#but it wouldn't have made any sense?

[coldbycrossfade]

MAN THAT REALLY COLORS THIS RESPONSE IN THIS CONVERSATION SO DIFFERENTLY FOR ME

[biblically-accurate-dca]

it's your/our/my special day!

[miraclesprinkle]

No memories remain of anything before

Yes, I'm with you in a garden of carnage

In a mayhem of trickster and tricked!

[aleksanderscult]

Darklina antis: "You realize, guys, that if Alina didn't have powers the Darkling wouldn't spare her one glance, right?"

Bro.

If Alina wasn't the Sun Summoner she would NEVER meet the Darkling in order for him to not spare her that glance you say, she would NEVER meet Nikolai, she would NEVER meet Genya, Baghra, Botkin, Zoya, David, Marie or Nadia. She would NEVER even see the Little Palace. She would remain forever as a mapmaker and Mal would continue to fuck around girls with his buddies. Because if she wasn't the Sun Summoner, Mal wouldn't latch on to her trying to make her dependent on him again.

Hell! She wouldn't even meet Mal. As far as I know they met because she was the Sun Summoner and he was Morozova's third amplifier that felt attracted to her presence and existence.

Oh! And if she didn't have any powers there wouldn't be any Grishaverse!

Your point is?

[problemswithbooks]

With the tentative and rough translations out, i have to say, yeah, Hori really doesn't get what he's actually writing and if he was trying to make Toga's entire deal a metaphor for queerness, he's ended up being quite offensive.

Like first off it seems he has Toga say she falls in love easily with boy and girls and...animals. Which, I always felt the bird thing as a kid could have negative connotations, but wrote it off as 'she was a little kid and this was before her desire for blood was wrapped up in her romantic feelings' type things. So having Hori reinstate that yes, she does still love animals to the point of blood drinking desire--a desire Hori coded as sexual/romantic is not a good look.

It also just makes me question if she could ever own a pet or if she'd end up killing it because she loved it to much and she needed to drink it's blood.

Also getting her perspective on the boy she attacked isn't great either. The translation is rough and basic so it could change, but I don't think there's any translation that could make the situation not read poorly.

In the rough translations she says something along the lines of "I didn't ask to drink his blood because I was afraid he'd hate me and think I was a decent monster."

I could see an alternative translation being "I asked for his blood and he called me a deviant monster, and I sucked his blood."

Again if Hori is trying to make a queer metaphor with Toga, this is a huge issue. Her attacking the boy was always a big problem, but if he didn't bring it up again I think a lot of casual readers would have forgotten it. But now it's front and center again and brings back bad connotations for Toga and a queer reading of her character.

Because again if we read her blood drinking as queerness, and Hori has already coded it in the past as lust while just last chapter confirming that Toga sees it as kissing in the very least we get two equally bad reads.

A) Due to fear of rejection Toga did not ask for consent and decided she'd just make sexual advances toward someone she had a crush regardless.

or B) She got rejected and told no, and then made the sexual advance anyway.

With a queer reading this only becomes worse because it pays into the really negative and even dangerous idea that same sex attracted people will go after anyone regardless of consent or the other persons orientation. It continues to perpetuate the idea that queer people are sexual predators, who target straight people or in the very least do not care about consent, or are unable to control themselves long enough to get it.

But even without a queer reading what Toga did is wrong. It sucks that people don't get her way of showing love, but consent is still needed regardless. You can't just do what you want to someone because you were to afraid to ask them out. You can't just do what you want with someone after they tell you no. Even if the boy had called her a monster that would not make it ok for Toga to, essentially sexually assault him (yes, kissing someone against their will is sexual assault, which is what Toga sees her blood drinking as).

And I think that's why Toga's character is really hard to get behind for some people--because at the end of the day she's literally just saying "I can't help but sexually assault people (and animals apparently)', and the solution to this is to give her exactly what she wants and apologize for not seeing how much pain she was in when she was actively trying to sexually assault people.

[coquelicoq]

victor hugo ended one chapter on the word "merde!" and then wrote a three-page follow-up chapter to justify including such a bad word in his book. and the best part is that i just looked up a contemporary translation and discovered that the translator (isabel f. hapgood) replaced the "merde" with "-----". so she ended a chapter on a bleep and then went ahead and translated the next chapter about why she shouldn't bleep out that word. incredible.

[katoska]

The Doctor's theory that the Dots developed sentience and came to hate their classist, vapid users makes no sense and sounds imo like projection.

We know what happens when an AI gets exposed to a lot of bigoted speech. It starts spewing bigotry itself, because it doesn't know better. Not that our current AIs are truly intelligent or sentient, but they do share the human trait that they are a product of the society they exist in. Same would go for more advanced, truly sentient AI. It would get it's opinions from it's programmers and users.

The Dots didn't seem to be ever intended to even mimick sentience like our AIs are. They are higher tech smart phones. You don't talk with them, just at them. And no one seems worried about saying something bad that an AI might pick up on, about pissing off the algorithm, eg about the "I'm going to buy 100" thing, which'd go against the city's Avoid Waste policy. If they were expected to moderate, it would give the Dots something concrete to base their annoyance on. It would have been so easy to put in a "You can't SAY that word in the bubble. Do you want to get suspended? You gotta say [euphemism for the same word]. God, you're so stupid and offensive."

Like, our AIs and content algorithms have more Robot Overlord forshadowing than their Dots do. The Dots show them exactly what they ask to see, and most of their relationships are still live, albeit over a screen, with a real person, some parasocial stuff with celebs (one celeb. whom Lindy wasn't obsessed with enough to not throw him under the bus) notwithstanding. Even their ads are only word-of-mouth influencer-type stuff rather than interrupting them every 5 minutes (it's cause they have a premium Bubble subscription, isn't it?) Their virtual bubble doesn't actually matter, because it's roughly made up of the same people that exist in their very much physical bubble that is their gated community.

Since their Dots don't seem to be set up to encourage or discourage any particular type of behavior at all - what to say, what to buy, how much to buy, or suggesting eco-fascist vids bc that person looked into veganism - why, if it became sentient, would it get annoyed? Esp about people using it for plain chatter, the thing it was intended for.

[reinedeslys-central]

when it's been so long since you've read a fic that you forget about it and you find it in the search tags and start reading it again

and it's great, if a little familiar, but you've read a lot of these sorts of fics bc you like this tag a lot, so you assume it's nothing

but then the deja vu starts adding up and you start to wonder

and then moments before the great big Plot Twist Reveal happens you're suddenly like ah hell this is the bloody sundial fic again isn't it

smh this has to be the fourth time yet

[alisaint]

i blocked you and cut ties with you because you're an antisemite who admitted to ignoring me as payback as if i wasn't the one that reached out and was literally asking you if you still wanted to be friends and keep in touch. and this was after having already said something however long ago to you before that about talking, which you also ignored (which is why i messaged you to begin with). it had nothing to do with noah schnapp lmao.

i explained what i meant by extremism and i told you i was very clearly talking about tankies and their "there are no bad moves, only bad targets" ideology, of which there was a shit-ton on my dash at the time. i over-explained what i meant and you still made it about him! not me! you made it about him because you needed to manufacture a scenario in which i would have to be the one to break the friendship instead of you because you couldn't just outright say it.

but yk. if saying that i'm a parasocial freak that chose an actor over our friendship is a more palatable reason, then okay. whatever makes you feel better, big man 👍

[mithomite]

had the most braindead repetitive conversation/argument with my parents. buzz cuts are too masculine but if you dye a design on it it become effeminate which is bad because then you look weak and if youre weak then society falls apart (all societies ever that have fallen apart for any reason are actually because of feminine men) and we start sacrificing babies. and also all mental illness is invented because only 4 people had anxiety in the 90s and covid was made up so that we would all become gay and trans and then the government can control us better and be joe biden's little sex slaves. and also i need to keep my hair long because my father finds it attractive. what

[alwaysoc]

[bunnyinatree]

I feel awful. My dad and I got into a screaming match over my dad's casual transphobia on my mom's birthday 😔 She didn't deserve that... And I don't deserve my dad saying, "Well, now you're hurting MY feelings" every time I try to explain to him why something he said/did is hurtful towards trans people.

[silvermarmoset]

your tags are SO true like it was one thing to bring tennant back pre-ncuti, since the whole point of that was quite transparently to increase viewership FOR ncuti, but to be like "actually tennant!doctor gets to go have his own life and ncuti is a totally different offshoot" is like ....... well.

i'm screaming a lot in the tags but i'm guessing you meant these ones?

#honestly. horrible horrible flex to set ncuti up across from the most beloved doctor from the start?#like i (and im guessing a lot of other people!) will /always/ be drawn to 10 and feel like he's our doctor#don't set ncuti up like that!! deny us dt and MAKE US LOOK AT HIM. this is so SO weird rtd wtf did you do

because yeah. it actually makes me a bit furious because leaving a spare doctor hanging around and sending Ncuti off as a double is just handing the perfect excuse to every bigot who wants to claim that Ncuti isn't the real doctor, the real doctor is back on earth in Donna Noble's garden. Why do that? Why make it easy for fans who want to drop the show now and pretend it's always the old way, forever?

i can think of reasons for doing it this way—like i'm 95% certain this was just a convoluted way to give Donna her happy ending—but none of the possible reasons i can think of justify going about it like this. I love Ten, and Tennant, I could watch him go on adventures forever, but the point should be I DON'T GET TO because because here's A WHOLE NEW WONDERFUL DOCTOR to go on adventures with! The whole constant point in Who is that change and death DO happen, and one of the joys is grieving the old while embracing the new!

But this episode doing this weird little pivot where you can die but still live, where a separate form of you can rest* so you can go on adventures....idk what moral RTD was aiming for here but it feels like he just shot his own next era in the foot for no particular reason beyond "we love Ten" (and we do but. come on)

*(what does that even mean?? canonically we know the doctor is restless and always running into trouble so what was the point of that?? it's confirmed he's going to mars on fun little trips!! this is the same man and you gave him a tardis and apparently there's no sacrifice at all?? what is this!! why!!)

[masked-alien-lesbian]

Well somebody needs an ass whooping

[frumfrumfroo]

So Reylos are now freaking out over episode 4 of Ahsoka cause Anakin showed up in what appears to be the wbw. I have not watched Ahsoka and don't plan to. I personally think that nothing will come out of this in regards to Ben Solos return. People think Leia sacrificed herself to send Ben there? If she sacrificed herself to save him then he wouldn't have gone anywhere he would have been alive.

Anyone who thinks there was planning or thought behind anything in tros is delusional.

Thinking they're setting up Ben's resurrection is almost as removed from reality.

[starvingtongue]

ooc: what if....

Seymour was an accident.