#a major human activity

[pratchettquotes]

"I Wish To Ask You A Question," said the golem.

"Yes?"

"I Smashed The Treadmill But The Golems Repaired It. Why? And I Let The Animals Go But They Just Milled Around Stupidly. Some Of Them Even Went Back To The Slaughter Pens. Why?"

"Welcome to the world, Constable Dorfl."

"Is It Frightening To Be Free?"

"You said it."

"You Say To People 'Throw Off Your Chains' And They Make New Chains For Themselves?"

"Seems to be a major human activity, yes."

Dorfl rumbled as he thought about this. "Yes," he said eventually. "I Can See Why. Freedom Is Like Having The Top Of Your Head Opened Up."

"I'll have to take your word for that, Constable."

Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

[mxtxfanatic]

Ngl, I’m actually pretty uncomfortable reading my old posts defending the goodness of the common people and their right to defend themselves—as persecuted groups or as individuals—from hierarchical tyranny, given how easily in this current irl moment a not-insignificant amount of people have fallen into supporting an active genocide, because I cannot separate this from how much pushback I got (and still sometimes get) for being consistent in my politics

[jacksoldsideblog]

something i've never understood is the idea that the narrator is just a pathetic guy who can't even handle the mild annoyance of having an office job. like. the reason his job is so deeply soulsucking isn't really because it's in an office. it's because it's the corporatized murder of hundreds wherein he actively is used as the smoking gun. he's a cog in a deeply inhuman machine that literally, point blank values minute costs over human lives.

and yes, it's in an office, meaning he has to pretend he and everyone else working there are normal people and not complete and utter monsters for what they do. and their jobs are made easier by this artificial distance that also imposes them away from material society in general, deepening all senses of alienation. and they are all monsters for it but they ARE normal people, he idealizes and hates his coworkers who can do all of this while staying happy and normal. he senses there's something very wrong with that. he knows if he was gone there would be someone in his place.

and yes, it's in an office, so he has all the arteficial office banality and stupid little politics and utter pointlessness, all while they all pretend his job isn't to be actively complicit in further deaths.

it would drive me insane. it would drive anyone insane. why isn't it driving his coworkers insane? how can they live with themselves? how can anyone furthering a system like this live with themselves? how can he live with himself, with anyone, knowing this is all within their capacity? how can he function, knowing that even if he stopped, even if many of them stopped, all of this would march on, new atrocities forming in this one's place?

he could go to the press, tell all about his company and their lack of recalls. it's his leverage. it's why he hasn't lost his job. but would it really make a difference? has it ever really made a difference? Ford sold the exploding pinto and for all the hubbub it generated, clearly the company is still just fine. they used the formula, even admitted it, and here they still are. the inability to stop all of this is maddening.

honestly, the narrator's job is fundamental to Tyler Durden and the entire events of the novel and movie, both literal and thematic.

[thatonebabybat]

Hey btw having depression is not a requirement for being goth and if you think it is I don't like you. That's a whole chronic illness, not a part of your "goth mindset"/"aesthetic". Please reflect on that.

[kingofmyborrowedheart]

I’m sorry but you can’t cry “human rights violation!!!!” when you are actively carrying out a campaign of genocide.

[see-arcane]

Mina's incredible (and underrated) detective prowess would be very useful I bet. Put her on the helm Integra, Van Helsing praised her brains as being above everyone's including himself for a reason.

I honestly can't guess what the chemistry between Integra and Mina would be. Integra doesn't really click with me as a classically heroic character, for all that she does focus on saving humanity from the undead via Alucard and her forces, being the Boss Lady etc etc. She's miles away from being as insidious as an Amanda Waller, but...

The hotel. The fucking hotel will never leave me.

Yes, the order went directly against 'soldiers of the enemy,' but those soldiers had been lied to about who and what they were charging into. Which was obvious even without being a fly on the wall to know their higher-ups had fed them some BS to march them into death and win their own power grab from Millennium. She didn't tell Alucard to 'make it quick' or even just to 'neutralize.' She told him to search and destroy. Folding to Alucard's egging and negging to seem like a Worthy War Commander in the grand scheme~ of the plot

She's not heartless, exactly, but she is arctic and surprisingly quick to breeze past the loss of lives that aren't under her direct care/command. While she might respect Mina's abilities and investigative skills--I wouldn't be surprised if Mina could intuit Millennium's endgame well before the climax could happen--Integra inherited none of her ancestor's warm regard, supposing Abraham van Hel(l)sing had any of the original's tenderness in him (50/50 considering this takes place in aggro horror territory). We can't even say if this universe's Mina played any big role in cornering Dracula; she might just have been a targeted damsel.

All that said, I think Integra would see Mina as another time-displaced bleeding heart with a few useful skills, same as Jonathan. Someone to be an ally at best, a liability at worst. So I don't see her handing over any reins or offering to be co-girlbosses any time soon :c

[coockie8]

why do you hate "humans and earth are weird" posts and stuff?

Look, you can do whatever you want in fiction, I really don't care at the end of the day, it's just that like 70-80% of our problems stem from humans thinking we're uniquely special in some way, when we're really probably not, like at all, so I'm just not a fan of that trope.

[antirepurp]

me feeling bummed for my excitement over the third movie diminishing more every day VS "sonic cinematic universe" and the suspicion the knuckles show is mandatory homework for the movie and even more Human People in my furry movies and -

[scalproie]

I have a whole essay about vegeta in me but my phone is at 9% so youre all spared right now

[anarchonist]

I think a big problem in our culture is equating intent and effect, and this works both when predicting the effect and when determining the cause. It is important to remember that just as having good intentions does not excuse the harm one causes, so does someone having caused harm not always mean they intended to cause harm all along.

We are able to know our own thoughts, so when we cause harm we may easily downplay it because "that's not what I intended", as if that would make the harm go away. And when we judge others who cause harm, we similarly try to work backwards from the assumption that harm requires intent - and since we see the harm but not the intent, we assign intent somewhere where it may not even exist.

None of this is to excuse people who cause harm, but maybe to clarify that what we call evil is not some nefarious satanic mindset of ill intent, but rather a stubborn unwillingness to critically examine whether you might be causing harm even if you don't actively intend to, and even whether or not you truly care.

And the more power you have, the easier it is to distance yourself from the harm you cause and keep causing it.

[ruthlesslistener]

mildly frustrated with feeling like my Seawalker species is somehow not 'advanced enough' to count as a modern-level alien civilization because they do not have clothes or aboveground complex cities or tech (outside of medical use and emergency-only weaponry) but also like. how the fuck am i supposed to put clothes on a 9-foot-at-the-shoulder-sometimes-12 amphibious alien reptile with 8 limbs that lives in a climate that is on average 95 degrees fahrenheit at 100% humidity that spends an equal amount of time at sea and on land. and why the fuck would they need complex tools when two sets of those limbs are highly dexterous, they have tusks that are both specialized weapons and excellent tools for holding things when the hands are occupied or puncturing/carving objects, and they are the apex predators on land and near-apex predators in the sea. they dont fucking need clothes or complex tools outside of medical use they have everything required for comfortable living built in

[mantisgodsdomain]

I'd like to hear about Marble and the exact context behind her... unfortunate demise.

Why, yes - we absolutely can!

Let's start with this: Marble is a Wasp Bomber, by game terms. She is very competent in making and employing explosive charges. She is, in fact, so competent at making and employing explosive charges that she is capable of producing bombs that can melt a hole in a kaiju. She was also banned from military service for collateral damage before the Wasp King turned up.

Wasp Kingdom military attitudes tend to, overwhelmingly, be shaped by the environment they live in - they border on deadlands, but more specifically Northern deadlands, where them being classified as Deadlands because of the sheer number of hazards to bug life that they have around there meaning that anything that isn't specifically adapted to the environment will be incapable of surviving well enough for any children it might produce to not end up Lesser.

There are monsters. The Wasp Military is, on a regular basis, pitted against a very large number of Beasts of all sorts, which means that having a decent supply of bugs capable of fighting them off is a necessity. Pretty much any wasp with capacity to serve is set to work as some part of fighting forces at some point, be it out in the field or repairing equipment for those who can be out in the field. Conscription is very much mandatory, and it is considered a deeply important role and a core part of a wasp's duty in the hive to, at one point or another, contribute to the fighting fitness of the Hive.

This demand - and the need for bugs associated, especially when the general danger of the territory will lead to wasp lives lost even on very standard patrols, goes to the point that the Wasp Kingdom will actively pull from demographics that most kingdoms prefer to either avoid or keep out of the line of fire - drones, kept out of the line of fire in nearly every other kingdom, are drafted just as often as workers, and the Wasp Kingdom is just about the only kingdom to actively welcome brood parasites and random out-of-kingdom bugs for the potential strategic advantages that they may offer.

With this established, Marble was been banned from active service the Wasp military forces after approximately two months of service due to her flagrant disrespect of safety procedure and astronomically high risk of friendly fire. She is, in fact, not actually allowed to do mechanical work without supervision, because not keeping track of what she's doing has an extremely high risk of her including improvements that, even while working as intended, are capable of maiming or killing their users if mishandled even slightly.

Even if Marble herself is capable of handling her inventions safely, for the most part, the Wasp Kingdom under Vanessa was entirely unwilling to take that risk. As such, she was banned from military service, as she was deemed unsuitable for just about any other potential role available to her and no one was really willing to put her within reach of any sort of potentially volatile equipment that absolutely anyone else might handle, and she spent a few years mostly just hanging around Defiant Root and making friends with the inhabitants of the Black Market.

Hoaxe put her back into military service after taking over the Wasp Kingdom.

Unfortunately, a Marble who is being actively mind controlled by someone who doesn't know shit about bomb safety and is simply setting her to whatever will be most effective offensively is even worse at safety than a Marble who is creating highly volatile explosives constructed with the assumption that whoever is using them Also has exactly as much knowledge of her own work as her.

She blew herself up. Badly.

Technically, it wasn't immediately lethal - the specific bomb that did it wasn't something that would instantly vaporize her like some of the other options! It was, instead, a crowd-control weapon, which released a fucking massive amount of heat energy and cooked everything in a hideously wide radius to cinders.

Technically, there are forms of treatment available to Bugaria that could keep her from straight-up dying to that, if they got to her in three minutes or so - mostly just Gold save crystal restoration or flat-out replacing most of her body with charmcraft, and definitely not without major damage to just about every organ in her body. Depending on the specific circumstances that she blows herself up in, it might even be survivable - it's possible for her to die even while handling the bomb properly due to things like "it has an effective range that can be measured in human-size metres" and "Hoaxe is not an effective strategist". However, this is a very remote chance, and most of the time she just dies badly.

[aza-trash-can]

The trick to this essay is to derail it from the novel I need to write about and just go on a six page rant about the importance of stories to humanity

[redd956]

I wish there was a tag for disability pride flags, so I can not see them. They make me uncomfortable, as they make me feel like having a disorder is fun and quirky, and something to wear as a badge. It really really bothers me. I’m not saying we should feel ashamed of having a disorder, but pride is a strong word for that category too. Like proud? Proud of going through traumatic experiences that tacked on a disorder to me? You do you I guess, but I’m not proud at all.

I know it makes others feel heard which is why I’m not against people really making them. I just want a tag. I don’t want to block the tags to my own disorder. 

[marginal-notes]

Would you mind sharing your thoughts about mha’s world building? I never put much thought into it positive or negative. Where do you think there was wasted potential? I am curious

OH BOY, OKAY. BUCKLE UP. This isn’t really a cohesive essay covering all my thoughts, just some bigger points immediately coming to mind.

First things first, some context.

I have yet to run into any other fandom that lives off its own fanon the same way as the MHA fandom does. It’s not even like how the HP fandom did it, where they completely threw out the burning dredges of canon they didn’t like. Reading MHA fanfiction, there’s a lot of broadly accepted fanon that still gets treated like it could be canon. Idk, it’s weird and fascinating.

As you’ve probably figured out from my ramblings here and the random details I like stuffing into my writing, I care a lot about how fictional narratives can convey and explore societal institutions and conventions. Form should drive function, and everything should have consequences.

I am absolutely aware that MHA’s a mainstream shonen primarily functioning off the rule of cool, and thus isn’t supposed to operate at the level I keep trying to bully it onto.

Anyways, short story of my love/hate relationship with this series boils down to: it keeps bringing up tiny details that implies that SOMEONE on that writing/editing team is trying to make this series deeper than an almost dried out puddle, and then abandoning all thought for more of the same old “who can punch hardest” boring shonen tropes.

Also, I’m an American reading this without the full Japanese cultural context.

Here’s the long story.

Inherently, My Hero Academia is telling a story of a society reaching its breaking point under the strain of its social politics, through the lens of a highly influential and powerful industry associated with law enforcement. From the beginning, the series introduces the concept of a social hierarchy constructed on the basis of having a quirk and its raw talent. It’s a story of blind veneration and a country still not fully ready to accept a world of superpowers.

And to me, it’s extremely important to understand that for all that professional heroes are technically public servants, professional heroics is first and foremost an industry.

~~~

Okay, let’s just start with quirks themselves.

To this day, I’m still a much bigger fan of the spinoff manga than the main manga itself. I like the cast better, I love their interactions with each other, the plot makes sense, and it still has spent more actual panels discussing the impact of trying to accommodate quirks in universe than the main series has. Sure, Hori put in tidbits into the end of chapter extras, but that’s it.

Vigilantes actually takes the time to discuss how people with non-humanoid quirk mutations can run into difficulty finding affordable housing and the inadequate government assistance on that front. This piece of worldbuilding actually has consequences on characters and as the plot progresses, the consequences actually have influence on locations that appear as settings.

The main manga just doesn’t have this level of thought.

How do highways and mass transportation handle very large individuals and very small individuals? What changes to building codes and architecture has there been? What changes had to come to product design to accommodate different quirks? How do you as a society deal with individuals whose biology aren’t close to the old quirkless standard? What happened to food production and distribution? How well are government agencies addressing concerns brought up among the citizens due to their quirks? What impact has quirks had on the medical system?

(Minor pet peeve, and this is more directed towards fanon. I personally hate healing quirks, from a logistical and ethical standpoint. Canon proves that repeated use and high stress causes quirks to evolve and change over time. If you’re medical personnel and you’re using your quirk on your job, that quirk’s going to change its effects and abilities over time. Hello? Do you have any idea what the short- and long-term side effects of your quirk fully are? How did you figure out its full benefits and drawbacks? Are you taking a risk with each new patient that something completely unexpected could occur? Do you know how annoying it is when you can’t replicate or standardize procedures in a field like medicine where you need to carefully evaluate safety through scientific investigations? Do you know what using healing quirks sound like to me? Dangerous human experimentation, on both the patient and the doctor. AAAAUGH.)

I really want to know the political history behind the rise of quirks. What rate did it spread across the world and through generations? How did the politics around quirk rights shift over time? When did society stop using language like “meta-humans” or “quirked individuals” and started assuming having a quirk should be the default for describing humans? When did quirks first appear in the Imperial family? What shifts happened in rhetoric across the political spectrum over time in relation to quirks? How did that influence legislation and law enforcement? How does that influence employment statistics and population demographics? How did what was considered “desirable” change with each generation and decade? What influence did quirks have on the international scene? What really happened during the period of chaos and violence in the earlier quirk years? What pressured the system to finally hitting its boiling point? What were all the influences that finally calmed that period down?

Hori, for the love of god, shut up about daddy issues and fuck you for turning AFO into a stupid, boring cartoon villain.

~~~

If you’re going to introduce a corrupt government institution that has no problems abusing its power to order assassinations and partake in child trafficking, go all in. And I don’t mean go all in the way the “HPSC Bashing” tag on AO3 tends to. I mean stop treating the HPSC like some kind of singular monolith that didn’t derive its power through its connections and influence.

If you have corruption in the HPSC, that means you have corruption in the Ministry of Justice. You have influence and competition with the police force. You have relationships with the courts and the judges ruling cases. You have the ears of politicians in the National Diet writing laws on criminal justice and prison infrastructure. You have sway through your own regulations and oversight on heroes and their agencies. You can steer the industry towards addressing one kind of crime over the other by dangling the secret ranking algorithm over the heroes’ heads.

You can create a society where the shiny surface covers over the reality of letting violent offenders go on light sentences, if they’re prosecuted at all, so you can have enough repeat offenders to feed and inflate the apprehension and arrest performance metrics of heroes. You can create a society where powerful businesses can lobby with their money to influence patrol routes. You can create a society where the insular press clubs dutifully spread your party message across the country. You can actively craft a society that forces large portions of your population into crimes of desperation in order to feed the gaping maw of an oversaturated hero industry.

This is just run of the mill politics and dealmaking, folks. You don’t need to turn towards torture and more cartoonishly evil entities to create conflict. Freaking – god, I hate whump. (EDIT: it occurred to me after posting that this is a great place for me to wax poetic about how much I LOVE, ADORE, APPRECIATE “may death never stop you” by slex on AO3 for addressing some of my points in a witty and engaging way. Superb writing.)

Of course, MHA also doesn’t go into goddamn ANY OF THIS even in the background as flavoring that can color the plot in interesting ways. Hori, it’s not enough to just have Aizawa point out that his students are being drafted as child soldiers, and then move on. HELLO? HELLO?

~~~

MHA, I swear, is your technology more advanced or not? You can’t just throw in “Detnerat makes support tech and now it’s moving to hero gear” and then bail. And the way it’s portrayed? As making all this custom gear? Tailored to each customers’ quirk? MAKES NO SENSE FOR A LARGE CORPORATION? How did you scale that?? How are your logistical supply chains not a profit killing mess? What on earth is your manufacturing and fabrication process like? How inefficient are your operations that no one freaks out or notices your prototypes being intentionally leaked to the black market? How did you even make those connections, you’re a bunch of –

Using the excuse that they’re the arc’s villains is such lazy worldbuilding. Sure it’s in-line with the series LITERALLY going “UA’s Sports Festival has replaced the Olympics in importance” (w h a t, no, bullshit, get back here, STOP MOVING ON, HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE), but still it’s frustrating and it’s lazy.

Smartphones and vehicles?? Still look the same?? Even though chapter one implies it’s been around a couple centuries since roughly modern times?? Are holographs cheap tricks or not?? If they are, why aren’t they more widespread? Why are there still plenty of normal monitors and TVs? If they’re not, then why is UA able to jam them into their acceptance letters and it’s able to be some kind of bonus item among Kirishima’s merch?

I swear there was no thought put into tech beyond pure rule of cool. Which creates completely arbitrary hijinks and aesthetics without a lot of internal consistency, for something that really should be extremely important in universe across society, not just with heroes.

Like at least ATLA’s consistent and there’s logic going on with its tech. They’ve pulled off some things that also raise a ton of question marks with me (again, putting all that fire right next to the airship fleets is a recipe for disaster), but there’s at least an internal logic. Take Sokka’s submarines for example. The thought behind their design makes sense in a world with waterbending.

MHA’s just like, “And now UA’s a flying fortress.” WHAT??

(Disclaimer: Like how I don’t consider material outside the original shows canon for ATLA, I don’t really treat the movies as canon to MHA either. If people try bringing up I-Island at me, they’re just going to get a different giant but WHY rant.)

~~~

Uuuugh, the Todoroki family situation.

This response is already clocking in over two thousand words, so I’ll save my giant rant about Hori’s and Japan’s stand on abusers for another day. Suffice it to say, I’m extremely cynical about the various redemption arcs and why they occur the ways they do. I believe the driving force behind those arcs is highly motivated by real world profits and massaging the series’ messaging to conform to an easy to digest black and white mentality.

But, it always makes me. so frustrated. how fic proves again and again how the Todoroki plot can be an excellent lens into the trappings and failings of elite pro hero society. It can be a really engaging lens into the corrupting influence of power and the dangers of blind hero worship. It can discuss people’s choices when the system fails them and their different decisions on how to take matters into their own hand. It can show the dangerous and corrosive effects vigilantism has on a society (ugh, more personal beef from me against some fandom tropes, ANYWAYS) through some of vigilantism’s more extreme manifestations.

The implications and consequences involved here are pure Navi bait. And Hori and his team just.

The things going on right now in canon always, guaranteed, makes me so angry.

~~~

Also, as a final insult to injury, Hori’s self-insert is basically Mineta, whose main character trait is being a repeatedly aggressive sexual harasser. Dude.

~~~

Idk if you really got anything out of this, I’ve been obsessively thinking about different parts and facets of the MHA universe for over a year now. My thoughts are just all over the place.

I still haven’t gone into the whole AFO situation from an organized crime perspective. Nor have I addressed the full impact of the ranking system on the hero industry as a whole, when you split heroes into a pyramid of the top elites, mid-tier, and bottom-tier groupings. Nor have I gone into all the wild potential and shenanigans of an elite, exclusive, and wealthy place like UA (that’s a whole fic in progress right now). Or about what kinds of social insecurities and concerns craft the look and feel of each generation of heroes.

There is just so much that can be explored in MHA, and since it’s a mainstream shonen, all it cares about is punching people real hard.

[saintvampe]

wondering how many things seraphina does because it allows her to play at human-ness.