#dumb discourse

[kreature-ofthenight]

People discussing if Magnus Archives is guilty of “burry your gays” even if the cast is 60% queer, like burry your gays is specifically the practice of killing of queer or queer hinted characters in a story to not give them a happy ending or any more screen time, thats not whats happening here, people die horrible deaths in tragedies, its not because of the queerness, no one gets a happy ending Jonny Sims, just likes burrying people, dead people, living people, get to close to that man and he will put you six feet under!

[darkawn17]

As an asexual, I’ll agree that the pasta song has a very high chance of working.

But knowing me, it’d 100% be a song about Transformers or Xenoblade or something. Cause I’m awesome like that.

why are there so many posts about asexuals being immune to sirens. people. sirens don’t lure you in with sex (necessarily). they sing about whatever it is that you want most. they could sing about mothman or cinnamon toast crunch and guess what then your asexual pirate is fucking dead

[kavehayati]

The way my luck is so good :D

[aismallard]

"your OC is a bad person, that's so problematic!"

What the hell do you think a "villain" is

[that-satireguy]

'oh but if you remove the words trans and cis...!'

Its a different sentence.

Observe:

Trans men experience greater rates of sexual violence than cis women - True ✅

Men experience greater rates of sexual violence than women- False ❌

See how its NOT the same sentence if you remove the words trans and cis?

[forever-plz]

i genuinely feel like sobbing every time they remind me how much they fucking love lesbians fuck my stupid phlesbian life

[mid-knight-black]

I think Eddie feels the most comfortable and at home with his abuela because growing up, she was probably the only person in his family who allowed him to be a child while everyone else expected him to be the man of the house. She let him be her little Eddito… 🥺🙃

[gif made by the talented @housewifebuck 🤍]

[brettdoesdiscourse]

Just say yall don't think women have actual autonomy and move it

[acquired-elfroot]

The annoying thing is that reducing Solas to a dislikable two dimensional caricature in Veilguard didn't even come close to fixing the problem they set out to fix in doing so, and it was never going to.

I can’t pull up the exact quote, but I believe one of the writing team said something along the lines that they needed to make Solas less sympathetic because at the end of Trespasser too many people agreed with him and wanted to end the world. Which is why they chose to have him kill Varric, among other things. 

While I will say that I agree with the choice to have him kill Varric(I like the idea of him making Rook hallucinate him too, that could have been sweet if it had been well executed rather than a bland set up for a M. Night Shyamalan level twist) to raise the stakes and set Solas up as a serious antagonist for a new audience, or an audience that hadn’t been paying particularly close attention to him - but there is no way it could have ever suddenly made his goal to tear down the veil unsympathetic for those who found it to be so.

The writers seem to have been under the impression that members of the audience sympathised with Solas’ plan to tear down the veil not on its own merits, but for the draw of his sparkling personality alone. Not for well established lore related reasons, or for extra-narrative reasons rooted in a desire for emotional catharsis and narrative satisfaction (which a fictional body count has even less bearing on besides) but because he’s a sad pretty elf boi and we want to kiss it all better.

I’m going to be real with you, if they had surgically transplanted Ogrehn’s personality onto Solas and had him stone cold murder every other beloved character in the series, I would still want the  Veil to come down, or at the very least a better solution than leaving it just as it is. How likeable he is or isn’t has fuck all to do with it? 

Making Solas more dislikable does nothing to change the effect the Veil has on spirits and mages, it does nothing to address the question of the value of mortal lives weighted against immortal ones. It does not change the narrative role of a trickster in bringing enlivening chaos and upheaval to a stagnating world, in this case one that’s been forced to stagnate in service of the illusion of player choice; nor does it quiet our desire to see the rotten roots of Thedas’ corrupt institutions torn up and put to the torch ect. ect.

Most annoyingly, attempting to use Varric's death to accomplish this betrays the writer's assumption that players that did sympathise with Solas’ goals did so out of a naive misapprehension that he’s some sweet uwu softboy that could never do anything truly ruthless or cruel in order to accomplish his goals, and that once we had been disabused of that belief we would clutch our pearls in horror(you mean he’s willing to kill people? In a video game series with protagonists that each have kill counts numbering in the thousands? Quick, summon my fainting couch!) and tidily dismiss the notion that he might have ever had any worthwhile motivations at all. 

Look all you silly little girlies that want to kiss the fictional man, I feel like you don’t understand that he’s the *bad guy* here, glad we’ve cleared that up for you sweetheart. And isn’t he just sooo condescending?

It does not seem to have occurred to the writers that, to his fans, his stone cold ruthlessness is both one of the most well understood and deeply compelling features of the character.

I would happily give that writer a pass on a wicked case of foot in mouth, but the way Anaris & Cyran are written seems to very much enforce their the stance that an overabundance of sympathy for Solas as a person, as well as a desire to see him vindicated are the primary reasons any of the audience would ever agree with his goals. 

So to fix this issue, it stands to reason that the writers needed to de-emphasise everything that humanised(for lack of a better term) Solas and made him sympathetic as a person. Because apparently the problem is that their attempts to do so in the previous game worked a little too well on some people, right? 

As @mythalism pointed out, we cannot see him comfort his friends through their panic or grief or their crisis of faith, or have hushed philosophical conversations with them. We cannot see him flirt awkwardly, or try to pretend he didn’t just set his own coattails on fire.

We never see the god of liberation free so much as a wisp bound to a teaspoon.

And all of those compelling character motivations you thought he had about free will and self determination? Don’t worry kitten, we’ve sanitised all of the conflicts those might be applicable to right out of the setting anyway. Yay <3

At the same time, it feels like they’re too scared to upset the very same audience that they imagine has this woobified rose tinted view of the character, lest they scare them away. They’re too afraid of the audience to let him be truly unwaveringly ruthless, prejudiced, bitchy, vindictive, and even genuinely sadistic towards his enemies, because that might upset our fragile sensibilities too much! 

He can’t ever say anything mean to Rook - that might hurt our feelings!

He doesn’t really do anything bad, and if he does he doesn’t really mean it. He committed war crimes, but only because Mythal asked him nicely. He killed Varric, but it was an accident. He makes Rook hallucinate Varric, but he doesn’t use that to manipulate them; Varric just hangs out and vibes. He uses blood magic on you, but he doesn’t do any of the truly fucked up violating things that we know full well blood magic is capable of. He misleads you when he says “the Veil will not fall by my hand”, but it’s so transparent that it’s laughable. He’s never allowed the conviction to really follow through on any of his misdeeds, while still he’s bizarrely framed as outright villainous for them. 

So what we’re left with is a character divested of most of his admirable qualities, but with most of the rough edges filed off as well. Toothless. Boring.

It feels so much like they’re talking down to their audience? Like they don’t trust us to see a character with BOTH vices and virtues in spades come to our own conclusions about them? 

So we get this bland mealy-mouthed version of the character that we apparently need watered down further with ‘our team’s’ insipid commentary, much of which is blatantly based on bad takes people were spewing online almost a decade ago, and many of which have no bearing whatsoever on the actual story we’re being told because ohh my godd apparently we need to have our hands held while we’re walked though every opinion the audience might theoretically  have about the character and gently reassured by proxy that it’s a hashtag #valid opinion and why does this game insist on speaking to us like we’re morons??

For all that they incessantly bring up how condescending Solas is, I’m not sure if I've ever felt more spoken down to by a story I had been so invested in.

So Solas is boring now and I still l wanna tear down the veil lol

[peantisdeliriouts]

Ah yes. Very punk to accuse a group of mostly minorities of being predators who are anti-recovery because they are anti-censorship.

Real punks don’t make fake accusations. Real punks don’t shame others for their coping mechanisms. Real punks don’t adhere to right-wing ideology being advertised as progressive. Real punks don’t accept censorship.

[frownyalfred]

the funny thing about tumblr is that sometimes 16 year olds will get on here and tell you with the confidence of a thousand suns that you are the worst person in the world and you should kill yourself….babe have you heard of ISIS??

[nyancrimew]

hi! actual communist anon here. sorry for using you as an intermediary. hey, fake marxist anon, did your ma forget to tell you to read Frantz Fanon, Black Panther Party, Contemporary Relevance? Marx is not an end-it-all goalpost of modern philosophy, and you should be careful at taking his frankly xenophobic or not-that-deep (like on the "ragged proletariat") takes. historical materialism when turned on the man, the legend, himself, can not divorce him from his own problems as a white German man — he lacked the vision to contextualize the disposessed, marked "redundant" men suffering from commodification of housing as something that is the bedrock of revolutionary potential of the working class. not to mention the need to understand that depriving people of shelter are tools used for oppression, both capitalist, racialized, and colonial. anyway, to my fellow men — you are not a true communist if you fail to see all men in your commune as men worthy of love and dignity. peace.

.

[bixels]

a drawing of miku by a white person wearing a hoodie is not indicative of culture

they think i'm white, chat.

[evansbuck-ley]

8x11: bucktommy being completely insatiable and horny for each other. evan “heart eyes” buckley back in action. both of them looking at each other with so much love and fondness. both of them actively expressing that they want to be together and try again. straight eddie dropped TWICE. buck saying with chest he doesn’t not have feelings for his STRAIGHT best friend

bvddies: OmG BuDdIe CaNoN!! We NeVeR BeEn So ClOsE!!!!!! GaY EdDiE NeXt EpIsOdE.

[oyanagicake]

i don't think that's the type of thing you should casually say to a random person on internet fam. joking or not. also please do not harass this person. i've censored the username for a reason.

and "doesn't affect reality"... yes, but... why are you thinking about skinning a real person alive? they're a real person. they're NOT fictional. you're kind of contradicting yourself here :|

[elf-trash]

reposting this bc the OP blocked me (and is blocking anyone else who disagrees which means blocked people can't reblog) and i want to say this loud and with my whole chest!!!!!

another Dragon Age fic was recently outed as being AI, and this is what the writer had to say for themselves about it:

so actually, Grammarly uses generative AI and is just as bad as ChatGPT. it also objectively makes your writing worse, it sucks the voice out of your prose and turns it into corporate sounding homogenized paste. it's also unethical for all the same reasons any generative AI is unethical. get a writing group and have a real human beta read for you if you don't trust yourself to check your own grammar etc. but honestly something unpolished and written entirely by your human brain and human imagination will ALWAYS be better than AI slop.

also, the part about published authors doing this is patently untrue. i know this is a huge problem in the self-publishing space, but most publishers now are including clauses in their contracts that expressly forbid the use of AI in ANY part of the creative process. this includes using ChatGPT to generate or clean up outlines or Grammarly to spellcheck and revise. so if you're trying to publish, don't fucking do this or you could literally be asked to return an advance if you get caught.

i've posted about this in the past, but AI detectors are actually shocking accurate these days. i've tested them extensively recently and they can consistently and correctly flag individual sentences written by ChatGPT in an otherwise original passage. and they almost never flag false positives. so the argument that AI detectors can't be trusted is just flat out wrong. are they correct 100% of the time? no. but can they indicate with a high degree of accuracy if AI was used in some capacity? absolutely, especially if there is additional evidence.

and for all the people hand wringing about AI detectors flagging false positives, let me just say this: if something is not AI written it is very easy to prove. you can't write anything of any considerable length without leaving a massive paper trail of notes and drafts. almost all writing software tracks changes and makes it very easy to prove you wrote something yourself. being falsely being accused of AI isn't actually a real problem and is only being made to seem as such by people who are trying to get away with and justify using AI or who are worried about getting caught.

i think a lot of people are just lured by a seemingly easy shortcut, and to their untrained eye, what the AI is spitting out feels "better" to them than their own writing. but i promise you it's not. trust your own brain and put in the work to improve at your craft rather than outsourcing the gift of your imagination to a robot that steals from other people's work.

i will continue to die on this hill!!!!!