#caveats: there are a lot of generalizations and this is my opinion

[djeterg19]

Ok, so I was chatting on the bird app about why I generally hate third act breakups and it kinda inspired this post. First, conflict is necessary in any drama. The issue that comes up with many third act breakups is that they are often forced or contrived. Or the response is disproportionate to whatever issue comes up. Often it's caused by a lack of communication or a miscommunication.

I'm supposed to believe these two characters are in love but won't talk with or listen to the other person when they try to explain what happened or how they are feeling? Or they see or overhear something and, without speaking with the other person, jump immediately to wanting to break up and then refuse to give them a second chance. Or, and this might be the one I hate the most, they decide they know what's best for their love interest and break up because they don't want to hold them back. You should not be deciding what is best for someone else. People are capable of deciding for themselves what to prioritize in their life. You might think that specific job or going to school is the most important thing but someone else might think a family, friends, or love is more important to them. Because there are plenty of jobs or schools but family and love are irreplaceable.

And if they are so willing to throw the entire relationship away without communicating, how am I supposed to believe that the reunion or their feelings are genuine? Did they learn or grow from the situation? Or is it just cheap conflict to make the last episode have suspense? Why am I supposed to believe they are in love when they don't try reaching out to try resolving whatever the issue is? If your answer to the first big fight or issue your relationship encounters is to dump the other person and refuse to even talk to them...it just does not work for me character wise or plot wise. I can understand yelling and fighting in the moment but I cannot understand someone taking time to think and reflect and not even trying to patch things up or make things work with someone they truly love in most circumstances. And characters and relationships can be tested without forcing the characters apart through forced drama. They can have adult conversations where they can decide that they need to work on x, y, or x but won't cut all communication because they are important to each other. It can be outside forces that cause issues that actually strengthens their bond by forcing them to work together to overcome the odds. Or maybe one of them suffers a setback or struggles with something that is the big drama but they are there for each other and help each other through whatever comes up. Honestly my absolute favorite conflict in a BL was Kawi getting sick in Be My Favorite. It's realistic. It's traumatic. It produced drama AND utilized the time travel element in a great way.

Also the timing is frustrating. Because, with BLs especially, the third act breakup doesn't even happen in the third act. It happens in episode 11 generally. One episode is not the fourth act of a 12 episode series. For it to be a third act breakup, it would need to happen around episode 9 or 10 at the latest. But it almost never does and the ending is almost never satisfying because they have to cram too much into one episode to resolve things. I personally would prefer if such drama was done earlier so that the last episode could be reserved for seeing the happy ending that most of these shows promise. I don't want to spend 12 episodes with a pairing and only have 5 minutes showing them happy at the end. That is generally not satisfying to me.

[nohaijiachi]

Why I Think The Fandom Has Been Doing Aziraphale Dirty Ever Since Season 1 And It's Only Gotten Worse With Season 2 And It's Killing Me Inside

Before we get into the subject matter of the title let me preface a couple of things:

1- All that will follow is, big surprise, my opinion and my interpretation of this character. Do I think I am The One And Only Who Gets The Blorbo Right and that my ideas are 100% the way the author(s) intended to convey the character? No.

More likely than not the way I see Aziraphale could be intensely different from the way Authorman sees him, or Actorman sees him, and I don't think that my interpretation is necessarily any more correct than anybody's else.

That said, if I also did not think that I am, in fact, correct on a certain level, I wouldn't have bothered forming such a thought out opinion of Aziraphale in the first place, nor would be sitting here, writing this post that I can already tell is going to be entirely too long and might probably ruffle some feathers.

So I'll be writing the rest of this post with the caveat that I while I do think my interpretation correct, I'm also not trying to change anybody's mind nor to discredit anybody's else interpretation of Aziraphale. We can sit here in the sandpit and hold different opinions and still be able to build sandcastles together, it really isn't that deep at the end of the day; I can assure you, I'm not here to fight nor cause fights with this one.

2- With the above point, comes also the fact that I won't bother continuously saying "In my opinion" for the rest of this post. You already know that. So, if something will come across as a bit caustic, do know that it is very much tongue in cheek and I am poking a bit of fun at general fannish habits that I am also very much quote-unquoute 'guilty' of having partaken into, and will partake into again plenty of times in the future, I'm sure.

So, with that: Here's Why I Think The Fandom Has Been Doing Aziraphale Dirty Ever Since Season 1 And It's Only Gotten Worse With Season 2 And It's Killing Me Inside

A large part of the people comprising this fandom prefers Crowley. There, I said it.

This fandom's preference blatantly skews toward Crowley. Can we admit that openly? Let's admit that openly.

To be clear, this isn't meant to be an accusation or recrimination or any other -ation you can think of, I am merely stating matter-of-factly a phenomena I've observed in the last four years.

It is also not a wrong nor bad thing in any way, shape or form. I adore Crowley myself. I love them both so much it's unreal.

But I started with that because I think it is very much a symptom of the fact that a lot of people don't get Aziraphale.

I remember back with S1 there had been plenty of times when I found myself reading discussions and opinion exchanges about Aziraphale and Crowley, their dynamics, all the things that went unsaid behind the things that were said, and found myself genuinely surprised by seeing how some people interpreted certain moments wildly different from how I personally saw them.

I look back at that and I think "Oh, sweet summer child". Nothing could have prepared me from the onslaught of takes about Aziraphale that make me go "Good lord, what???" in the wake of S2, and the infamous Last Fifteen.

Now because I don't want to be pointing fingers at specific things and risk upsetting somebody more than I already am by being open in admitting that, guys, yes, some of the takes y'all have been sharing make me go "Yikes(tm)", I'll move on the interesting part and what I would actually love to discuss, aka cracking Aziraphale's head open and see what that actual fuck is going on in there.

Another preface: Because this duo is intrinsically linked and woven together it is downright impossible to only focus on Aziraphale without also mentioning Crowley, so... Let me circle back to our fav demon bae for a sec, here.

I think the reason why it seems that a larger part of the fandom favors Crowley is because I feel like Crowley is a much easier character to grasp. He is very open in his thoughts and feelings, at any given moment us, the audience, have a much easier time watching a scene and sort of ruminating in the back of our heads about Crowley's motivations for saying the things he says and doing the things he does.

That isn't to say Crowley is a less complex character than Aziraphale. They are very much equally complex and multifaceted individuals with their strengths and weaknesses, their issues and the way they each cope with them, how differently they approach their existence and so on and so forth.

But whereas Crowley as a character presents itself with a certain dynamism and a far more outward openness about his complexity, Aziraphale does the exact opposite; we can say Aziraphale is downright hermetic about it.

For us, the audience, he presents a challenge that requires a good deal of thought being put into him to see over the facade he presents at a more superficial level; he requires time and effort to fully dismantle him in our minds to try and see what makes him thick (other than his thighs), and thus I think it is entirely natural that more people latch on the far easier to identify-with, and relate-to, Crowley.

And that is the inevitable consequence of everything that makes Aziraphale... Well, Aziraphale.

So, where to start? Let's try and jot down what Aziraphale truly is at his core.

He is a contradiction.

This man-shaped being is a walking contradiction, constantly existing in a state of being coated in three thousand layers of misdirection and obfuscation and double thinking.

Why is that? Well. He's an angel.

Aziraphale loves being an angel. It is a tenet of his entire existence and something he cherishes. He wants, so very much, to be his ideal of what a good angel is: An entity who is kind and loving and understanding and forgiving.

Of course us, the audience, know that is utter bullshit, because we know angels can be individuals just as complex as the humans Aziraphale loves so much, with all their inherent flaws and capability for cruelty. And, on a certain level, Aziraphale knows that too.

So there we have it, one element of contradiction: Aziraphale wants to think that angels are always Good and Righteous and Never Wrong; Aziraphale knows that angels aren't, in fact, always Good and Righteous and, by god, can they make plenty of mistakes, too.

What else? How about Aziraphale sitting there, being in love with a demon, fully knowing that at the end of the day demons really ain't that different from angels, and also desperately hanging onto the concept of Good vs Bad.

And he sits there, existing with these two contrasting idea equally taking space in his mind, neither side ever capable of taking over the other.

What else do we have? Aziraphale loves God and wants so hard to believe in Her love for humanity and Her ineffable plan, and Aziraphale also time and again does things that very blatantly go against Her will, lies to Her face, and Doubts. He Doubts, a lot, and that requires the capital letter because those Doubts are what spur him in going against everything he's ever told to believe in order to do the right thing.

Aziraphale's very existence is a constant push-and-pull of things he wants to believe and things he knows are real; things he's told to do and things he wants to do. That's how we get "My side" and "there's a bit of good in you" and "you are the bad guys".

And nothing he's lived through has managed to break him out of this unhealthy way of existing quite yet; that's why he acts the way we see him act in the Edinburgh flashback in S2, or at the start of S1 when Crowley has to ease Aziraphale into the idea of trying to stop Armageddon with the usual song and dance of "temptation" and "plausible deniability" and "you'd be thwarting me", even though from the start we can tell there's a little part of Aziraphale who is clearly not at ease with the idea of the end of the world, and once he's been given 'permission' by Crowley nudging him, he is all the way in with the whole saving the world business, not take-backsies.

Both the moments I mentioned here are very important for different reasons, but of the two is very much the Edinburgh flashback that gets a lot more flack by the fandom and is blatantly misunderstood, which I think is the inevitable consequence of that minisode immediately following the glorious, beautiful, heartbreaking piece of art that is the "A companion to owls" minisode.

I've seen a lot of people lamenting that Aziraphale acts obnoxiously in the Edinburgh flashback and, yeah. He does. But I feel like the fact that we are seeing this after watching Aziraphale struggle his way through saving Job's children, even being willing to go to Hell for it, is a though act to follow and probably soured Edinburgh-Aziraphale for a lot of people, made them think that the character had regressed instead of progressing.

But, see, the way he acts is wholly congruous with who Aziraphale is and has always been and keeps being up to the very end of S2. Yes, even after what he does for Job's children.

If you get down to it, Aziraphale had been ready to give up and let the children die, in episode 2. For a brief moment, after Crowley told him he 'longed to destroy the blameless children', Aziraphale was walking away, having tried all he thought he could try to do to stop this senseless act. That was until Crowley tested him by making the crows bleat, cuing Aziraphale to the fact that his impression of Crowley wasn't wrong, and the he could count on him to do the right thing.

To be clear, I don't want to undermine Aziraphale's action by only giving the credit to Crowley but... It is, also, only thanks to Crowley cajoling him and giving him the right excuses, that Aziraphale feels safe in doing what he's always wanted to do all along.

He'd wanted to save Job's children, and thought he couldn't until Crowley threw him that hell of a lifesaver. He wanted to save the world and thought he couldn't until Crowley nudged him on the path of plausible deniability.

He wanted to save Elspeth's eternal soul, blinding himself to the hardships she'd have to endure in her not-eternal life, and was smacked right in the face by the reality of human suffering multiple times.

The way Aziraphale acts in that flashback can't be a regression, because there never was a progression in the first place: He'd always walked the line between Heaven's and God's will and his own, personal morality and sense of justice.

By all means, if we look at Uz-Aziraphale and modern-day-Aziraphale at the start of S1, his reticence about the whole saving the world business should, by all means, appear as a regression as well. You mean to tell me that he'd been ready to become a demon for the sake of three mortal children, and then suddenly a handful of thousands years later when faced with the prospect of the whole world going up in flames he'd just be all like "Heaven will triumph over Hell and it will be all rather lovely"? Like, fuck off, Aziraphale, you lying double-thinker, you (/pos)

Aziraphale constantly exist while being at war with himself. Circumstances have allowed him to rebel the will of Heaven and God more or less safely time and again, but he never quite managed to break free entirely. He'd always ended up being reeled back in, being fed the party lines, being made to feel shame for his independent thinking, until it all becomes too much and he is forced to step back from that freedom he'd been inches away from grasping.

Back and forth, back and forth, never stopping.

And all of this, all of what he is, makes it so hard for us, the audience, to truly see him. To truly grasp him. To truly watch any given scene with him and figure out what he might be thinking or feeling.

To understand Aziraphale is to understand what he is not saying when he says something, which is a good deal harder to do than it is to understand and relate to a character like Crowley, who very much revel in saying exactly whatever the heck he thinks whenever he damn well pleases.

All those layers of obfuscation and misdirection and double thinking that Aziraphale coats himself in are as much an armor that makes it harder for the audience to understand him as they are his very own downfall because, good lord, if you exist like that, if you exist forced to keep things hidden from yourself, well... It's inevitable that at some point you are going to stumble into pitfalls of your own making.

And I love him for it.

So, there? I hope I managed to explain something with this post, and that it wasn't just the rambling of someone who spends way too much time thinking about her blorbos. To be clear, I don't think people who haven't spent as much time as me trying to dissect and better understand Aziraphale's character are like, dumber than me or anything. It's just that this pair of angelic-demonic blorbos take too much real estate in my mind, lol.

Feel free to let me know your opinion and if you think I am wildly off mark and my Take Is Bad. I might answer, I might not, it all depends on time and my mood ◝(ᵔᵕᵔ)◜

[simplydnp]

hey char! what do you think phil meant when he said "as long as you're not being too weird" when he talked about rpf and being "shipped with another youtuber" ?

it seems like his take on rpf is that if people specifically say don't, then don't (which, considering what he graciously went through for years as a public figure, i can understand the viewpoint), but otherwise, it's pretty much fine, with a few caveats.

now he doesn't specifically say, but based off our history with dnp, the line would be:

insisting/assuming fic is real

shoving fic in their/their families' faces

it's hard to say his actual opinion on some of the very graphic/disturbing crackfic that happened in our community, cause both he and dan reference specific ones when making jokes. any concrete thoughts on that would be pure speculation on my part.

beyond that, i think there's not a lot that would phase him. he truly has seen it all throughout the years. if you're a writer, i hope you're not too stressed. i don't think any of our writers are doing anything even close to 'over the line'. dnp have been good at respecting our writing space and we've generally been good about respecting them back (especially these last many years i wouldnt say theres been anything 'bad')

this is just my take on it!

[twig-tea]

Lately I’ve been feeling like Thai bl is truly all over the place with so many shows airing at once and some of the best ones flying under the radar while discourse is focused on a couple of the big messy ones. I think you’re the only person I know who is actually watching ALL of them and has been here for the whole evolution of the genre, so I’m curious what stands out to you about this current moment. Do the shows feel different to you? Is the way fandom is interacting with them changing? And what are your current favs?

I ended up writing a thesis, sorry friend lol To be fair to me there are 3 questions in there, all of them meaty! I've done my best to give a sense of where I'm at with Thai BL and how it feels like it's changed over time.

Caveating all of this: I am just one fan who I'm sure has had specific experiences that will colour my opinion, also a lot of this is just vibes so I'm open to being told I've forgotten something major or misremembered what it was like! If you are reading this and your opinion or experience is different please share, with stuff like this I'm always interested in hearing about differing opinions because the fandom experience will depend at least partly on where you hang out. For years, my main fandom space for BL was the YouTube comments section (RIP me).

Overall feel

Honestly, things overall don't feel all that different to me in Thai BL in particular, even though I'm about to talk about a lot of changes and ways it actuallyd does feel very different below lol And after reflecting about it, I think it's because these things still feel very much in flux, in a way that they've felt in flux this entire time. Producers are still figuring out the best funding and distribution models and merch models to make money; creators are still calibrating how queer these shows can be and still be popular; actors are still figuring out how to do BGP (business gay performances) without having fans interfere in their private lives off the clock. Writers are still trying to figure out how to write 12-episode arcs that don't drag in the middle or fumble the ending (which is also not new). The tension between established ships, fan expectations, and genre requirements has honestly been there almost the whole time, though the reverberations of missteps is louder now because of the larger fanbase that is (comparatively) more plugged in to live viewing. The core question in BL has always been 'how do we make this marketable', and that unsurprisingly hasn't changed, though the answer to that question has over time, if that makes sense?

Shows

Do the shows feel different? As a whole, I'd say yes. The biggest differences are of course total quantity and overall quality, but the actual distribution of % of shows that have high(er) production values (i.e. quality) feels close to the same--it was close to 50/50 in the late 2010s and now is maybe more like 40/60 with a higher percentage coming from more smaller production companies. But the numbers we're talking about are something like 15 shows in e.g. 2018 and something more like 50 shows in 2023 (being vague because there are shows that people could argue over whether they should count). The quality overall has increased, even the pulps look better, sound better, and tend to feel a little bit more put together than the pulps of even 2020 (please note that these are all relative qualifiers, most of these shows are still not objectively good). 2020 in particular was a watershed moment for high production value BLs; we get colorists and special effects artists, and sometimes decent sound production now!

There has also been an improvement in terms of what is depicted and how certain subject matter is treated very generally, though I think that's still in flux. Things like evil ex girlfriends are less common than they were and the women in BL are more likely (in general, still not always) to be treated as realized characters. We've gotten more and better femme representation in ensemble shows, and the "gay for you" trope is much less common. Consent is now considered sexy and is much more common than it was; non-consent as "sexy" has eroded and is much less common. Things that used to happen in almost every BL now happen in a much lower percentage. I also feel a little bit less worried about some of the actors on pulp sets because there is more general scrutiny about things like minor actors, intimacy coordination, BGP (business gay performance) expectations, and sexual exploitation. Overall, show recommendations these days come with fewer caveats.

The assumption that if you worked with someone on a BL once you would stay with them as an established pairing was surprisingly early in BL; I don't know if it's just because there were a few shows that had side pairings then get main shows, so the actors did work together on a few shows in a row, which made them feel established, or whether it's because the BGP started early to build hype both before and after shows aired, or whether audiences just made homophobic assumptions about how if two actors had chemistry they had to be gay for each other, and otherwise nobody would want to "play gay" more than once, or would want to have to kiss too many other men....in any case, there were huge scandals and blow-ups around this in BL on even the earliest shows, and some early shows were snubbed because of the pairing alone. Similarly, it was established very early in BL (i.e. 2016-17) that an unhappy ending for a pair would result in your show being panned; cheating was also a guaranteed flop in BL circles (though some ensemble shows that had gay relationships in them such as Friend Zone did fine with cheating plots and unhappy endings). Overall it feels like some things were only depicted in early Thai BL and creators have avoided them since due to the audience reception at the time. I will say, generally, that there have now been enough examples of people in a "branded pair" moving on to a new pair or multiple shows, that it feels less like a death knell to a BL career if one of the actors says they no longer wanted to make BLs, or if they switched companies.

I pay a lot of attention to queerness in BL, and that has changed a little bit too, though not in the way I expected. I had been expecting a more clear and steady trajectory in BL, but we've instead had real swings, and I've realized there will just always be shows that feel more or less actually gay or queer than others, and that's ok. Early Thai shows really spoiled us for good queer content, GayOK Bangkok and Diary of Tootsies are still shows by which i measure what we get now, and both of those are from 2016. I would say that more "mainstream" BL (i.e. by one of the major production companies) hit what turned out to be queer saturation around 2020 and that's where I was most surprised not see a more clear trajectory; rather than things getting more queer from there, I'd say a greater percentage of shows overall feel more queer, but we haven't (and I now suspect won't) reach the queerness we had in Thai tv in 2016. That being said, my secret running list of things I want to see in BL gets shorter every year as entries get crossed off, so I would say the range of queer experience is slowly getting captured as more content continues to be made by a wider range of production houses (PrEP being mentioned in a mainstream show is my white whale).

I know some people assume that shows are higher heat now overall, but I don't think that's true. I do think Thai television producers and directors have overalll gotten better at capturing sensuality, and acting workshops have improved chemistry-building overall too. But from what I can tell the ratio of high head and low heat content is still pretty similar to what it's always been, maybe slightly higher (e.g. at a quick glance I'd guesstimate 30% of shows had a sex scene in 2018 vs 40% in 2023).

Fandom

The main differences in fandom from the really early days and now are the ways we, as international fans, are able to engage with each other, with thai audiences at the same time, and with content creators, and the entitlement that comes with that. In the 2010s we were almost always watching after Thai airing, with either fansubs or, later, official subs, trailing online releases by days or weeks, which themselves may have trailed the Thailand airing date by days or weeks or sometimes even months. That became less true around 2019ish, and especially in 2020 when I think Thai producers were desperate to reach audiences during the start of the pandemic (and when audiences were desperate for something to distract us from what was happening in real life).

As a fan in the mid-late 2010s, watching something was either unofficial via a fansubber, or you were wading through hundreds of Thai comments to find anyone else writing about the shows in English. Now, it's actually rare we don't have immediate international distribution, though it may be paid. If the subs are not up at the same time as the official upload, even on free sites, fans get furious. It's a bit surreal to see people complain about waiting a few hours for subtitles, especially on YouTube, when we sometimes waited months for a series to finish being subbed (not to say people didn't complain back then too, because they sure did! But there were fewer international fans overall, and it wasn't an expectation that there would be subs, so fewer people complained when it happened). This meant that a lot of people only watched shows when they were complete, and people were not watching with any kind of synchronicity.

With international fans moving into simultaneous watching with Thai audiences, we suddenly had the chance to talk about shows as they were airing and affect the conversations about them and even, sometimes, the decisions. Folks seem to have differing opinions about what makes a BL, and what makes a BL good, and they are vocal about when a show doesn't meet their standard. This has always been true, but the strong opinions have more of an effect on the discourse when they're expressed in real-time to the show being aired. Also, when we have literally 3x the number of Thai shows being aired (nevermind other countries which have also increased), it seems so much more egregious to me to complain if a single show doesn't meet your particular taste. Just go watch something else! That was less possible in 2016, but now nobody has any excuse lol Please note here that I'm not saying shows should not be criticized. But when you have one loud faction saying shows should have nothing but innocent kisses if any skinship at all and showing more is distasteful and possibly homophobic, and another faction saying a show should be panned if they don't have at least one sex scene and if there is no good kiss it's homophobic, I don't know where that leaves content creators but I see the tension and how it sometimes results in my least favourite tropes like "blushing maiden" even after a couple has canonically had sex. These factions have always existed in BL fandom, this is not new, they just both seem particularly silly now with so much content to choose from.

The shows that get attention and the shows that get snubbed feel the same too, in all honesty. You can ask yourself the following questions:

Is the show a little slower paced?

Are the story beats less melodramatic?

Do its characters feel more human?

Do they feel more queer?

Is it a comedy?

Is there any risk of an unhappy ending?

Do people not think one of the lead actors is hot?

Do people ship one of the lead actors with someone who isn't his costar?

Do people have to do anything other than go to YouTube to watch it?

If the answer is yes to any of those questions, and especially to the last one, fewer people will be watching, even if the show is good. That's always been true. [Shows I'm thinking about when I say that: Make it Right, He's Coming to Me, My Ride, You're My Sky, Oxygen (though the sides in this one are also at fault), YYY, Something in my Room, Ghost Host Ghost House, Dear Doctor I'm Coming for Soul, Cooking Crush.] All this is to say, there have always been shows that have been ignored, though I agree with you OP that with more shows airing, more are being ignored at any given time.

The other thing is that when a show is good, it doesn't necessarily invite discourse. The messes are often what encourage people to dig in, fill in gaps, linger in the adrenaline. The part that does feel different is also related to the increase in genre BLs; genre stuff in general tends to get more attention in fandom spaces, and the way people are functioning as fans feels different in that they're bringing the way they interact with genre content to BL as BL has started having larger and better funded genre content. I'm thinking about those early genre BLs like He She It, My Dream, Love Poison, Golden Blood, So Much In Love, Why R U....we started getting genre shows in BL in I think 2017 and basically had 1-2 a year until 2020ish and then it increased from there; and the ones that had funding and decent distribution got engagement until they started going off the rails, and then they had even more engagement and then fell off. I don't think it's a coincidence that the shows last year that got people to write meta were La Pluie, Be My Favorite, and I Feel You Linger in the Air. When a show is building a world, there's more to say and interrogate about it, and when a genre show fails, it can fail more spectacularly than a regular romance story. The most popular BL shows used to all be straight-up BL bubble romances, but I think genre shows really started to take over a greater percentage of the popular spots in 2022 and 2023. Again, the main difference here is that there used to be 1-2 stand-out shows per year, and now there are closer to 6+ per year, and as we got more stand-out shows the variety of what type of show stood out as popular has expanded. I do think the overall percentage of shows that are more standard romance plots has reduced, partly because Thai production companies are running out of popular y-novels to adapt. So I'm anticipating we'll continue to get more genre content going forward, and maybe a higher percentage of original works too.

Shows I'm Enjoying Right Now

Right now, the Thai shows airing that I'm watching are:

Cooking Crush

Dead Friend Forever

Cherry Magic Thailand

City of Stars

The Sign

Playboyy

PitBabe

7 Days before Valentine

For Him

Of those, I'd currently most recommend Cooking Crush as a generic BL recommendation. Dead Friend Forever is very good, but is not a romance and is difficult for some to watch (there are a lot of dark themes in addition to the gore and scary bits).

Cooking Crush is doing so many things I love. I've written about the way it's set up its major conflict to be amongst the friend group here, and way the show is depicting communication between the two main characters and how they improve their communication with one another as they get closer here. Two of my biggest BL pet peeves are a conflict for the sake of a dramatic penultimate episode that ignores or retcons a character's growth or the building of trust that a couple has already gone through in the series, so the fact that this show is working so hard to establish strong communication between its leads and then setting up the significant drama to actually about friendship rather than romance is something I cannot overstate my excitement about. To tie this back into what I wrote above, this reminds me of Diary of Tootsies and I mean that in the best possible way.

Dead Friend Foreever is, like I mentioned above, not a romance; it's a slasher horror melodrama with a very well established mystery, an ensemble cast of mostly hateable characters (which I admit isn't usually my thing, but since they're likely all going to die as a result of the genre they're in I'm finding that more tolerable than usual, and there is at least one character I like). DFF did a great job of structuring the story for the ultimate payoff of information reveals. There are a lot of shows that have been messing with non-linear storytelling recently, Cooking Crush being one of the ones that actually does this poorly in my opinion, but Dead Friend Forever effectively uses non-linear storytelling so that we find out important pieces of information about particular characters at a time when that information will have the most emotional impact on what is happening in the "present" of the storyline. Every time there is a reveal, it informs what we've already seen, recontextualizes it, and means we understand some of the character motivations and actions differently from when we saw them the first time. I mentioned above that there are dark themes in this show; one of the things that I really like about this show is that the impact of class is not glossed over, and that the consequences of these events feel very real for the characters; people do terrible things in this show, but these actions are not treated lightly by the show itself.

You'd think these two shows would have nothing in common, but there are things that they share that put them both in my top category. Generally, in both of these shows, the character arcs are clear and logical; when a character does something, even if I don't like the action itself, I can understand exactly why they that and can see how it matches where they are in their arc at the time. The shows show change in characters as a result of what they experience, and the relationships in this show really matter. When characters start acting in ways that feel out of character or against their own arc because they have to in order to drive the plot forward, I struggle to remain invested; that's not happening with either of these shows. Both of these shows also treat serious topics with seriousness, and consequences for actions are real and felt by the characters in the show (and if someone gets away with something, the show is clear that this is not just). Nothing has happened that hasn't been signalled or implied earlier. Both shows also have clear class consciousness and represent the disparity caused by classism in a critical/harsh light.

Whew! I think I got to everything you asked. Thanks again for the extremely interesting question!

[cerastes]

As someone who hasn't touched it yet- how does IS4 stack up? How's first impressions been?

Ok, let me give my thoughts on IS4, now that it's been a week!

TL;DR -> This Rocks, I love it.

IS4 is far, far more polished than IS3. I feel a bit bad blasting and slamming IS3 so much, but the bottom line with it is that it's just very very flawed in ways that really make it hard to revisit it in the same way IS2 is always a fun romp.

If I had to point out flaws with IS4, it'd be that, on a personal level, I wish it had a few more Normal Arknights Maps. The vast majority of maps in IS4 are pranks and checks of some sort. This isn't necessarily a negative, but I do like playing some Tower Defense more frequently than what IS4 allows, since it's always got me worried about "oh god my team lacks X, Floor Y's Map Z checks X, if I get it, I'll D I E " so I try to go for my super tried and true team instead of daring to experiment all that much. This will eventually pass, but it's been a Thing for me.

Besides that, though? I just have a lot of good things to say about it. The systems feel like they were thought out this time: The Fordartals (sp?) system allows for a lot of player expression, agency, and just in general fun in a way the Light system of IS3 can simply never hope to compare to. About the only thing the Light system did right was the way it worked thematically: If you wish to confront The Corrupting Heart, you really, really gotta go in the dark, and for the best possible chance against, Izumik, Mizuki must find the Light again and be filled with hope. Yeah ok sure, thematically, these work, but the gameplay component sucks ass, because Light exists almost exclusively as a form of punishment and in basically no way as something you can use. It opens some roads, sure, but that Rogue Trader and Wish Fulfilled node are not worth having 9 out of you 11 Operators with Metastatic. Speaking of Metastatic, the single worst thing Arknights has done, even if you are maxed out on Collapse in IS4 and are packing four fully upgraded maluses, THAT STILL DOESN'T COMPARE to how bad Metastatic was. Let that sink in.

The endings are no longer RNG! Absolutely wonderful!

Eik is the first IS 2nd Boss I can say I think is good! Frozen Monstrosity was just annoying, Big Sad Lock is incredibly static, and The Last Knight, in my opinion, is the single worst and most boring boss in the entire game, not even just the game mode. Eik is like if The Last Knight didn't suck: Same principle, but done in a way that is actually not snooze-inducing. Mind you, the principle of the fight is still not something I enjoy, but unlike The Last Knight, that's wholly a me thing, as opposed to being an objectively awful and boring fight (like The Last Knight, the worst and most boring boss in Arknights).

Even though I said I'd like some more normal maps, the maps are good, to be honest! I can't think of any Fire and Water Unions or Out of Controls.

IS4 is the Smash of Arknights: (Almost) Everyone Is Here! Brush up on your gimmicks from various events, because they WILL appear.

The Midboss philosophy in IS4 is lovely, in my opinion: It's low HP bosses who can quickly fuck you up in their own way, be it stun, immense conditional damage, or simply supporting their team so well that you get overwhelmed. The Variant stages for the bosses are entire new maps, so that's also cool.

Collapsal enemies are congruent with the map design: Collapsals can be very quick, with a caveat: Normal Collapsal mobs speed up after they get hit, Casters speed up after not attacking for a bit, Aerials are fast but always have many loops and never directly go to the point until after a while. Shattered Champions are the exception, and they can either loop a while or just go straight for the jugular, making them apt Elite units for the faction.

There's much more I could say more concisely, but really, just try the game mode, get your ass kicked a bit, learn it, and then you'll see how coherent the design of IS4 is in terms of systems, maps, enemies, and features. Sorry, IS3, but you got your ass absolutely kicked like I did on my Waves 15 runs when you'd give my 2 main DPS units Metastatic on Floor 5.

[thecarnivorousmuffinmeta]

I don't think you've been asked- but what's your opinion on the accords?

I briefly touched on the accords here, in my post where I hate on Steve.

Now, I have to give the caveat of "in the MCU films" as that's what I'm familiar with and if I don't someone will invariably come to my comments and say, "But Muffin, you didn't read the comics, in the comics this made sense, in the comics this is different".

So, we're talking about the films.

In the films, they were a completely reasonable and legitimate international law that Steve and friends look... not quite bad but short sighted for fighting against it so hard.

Given what we're told in the film, this is an international agreement, agreed upon by pretty much every country, which is just "superhumans who play vigilante should be held accountable to international laws and should not be directing themselves". That's it.

The laws in and of themselves are not only not an inherently bad idea but probably a good one. The reason it seems they may not be justified is that, thus far (sans Tony in Age of Ultron when he made an evil AI and nearly destroyed a country), is that the Avengers as we've seen them in the film have reacted reasonably to threats and were unquestionably the good guys. They never threw their weight around, abused their powers, didn't seem to be picking and choosing of who they would save and who they wouldn't, and worked fairly cohesively as a relatively independent organization. This makes it seem more like a "Tony" problem in that he's the one who fucked up big time and should have had oversight.

The problem is, that's right, it is a Tony problem, Tony was an Avenger who had no oversight and was deciding where and how he should use his talents with no one to say "no", and there could be another Tony in the future and maybe someone should be able to check in and say when the Avengers should and should not be going.

Now, if it was just MCUsa, e.g. Ross who we know is a baddie, that'd be quite bad as the avengers can be sent out as tools of war between whatever countries except that we're told it's explicitly an international agreement and that it's internationally decided on when and where the Avengers should be deployed. In terms of politics, that's about as good as you're going to get, and a lot more justified than "six/seven people with mostly the same background decide when and where they should go without necessarily having a full understanding of the situation/place they're being deployed into".

Oversight is not a bad thing.

And the film completely and utterly fails to bring up any legitimate and convincing arguments against it. Arguments seem to boil down to: we as an audience know from general Marvel things and The Hulk that Ross is very bad and him being for the accords is bad, Tony was the bad guy in the last film and is clearly letting his fear get to him here and is afraid of making his own decisions, Bucky, and we know the Avengers are good and always will be.

It's just.. yeah, what else is there to say?

[arwainian]

The F@tT Fic Marathon: Catching up finally.

🎉I have officially read the full Friends at the Table AO3 tag!🎉

My very silly quest has reached its technical end point after EXACTLY 10 months of intensive reading! It has been sometimes grueling, often delightful, and led to me developing intense opinions in directions i never thought possible to myself. But I have done it, and I am extremely pleased with myself.

To get some housekeeping out the way, I usually give recs upon a writeup, but since there were only three fics left for me to read i'm just gonna shout them out generally.

Fics 1981-1983

check out i'm too scared to say half of the things i do (when i picture you) by waltztangocache for partizan era Kal'mera Broun fantasizing about Valence and trying to keep from letting that slip through their telepathic bond

and if you like Christmas fic, fangirl_squee has got you covered with Fero "not liking Christmas" but being roped into it anyway, and the Bluff City Masks crew hunting down some Christmas mini-miracles

and like, if you're looking for something to read, remember every single writeup has come with at least one personal recommendation. it's all under the tag #fatt fic marathon (also a caveat that these recommendations come from my personal tastes, i might not have mentioned a fic during the marathon that's a favorite of yours and i hope you continue to deeply enjoy what you love even when it might not have hit where I would have liked)

if you would like to take a look at the massive spreadsheet I used to keep track of which fics I was set to read together, as well as other info like what season it was for, and word count, here is a link to it!

What next?

First of all, I'm gonna spend a good long time reading other things. I've accumulated a great big To-Be-Read pile of pleasure reading consisting of both real-ass books and other fanfic that have been put at a lower priority while I powered through this project. I have had fun, but it is high time for a Break to read and do other stuff for a bit. (*glances nervously at my unstarted secsam project*)

If you happen to like my thoughts about what I'm reading, this past year I tried to keep track with reading log posts. They got stripped down to the basics over the course of the year and Finals Season sorta took it out of me so there's nothing for the past couple weeks BUT. i like reading a lot and i like talking about it a lot. so that's all tagged as #cal reading log if you want to keep up with me and my reading

and, what shall happen to these writeups! I'm not interested in continuing these in perpetuity, but I may give a final send off one when the tag hits 2000 (i'm still deciding). otherwise, this is likely the end of them. I might still shout out inidivudual cool fics that get published as I read them, but that's just like, good fandom practice to spread around cool fanworks tbh, rather than this weird thing I've done. nonetheless, i hope y'all had fun watching this journey

and a final thank you to all of the lovely authors who have made fanfic writing their hobby and have chosen to share what they write with others. Thank you! it is extremely obvious that I could not have done this if they never put pen to page or fingertip to keyboard and did the dang thing in the first place. you've made some cool stuff and i like reading it.

Happy New Year Everyone!

[waitmyturtles]

Pain, Suffering, and Narratives in Some Asian Dramas/BLs (An Utterly Un-Scholastic, Highly Personal Big Meta)

I’ve been meditating on the topic of pain and suffering in dramas over the last few weeks, as conversations across Tumblr have been taking place regarding the success (or not) of the Our Skyy 2 x Bad Buddy x A Tale of Thousand Stars episodes. I can’t help but connect these thoughts to some of the fabulous older shows I’ve been watching in my Old GMMTV Challenge watchlist project, where I’m catching up on older Thai BLs in order to better understand the fabulous works that we’re seeing airing now. This Big Meta in part comes out of my having just watched He’s Coming To Me and Dark Blue Kiss, but I was also very deeply inspired by a Japanese BL that many of us here have fallen in love with, Our Dining Table, that features a poignant moment recognizing that feeling pain is a necessity in feeling love for another person -- that accepting pain and suffering is a part of the life we decide to live, from an Asian cultural perspective.

I’m using some big generalities here, so let me explain where I’m coming from. During certain large portions of my life, I’ve explored either becoming a Buddhist, or at least practiced Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism. While the world of Western capitalism has unfortunately taken up the majority of my current time/life, I do still have a desire to learn more about the history of Buddhism and try to incorporate some kind of practice in my daily life.

The reason why I offer that caveat is that a core of teaching in at least the spaces of Buddhism that I’ve been privy to, is the recognition of pain and suffering in one’s life. Suffering is a core tenet of Buddhism, one of the Four Noble Truths, and one that a human being does good deeds or makes merit in light of (as we see quite often in our beloved BLs) in order to receive “good” karma for a happy existence in this life or the next. (Again, mad generalizations here, but you get the point.)

I’ve been thinking about this because I often wonder if us Western viewers (I count myself as one, as an Asian-American) are too demanding for linear, clean, direct, and/or happy communication, narratives, and endings, particularly in the realm of Asian BLs, in regards to either romantic love and/or love from one’s nuclear parents/family. I think about this very much in the context of the Asian BL genre, where queerness -- as accepted, OR NOT, in Asian societies, friend groups, and families -- may indicate an existence that is not necessarily a happy one. 

There are other issues by way of demands from fans that often determine the outcome of a BL script, such as shipper demands for overtly sexual content. What I’m proposing here is that, in my opinion, some of the best dramas/BLs from Asia are rooted in a reflection and acceptance of the tenets of suffering as a natural part of Asian life and, subsequently, Asian art. I further propose that because of that acceptance of suffering, that we — Western viewers — are often left potentially feeling unsatisfied or unfulfilled by a particular ending of a drama. I posit that the linear/binary/clear outcomes that Western audiences so often demand are limiting in comparison to the non-binary, non-linear journeys and conclusions of art that Asian filmmakers can reach in their work, vis à vis à general cultural understanding that pain and suffering are a part of daily life.

Before I give a drama example, let me use one from real life, that is so very often reflected in art: filial piety. I wrote about filial piety quite a bit in my reviews of Double Savage, a non-BL from Thailand that focused on the plight of a discarded son who was judged by his father as a jinx.

When I try to explain to Western friends that Asian parental love is very often conditional (I myself have experienced it, and my experiences mirror those of my friends), I experience a lot of denial.

“There is NO WAY your parents don’t love you.”  “There is NO WAY your parents will ever give up on you. Even if they treat you badly, they love you.”  “In the West, we ALWAYS end up loving our children. That’s what society demands of PARENTS. We’re CONDITIONED to be like that.”

A major cultural competency issue that Western therapists face with Asian clients is when Western therapists say to Asian clients who are having family issues, “why don’t you just talk to your parents about what you’re feeling?” Talking to Asian parents about a child’s feelings, in MANY instances, is not realistic. The language of that kind of emotion may not even exist. AND, there are unspoken social boundaries AGAINST children having those conversations with their parents in the first place. To have those conversations would very well ROCK the foundation on which Asian families are structured.

My parents may love me — the dad in Double Savage mayyyy have loved his son? — but an Asian parent like that, so rooted in their JUDGEMENT AGAINST an offspring, will often not budge. Time and time again, my Asian friends and family will talk about how they felt unloved as a child -- especially if their skin was darker, if their siblings were more successful in school, if they were a middle child, etc. VERY often, our Asian parents don’t know what us children do by way of work -- my parents don’t know anything about my work, for instance.

The Western perspective and social demands for a STYLE of loving one’s children in a very particular, involved, and empathic way -- those cultural expectations don’t necessarily exist in Asia. So we see parents like, say, Non’s father in Dark Blue Kiss; or Korn’s father in Double Savage; or ESPECIALLY Uea’s mom in Bed Friend, a fantastic example of an Asian parent who takes PERSONALLY every aspect of her son’s social and sexual “differences,” blames him for those differences, and accuses him of ruining HER life vis à vis how he was born to be the way that he is.

And yet, at least for Korn and Uea -- we see those children, for the majority of their dramas, continuing to devote themselves to their parents. Because filial piety -- the Asian cultural and social demand for RESPECTING one’s parents above all else -- is existent and EXPECTED of almost EVERY living Asian, no matter where you live on the continent or your various diasporas. 

The equation is: even if you suffer at the hands of your parents, even if you don’t receive unconditional love and empathy from your parents, you must sacrifice in order to respect and serve your parents. You can imagine how much therapy even one individual would need to process that -- if that individual even ALLOWED themselves to think about what was happening, which oftentimes doesn’t even happen. 

I’m not saying that filial piety EQUALS suffering. What I’m saying is that the practice of filial piety will almost always ASSUME a level of suffering that one must undertake to participate in the practice of honoring one’s parents.

Where I felt this *assumption* most strongly and recently was in my viewings of three Aof Noppharnach shows: He’s Coming To Me, Dark Blue Kiss, and Our Skyy 2 x Bad Buddy x A Tale of Thousand Stars, but I think Double Savage and Bed Friend also fall into this category as well. Very quickly:

1) HCTM was rooted in storytelling around the practice of Thai-Chinese Buddhism. Thun’s suffering was apparent: he was fatherless, he was gay, and could see ghosts. AS WELL, Med’s suffering was that he didn’t know how he had died, and why he was being held in purgatory before moving on to his next life. 

2) Dark Blue Kiss was rooted in internalized homophobia. My big review of DBK is coming next week, but quickly, between the two main couples (PeteKao and SunMork), you had internalized homophobia playing various roles of emotional INTERPLAY, that AFFECTED the external emotional demonstrations of the character -- particularly in Pete, who was viscerally working on becoming a calmer person, but was triggered by Kao’s internalized homophobia to not be open about their relationship, and Pete’s jealousy subsumed him. DBK is the only show I’m mentioning here that has a clean happy ending for all couples involved, but more on that in a second.

3) OS2 x BBS x ATOTS, on the Pat and Pran side, was rooted in a clear but indirect conflict between Pat and Pran about openness and independence. If Pat and Pran had been open about their relationship (à la Pete and Kao) -- would Pat have needed to sound tough to his engineering friends that Pran *depended* on Pat to close loops? And on the Tian and Phupha side -- there is plenty we don’t know about Phupha’s past to make judgements, but I think it’s safe to say that he grew up in such a rural environment in Thailand as to make him assume that coming out and meeting his partner’s parents was an non-reality for the majority of their relationship, until the end of the OS2 series. The journey to get to the point of the ring was a tough one, particularly for Tian, who wanted more openness.

4) Both Double Savage and Bed Friend seem to end happily, especially for Uea and King in Bed Friend. But: Uea loses his parent. Yes -- he NEEDED to lose his mom, because of how toxic she was. But from an Asian family structure perspective -- he only has his sister by the end of that traumatic journey, which is not necessarily an IDEAL or complete ending. The bonds among Korn, Win, and Rung are permanently affected by the behavior of Korn and Win’s dad in Double Savage. The ending is a copacetic one -- they have survived, and will learn to survive together, after all the trauma they have lived through. But it’s not necessarily a HAPPY one. Both of these endings do not necessarily reflect the holistic ideal of the Asian family structure.

I emphasize all of this because, as I said earlier: I think a Western demand to CLOSE LOOPS in Asian dramas is unrealistic.

In Asian life (big generalization, but let me roll with it): you are angry at your parents, and you process it internally, very often without any help, and after a couple days, things go back to the way they were. The children do not demand change from their parents.

In OS2 x BBS, what I DIDN’T SEE -- and, from this framework, what I argue that I DIDN’T *NEED* TO SEE -- were any clarifying conversations between Pat and Pran about how either of them would CHANGE for their relationship. The biggest confession we got was Pat telling Pran, “without you, there is no me,” and Pran quietly agreeing (thank you to @lurkingteapot and @dimplesandfierceeyes for the incredible post on the improved translation of “I can’t live without you”).

But throughout the episodes, we saw their existence together, and arguably, their conditions -- how each of them has organized himself to comport to the other’s immediate needs. How Pran’s larger burden of keeping in the closet to keep his nuclear family structure stable kept them from being totally out, and how Pran designed fibs to be able to have at least one public demonstration of love between him and Pat on stage. They know they cannot solve intergenerational trauma in the span of a series. They’re still closeted two years later. And throughout all of this: how Pat digests Pran’s needs, and keeps his (Pat’s) own needs for openness at bay. We know he feels pain, too, when he makes his confession to Pran in Pha Pun Dao. We know he’s watching Pran as Pran hesitates to put on the bruise cream.

I feel that Pat’s acceptance of this existence is both heart-rending and utterly beautiful from the perspective of seeing Aof’s work as *Asian* art. I feel like, as an Asian, that I KNOW, that PAT KNOWS, what Pran has to lose. Pran has A LOT to lose. And so, Pat -- instead of demanding for outing and openness -- will hold what Pran needs him to hold. He knows when Pran is grumpy, and needs to be grumpy. And Pran’s got a lot to deal with. He’s got so much that he’ll need to go to Singapore, likely to get separation from his mother -- and that will result in him and Pat being separated (and I’m intentionally not analyzing Pran’s need for space from Pat here, but I think we can safely argue that, too, as Pat’s helpful attitude may smother Pran at times) (and there’s also the issue of the nuclear pain that Pat himself may feel at losing trust in his father for his father’s past foibles). 

After the OS2 episodes, I didn’t need to know THE REASONS, the stark REASONING for why Pran needed to go to Singapore -- because, indirectly, it was already very clear to me that these young men were already holding tremendous burdens. Singapore, for Pran AND for Pat, could have ultimately been a motivator for growth. But I don’t need to know this. All I know is that they continue to have various levels of pain that they will be dealing with in their nascent adult lives.

While Dark Blue Kiss ULTIMATELY had happy endings -- how it got there was PAINFUL. Kao was ROOTED in fear that he would upend his family’s stability, while being the breadwinner. He was held back by extremely traditional role expectations of an older son. And he had no communication with his mother about straying from those roles. Pete’s dad served as the first -- and, I’d argue, maybe BL’s first -- paradigm-breaker as a parent, being SO open about his son’s queerness as to encourage healthy sex practices. But what I argue in this thesis is that up until the very last, bitter end, Kao was relegated to ASSUME that he would live in pain. His expectation was that Pete would ride with him. Pete couldn’t take it anymore and bubbled over. And Kao was forced to make a decision, for Pete’s sake, literally, to BE open, and to save the relationship. That shit ain’t easy.

Lots of folks who have read my posts on this site know that I appreciate a good Asian drama rooted in family and/or community trauma, like 10 Years Ticket. It’s the way in which Asian filmmakers depict this trauma that speaks very much to my life, my culture, and my viewpoint on what’s realistic in this world, and how that reality can be depicted in art. What I’ve found in watching Asian dramas is... I don’t always want clean endings. I don’t always want loops closed.

Sometimes, Asian kids can’t talk to their parents (Pran, Kao). If you grow up like that, you don’t immediately learn the language of intimacy for your family members, your friends, your lovers (Pran’s struggles after BBS/ep5, Thun’s coming out and not knowing the words for it). It might be EASY, or culturally UNQUESTIONABLE, to not argue with your parents about the ways in which they engage with their children (Korn, Win, Pran). Sometimes, to make a break in order to survive, you need to leave a toxic family member behind, which is NOT an ideal scenario (Uea). 

Sometimes, you lose the love of your life (Ueda-san in Our Dining Table). Sometimes, you fall in love with someone — and you find that you can’t *exist* without them (Pat to Pran). And you have to live with the pain. I might even posit that the risk of that pain makes the love you have, either for the person living or the person passed, that much more meaningful to you.

I watch Asian dramas because I don’t feel like Asian filmmakers are subject to the Western demand to clean up all emotionally questionable loose ends. This is not When Harry Met Sally. Harry and Sally should have only remained friends, and not gotten married -- even Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner knew that -- but they also realized that Western audiences would not accept such an ending.

“The script initially ended with Harry and Sally remaining friends and not pursuing a romantic relationship because she felt that was "the true ending", as did Reiner. Eventually, Ephron and Reiner realized that it would be a more appropriate ending for them to marry, though they admit that this was generally not a realistic outcome.”

If I don’t get clean clarity in Asian dramas, I’m okay with it. My mind switches to the pain POV, that relativity mindset. Everyday life in Asian cultures can handle the weight of the painful and sufferable unknown. And that’s why I love these shows. 

And, OF COURSE, not ALL Asian dramas are like this! Cherry Magic ended wonderfully. Old Fashion Cupcake ended beautifully. KinnPorsche ended sexily, if not a little confusedly (are they related? kinda? or not? whatever?). Minato’s Laundromat ended happily -- although we’ll see their relationship pain points in the upcoming second season. And we see relationship pain points in the ongoing drama of Shiro and Kenji’s relationship in What Did You Eat Yesterday -- all while they share their happy nightly meals together at their kitchen table.

Life is complicated. I posit that Asian dramas, for my taste, satisfaction, and cultural relativity, do a much better job at depicting that complicatedness than the West can ever do, and that’s why I stand so often on my soapbox to encourage Western viewers to understand these Asian cultural touchpoints more -- to learn about how we’ve accepted pain and suffering as an automatic given in our Asian lives, from our cultures, our spiritual practices, and from living amongst each other.

[linkspooky]

Gojo’s students, and in general Utahime’s students too, despite being Gen Z, they don’t have the mind set of one.

Then again, I am biased since I am an United States American who’s also within Generation Z, so I have a very westernized opinion on this. Gen Z in Japan can may well act very differently from the Gen Z in the USA. I don’t doubt that.

However, one thing I do want to point out is that the jjk younger generation didn’t seem to learn that the system they are in is terrible despite seeing or experiencing how horrible it is.

It could be a cultural thing, since my whole life the system that I lived in have failed me in every stage of my life. So I grew jaded and is critical of the system I’m in. I could see how they never have a change to learn nor see the flaws in the system due to how individualistic Gojo’s students are.

I suppose that’s a benefit with Utahime’s students, most of them are aware how terrible the system is, but all are too weak to do anything about it individuality.

Just some food for thought that I’ve been chewing on.

Okay, no comment on that Gen Z bit, but you're right there is an entire arc in the story dedicated to showing the Kyoto Kids and how they suffer from the injustices in their society. As they have suffered more directly from it, each of the Kyoto Kids is more than well-aware of the flaws in their society.

Each of the Kyoto kids is paired off with a Tokyo Kid and compared to them.

Panda and Mechmaru face off, and Mechamaru's point of jealousy is that he's not allowed to even walk around outside because he's debilitatingly ill due to his heavenly restriction and meanwhile Panda and every other sorcerer can walk in the sunlight free.

If you think about it Mechamaru is one of the children getting exploited, he's literally constantly in bodily pain, and he's still expected to perform as a sorcerer. Whereas, Panda's response is basicaly this: cool motivation bro.

In general, the Tokyo Kids all reply with very self-righteous statements that are technically right, but not too empathic to the person suffering right in front of them.

"Just because someone's been through a lot, doesn't mean they're right" is in fact a true statement, because the Kyoto Kids are lashing out with their emotions, and while their pain is valid emotions aren't objective fact they're just emotions.

However, the caveat of that statement is that suffering can also get you perspective though. People who aren't discrimminated against often don't understand the lives of people who are discrimminated against, because it's not a daily reality for them. It's just logical to not know about something that is not happening to you and you don't have to live with. So, suffering doesn't mean you're right, but it does give you perspective which the Tokyo Kids are sorely lacking.

So yes, Panda's not really obligated to care about Mechamaru's issue or life, but at the same time Gojo is trying to raise students with the purpose of having them correct the injustices of Jujutsu Society... but he's failed in that regard because when confronted with any of that injustice none of them really care.

When Momo tries to inform Nobara about the horrific abuse in the Zen'in Clan that Mai endures, something she's still not free of because unlike Maki she didn't get to leave Nobara's response is once again "I don't care." You have this same stock response that's technically right.

You don't have to pity the unfortunate, you don't owe them anything yes, but Gojo's trying to raise sorcerers that are going to correct Jujutsu Society so that less victims are made, but none of them listen to the victims around them and none of them even seem to grasp there's a problem... unless their name is Maki. Even then her solution to the problem isn't reform it's just destruction.

Kamo brings up clan politics and the pressures he faces as heir to the Kamo, and Megumi straight up says that not only does he not care about the Zen'in, or the Kamo or clan politics at all because it doesn't affect him personally, but he also doesn't care about whether or not he's right or wrong.

Megumi's not obligated to sympathize with Kamo, or even talk to him as they're practically strangers but at the same time how else are they supposed to fix the Jujutsu World if they don't listen to victims and aren't aware of the problems in it?

Which is a big problem in the Jujutsu World itself, because being a sorcerer is such a tough job, most sorcerers just work with their heads down not noticing what's going on around them. The kinds of sorcerers that rise to the top are exactly these people, ones that are either selfish enough to use others to further their advancements, ones who fit the molds of sorcerers a little too well and therefore aren't disadvantaged like a lot of the Kyoto kids, etc. etc.

This is pretty well demonstrated in Shibuya, someone like Nanami who is protective of children and tries to be a responsible adult around them dies because he stayed and fought, while someome like Mei Mei who actively abuses her brother and gets away with it still lives because she ran away.

Because Sorcerer society is such an individualistic society that rewards having your head down and being a cog, and punishes people who go against it by hammering down the nail that sticks out.

In order to overcome that you'd have to learn to think about other people than yourself, and look around you to see what's happening, but that requires thinking for themselves.

Which is Gojo's biggest flaw as a mentor, he's a cog that fits the machine of society so well, he still thinks with the values of sorcerer society. The solution to every problem is just get stronger. Which is why he's raised a bunch of strong sorcerers who fit perfectly into the machine just like he did, but he's failed to raise his children into free thinking adults.

[communistkenobi]

Hi, you tend to have well-thought-out political opinions (I don't always agree with you, but your reading liveblog were the kick in the ass to make me read Orientalism, and you have managed to change my mind more than once), maybe might have a better answer here than me.

Is there an ideological reason that American (b/c it typically is, god help me) left-of-center types love electoralism so much online (and offline too, tbh. College continues to deal new and fun kinds of psychic damage), but only in the context of the general national elections? I so often receive various extensive breakdowns of reasons that I MUST vote for Biden in 2024, but less about the benefits of, like, getting really invested in my city council elections or the school board.

We have so many freaking elections for goddamn everything because the US/Canada are fuck-off huge that it's super easy to argue for the importance of participating in electoralism and instead I (especially recently) see so many people picking the worst hill to die on, that I really struggle to. Well. Understand why.

I’ll speak mostly to Canada since that’s where most of my formal knowledge comes from and also because I live here lol. Also a lot of what I’m talking about is coming from books I’ve read - Still Renovating by Greg Suttor for example is a pretty in depth history of social policy (primarily housing) in Canada, it’s very dry but is useful for this conversation. This is off the dome and not meant as a PSA or anything, it’s my own perspective, if people want sources for what I’m discussing I can go dig those up, but I’m just putting this disclaimer at the top in case this post leaves my circle.

To answer your question, my instinct is that it’s because north american democracy is increasingly necrotic and disconnected from the general public (with the usual list of caveats about how much liberal capitalist democracies have ever been “for the people”). Reading up on social policy in Canada directly post-WWII is pretty bleak when comparing it to today - social housing used to be a robust part of the housing market, people were paid far better and had far more economic security, our healthcare was freshly socialised and invigorated, the promises of the Keynesian welfare state were generally being met (for a predominantly white middle class electorate, of course), and so on. Even conservatives were basically on board with these things in the 60s, at least in Canada, although that obviously did not last long. And over the decades we have become entrenched in neoliberal cutbacks, the gutting of public institutions, the sale of public space and utilities, the downloading of responsibility for social welfare onto provincial and then municipal governments who have smaller budgets and more limited institutional power, the massive expansion in public-private partnerships, the militarisation of the police - these things really kicked off in the 80s/90s in Canada and have showed little signs of stopping or even really slowing down since (something that also obviously happened in the US). People make the joke that if libraries were suggested as a policy goal today it would be called a communist plot, but it’s true - all of the shit the government offered us forty years ago is unthinkable to even suggest now. Life in general has gotten more difficult as private wealth and deregulation has taken a progressively stronger hold on domestic affairs. This happened slowly over the course of decades, and as political horizons shrunk in terms of what you could expect/demand of your government, there was a real air of this being inevitable, not a result of conscious political decisions but just some organic outcome that no one had control over (“the invisible hand of the market”). Democratic civic responsibility demands we vote as citizens of our country, but for all the reasons outlined above plus a bunch of others I’m sure I’m forgetting, the liberal conception of democratic participation shrunk to the ballot box alone.

And while we all joke about everyone having the historical memory of a goldfish, I think the pandemic made this a deeply dissonant position to hold onto - we saw the government seemingly awake from a long slumber to exercise its might. It placed eviction bans on landlords, enforced mass quarantines and social distancing measures, provided economic relief to people who lost their jobs, stationed itself inside every building and public space to enforce mask mandates, rolled-out universal vaccination programs that were mandatory if you wanted to keep your job - we saw the government flex its power in labour, in housing, in healthcare, in civic life, and at the border in a way previously unheard of, particularly for people who were not alive to experience the welfare state of the 50s and 60s and even 70s. The state revealed itself as the life-structuring force it always had been before receding again, telling everyone to go back to normal as if nothing had happened, as if millions of people had not died in a global plague, as if it had not just demonstrated to everyone in the country that the state can at the drop of a hat order your landlord to stop evicting you and your boss to give you paid time off. This of course didn’t really happen in the US, or at least not nearly to this degree, which resulted in the deaths of over a million people.

So now when politicians perform this same incapacity to do anything, when they trot out hyper-specific policies that might benefit a couple thousand people at most, when they make stupid non-promises and shrink away from even mild forms of social democracy (eg Sanders-style campaign promises), I don’t know how much people buy it. I’m not particularly optimistic about the pandemic radicalising large amounts of people, but I think even if it doesn’t, we saw what happened! And we’ve all seen a million fucking articles about how people don’t want to go to work anymore, about labour shortages, we’ve seen essentially every sector of labour go on some kind of strike in the past two or three years - there is popular organised political participation happening far away from the ballot box, and is only growing in power by the day. Socialism is now a word that exists in the national consciousness, something that was unthinkable even a decade ago. Currently right now we are seeing an international conversation about (and global popular support for) indigenous sovereignty, we are seeing a full-throated articulation of what a LandBack policy would look like, and this comes on the heels of the national Canadian conversation of residential schools and missing and murdered indigenous women. Decolonisation is now a household term. In the case of the US, we are seeing people make the very obvious point that America can conjure billions of dollars to bomb hospitals and civilians, but any social policy to help its own citizens is too expensive, pie in the sky fantasy nonsense.

And by the same token, there is organised right-wing and fascist violence happening in the streets, massive increases in hate crimes, insane political stunts and demonstrations like the Freedom Convoy and 1 Million March 4 Children (inspired by the Capitol Hill storming in the US), Qanon plots to kidnap and execute elected officials - things that right wing parties are actively encouraging, particularly the PPC and CPC. More and more we see that electoral politics is the domain of the far-right, whose culture war issues have the best chance of being realised through the sacred portal of the ballot box. Democrats can’t even offer people legalised abortion now!

I think this is why liberals are in a state of hysteria. A healthy liberal democracy does not require constant, unrelenting reminders to “vote your ass off.” Liberals are very much aware, even unconsciously, that voting does less and less of what they want every single day - you see this openly admitted to by American liberals, who are now doing Hitler % meter calculations about which fascist to vote for come the next federal election. Voting itself is what matters, even as they openly, frantically admit it will do nothing but slightly delay the inevitable.

So to like directly answer your question: I think it has less to do with federal elections as a specific political strategy and more just an expression of anxiety about the fact that voting does not do what you want it to do, or what it once did - perhaps encouraging larger questions if voting does anything at all. If national federal elections don’t do anything, if you voting for the most powerful position on the planet doesn’t really change very much regardless of who’s in power, what is the point of voting at all? So I don’t think they are articulating an actual political strategy or way of doing politics, because by their own admission it’s not going to do much of anything (while at the same time being an existential crisis). I’m in a similar boat to you, I vote in smaller elections where I feel they will do some measure of good (in part because municipalities are responsible for so much more of civic life than they were a few decades ago), I have engaged with the Ontario NDP for several years (although that has come to an end now because of their position on Palestine). Electoralism is a compromise, it is an avenue for potential good, but not always, or even most of the time.

Thankfully there are other avenues for politics - labour organising, protesting, mutual aid support networks, getting involved with community work, even something like local neighbourhood councils. Those are places of political potential, and a single person’s presence in them can make a legitimate noticeable difference (speaking from several years of heavy involvement in community orgs). I have never really felt like I was making a change while voting, but I have felt that way helping community members not get evicted, or offering them free daycare a few times a week, or running programs from lgbtq kids who don’t want to go home after school. Those things legit save peoples’ lives, a lot of them are low stakes relative to their benefit, and they help stave off the alienation and loneliness I know everyone feels. Obviously you run into the same structural problems you would everywhere else, it’s not a paradise by any stretch of the imagination, but they are so many avenues outside of voting that do actually help people around you.

And I think if liberals admit that these actions are more powerful, more effective than voting, they are admitting to themselves that their core beliefs are wrong, that the communists and anarchists are correct and have been correct long before their dumbass was born. They can no longer point to any institution that gives a fuck about them as a defense against left-wing critiques of liberal electoralism. I think that is part of what animates their hysteria, their temper tantrums, their screaming about the only thing to do is do nothing at all. It is a full-throated defense of self-defeat. They are wailing as everything they believe in dies. I’d be pretty upset too if that were me! Luckily I grew out of that when I was like 19

[aihoshiino]

Professor of Hoshino-Ailogy, might you have some tips on how to write the dear Miss genius idol herself? 🙇‍♀️ Been trying to dabble into writing stuff but her character's got me stuck. Been loving your OnK thoughts so I thought to try shooting an ask if that's ok!

Anon I know this is the joke but I am so genuinely moved at the idea of being considered a Professor Of Hoshino Aiology............ It really is all I was put on this earth to do. I immediately changed my discord name to this LMFAO

So! My recommendation would be to go back to OnK and specifically review episode 1 of the anime, as its take on Ai does a lot to flesh her out in comparison to the equivalent manga chapters. You should also check out Akane's little Pepe Silvia bit on episode 7, both so you can pick up on all that info and so you can point at the screen and go "Wow! She is Literally Me right now." (Anyone else? Just me? OK...)

And while everyone on earth has undoubtedly seen it already, take some time to chew on the Idol MV's imagery - the song as a whole and the MV specifically is basically just Ai's whole arc condensed and abstracted so it's good to look at how Ai is portrayed here and really think about why those choices were made.

After that, read Viewpoint B and 45510 side by side and do your best to put them in conversation with each other. What do these opposing views on Ai have to say about her and her motivations? That kind of thing. I also tentatively recommended reading the first chapter of Spica since it's some of our lengthiest unbroken Ai POV content, with the caveat that Spica doesn't always match up with how the main series talks about and portrays the same events so uh. Feel free to cherrypick what you take from it LOL

The Da Vinci interview and Artificial Girl are also both important in terms of getting a look at "Ai of B-Komachi" and seeing how she operates strictly in work mode. The Da Vinci interview also has some important notes about her history and relationships to certain other characters, so I think it's good to chew on in general!

From there, the most important manga chapters to review imo are 131, 136 and 137. 131 expands on Ai's history with her mom & has information about the abuse she put up with. As I've said before, her formative experiences with abuse and neglect and Ayumi's hands basically run through her entire soul like fault lines, so it's important to get a good understanding of that to start unfucking how it affects her behaviour. 

136 and 137 are also really important in understanding the emotional narrative of Ai's life, even if the literal events they portray obviously need to be taken with a grain of salt. We generally only see Ai of B-Komachi as a beguiling presence but 136 gives us a good look at just how fucking frustrating she would be to try and have a human relationship with and how this mask and Ai's general avoidance and discomfort with serious conversations contributes to her social isolation.

137 is, in my totally biased opinion, one of the best chapters in the entire series and so, so important for understanding Ai. It lays out in plain terms the most important foundational keystone of her entire character: that she was a normal, lonely girl struggling to connect and to find happiness and her desperation was taken advantage of so people could turn her into an object.

I think it's possible to get a good read on Ai just from the prologue arc, the rest of this material is important as reiteration and expansion on her core character. With all of it together, you should start picking up on patterns in her behaviour and drawing connections between her actions and the things that inform them.

If you're still having trouble figuring her out after that, here are some points I think are really important to keep in mind that often go overlooked when it comes to Ai:

Ai is neurodivergent and an abuse survivor

Ai is stated at least twice in the text of Oshi no Ko to have a developmental disorder and I think there's enough evidence in the text to say that she's intended to be read as autistic specifically.

On top of that, Ai's formative years were spent on a home environment where she could not rely on her primary guardians to consistently care for her and she was alternately neglected and violently physically abused, to the point of not feeling safe in her own house at night.

This is important to keep in mind because while Ai is pretty good at masking, her neurodivergence and her history with abuse means that she processes information - particularly social information - in a very different way to a neurotypical person.

Ai does not always lie - and her lies are different than you think

I've said this a million times before and I'll probably say it another million but a lot of the really out of pocket Ai takes you see in OnK fandom generally come from people who go to the extreme of dismissing everything that comes out of Ai's mouth as a lie and thus just completely missing out on a majority of her characterization.

Ai's "lie" is her performance - it's the illusion that "Ai of B-Komachi" is her true self with absolutely nothing else going on in her personal life. It's not a case of making shit up, but leaving things out - obfuscation and omission are the name of the game.

Picking up on when she's being honest Vs telling a lie is just something you end up getting a feel for as you get an understanding of her but generally, if Ai directly and plainly states something and it is not in conflict with things we know to be fact, then it's probably true enough.

This isn't a strict binary obviously and there are plenty of times where Ai says something that is obviously untrue but isn't her consciously lying - rather, like any human being, she has biases that affect her judgement, with her own stemming from her history of abuse and rejection and her poor self image.

The fact that Ai lies is less important than WHY she lies

This is sort of a reiteration of what I said above but where a lot of people get stuck on Ai's external behavior (that she lies) and fail to take dig into underlying motivations that actually cause her to behave that way. I know "this character has motivations" is probably like an insultingly baby mode reminder but I really do see so many people just completely abjectly failing to grasp this that I felt it needed saying lol

Deception is not Ai's end goal. Ai lies not because she wants to trick people but because she's been taught over and over her whole life that it's the only way she can be treated with basic fucking decency, and she has internalized this persistent cruelty as being her own fault. She performs Ai of B-Komachi because there is clearly something wrong with Hoshino Ai.

Even with that in mind, this isn't something Ai wants. As she says herself says in 45510, she wants people to know and accept her as she really is, flaws and impurity and all, and as she demonstrates in both Viewpoint B and chapter 1, she's incredibly quick to start opening up to people who seem to have the potential to accept her, or even just who treat her kindly. She is simply that lonely and that desperate to connect.

I hope this is all helpful, anon! I didn't necessarily want to just point by point how I write Ai just because I think that takes the fun out of things, but this is more or less the process I went through in forming my interpretation of her, and the rest is all things I've just intuited or drawn my own conclusions about from writing her - "oh, if Behaviour X, then Underlying Cause Y", that kind of thing. I hope this gives you a solid base to work on for writing her, tho - and please let me know when you're done so I can read it 👀

[zmediaoutlet]

What's your opinion on the fandom rhetoric about how Sam lacks bodily autonomy but Dean has it? I personally think it's weird that it's such a widespread idea when it's just blatantly untrue. A big theme for Dean's character is that his body is seen as a weapon or tool for others to use, so it's strange that people claim that he has full bodily autonomy.

(...okay, that the gif is by 'unfuckablebogtroll' is somehow very fitting.)

I think my main opinion of the fandom rhetoric is that there are a lot of batshit bitter sam girls who screech that dean is a meanie meanerton who doesn't respect sammy's presh 'tonomy and there are a lot of batshit extreme dean girls who wail about how sam is a meanie meanerton who, idk, waterboards dean in his spare time or whatever they're complaining about this week (I've unfollowed as many as I can of both camps), so for the most part both groups can be completely flushed down into the sewers of 'jesus christ, do you guys ever actually watch the show rather than circlejerk the same four arguments about it? ...no? oh. well, at least you're honest.'

So, with that said.

Yeah, obviously Dean lacks autonomy. But there's a difference between autonomy and agency, and I'm not going to pretend to have a super solid grasp on either (since a lot of philosophical debate [especially by fangirls] makes me want to jump into the aforementioned sewer just not to hear it anymore), but I can at least kind of make a stab, since you asked.

At least in the way I understand it (do you see all the caveats), bodily autonomy is literally getting to decide what happens to your body, including where it goes and who's inside it and what's done with it, and agency is general decision-making of like the brain sort -- what decisions will I make, who will I be, and so on. Both Sam and Dean are assailed on both fronts alllllll the time. Fandom folks tend to exaggerate those assaults on their preferred brother (because, for some reason, egregious victimhood is the only way you get to be a cool character?? what is that about.), but as with a lot of things in CW's Supernatural, the actual facts are a lot more balanced than fandom weirdos will admit.

Sure, Sam's got a bunch of autonomy assaults. Torture, possession, etc. Most of the time, though, I see his agency as pretty intact. He may not necessarily want to do some of the things he does (childhood hunting comes in here), but he chooses to do them. Is he manipulated sometimes? Sure. Lied to? Obv. But there's an essential steel pillar at the center of Sam and whether they're good choices or whether they're bad choices, he is the one who makes them, and he lives with those consequences. This is part of why the s9 thing with Gadreel is troubling: yeah, it's about bodily autonomy on one (more boring) level, but the much bigger problem is that Dean overrode his agency -- part of why I tend to believe that Sam's biggest objection is that Dean lied and then couldn't apologize for it, when Sam's agency is the most precious thing he owns. Now, he's a smart guy, and there are times his agency does take a blow because of some canon circumstance -- he doesn't want to do X but the world will end if Y, so X it is -- but for the most part Sam's solid and he can live with what he has to do. Though he won't pointlessly die of blue balls about it. What a silly stand on agency that would be.

Dean, meanwhile, doesn't actually have his bodily autonomy violated too much. By which I mean: of course, Dean-as-object is one of my favorite tags, of COURSE he's used as a meatsack and a weapon and a fuckdoll and all those lovely things. But he's very rarely literally possessed; he's holding the blade or the gun or what-have-you. That said, his agency is in the fuckin' gutter, haha, and that's more often what I mean by Dean-as-object. From childhood he's fully expecting to be told what to do, to be used as a pawn, to be used in other ways, to take on someone else's responsibility and make it his own and subsume his actual desires and wants for the good of... whoever. Usually John, but not always. This is something Sam doesn't really... do, that often. Sam might hate that he's making a choice but he does seem to understand that he is the one making it, whereas on Dean's part it so often feels like the choice is automatic -- of course he'll do what John says, of course he'll sell his soul, of course he'll... kiss some lady so the Qareen chases him instead. Now, are all those things tied to autonomy, too? Of course. But with Dean I feel like it's a bigger issue that his agency has been taken out at the knees ever since he was ~5 years old -- the autonomy problem is very much secondary.

Agency and autonomy are tied together and assaults on both happen relatively equally to both characters. What matters more is their attitudes about it, and their natures (whether they're essential or if they've been nurtured into acting a particular way). And, of course, there are different times in canon where these tendencies shift or even flip, e.g. in late s8 where Sam's certainty wobbles, or in s10 where Dean's autonomy w/r/t the Mark of Cain is really dicey.

Violated vs violable, victimized vs victim. A ton of it is in the eye of the beholder and OBVIOUSLY fandom will just sail off in its own directions any ol' way, depending on what shipping mood someone is in, how much projection is going on, what the phase of the moon is, etc. But generally speaking I find that Sam has a lot of agency in his life but often his autonomy is imperilled; Dean has a lot of autonomy but his agency is practically nil. At least for a while. What's nice is that Sam does have agency and he uses that agency to choose his own path in life, decide what he wants, and what he wants is -- a life with Dean. Dean maybe never really had a choice in the matter, but so what? He can stay in his bunker, and fight the monsters he needs to fight, and -- lucky for him, there's a strong hand covering his left side. What more could a cat ask for.

[theminecraftbee]

as someone who is also interested in making a persona au but is struggling, how do you decide on the more persona specific stuff? like, how do you decide on stuff like who’s which social link, what personas they have, costumes (if they have any in your au) and stuff like that? it’d be nice to hear about someone else’s thought process;;

SO! starting with general advice that will apply even outside of persona aus: the thing is that none of the assignments will ever be perfect. the inherent nature of ANY au like this is that different people will have different character opinions; for example, i'm sure there are people vehemently think my social link assignments should be different! and that's fine; your goal isn't "perfect, immutable fit", your goal is "it fits to the story i'm trying to tell". like, in general,

with that ALSO said: you shouldn't try to shove characters perfectly into roles from other things, either. two different characters will have two different reactions to Situations, and you should take advantage of that, too! it's like... the role you give a character WILL shape them, but the character will shape that role, too.

with that out of the way: specific persona au thoughts!

first, you are going to want to decide who your team will eventually be; persona squads normally start out with around three guys and end up at seven or eight (with the eighth man often being an odd-one-out). I went “the cherry blossom hill gang” in my au, which was easy, but you may have less simple ideas there! also keep in mind that you will, at least, have protagonist/healer/physical damage/magical damage as the four “basic” in-game archetypes, with persona also typically having a “balanced” guy who does both, a status setter, an instakill guy, and a party buffs guy, spread across its guys. so if that helps you here, excellent! you will also need at least one of the main party to be a navigator.

you will also want some idea of the “themes” of your au because it’ll help you out deciding personas and social links, plus a little plot.

so, first: each persona game has a “theme” for the main party personas. 3 is all greek legendary figures that evolve to greek gods (with lucia prior to ultimate personas breaking theme, and kala-nemi and messiah breaking theme with the ultimate personas). 4 is all japanese gods that evolve to another name of those same gods (with chie breaking theme in that her ultimate persona has nothing to do with her original one). 5 is all legendary rogues/thieves that evolve to trickster gods (with necronomicon breaking theme and frankly milady is a STRETCH for the starter personas, and astarte and anat being questionable for the ultimates). as the like… MANY caveats show, you don’t have to be perfectly on-theme, but having a theme at least in mind helps a lot with picking what persona everyone gets by narrowing the pool! for my au, is went “famous lovers”, since a major “theme” of my au is “isolation versus bonds”. however, you don’t have to stick to something with thematic relevance, you just want something that helps tie everyone together a little bit.

as for weapons, what elements they attack with, what their party role is like: that’s a personality call, you know? and don’t be afraid to get a little weird with it, we aren’t atlus, we CAN break character archetype.

as for social links: that’s indeed tricky! it can help to remember you don’t ACTUALLY need to come up with 22. the world/the universe is ALWAYS only the protagonists final persona. the fool is ALWAYS a plot-driven social link that effectively represents “the protagonist’s relationship with the plot”, with p3/4 making that the team, and p5 making that igor. judgement is ALWAYS a plot-driven social link that represents the protagonist at the end of their journey; in p3/4 it’s the team at the end of the plot once they know their true purpose, and in p5 it’s sae nijima as she interrogates the protagonist. so that cuts out three arcana already to be set aside as “this is for the plot”.

next, while I know this isn’t true of p3, it makes sense from our own writing perspective where our story is NOT constrained by “gameplay dictates a social link can happen at any time” to make each member of the team a social link. fill out the rest with additional canon characters.

but how to decide which character goes in which link? helpfully, this is persona: it tends to have a little less to do with personality and more to do with storyline. you can go by “what character fits the tarot symbolism best”—doc as the tower, jimmy as the hanged man—or “what character fits the normal persona character archetype for this arcana”—skizz as chariot, mumbo as moon. you can also go for a mix! if you don’t KNOW what kind of character normally fills an archetype, the megami tensei wiki has pages for each arcana that describes the typical character archetype that goes there. you can also break type as needed—joe is hermit in my au despite “hermit” not really being his persona character archetype for very specific plot/tarot reasons, for example, and impulse is emperor, but is breaking persona type by being a healer rather than a heavy physical attacker. it’s your au, have fun with it!

also, ultimately, know that because it’s your au to have fun with, if you DON’T have fun giving everyone an arcana, just pick out the ones that are relevant to the part you’re writing and ignore the rest until they come up. this is my tactic for worldbuilding in like half the aus I write it hasn’t steered me wrong yet.

good luck! I hope this helped!

[iraprince]

I adore all your art with cookie and was interested in Sapphicworld- but I’m curious (so plz don’t take this as a negative-) what exactly in your opinion sets it apart from other Queer PBTA hacks like Thirsty Sword Lesbians?

I’d just really like to hear your thoughts about it as a system and world especially given you are a indie developer yourself?

hi!! thank you!!

so, a few caveats before i start off — one, i actually haven't played many other pbta games (like for example i know Of thirsty sword lesbians + own a copy that i've poked around in but im not very familiar w it), so i honestly can't provide much in the way of comparing/contrasting it w other pbta stuff in the same vein, and my impressions of sapphicworld are pretty much just contained to the game as its own thing, not so much sapphicworld as a Type Of Game

and two, while i am a dev myself, i'm a huge novice! like, i'm proud of the stuff i put out and i love doing it, but i personally feel like my lack of experience is such that like, i don't think my opinions in this case are particularly informed by my own work as a dev or anything. all this to say im happy to answer this question, i think i just gotta tackle it from a different frame than what ur specifically asking!

BUT ANYWAY. i can still talk abt why im so excited abt sapphicworld in a way that has kind of outstripped other stuff in general, and for me it's about the world 100%. like i honestly spend close to no time thinking abt the fact that sw is even pbta to be honest. not that the mechanics + gameplay aren't important, bc they are thoughtfully crafted and well done and fun, and i'm saying that from the perspective of someone who playtested earlier versions that have now been reworked! it's just like, not what comes to mind first for me — what's exciting and fresh and irreplaceable abt the game in my mind is like. it is fully committed to immersing you in an extremely lush, strange, richly fleshed out world, one with a long history and folklore/mythology and a TON of really fun npcs who all have different subcultures and its own calendar with seasonal holidays and regional terrain with specific fleshed out dungeons/towns/etc to discover and even like, specific FOODS typical to each different region and and and and —

and maybe at first that seems kind of overwhelming, and tbh it is. when i first got into it and i was going thru the playtest document (which if im remembering right was like. ~300 pages shorter at the time than the current playtest doc) i DO remember anxiously thinking to myself "god this is a LOT and idk if i'll be able to retain enough of this to rp convincingly" etc etc. but like... it's just really compelling, and it does an incredible job of mixing humor and gravity and horniness in a perfect ratio that always comes across as intensely earnest and makes it equally easy to have a fun goofy time or a really emotional time, which i think is REALLY hard to do.

and while normally it's hard for me to get thru something that dense and long all i can really say is that i just straight up like it enough and was charmed by it enough to pick away at it until i grasped it and felt like i understood a bunch about the world, which also has a curve to it bc in structure and tone its very different from any of your... idk more Standard fantasy or sci fi worldbuilding, so it's not like u can immediately slot in ur expectations from other settings and just learn some new vocab words, it's a world that from my perspective also Functions differently than a lot of other fictional settings in a way that's a little hard to describe succinctly. (none of this is succinct to begin with but ykwim). it makes me want to gm my own campaign, really really bad, when usually i have always been absolutely Terrified of the idea of gming! idk man. it has a Flavor. it's full of Vapors. u get transported somewhere else reading it and playing it in a way i haven't experienced in a while and a lot of times after a playtest session i felt like my brain stayed behind in sapphicworld for a pretty long time.

i feel like i am sounding a little melodramatic and incoherent but like. genuinely sapphicworld is just a fictional world that i am really bone-deep charmed by and interested in and when i WAS reading thru the rulebook for those first days it did not take me long at all to find myself constantly thinking "i want to play in this world, i want to play in this world, i can't wait to play in this world," and i just think that's really special. and like — just as your curiosity abt comparing sw to tsl was not intended as a diss or a negative, what im abt to say is similarly neutral — im a person who sometimes finds it a little difficult to click with or feel excited abt a lot of the Queer Indie Stuff that i see get popular with other people, bc it just doesn't connect w my specific lesbian + trans experience; not that it feels inauthentic but that im like, oh, idk, i think these guys are just. not My Zone, ykwim. on the flip side so much of the humor and heart and transness and sex in sapphicworld is something that really resonates w me and just Clicks in a way that i have also found really special.

rounding myself off before i ramble for like five more paragraphs but just as one more morsel of something i like abt sapphicworld that is a little more concrete than me spinning around the room yelling "I JUST LIKE IT OKAY": one of the most fun parts of character creation is getting to mix and match your kind (sort of like ancestry/species, the form ur physical body takes) with a subculture. so u get things like a werewolf babe (cookie! babe being a subculture that focuses on being Like, Totally Hot), or a centaur knight, or a minotaur debaucher, or a vampire cowboy, or an organist (cthulu-y tentacle guy) scenester, or a skeleton wizard, etc etc etc etc — there are SO MANY to pick from that when i was trying to bait my friends into playing w me i couldn't find a convenient way to list them all so ppl could start thinking abt their characters. and every possible combination basically is interesting and amusing and fun and practically THROWS a great oc into your lap and i literally think i could amuse myself endlessly just Making Characters in sapphicworld and never actually playing w them.

[panting, disheveled] so tldr. i like it. uh. what sets sapphicworld apart from other ttrpgs to me is that i have fallen balls to the wall in love with the very soul of it to the point where i don't even really think about it in comparison to other games at all and it has just become an Experience to me and i suppose i cannot guarantee anyone else will fall into insane homosexual hysteria in the same way but here we are. HOPE THAT HELPS

(ALSO PSSST. idk if this is just perfect timing or if ur curiosity was specifically prompted by this but the @sapphicworldttrpg patreon DID just launch and if any of this has been intriguing u should check it out. okay mwah bye)

[antimony-medusa]

Hi! I don't know if you've followed the debate on twitter these last few days (if you haven't, feel free to ignore this ask, I don't want to drag you into stuff) about whether themes of slavery can be depicted in fictional settings. I'd be curious to have your opinion because you have very based takes on the topic of fanfiction

Boy. I have been at a wedding so I have NOT been following, but a friend dug that one up for me, and boy. Isn't that something.

Okay, do I think that slavery can be depicted in fictional settings?

I'm gonna start this with a caveat of saying that I'm white, and as far as I know my family tree doesn't include any enslaved people. So slavery is an atrocity, but not a personal one for me any more than I feel personally about all atrocities, and your opinion on this subject might be different based on your experience, and that's completely fair. This is just the opinion of someone who thinks about content warnings and representation and exchange rules sometimes, and honestly if you want to take my answer as me saying "i'm white, anything I say after this doesn't really matter" that's a fair read of the situation. End post.

But further, the siren song of being asked a question:

My general stance is that there are very few things that can't be depicted in fictional settions, but there are a lot of things that should be depicted with care and research. And I consider major archive warnings to be one of these things. (I'm on the team that says that in an ideal world we would have a major archive warning for racism or slavery.) I don't think that there are any topics that are inherently off-limits for fiction.

If you're interested in writing professionally, there's a workshop called Writing The Other that does intros into writing topics that you don't share experiences with, and they do a really good job of breaking down the ways that you can analyze your work for cliches and stereotypes and other weaknesses, and ways that you can research to avoid them. It's an excellent workshop and I really recommend it— they even do scholarships, which is how I got to join! I consider them the industry standard of the question of "can I write about this", and as I remember it their basic answer is that the more outside of your experience a thing is, the more research you have to do to make sure you don't mess it up, and the more central to your story a thing is, the more you want to make sure that you don't mess it up. So sometimes you do hit topics and you go "am I the right person to tell this story, should I leave this topic to someone who knows it more personally, who's studied this". But that doesn't mean that you can't tell the story, it just means that to do it well, you have to put the work in. And that no one is obliged to trust you on the surface of things to have put the work in. I am probably going to trust an author who I know is disabled to have written disability well, for example, more than an ablebodied author. But there are authors out there that I know do their research and I pretty much trust them to deal with any topic carefully, if they want to take it on. A lot of the time, the more sensative a topic you are touching, the more you need a relationship of trust between author and reader, and sometimes you have to earn that trust carefully.

And boy is there fiction out there that deals with sensitive topics in ways that does not earn that trust. I have read things that I find highly distasteful. I have read published work that chooses to deal with real life atrocities in ways that I find wildly uncomfortable and I do not tend to recommend those books or authors.

I have also read nuanced and insightful explorations of horrific things, including slavery, including domestic violence, including racism, in ways that I felt enriched my understanding of the world and the people around me. I've read books that carefully touched on things like childhood sexual abuse and police violence and involuntary commitment, and that didn't make the story not a life-affirming and joyful experience, because the stories were able to take these things and make healing and catharsis out of them. Simply hearing that a story deals with a topic does not tell you if it's a story to recommend to others. We all live lives that sometimes touch on terrible things, and I think that trying to police who can tell stories about bad things leads into bad things like making people prove that they've suffered enough to write or shit like "are you black enough for this story", and I don't want that in my writing community. I have literally seen the bad end for going down that road, check out "helicopter discourse," and I'm against that.

I'm against that enough that I'm willing to endure people who do not share an experience writing badly about terrible things as the price we have to pay to allow people who have personal stake in the situation to be able to explore sensitive topics without harassment. Especially with fanfiction, we're dealing with amateur writers, so unfortunately most of the time when you have a subject come up the default assumption is going to be that it's dealt with badly. But I personally fall on the side that it's worth five people writing it badly to allow the one person who's personally impacted to write about it as much or as little as they want. My personal bugbear is terminal illness in children, that's my trauma, but I would personally rather have people write horrible tearjerker fic about aging down their characters and killing them off and it's so sad, even though I don't want that, rather than to say that that topic is off-limits to people.

On the topic specifically of slavery, this fandom, as many fandoms do, has a habit of including slavery and human trafficing as themes in their writing. A lot of the time this is not done well. We have a lot of baby writers who are deliberately writing the saddest thing they can think of or writing unjust societies for their guys to rebel against. This is not what I would say is a strength of the writing in the fandom, taken as a whole. And some people do their research and do it well! I've read great fics that pull from history in an informed way and do interesting things with it! But not everybody, good lord.

But saying that because a lot of people deal badly with slavery nobody should deal with slavery is not a path forward that I'm personally in support of. Do I think it should be tagged? Absolutely. Nobody should hit that unawares. But a lot of societies through human history practiced slavery of one kind or another! If you are drawing from roman history for your gladiator au, most of those guys were not there of their own free will. Tropes like fae folklore includes themes of posession and ownership, because that was the background radiation to the lives of the people who told these stories in the first place. There are a lot of tropes where these topics are going to arise, and I don't think that's inherently bad (though I personally would certainly feel a lot more comfortable with pulling on classical and medieval history for these stories rather than 1800s America, for example). And like, you can absolutely try your best to steer around these topics! That's an option! But honestly if you're doing something historic or historic-inspired, I'm not sure if it's more respectful to write a fantasy past in which greek history did not include slavery. That's whitewashing of history by definition. So if you want to avoid that, you're left with most of human history off-limits to write about, because of the atrocities? And I don't think that's ideal.

And like, I think with fanfiction you kind of just have to accept as background radiation that there are going to be a lot of people dealing with topics that they are not equipped to deal with. That's just how it goes. These are people writing with minimal research, experience, and editing, cause we're all here for fun, not professional development. You're gonna have people mishandle things. And that's why I think tagging is really really important, so that you can see the tags on a fic and go "oh I do not trust them with that topic" and navigate away, or filter the topic entirely. I have my touchpoints that I steer away from, and I have 100% clicked away from stories in horror going "oh no no no no no that's not good." But I don't think people should all be banned from writing about these things because some people do it badly.

Note: that doesn't mean that like, we shouldn't have conversations about how maybe if you put the minecraft men in your story where hybrid trafficing is a metaphor for the underground railroad, you should do that Carefully. We can still strive to do better. I have Seen Things and there is room to improve. There's room for discussion about people using slavery for cheap angst, in the same way that I've talked about the treatment of disability used for angst, and I've seen people talk about the agency allowed female characters, and the list goes on.

And that doesn't mean that I'm not going to 100% respect it if I get a DNW in an exchange where someone has said they don't want slavery or hybrid racism. People should be able to opt out of these topics (entirely! even if they're dealt with well!) and nobody has to read things they don't want to.

So in essense, when it comes to writing sensitive topics like slavery I'm going to do my best to think about what I'm doing and do my research— and I have written slavery and human-trafficing-type-deals before, I like gladiator aus and classical-inspired fantasy— and I'm going to tag so that anyone who doesn't trust me— and nobody has to trust me— can navigate away. But when it comes to policing what other people are writing, I don't think it does anyone any good to post callouts on twitter. At most I'm going to warn a friend that a certain fic deals with a topic badly. That's my viewpoint.

[onemustalwaysbecarefulofbooks]

HOFAS/MAASVERSE THEORY: This is not the story SJM planned to tell us

Listen, if you are feeling let down by the overall lack of an ACOTAR crossover in HOFAS, your feelings are entirely valid and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. And I'm saying this as someone who largely finds the Inner Circle insufferable and has the opinion of the less we see Rhysand, the better. But for real. . .point blank, this book was absolutely 100% marketed and hyped as a "crossover" which, in reality, ended up being sort of a stretch. And I believe, that at one point, it truly WAS all it was hyped up to be.

Raise your hand if you felt like HOFAS felt weird, disjointed, and unsatisfying at a lot of points.

Everyone, right? I don't think I've encountered a single person who can say they never experienced this at any point, even if they loved the book overall.

I'm sure some of you have probably heard by this point that there is a whole first draft of HOFAS out there that was apparently scrapped and rewritten entirely by SJM: SOURCE.

This draft teases a LOT of things that had people salivating, none of which actually showed up in the book we read. Examples:

HOFAS being "split between Bryce in the world of ACOTAR and the characters in Midgard".

Bryce being worried and freaked out over whether Prythian had toilet paper and receiving an answer

Nyx being featured in the story and the IC being extremely protective over him

Receiving an explanation on Rhys seeing Aelin during Starfall

SJM positively gushes over this stuff as she talks about it in interviews. You can literally see the light in her eyes and how excited she is as she discusses it. She compares it to Avengers Endgame and talks about how excited she and others were to see all the good guys come together for something epic and says this reminds her of that. However, there's a caveat. She consistently repeats things like "as of right now" or "in this first draft" or "we'll see what my editor says". Check out this live chat here.

And the next thing we know, she is claiming she turned in her first draft and felt "meh" about it, didn't like where the story went, and re-wrote the entire thing. Ladies and gentlemen, I call bullshit.

Bottom line: I truly believe, and would honestly bet a significant amount of money on, that this first draft was truly the story of SJM's heart and was brought to a screeching halt by her publishing company, who felt they could milk this hype and get more books out of it.

Essentially, if you were expecting ACOTAR 6, sorry can't help you, that was NEVER happening, BUT if you were expecting MORE than what we got, you are entirely within your rights to feel disappointed! That's why things felt weird and disjointed. . .because it was not the story she intended to tell organically and she had to make some pretty significant changes on a short notice.

The silver lining, I suppose, is the fact that I don't think her publishers talked her out of this happening in general. I think they just convinced her to drag it out longer. . .to delay it, essentially. Like I said, get more books in before finally making it happen. Because once that happens, how do you reach a higher peak? What could she make happen after that point that is more exciting than a huge epic crossover? I think that unfortunately, the Asteri were kind of wasted villains, as I don't know what other force of evil could bring all of these characters together realistically. But I do believe it's going to happen.

So yeah, you'll never be able to convince me there's not some version of HOFAS out there that only exists in Sarah's mind at this point, where the ACOTAR characters (and honestly, Aelin and the ToG characters) are much more central characters to the overall story. I'm convinced she wrote this epic story, went to her editors, and was told "Hey, the hype around this is so insane, we COULD do it now, OR we could develop the characters even further and do it LATER" (meaning more $$$$$$ for them). SJM is the QUEEN of changing her mind mid-series but to me, this really reeks of corporate greed and milking the hype. I'm trying to trust the process and tell myself that it's all coming eventually.

So stop shitting on people who complain about the lack of a crossover. We were teased with one and you know damn well SJM wrote one! I'm convinced it was teased and hyped this way because that's the way she originally wrote it and then when publishing convinced things to change the way they wanted them to. . .why tell us? If the already existing hype gets us to buy their book, it's a win for them.

I guess only time will tell!