Jeronica" to see when I post.

My intention with this is to show that from the pilot there has always been the opportunity for Jeronica. I know what you're saying "there's an opportunity for ALL pairings."

And, yes, while you are correct. There were some possibilities that were more feasible than others (Sorry Jarchies!). For the skeptics out there, the showrunners did chemistry tests with so many pairings. Cole even admitted that he did one with Cami and he was open to a Jughead/Veronica relationship "It's the CW, anything can happen"! Coding isn't always intentional or needs to be taken seriously. And that's okay. As a writer myself, I understand the "side character curse" all too well.

With all of that being said, I will only be focusing on the evidence we get in the show itself. I may reference the comics sporadically (like how Jughead and Veronica have been paired up/dated several times in the comics, throughout the comic's history. Below is a picture from Pep #154 in 1962!) but I'll never reference anything outside of the source material as evidence.

The Writer and His Muse

It's established from the pilot that Jughead is a writer, an aspiring novelist. All writers need a muse. Something that inspires them to put pen to paper. In Greek Mythology, Muse was a Greek Goddess who gave inspiration to all. Often, a muse is referred to as a beautiful woman but it can be anything. The show Riverdale is the muse for fanfiction writers who write in the universe. Jughead has several muses throughout the show. He goes through various tribulations with his writing. We see him suffer with writer's block, make a deal with the devil (both Jugheads in Rivervale), and we know that the story that put him on the map was a telling of him and his friends.

In the overall show we know of five big stories that Jughead writes. Jason Blossom's murder, The Red Dahlia, Killing Mr. Honey, The Outcasts, and Bend. Towards. Justice. All follow a pretty basic plotline. Something happens, a group of teens have to investigate, there's a surprise twist, and then a resolution.

But, through all of these he has one muse that is constant. Would you believe me if I told you it was our fair Veronica? Because it is. Before you ask "What about Betty?", let me ask you the same. What about her? She is a character in his stories. Sometimes she's the main character. But being the main character and being a muse are two very different things. Veronica's presence in his stories symbolize different major elements to a story. More than any other Riverdale character.

Throughout the series we see Jughead struggle with his writing. His father tells him to keep writing as a way to get out of Riverdale and not get caught up with the Serpents. We see him have profound writer's block, plagiarize another author, change the way he writes due to his disability, and physically lose his ability to write. His writer's block, and the complications with it, start in season 5 and aren't resolved until season 6.

Here's an unexpected bonus from helping Veronica...

...I started writing again.

She is, and has always been, his muse. This is the first time he acknowledges it, but the clues have been there since day one.

Jason Blossom's Murder

The first story begins with the pilot's very first scene. It also introduces the audience to a concept called "The Center of a Story". The center of a story is just how it sounds. It is the element that brings everyone together. However, while this can be the main character and what that character goes through, it can simply be a person or place that has very little interaction at all with the main story. In a murder mystery, which Season 1 is, the center of a story can be the murder victim. In telling that story we can either have flashbacks of the person's life up until they are killed; or, they are simply the reason why everyone comes together (and not even just to find out why. Sometimes the why isn't necessary).

Jason Blossom is the center of the story. It's all about finding out who killed him. But the muse of the story? The hook? The character's entrance that actually connects everyone together? That's Veronica. "On the last day of summer vacation, a new mystery rolled into town." Jason's murder is the B-plot of the season. It might have kicked everything off, and the action might be connected to him, but it's not the entire reason why Jughead is writing this book. In fact, the opening soliloquy says:

Our story is about a town, a small town, and the people who live in the town. From a distance it presents itself like so many other small towns all over the world. Safe, decent, innocent. Get closer though? And you start seeing the shadows underneath. The name of our town is Riverdale.

The story was never about Jason Blossom.

The Red Dahlia

I'm not going to touch on this much, because I have a whole post planned just about this episode. But, I want to point out that out of all of the stories we see him write, this is the only story that focuses solely on one character. It's completely about Veronica. She, like Jason, is the catalyst. The difference is that, unlike Jason, she plays a major role.

Killing Mr. Honey

In his last story to submit to the University of Iowa, it's about how seven teenagers try to get rid of their unethical and overbearing principal. We have known up to this point that Jughead loves horror. He likes to write "Lovecraftian" style stories. The difference between the two are HPL rejected morality. He considered himself a "Morality Atheist". Jughead, on the other hand, loves morality tales. (In 1955 there's a whole episode about it.) This is most evident in this telling. Each character represents an architype. Veronica, arguably, is the most important architype. She represents morality. She's the only one who really challenges what they are doing. Specifically, Jughead. At face value someone can go "Well, Jughead and Veronica aren't friends so it makes sense". First off, no, they very much are friends. But, second, if they weren't, why put her in such a place of honor. In actuality, given his character in the show (and the comics), Archie should be the moral compass of the story.

The Outcasts

The Outcasts is really the only story that we have very little knowledge of. I freely admit that for evidence, it's the weakest of the five. It presents coded details for the audience to infer their meaning. Jughead is the Viper Leader, the Serpents are the Vipers, but is Betty The Homecoming Queen? Most likely. The co-ed he takes home tells him that he wrote a "very sexy book" in regards to the Viper Leader and the Homecoming Queen. However, in his drunken voicemail, he lambasts Betty. One line in particular stands out "You're a cold, fake, duplicitous bitch. And once people read my book, everyone's going to see that". Now, we don't know what is in the book (Kind of wish they'd released it) and it could end with the Homecoming Queen cheating on the Viper Leader with the Football Captain (I'm inferring that that would be Archie's character). Or, they could have lived happily ever after. Or... using the ambiguity to stretch the possibility... the Homecoming Queen could have been Veronica.

Why? Well, there's a reason why the Enemies to Lovers trope is so popular. What better way to get back at your ex for cheating but to immortalize their best friend (who was also cheated on by your best friend) as the true-love-fairy-tale-princess of your wildly popular NYT best seller?

Bend. Towards. Justice.

The last story we see Jughead write is when they've been taken back to 1955. 7x01 is very reminiscent of the pilot. But, for Jughead and his writing, it's always been in the details. Season 7 is my favorite season, and trust me, I have a lot to say about what happens. So, I'll keep this brief. Even when he describes Tabitha it's very factual. There's no emotion. He lists who she is and the reason why she might know what's going on. Please don't take this to mean that at this point he isn't still in love with her, because he very much is. When he sees her, he doesn't know the 1955 version isn't his girlfriend. He keeps all of his emotions bottled up until he can figure out a plan. And to spare her from any craziness because her memories also might be gone. Up until this point, everyone's description is "This person is here, and this is who they are". Including himself.

For starters I live in an abandoned train car with Hot Dog which... actually tracks... Betty and Kevin aren't merely friends, they're dating. Cheryl's twin brother is alive, but he's not Jason, he's Julian. No sign of a Reggie yet. But Archie exists and he's pretty much a teen Charles Atlas... I've been waiting to reconnect with the one person who might shed some light on our predicament because she was both Chronokenetic and the town's guardian angel. My girlfriend, Tabitha Tate.

He mentions that all of this information is "overwhelming, heartbreaking". But he doesn't say why because there are many reasons why. His best friends don't remember anything. Do they even really know him? With one one question he realizes that the person he loves doesn't love him back. But he breaks this way of introducing the "characters" when he introduces Veronica. It's all emotion. There's even a sexy jazz trumpet riff announcing her.

"Damn..." His thoughts whispered to him breathlessly. "Even in 1955, Veronica Lodge still knew how to make an entrance." He goes from boredom to attention. He straightens his shoulders, he sits up to see her better, and he doesn't blink. Like everyone else, and very unlike him, his whole attention is on her.

THE PILOT

Now that we've gone through the five major stories we know he writes, let's go back to the end to see the beginning. The last episode of the entire series ends with a typewriter. All of the stories mentioned above are stories written within the main one. Riverdale itself is a story (possibly Archie Comics fanfiction) written by Jughead.

The pilot itself, as all TV shows, has a narrative woven throughout. There's characters, conflict, plot, etc. Though the episode opens with Jason's murder the pilot was never about that. Hell, Jughead is barely featured in it. We see him two significant times. The first time is two minutes in, where he's drinking his coffee writing his story. And he says the classic line, "We were still talking about the Fourth of July tragedy on the last day of summer vacation, when a new mystery rolled into town." We are introduced to Veronica Lodge, by Jughead, right after we're introduced to him. At this point he's only named Cheryl and Jason Blossom as that is the impetus for this show/season. "There needs to be a dead body".

The pilot is about Veronica. She moves to Riverdale, she meets Archie and Betty, she mentions Our Town, and her desire for Archie is established. Compared to Veronica, it takes 8 minutes to mention Jason again and 10 minutes to bring him back into the plot. Then nothing significant happens with him until the very end of the episode! But even after that brief interlude it's only 5 minutes later Veronica is given her first conflict. And by the halfway point, she's thoroughly decimated said conflict.

So, Miss Auteur, why are you bringing this up?

Because Riverdale was supposed to be about Archie. But by the end of the first half of the first episode Veronica is the only character to have a full plot arc and even an epilogue! More importantly, she is immediately woven into the fabric of the town. Even though the Varchie romance is introduced we must remember how the episode is being framed.

If you compare the narration to the writing on Jughead's laptop, it doesn't match up. Cole Sprouse might have read everything on said laptop and it was shortened for time. But, I wouldn't read too much into the discrepancies. I mean, the previous two pages are exact copies of each other lol. And while there might not be numbered pages it's at least four and I'm baffled about what he could have written prior to the opening lines. Also, as a writer, there are the things we think we're going to write and the things we actually do write (For example, I wrote a 16 chapter 100k+ Zack and Cody fanfic, and I didn't know the show existed! The Suite Adult Life). Our thoughts vs our words carry weight to a story. An argument can be made that either position is the most important. Is it better to write out that which we keep so closely guarded so it may live on in infamy? Or are the most profound thoughts those we keep closest to our chests?

Though one little line stands out when I do read it...

"See, the Blossoms had their tendrils wrapped around the entire town - no one wanted to make enemies of them."

Who is the person not wrapped up in their tendrils? And who immediately made an enemy of Cheryl Blossom?

Bisous, Bisous... Votre Auteur.