#believing you get what you deserve

[furiousgoldfish]

I hate that us humans built a whole ‘who deserves what’ hierarchy and it follows no sense or justice or benevolence. If people have to deserve to live, to eat, to have a shelter, to be safe, then it’s so much easier to abuse someone by saying ‘you didn’t deserve it’. And even more easier for abusive parents to convince their kids they haven’t deserved to be cared for.

Animals don’t do this shit, as soon as they exist they go ‘I will demand this thing I need until I get it’ and nobody can condition them to think otherwise. But, you can condition humans to believe they’re not worthy of resources, shelter, affection, acceptance, love, and everything else. There is no real ‘deserving’ system. It’s our birthright to have things we need to survive, we’re alive! The alternative is that we die or live in pain! Nobody deserves that. There is no justice in this idea. Nobody is getting what they deserve.

[featheredadora]

[otaku553]

Quite frankly still obsessed with the three of them

A little procrastination doodle

[eternallovers65]

Just saw someone on Twitter complain about the lack of Japanese people in Oppenheimer, and what did you expect??? Did you want the final act to be the bomb dropping and see people burning alive???

The reason why we don't see a Japanese perspective is because one, including a Japanese perspective, just to see how bad the suffering was would be exploitation. Two, to see an accurate and sensitive take on how the japanese felt about Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan (as incredible as he is) isn't the right person to do this. And three, it's based on Oppenheimer's biography

Oppenheimer, the movie, literally shows you people (mostly the superiors, because by the middle/end of it you see Oppenheimer regretting his creation) doing something dubious and inhumane because they removed themselves away, both emotionally and physically, from the people they are hurting.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima only exist in those men's distant thoughts and imaginations. One guy literally asks to take a city off the bombing because that's where he had his honeymoon. It's disturbing and unsettling, as if those people were not real human beings. The lack of Japanese people drives the entire point home.

Also, Japanese cinema is right there. Barefoot Gen, Grave of the Fireflies, or Hiroshima (responsible for showing to many Americans the effects of the bombs for the first time) are just a few of the many, many decades of post-war Japanese movies we have

[veryintricaterituals]

Also can we talk about how Guillermo's response to seeing how vampires never really change, how they are all stuck in these vicious and unending circles, how nothing really matters or has consequences for immortal beings, and how unnecessary, wasteful and frankly hollow it all feels in the end... is to inmediately go and try to become one of these unchanging creatures

[theaceace]

imagining a world in which Simon agreed to go with Edwin and try to escape hell, imagining Simon developing an immediate and very inadvisable crush on the cute guy that just threw a grenade at a demon and Edwin's reaction to that, imagining the reaction of Charles Overprotective Rowland when he finds out that the guy Edwin insists on dragging along with them is one of the guys that sacrificed him to a demon in the first place, imagining the Night Nurse's face when three dead boys pop back through the door instead of two

[cozylittleartblog]

swatchvember prompt: party

happy 37th birthday to Microsoft Paint ✨🎂🎉🎈

[messiahzzz]

When I came across that "joke" from Tav to Quill and Z'rell's comment (plus Halsin), I had to take a minute to process what happened. Gale might be a bit silly and eccentric but he's the kindest, sweetest and most passionate character in that party. No wonder the poor man has deep insecurities to solve, so many people reduce him to an easy target! Ofc one of the side effects would be overconfidence and ambition as a defense mechanism. He's obv lonely; only Tara and Morena ever loved him for him.

his eccentric nature might be a part of it. he is loquacious, outgoing, and doesn’t see the point in hiding his enthusiasm. he is considered to be the weird one. naturally, wizards in general being seen as somewhat squishy and physically weak might also add to it.

personally, i really don’t like the implications of the (widely considered) autistic-coded character being the one who faces the most ridicule by far by other characters and fans (and larian) alike.

some might disagree with me on that, but i don’t find it funny by any means either. mostly it just makes me feel bad. “he deserves it. cocky, arrogant, hubris-ridden wizard needs to be taken down a peg” like he isn’t… y’know… already at his lowest. it also disregards the fact that much of his bravado is part of his carefully curated Great Wizard of Waterdeep™ persona that he has skillfully adopted to mask his general feeling of being defective. being fiercely proud of your skill and knowledge and being doubtful of having something truly worthwhile to offer are mindsets that can coexist. according to fandom, gale is either secret hubris incarnate that is only waiting to be unleashed upon the world or pure baby that can do no wrong. instead of a character that is just as flawed and traumatized as all the others, but no less deserving of genuine love.

to me, the constant ridicule just reads as further feeding into his deep-rooted insecurities and his belief that he (as gale, the person) isn’t someone who holds inherent worth. it really, really doesn’t sit well with me.

[mell0bee]

“average spirit medium gets accused of murder 3 times a year” factoid actually just statistical error. maya fey, who lives in capcom’s stock plot contrivance box & is accused 10,000 times a day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

[whillowed]

disrespectful

[uncanny-tranny]

I love you smile lines and worry lines and grey and white hair and wrinkles and purple spiderweb veins and the process of aging and living in a body that is standing the test of times. I love you experiences that make you wiser and stories that make you laugh, and every little process that happens to get to the point where you have so many memories because you have the fortune to be here and be so radiant

[monkeybebop]

POV: Lacho approach you at the bar.

[candycatstuffs]

uhm. erhm.

[m00ngbin]

Guess what FUCKING DAY IT IS

[weeeeeeezamboni]

if i had a nickel for every time ming made joe's smile fall in episode three alone i'd have three nickels which is a fucking lot actually and ming better catch these fists istg

[dr3amofagame]

I find it strange that a lot of people are coming forward and saying that the staged finale was a bad play for one reason or another but it really isn’t and I don’t understand where the hate is coming from.

yeah i've seen some of this the last few days--staged finale has always been somewhat "controversial" in the lorehead scene, so a measure of disagreement/discourse about it makes sense. especially bc it was honestly a very big change to what people thought was the story and required people to go back and reevaluate a lot, which. people are naturally resistant at doing

but while obviously i think that some healthy discussion about these things is good, and i feel like i have seen a level of...misunderstanding? about it?? which has gone into the ways that people disagree

staged finale refers to the decision to stage the finale. that's it. staged finale just asserts that based on preexisting foreshadowing and based on the sheer level of suspension of disbelief in order for genuine finale to be real, it made more sense for the finale to be staged than for it to have been genuine. how the finale was planned, when the finale was planned, and to what ends it was planned are all things that you can disagree on w/ other staged finale believers/supporters while still being a staged finale believer/supporter, ykwim? if you believe that c!punz faked his betrayal to c!dream, then congrats! you believe in staged finale. oftentimes i see people say things like "i don't believe in staged finale, i think that c!dream faked the betrayal and all and always had c!punz on his side but i think that the reason behind why he did it is [X]" and it's like. staging the finale is one (1) event, not a comprehensive explanation for everything c!Dream does. that would be more in line with something like the "strategist dream interpretation," which in itself does have different readings as well.

people have listed all of the inconsistencies in the staged finale before, but just to summarize--the guy literally could've dipped when everyone came to "defeat" him, c!tommy leveraging his own life is basically no leverage at all when the mans has the revive book, skeppy cage is a joke, c!dream revealing all of his plans when they were maybe 10% carried out (the entire damn attachment vault was empty of items besides stuff that was literally faked, his own damn stuff, and stuff that he stole recently from c!tommy such as the Axe of Peace and the discs) is ridiculously stupid, why the hell does he have blackmail against c!punz included in a bunker that c!punz clearly had access to???? the list goes on.

(as someone who took awhile to be fully convinced in staged finale, what really tripped me up was the stream punz did the day before: here's a post breaking it down that definitely helped me to see it in a different light.)

as far as foreshadowing goes, just off the top of my head: the original prisoner is a constant question from the day of the prison's creation, being something that's even highlighted on the day of the staged finale itself. c!Dream saying he has "the biggest house on the server" and how it's full of redstone. the entire conversation he has with c!punz, obviously. his holding back on the favor with c!techno, the connection between the revive book and the prison that he establishes the day they begin prison construction.

from a logical perspective, the plan as c!Dream establishes it doesn't make any damn sense. c!dream had opportunities to escape that he didn't take for illogical reasons (if the only reason why he allowed himself to stay in a fucking possible kill chamber was to keep c!tommy from committing suicide, then? what about the revive book? what about the fact that he literally kills c!tommy just a few months later????) -- a level of plot contrivance is expected in the medium, but for a lot of people this was just. Going way too far. Unless he literally lost his whole mind (which, to be fair, was the persona being played) there's just. really no other way to make sense of what was going on there, if it was all genuine.

the other argument is a narrative one--people claim that the story established by a genuine finale is cleaner than the story of the staged one, and honestly. it's like. like that's...a feature, not a flaw? the reason why the genuine finale worked isn't because it was logically believable. dream is Dream Manhunt. he's famously hard to nail down, famously good at escaping sticky situations, famously a man that can outsmart his way out of crazy disadvantageous situations--like. just in terms of minecraft skill, i'd wager that most people would think that dream would've technically been able to pull off an escape even when facing down the collection of enemies that were there. like he had 2 stacks of pearls.

narratively, though, the staged finale has a story that's quite appealing on the surface. the "story" of the events from the spirit speech onwards is one that revolved around the idea of "attachment." c!Dream rejects attachment in favor of control in the spirit speech when he says he refuses to let his love for his dead pet control him anymore, and he focuses on the ability to use the discs to control c!Tommy. the fact that c!Dream's relationships deteriorate at this time seems to support this point, and c!Tommy's strength in his relationships being what saves him and damns c!Dream ties everything off into a neat bow. c!Tommy wins because he has friends and c!Dream loses because he doesn't, moral of the story established, hip-hip-hooray. And so it goes.

but when we look at this more in specifics...? it does start falling apart a bit, doesn't it?

although c!Dream supposedly begins his rampage over his existing emotional connections with the spirit speech, his reputation had been in shambles long before that point. c!Dream-as-villain is first established as part of the greater story in the lmanburg revolution, and that's a title that he never really sheds (this point being emphasized in inconsolable differences and the book c!Wilbur has c!Dream write.) Dethronement happens within a day of Spirit Speech, iirc, and on that day c!Quackity specifically points out that c!Dream has no one on his side but c!Punz. the moments where he is more specifically isolated go back to events such as november 16th, where his alliance with c!Wilbur involved blowing up L'manburg, his deal for the revive book, which involved his publicly betraying Pogtopia, or his opposing Manberg to the literal Manberg cabinet. etc. all of these events in the Manberg/Pogtopia era had c!Dream's loyalties erode to end up as just c!Wilbur and later c!Schlatt for the book, two dead men. (and i say eroded loyalties as if pogtopia really believed dream was on their side, like, ever? like he was never trusted in their ranks, even by c!Tommy, who was definitely the person he worked the closest with outside of c!Wilbur.)

if we look at Dethronement itself, it doesn't actually fit the pattern of "c!Dream cuts off his attachment to people in order to make himself uncontrollable" -- in fact, what it does fit the pattern of is. Staged finale? Faking an end in a relationship with people that he does consider important to him, making a public appearance of betrayal + anger to mask an existing connection, drawing attention to their being enemies to hide the fact that they're actually friends--that's not c!Dream cutting anyone off. That's just the exact same ploy that he uses to make people think that c!Punz betrays him (only c!Sapnap and c!George ended up deciding that Nah We're Gonna Kill You Now. Fuck You It's Coup Time. so that's how that ended up.)

Otherwise there's...the Badlands, who were perfectly happy to agree to joining the coup on the day of dethronement if it got them more power and land. c!Techno, who c!Dream wasn't an ally of until later on with the favor established and then doomsday, and who was someone c!Dream was quite openly wary of + afraid of due to his combat skill. c!Dream was alone literally before exile even happened, his remaining "attachments" of c!George and c!Sapnap turning against him like the day he goes on a whole spiel about ohhoho from today onwards i DONT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT MY ATTACHMENTS !!! I ONLY CARE ABOUT THE DISCS !!! like congrats you don't even have a chance to cut off any attachment at all dingus they all hate you and want you dead already.

further, with c!punz, he literally says that they're more than just employer/employee in the infamous conversation they have about planning a betrayal. if the whole point of the story is "attachment good," then why is it that what takes down c!dream is...his one remaining attachment? if his fatal flaw is that he didn't trust people enough, why is it that he loses because he trusted someone too much? it's not like c!tommy had any attachment to c!punz--c!punz explicitly "has a reason" to betray c!dream because of money. he helps c!tommy because dream "should have paid [him] more." none of that reflects that spirit of "attachment" that people claim was c!dream's downfall.

(not to mention how the people present in the staged finale to take c!dream down included people who literally hated c!tommy's guts. like. what brought them together wasn't the power of friendship, it was the power of we hate this green bastard.)

this isn't to say that c!Dream didn't have some relationships that go up in flames because he starts acting particularly cackling evil villain (with the green festival being the specific moment where he really goes full in with that persona, going from someone that was framing himself as having a Reasonable Complaint to literally the joker as soon as he gets the disc from c!Tubbo. It's purposefully played as a "mask off" moment that is meant to make him look like a crazy fucking villain in front of a large audience--whether or not you think that was a choice that he made in character or not, the way his personality changes as soon as he receives the disc is jarring.) In particular, his relationships with c!Puffy and c!Sam come to mind--c!Puffy burns the house she made him when she decides that he's too evil (but, uh, c!dream really wasn't even there for that and didn't ever have a particularly close relationship with her) and c!Sam is among those whose opinions of c!Dream become drastically more negative around the period of time that spans green festival->doomsday->staged finale. but it's important to note that c!Dream's relationships on the server aren't...great, at the time of spirit speech. They're uh, really fucking bad, actually. dethronement only makes them even worse, and all of this happens pre-exile. c!Dream had significant reason to be paranoid and afraid for his life long before exile happens, which is Quite Significant, Actually, when you consider that that paranoia is literally what goes into his decisions to carry out the staged finale + put himself in the prison (which isn't the case for genuine finale, where he's more motivated by a desire to control the server without being controlled himself.) staged finale does solidify c!dream-as-villain for a lot of people, but it never would've worked if people didn't already see him as a villain in the first place. c!Dream doesn't make people hate him with the staged finale; he uses hatred that he already knows exists to put himself in what he sees as a safer position.

and look we could go into a whole discussion about manberg/pogtopia c!Dream (which i do think is way overdue to be fair considering that that's where the paranoia + isolation that motivates him post-november 16th comes from in the first place) but this post is long enough already and i still have to figure out a better way to articulate my thoughts on the matter. anyway. carrying on:

people still have different feelings on why he carries out staged finale in the first place, but what we do know for sure is that it was meant to protect punz and protect the revive book. by firmly establishing that c!punz and him were on opposite sides, he keeps the revive book safe and both of their lives safe by extension: as long as no one would kill both of them at the same time, they had a means of reviving the other if need be and obviously had the information on how to raise people from the dead secure. which was important to them. and otherwise...c!Dream is paranoid. c!Dream is very, very paranoid, and this paranoia goes back at the very least to when he learns about the revive book. the prison, for all the dependence that it required of him, was tailor made (and the construction process controlled by dream every damn step of the way) to make sure that whoever was in the main cell would be safe from external threats. the security of the prison and the prisoner was the POINT. i've seen some assertions that staged finale implies that he predicted everything that happened after he was put in prison and...no? i'd say that c!dream's behavior indicates him being thrown off by c!sam as early as bad's prison visit, c!sapnap's prison visit for sure. c!Ranboo being banned from visitation pretty damn obviously fucks him up, tbh. he has c!punz explicitly out there to keep an eye out on the server while he's in the prison, where he was meant to remain for a period of time that was supposed to be much shorter than how long he ends up being there. likely because, you know, he was supposed to have a consistent and reliable source of information with the outside world in the form of c!Ranboo, and c!sam wasn't supposed to fall off the fucking rails as soon as the prison started. people have also talked about how having the staged finale be true means that c!dream doesn't lose, which...i mean. gestures at the prison arc? that whole thing is a loss so catastrophic it literally destroys him. he's never the same after the prison happens. the false betrayal of c!punz is deliberately like ironically described to c!sam, who was the REAL betrayal that fucking. ruins him. he loses SO MUCH over the course of the prison, which was something he literally designed to keep himself safe from external threat. as far as losses go, i definitely find that a lot more compelling and a lot less contrived than watching c!dream go "whoop de doo guess i have to die now" when he's like 3 pearls away from making a clean escape in the disc vault, tbh.

at the end of the day, i think having some conversation about staged finale is fun! and it's always good to reexamine what you believe to make sure that it still holds water. but i've really not seen much staged finale crit that makes the genuine finale feel favorable as an explanation: logically, it makes a lot less sense. narratively, it relies on a story that the audience wants to be true and acts as a "clean" explanation for everything while not actually taking into account a lot of what was ACTUALLY going on for c!dream (cutting off attachments for the sake of control versus watching people turn against you and becoming increasingly paranoid, for example). and believe them or not, the content creators involved have always asserted that staged finale was the plan from the beginning, not any form of retcon. (and we do know that people have been dodgy about stuff like the "original prisoner" literally since the week that c!dream was imprisoned, so take that as you will.) (okay to be fair theyve been dodgy about the original prisoner since the day that the prison began to be constructed, but the QnA from that first week of imprisonment sticks out to me in particular because cc!Sam had the biggest fucking smile on his face and staged finale would've been planned out and then carried out in entirety by the ccs and the c!s by that point.)

this is a longass post but uh hopefully it makes sense, lmao. tried to touch on most of what i've seen recently 😅