#i'm qualified to speak on this

[royalarchivist]

[A sad violin song plays over an image of a sad hamster]

Pac: This doesn't have anything to do with me – I wear a blue sweatshirt, you're crazy, this mouse doesn't even have a sweatshirt, this hamster! [Reading chat] Am I a depressed hamster?

[ Transcript continued ↓ ]*

–

Pac: Actually– that's fine! I embrace that idea – of course I'm going to be depressed, are you crazy? [He hits his desk, then starts counting off people on his fingers] Fit is gone, Richarlyson is gone, Ramon is gone, Bagi and Empanada who were always there when we were there are also gone, I haven't seen them! It's just me and Tubbo, and sometimes Philza shows up.

Pac: I lost Chume Labs, I lost the Favela, I lost Murder Mystery, I lost Ilha Chume Labs, it's crazy! Look at how much I've lost, and I've gained nothing! Of course I'm going to be depressed, are you crazy?! How am I supposed to be happy?!

Pac: [Reading chat] "You have us Pac," that's true, thank you. No, that's true, sorry.

* NOTE: Please note that this is an incomplete transcript, as I was primarily relying on Aypierre's translation mod at the time and if I am not confident of the translation, I do not include it. As always, please feel free to add on translations or message me corrections.

[aureliaen]

My Durge Siri is president of the Orin Support Squad

Like yeah, she tried to kill him, whatever... what's a little attempted murder between siblings

[canisalbus]

I just recently started following you so i don't have the full lore of your murderous gay religiously traumatized doggos, BUT, from my understanding, they are Italian and i don't know what part of Italy they are from, yet i can't help headcanoning Vasco as Tuscan, while Machete is probably from some part of Veneto. And as an Italian who has heard Tuscans and Veneto dialet, well it's an hilarious mental image.

Vasco is indeed Tuscan, Florentine to be specific. He comes from a wealthy and influential noble family that has lived in Florence for centuries. He's proud of his roots, and it's usually easy for strangers to tell where he's from. He's a resonably successful politician and has worked as an ambassador and representative of Florence on numerous occasions.

Machete is originally Sicilian (ironically about as far from Veneto as possible), although he was taken to mainland at young age and has lived in several places since then, before ending up in Rome. The way I see it, he exhibits very little local color, his demeanor and (even though Italian hadn't become a standardized language yet) way of speaking are formal, neutral and scarcely give away any hints about his personal history, at least in the 16th century canon.

[garden-of-infinity]

"We need more diverse queer representation in dbd" half of ya'll can't even handle someone headcanoning your fave as aroace

[number1villainstan]

we need transman/transmasc characters who are a) butch dykes or/and b) absolute bastards of any variety--magnificent, sleazy, fucked-up, garden-variety, weaselly, queer-coded, with a heart of gold, any and all varieties! more butch trans men/mascs! more bastard trans men/mascs! the stereotype of "trans men are/want to be Just Some Guy" might be a step up from "trans men/mascs are all effeminate uwu softboys and can never be Real Men" but some of us want to show off!

[thedandelionresistance]

So, something that has still been bothering me about misanthropy in nonhuman spaces, as a pankin fae endel is that... not all humans have access to human privilege and hegemony. Not all humans have power over nonhumans or benefit from our society being human-centric. The fact that even alterhuman spaces can still be centered around humanity even, doesn't always benefit all humans in those spaces.

The easiest example: We have human headmates in our system. They are, for all intents and purposes, otherkin in a way that those of us who are fae AREN'T. While we are all perceived as human, they are essentially humankin, humans in a physically nonhuman (or magically modified to pass for human) body. Their internal identity is fundamentally altered by our plurid and bodily identity.

In fact, the experience of being a changeling has also fundamentally altered our faeness as well. Culturally, having been raised human, we have some connection to human culture as well as to the fae culture we long for but haven't gotten to know. It's similar to our experience having been adopted into a blended family, where we have a complex relationship with both our Mexican and white american heritage, especially with the fact that what our body and our cultural heritage are, are different.

We feel fundamentally somewhere in between fae and human while still being fully fae, or more accurately we are still fully fae while having become a bit human on top of that. Our faeness+humanity aren't two fractions equalling a whole, but something greater than a whole. The faeness itself, while influenced and changed by the humanity, isn't itself any less fae.

Here are some other examples of marginalized humans, most of which we have personal experience with:

1. A werewolf who is both human and wolf.

Not all werewolves consider themselves to be human due to their lycanthropy, but some do. Lycanthropes face extreme oppression which is often sanist in nature, and is certainly anti-nonhuman. For those that identify as human, them being BOTH human and wolf is a fundamental part of the oppression they face. In the same way, multigender people who are men and women are oppressed for being both, while monogender trans women and trans men are oppressed for being noncis. Nonhumans and marginalized humans/humans who are also nonhumans can both be oppressed. This also applies to other weres and those who are nonhuman AND human.

We should mention here that some of us are weres, though our main shifter identity is tied to our fae identity. We do have were identities separate from it though. I would also say that some objectkin identities might be essentially the same as this, particularly dollkin where the doll itself is a doll version of a human? At least, some of my dollkin identity does seem to fit this in the same way, where it's explicitly related to humanity or both human and nonhuman.

2. People who are fictkin or factkin of a specific human character/person, even when that character or person presents as or is human-standard in appearance and abilities.

They have their otherkin identities refused and denied, despite it being a human identity. They are marginalized for an identity which is directly human, and have also faced exclusion and hate from otherkin communities during our history for those same identities.

3. Human members of nonhuman (especially physically nonhuman) systems.

This is itself more because of pluralmisia, but human members of nonhuman systems are often oppressed because they are seen as the same person as the nonhuman headmate and therefore as nonhuman themselves.

Much in the same way that a butch cis woman being attacked by transmisogynists is still that butch cis woman being affected by transmisogyny, so too are human headmates being marginalized by anti-nonhumanity. The target of a form of bigotry or oppression is the person who that bigotry/oppression was being used to hurt, regardless of whether or not they actually are that identity.

Moreover, because pluralmisia is widespread and constant, human headmates in nonhuman systems (and even sometimes just who have nonhuman headmates) are near-universally and near-constantly seen as nonhuman, not just occasionally. The only times they are not is when the system tries to pass for human, and passing privilege does not exist. That is to say, the only time they are not seen as nonhuman is when every nonhuman member closets themselves for safety and typically also when they pretend on top of that to be a singlet.

Conditional privilege that relies on not being out and open as every part of your identity/identities - of hiding part of your attraction as a bi or pan person, of hiding part of your gender as a multigender person, of hiding your plurality as a system, of hiding your transness as a trans man or woman - that's not privilege, it's a hostage situation. There's nuance to this, but fundamentally, if you can entirely lose any privilege and power you do have just by being open about your/your system's identities - often facing even more violence from people who feel they were "tricked" into treating you well only because they thought you weren't the identity they were bigoted about - because of coming out or being outed, it's not privilege as we understand it in the context of oppression.

4. A human with superpowers, mutant abilities, or otherwise not human-standard appearance or abilities, especially one with exomemories of having been considered nonhuman in their universe/past or parallel life.

Many of them faced oppression if not outright attempts at genocide for being human differently, only to come here and face oppression for being that person internally in a body which doesn't reflect it.

To have other people marginalized by humans then turn around and say that they're actually privileged just for the human identity they were denied and may have risked their lives for in their original universe, simply because here they are human in a way the humans in power don't actually allow to exist and continue to oppress them over... it's just cruel. It's like how trans men don't actually have male privilege, because they are trans (and they are trans because they are men and men because they are trans, inextricably). While patriarchal manhood is privileged, trans manhood isn't part of that. Even a stealth passing trans man who is outed can face extreme violence if his manhood is revealed to be trans, and any even conditional privilege gained from hiding a core part of his identity will be stripped from him.

Doing humanity "wrong" is similarly marginalized. Being a mutant, a human from another world, a magic user, or in any way internally having abilities that humans here don't have, results in oppression from normative humans and having your status (and therefore privilege and power) as human stripped from you, often permanently!

Alterhuman humanity is itself marginalized - their actual identities are denied in the same way nonhumans' identities are. They are denied in the way that genderfluid people being called cis women and cis men face. Acknowledging only part of someone's actual identity but mislabeling even that as something it's not is part of oppression. Moreover, facing violence over refusing to conform to the narrow expectations of your identity enforced by those in power is especially oppression.

Being locked up in psych wards for human identities that significantly diverge from anthronormative humanity, facing actual literal physical violence and abuse for atypical human identities, having zero legal protection for alterhuman human identities - these are all forms of oppression. These all affect marginalized humans.

Hell, anti-nonhuman and anti-alterhuman oppression even sometimes affect nonmarginalized humans. While there's a large overlap between furry and nonhuman (especially therian) communities, human furries face anti-nonhuman AND anti-alterhuman sentiment just for doing humanity wrong by dressing up as anthropomorphic animals.

Very few of the furries that use the anti-nonhuman "they believe they're actually animals" actually believe that about human furries (or even nonhumans, since part of our oppression is them not believing us) but they still use it to harm those human furries even to the point of trying to get them fired from their jobs.

They believe it's wrong for people they fully believe to be humans to even want to appear in any way animalistic - which affects human alterhumans with animalistic characteristics as much as nonhumans with the same. What's being attacked is as much non-normative humanity as perceived adjacency to nonhumanity, and affects both marginalized humans and nonhumans.

.....

Anthrocentrism and anthronormativity are structures of power used to maintain human hegemony. They are used to maintain the relationship of humanity as an oppressor class and anyone those in power consider not sufficiently or correctly human as an oppressed class.

Not all humans have power over nonhumans. Some humans are themselves marginalized by their very human identity itself, because it is considered human in "the wrong way".

So why is this all important?

Attacking someone's actual identity never actually hurts the people who have power over you, but CAN hurt other marginalized people of that same identity.

As an example, "kill all men" hurts trans, nonbinary, and otherwise noncis men, as well as those who don't have access to patriarchal privilege because of other marginalizations not directly related to their manhood such as nonwhite and intersex men. Patriarchy as a system is as much transphobic, colonialist, white supremacist, and intersexist as it is sexist.

Human hegemony is as much sanist, enforces consensus reality, against past and parallel lives and exomemories, anti-soulbond and against those from other universes, and fundamentally anti-alterhuman as it is anti-nonhuman. These are built inextricably into the very foundation of human hegemony. They are neither incidental to it nor an unintended side effect of anti-nonhumanity; rather, anti-nonhumanity is one (extremely major) part of the enforcement of the larger structure of human hegemony.

This is without even getting into intersectional nuances of privilege and power involving identities that aren't directly human. A white nonhuman still has white privilege over a human person of color, even if that person of color has managed to access human privilege (something that, because of how deeply white supremacy is baked into society, it could be argued that they don't - especially given how much white supremacy literally relies on dehumanization). Moreover, in our society the white nonhuman will often have power over the human person of color.

Privilege and power are complex, nuanced, and not clear cut, especially when you get into intersections of actually privileged and actually marginalized identities. They are more so when you get into where otherwise typically privileged identities themselves are marginalized.

Nonhumans and alterhumans are both oppressed by the majority of humans. Lateral aggression can in fact hurt alterhumans, and isn't "punching up".

One example that we've specifically been hurt by is access to community and resources. We're fully nonhuman, yet barred from many nonhuman spaces and resources for also being human/having human members. Where do you draw the line? Is being nonhuman at all enough? Are only system members who are zero percent human allowed to participate in these spaces and receive support? Are lycanthropes too human for you, in some cases even if they don't consider themselves human at all? Are "humanoid" - elves, dwarves, fae - too close to humanity?

These are all actual reasons I've been excluded from nonhuman spaces. You may be horrified by some of them, but still think that there should be spaces "for nonhumans only".

I agree that there should be spaces that center nonhumanity, that are FOR nonhumans. The problem is, you can't have a space for only nonhumans by excluding humans, because people who are both exist.

The way you draw the line is by selective inclusion. It means letting people who are humans into the space because they are nonhumans. It means letting us talk about the nuances of oppression we face for the intersection of our human and nonhuman identities in nonhuman spaces, because it's directly related to our nonhumanity even when also related to our humanity.

It means when in wider alterhuman/nonhuman community spaces, acknowledging marginalized humanity. It means, even when expressing justified negative feelings towards humans as a class, remembering that there are humans that are oppressed by that same class who don't oppress you.

It means not acting like expressing your blatant hatred of all human identity is always harmless just because of the oppression we face, that I have directly faced myself as a result of being fully nonhuman. It means not hurting other nonhumans and marginalized humans over your very real and valid anger at how humans have hurt all of us.

It also means recognizing that while emotions are morally neutral and it's necessary to have safe spaces to process them, it doesn't mean that they can't hurt other people or that said hurt is always justified. It means that just because something isn't morally wrong, doesn't make it morally right or a form of justice or resistance against oppression.

It means recognizing that you are capable of hurting people and doing real harm to other marginalized people as a marginalized person yourself. It means recognizing that you can even hurt nonmarginalized individuals, and that while a good ally will be an ally even if you do, repeatedly attacking a friend over an aspect of their identity they have no control over can do lasting damage and is just shitty and wrong. It means "I don't know how to tell you that you have to care* about other people" and that just because you have the right to be cruel about someone's identity, doesn't mean that you're IN the right for doing so.

*care as an action, not a feeling. We have ASPD among other things. Idgaf how you feel internally as long as you are not hurting the individual PEOPLE in your life, especially over things they can't control

It means that treating a whole identity as horrible and worthless will only hurt the most vulnerable people of that identity. It will only hurt those that experience a marginalized form of that identity or are otherwise significantly marginalized. A man who commits suicide over everyone in his life constantly attacking manhood instead of patriarchy is still dead, and somehow I don't think my friend Brian who is a staunch feminist and all-around decent person dying advances the cause of dismantling the patriarchy, for example.

(I also don't find the argument that "well if they're not that kind of [identity], they should know it's not about them" if you are the one making it about the identity itself rather than the behavior AS a person of that identity in the first place. Talking about how someone's identity gives them privilege and power and therefore makes certain actions more harmful to marginalized people is very different than treating the identity itself as inherently harmful, and therefore everyone of that identity as both deserving to be harmed for it and incapable of being harmed about it.)

I do think there's a time and place to express and process those feelings, just like there's a time and place to express very real patriarchal trauma that directly centers around men as a class. I also think that while emotions themselves are morally neutral, that expressing hatred of someone's inherent identity can absolutely be harmful. When people start acting on their hatred, even simply by acting as if it is morally right (let alone praxis) to hate all people of a specific identity and express that hate, it can be harmful.

Demonizing any part of someone's identity, identity essentialism (treating an identity as if it is inherently harmful or makes you evil), and especially denying that people of a given identity can be marginalized on that axis; these are the tools of the enemy. We do not use them.

It's also simply ineffective and inaccurate to attack an identity, rather than the systemic power structures that benefit the majority of people of a particular identity. So often, even so-called "trans inclusive" rad/ical femini/sm which treats manhood as inherently corrupt and privileged not only harms trans men, but also reinforces patriarchal masculinity itself.

Misanthropy - or hate and vitriol towards human identity - doesn't actually do anything to deconstruct or challenge human hegemony. This is because it's not the identity itself that's the problem, but the class inequality and oppression.

Humans are not born oppressors. If they were, nonhuman liberation would very likely be impossible, because even if we gained significant number and powers, they would continue to try to oppress us forever. No human would ever be capable of being an ally to nonhumans.

Now, don't misconstrue me - humans are largely born into privilege (with the exception of human alterhumans) - because of the system of nonhuman and alterhuman oppression we currently exist in. It is their humanity which grants them privilege and power over us, because that system makes it so.

The existence of marginalized humans only proves this. The point is NOT that the majority of humans don't oppress nonhumans and alterhumans. The point is that they do, but that humanity itself as an identity isn't inherently oppressive and harmful.

Honestly, this is such a complex subject that I've only scratched the surface here. I could go into the way I define harm as largely hierarchical - as in, being based in having power over another person - but also how lateral harm where you don't have power over another can still happen, specifically as a result of leveraging people and systems that do have power over them to hurt them.

(A trans person calling the cops on another trans person would be a good example of this. Even if both trans people are the same in every other way - every marginalized and privileged identity, even the same exact gender - the first trans person who called the cops has USED people who have power over both of them to harm the other.)

I could go into how humanity and nonhumanity aren't actually opposites and how the creation of this false binary most hurts those who are both. I could go into how this is basically oppositional sexism but for nonhumanity/alterhumanity - oppositional anthroism? 😅

I could go into more detail about the need for spaces to safely process negative feelings towards identities that consist mainly of nonmarginalized people, without harming marginalized people of that identity. I could go into the complexity of spaces like tumblr, where a lot of personal blogs are essentially virtual extensions of your private bodymind on a public site, and how that means balancing autonomy and simply curating your own experience with wider interactions as members of a community and what conversations we even choose to have entirely publicly to begin with.

I could even go into how different systems of oppression function differently, and how I would not apply the vast majority of what I've said to racial justice and white supremacist systems simply because people of color know better than me whether or not this applies to a system I unequivocally have privilege and power in. I could talk about how the majority of stuff that I HAVE seen DOES focus on whiteness in relation to how it grants privilege and power within the system, but that because my whiteness isn't marginalized in any way, that I've never myself felt hurt by venting about whiteness-as-identity. I could talk about how white supremacy functions differently from just about any other oppressive system (including ones like patriarchy which rely on it) in that white people ARE the closest to inherently categorically oppressors, while I would argue under systems like patriarchy, even a good majority of cis men are oppressed explicitly by patriarchal masculinity, precisely because patriarchal masculinity is white, het, christian, abled, and so on. I could talk about how the reason whiteness itself can't be marginalized is because it is conditional and a social construct, which is often revoked societally over ethnic identities such as jewishness and irish travellers.

I could talk about how dehumanization is a frequent tool of systems of oppression such as racism and ableism, and how that's rooted in anti-nonhuman sentiment. I could talk about how significant enough dehumanization as a result of disability stripped me of access to human hegemony long before I was ever openly nonhuman, precisely because systems of oppression rely on one another to remain in power.

I could talk about how it's not nearly as clear-cut as "human=oppressor, nonhuman=oppressed" and especially that equating oppression with harmlessness itself is used to harm other marginalized people and avoid accountability for it, especially by painting other marginalized people as actually privileged over you. I could talk about how reductive it is to take a single identity, nonintersectionally, and treat it as eternal victimhood, and how deeply antithetical that is to the very concept of intersectionality.

I could even get into how identity doesn't guarantee safety, and that the only way you can judge if someone is a safe person is by their actual actions.

But my main point here is this: when I say I've been hurt and harmed by misanthropy in nonhuman spaces, as someone who has experienced significant oppression for being nonhuman, because I am also partially human and our system experiences marginalized humanity, and get my actual experiences with marginalized humanity denied, picked apart, asked for "proof" (this is a complicated one, but it was about my own personal experiences that I was explicitly sharing), had the goalposts moved and was ignored when aside from community I couldn't at the time effectively communicate what nonhuman resources that I'd been barred from due to already being extremely badly triggered, I just want people to take the fact that misanthropy can be harmful seriously.

For the record, community itself is a resource - actually multiple. It is support - emotional primarily, but also sometimes financial, legal, or other structural forms of support. It is often access to other resources that aren't fully public - guides on managing dysphoria and living as your kintype or theriotype, on safety, on where to get species-affirming gear and even medical procedures, sometimes on exclusive discounts and community-run grants for the same. It is to some extent safety, depending on how the community is run - safety in numbers, essentially, if they are willing to stand by you in a storm. It is understanding and acceptance.

There are not a lot of public nonhuman resources outside of our communities, and that's a problem itself, but even of the material resources that are publicly visible, they often explicitly exclude even part-humans, human nonhumans, and marginalized humans who still would otherwise benefit from or have need of those resources. I have been told that it's not actually exclusion just to explicitly say that something is not for someone who needs it, because they can't technically stop you from using it anyway.

This was said by a person who just recently had been venting with me about people who will say bigoted shit like "endos f/uck of/f" on trauma recovery and general plural resources (both ones they created and ones created by inclusive people), who otherwise recognizes attempts at emotional manipulation and verbal gatekeeping as such, so it was very clearly just a double standard for marginalized humans and nonhuman humans.

My point is that we are hurting other marginalized people when we deny their experiences with oppression on the axis of humanity/nonhumanity for their non-normative human identities. My point is that I as a nonhuman have BEEN hurt by this. My point is that misanthropy is neither harmless nor all that useful in nonhuman and alterhuman liberation. My point is that nonhuman separatism is just as unhelpful and ultimately antithetical to liberation as any other separatism movement.

My point is that when even other nonhumans are telling you "hey, misanthropy hurts ME too", you should believe them. You shouldn't erase or ignore their nonhuman identity, you shouldn't deny that it's possible for you to laterally hurt or use oppresove systems to harm other nonhumans and marginalized humans, and you certainly shouldn't act as if hurting marginalized humans is actually morally justified.

My point is that you don't have to participate in it, but alterhumans and nonhumans ARE part of a wider marginalized community together, and that misanthropy will affect people in that community before it ever actually affects anyone in power (which it never will). My point is that our marginalized human siblings/cousins in this community are not our enemy, and we shouldn't be hurting them, let alone acting like it's morally justified to do so because of their identity which is actually marginalized even if you personally deny that it is.

My point is that hate is not praxis, humanity is not inherently bad or privileged, and that hurting and harming people who are not oppressing us is still wrong.

I know a lot of people in nonhuman and alterhuman communities already agree with me about misanthropy, but I've seen enough of an uptick in it lately to say something.

Misanthropy is not "fighting back". It's not always harmless. It's not always "punching up".

The way we achieve liberation may require violence - as a last resort, but still. Attacking other marginalized people, allies, and an identity itself isn't how we get there. Organizing, demanding recognition, acceptance, and rights, with support from our allies and other marginalized groups, is. We can't mistake revenge fantasies and lashing out for action and progress.

Again, there are and should be spaces for processing misanthropy. It's just bog standard bigotry, however, to be cruel toward other marginalized people on the basis of that very same marginalized identity. Denial of that marginalization is part of that bigotry (and can be used by our oppressors to further oppress them, no less. Don't be a pick-me or a token for them).

True misanthropy - hate directed at human identity itself - shouldn't be prevalent in nonhuman spaces outside of those spaces for processing it. It's not worth the harm it does, and it's not even helpful in the end. Misanthropy should not be tolerated, because it is most intolerant to other nonhumans and marginalized humans, and just cruel and unhelpful to boot.

[seventhdoctor]

Yugioh GX season 1 is so funny when you watch with the knowledge that the protag has a secondhand bodycount that only the principal knows about.

The kid with a secondhand bodycount is applying to your school? Sure, but he only gets in if he makes the grade - but oh no, his train is late and your elitist teacher is trying to reject him before he even gets a chance? Well, maybe you can grease the wheels a bit.

Your elitist teacher is openly cackling about the matched he rigged to get the kid with a secondhand bodycount expelled? Do nothing, say nothing. Make a snippy comment when the kid with a secondhand bodycount wins anyway.

Need some top-tier duelists to protect the keys to unleashing the god cards lite? Okay, maybe the kid with a secondhand bodycount does make sense here. Or it could still be a terrible idea.

...

...

...You know what? Originally I left it here for the joke but actually no, I'm gonna pull out my tinfoil hat and talk about the other kid at DA with a dueling bodycount. No, not Hell Kaiser. Not the abandoned dorm stuff. Not any of the kids who hold seances to summon duel spirits for a winter horror episode or anything. I mean:

Motegi, AKA Belowski. The season 1 opponent who's introduced for a one-off episode and then left to cameo a couple times in the rest of the series, mostly in crowd shots. He's at DA as late as the series finale, at which point he's been a student for six years (Judai's first year is his fourth). And he might be there even longer! I'm not even sure he's even allowed to graduate, as opposed to being indefinitely contained at Duel Academia.

If Judai still had Yubel around when he started at Duel Academia, and they were found to be causing problems...would Judai be isolated the same way Motegi does? It's not like DA has the resources to actually handle their spirit problems, and yet the resources it does have make it a better place than most to keep them in the meantime.

GX has a lot of weird one-off episodes whose implications are never fully explored but the Motegi episode stuck with me, so much that I wrote a whole fic as a baby GX fan trying to imagine what his deal was. Now in the year 2k23 I'm looking at this and wondering what his situation could have suggested for Judai's fate if his spirit/dueling bodycount problem hadn't taken a couple more years to rear its head...

[batsplat]

Is Valentino Rossi the best rider in 1vs1 battles?

ehhhhh *shrugs* I mean. the best ever? like. who knows. the best in the field most years he was competing in the sport? maybe, I guess?

this is one of those questions where I don't really like giving definitive answers but am more interested in how you'd even go about assessing it? like, what metrics are you looking at, what are the criteria, can you put numbers to it or do you have to be super holistic about it or what. I think the 1 vs 1 is already an interesting distinctions, because that is a little different from just talking about wheel to wheel skill. they're related skill sets, but it's not the exact same

so. to bring in an example with a sample set of races I imagine most people reading this are pretty familiar with. let's say we're comparing valentino and marc in direct combat with each other. let's say we put the races where they're fighting one-on-one for basically the entire race in one box, so assen 2015 and catalunya 2016. let's say we have races where one of them is working their way through the field - and it's all building towards the confrontation between the two of them, so say a qatar 2013, a qatar 2014, an argentina 2015. let's say you have a very intense fight that doesn't last the whole race, like sepang 2015, or an extended 'duel' that is basically a defensive ride without any actual overtakes, like silverstone 2015. now, you may have noticed that from this list, valentino... kinda wins a lot of these? not qatar 2014, plus sepang 2015 is in the 'this cost both riders too much to have a winner' camp, but except for that? it's a strong record for valentino. however! the moment you take away the '1 vs 1' qualifier, suddenly the record looks way kinder to marc - you have a catalunya 2014, a phillip island 2015 and a phillip island 2017 go in his favour, while only assen 2017 is a multi-rider dogfight that involves both of them where valentino ends up taking the win. I do think when you're considering 'rivalries' and how a particular dynamic develops over time, it's worth looking specifically at what's happening in extended one-on-one combat and differentiating that from dogfights! because it is a different vibe, because it matters if you're just focused on one guy. but of course both categories still matter in assessing direct combat... even if there are also different skills involved in those different types of fights. valentino, even very late in his career, was still particularly adept at challenging and outsmarting individual riders, and it's a specific format he clearly did thrive in. so. yeah. both of these general categories are indicative of w2w ability, even if they're not quite the same - either in terms of the skills required or in terms of narrative implications

here's another issue. valentino tends to win the race-deciding extended confrontations against marc, but obviously that too isn't entirely reflective of what happened when they met each other on-track. this is because during their time together in the premier class, marc was winning a lot more races than valentino and generally had more pace than valentino, so a lot of on-track confrontations that marc came on top of where typically one-and-done type situations. overtake and move on, overtake and move on. so while you still have a misano 2014 (valentino overtakes marc and marc eventually crashes while attempting to keep up) or a brno 2014 (another valentino overtake where he pulls clear), you then also have laguna 2013 (the corkscrew move is the end of that battle), le mans 2014 (a single overtake around halfway through the race after which marc easily pulls clear), indy 2014 (an early tussle that eventually becomes more marc domination), motegi 2016 (similar, except here valentino ends up crashing), thailand 2018 (valentino can't keep up the pace once marc has gotten past)... like, we get to a place where we're risking penalising marc for 'being very fast' and not sticking around once he's gotten the overtake done, which does also feel wrong? it's an odd balance - because, again, when we're talking Actual Rivalries then it does matter who is winning an extended battle, psychologically if nothing else. like if that's the bit that mattered the most to the outcome of your race, if that's the bit people will remember years to come, if you invested a lot into winning that fight, of course it does matter. but that's narrative, not skill... is this really a good way of assessing how good someone is at 1 vs 1 duels?

I picked the example of that specific rivalry not just because it's the one most people are most familiar with or because I love engaging in discourse about that rivalry - but because I think direct rivalry comparisons are probably the most straightforward way you can approach trying to figure out who is 'better'... and marc clocks in just behind casey as the one who has the most balanced record against valentino w2w. like, biaggi is basically a walkover, and honestly you don't really have that many extended 1 vs 1 duels except for welkom 2004. and for sete, obviously a great rivalry (and I've always believed you don't need a rivalry of equals for it to be good and fun), but also once you get past that sachsenring 2003 turning point then the balance does go out of the window. I've been thinking about this in relation to a longer ask I've ended up massively overthinking (surely not), but I was kinda startled looking back at just how one-sided valentino's record is against jorge. like, unless I'm forgetting some major battles, the most extended scrap you can point to that jorge won is for his very first premier class win at estoril 2008 - and that's also pretty much settled by around halfway/two thirds through the race. but the actual 1 vs 1's that last much of the race? catalunya 2009? sachsenring 2009? motegi 2010? well.... hm. races that build to a battle like sepang 2010 also go in valentino's favour, and even extended tussles like le mans 2011 and phillip island 2014 are more valentino W's. hell, even various short and sweet battles like jerez and indy 2008, misano 2009, motegi 2015, aragon 2016, sachsenring 2018 generally have valentino come out on top - though in this category there's some exceptions, like qatar 2008, indy 2009 and jerez 2010 that all involved jorge besting valentino in a short direct fight

which raises another problem... we do need to in some way acknowledge that valentino simply ends up in more of these fights than most of his rivals - and as a direct result ends up winning more of them. like, once jorge clicked into title winning form in 2010, most of his wins became 'shoot off the line and win way ahead of everyone else with metronomic consistency'. I'm not saying all his race wins were like that! and he did win some great duels in his time in the premier class, especially against marc. but of course, he did that kind of dominating races a hell of a lot more than valentino did - whose approach to winning races was more 'qualify wherever, amble off the line, get moving around halfway through the race and figure things out from there'. now, I discussed this point a little bit here in the context of 'was valentino still successfully mind gaming the other aliens' - but just to bring it back, valentino was deliberately approaching his races in ways geared primarily towards being able to fight his opponents, even to the level of how he set up his bike:

you see this most extremely with something like laguna 2008, where valentino flat out knew he didn't have the outright pace to win - his entire strategy was built around not being the fastest but being able to fuck with casey. in that situation, he's not got the speed, he's building his entire strategy for the win around wheel-to-wheel disruption. and this, plus the regularly mediocre qualifying and starts, does just mean that statistically speaking he's overtaking more riders in his average win than any of the other aliens are. like, if that's your primary metric, then yes! he's clearly very good at w2w! by extension he's also very good at 1 vs 1 duels! if you're looking at riders who have clocked in more than a certain number of wins and do the maths of average overtakes per win, then, yes, I would imagine he tops that metric. does that make him the best? ... well, again... it does feel like you're risking penalising the better qualifiers and starters for being better qualifiers and starters and not ending up in seventh place at the end of every single first lap

so, you've got 'how they measure up against their direct rivals' and 'average numbers of overtakes' as ways to begin considering w2w ability as well as 1 vs 1 track record. then you get into increasingly nebulous waters... here's another potential metric for w2w skill I quite like: efficiency in overtaking. not naming any names, but there are certain riders who, when attempting to work their way through the field, will just. get stuck. even though they have a clear pace advantage over the rider directly in front of them. leading to incredible amounts of faffing about rather than just getting the overtake done. obviously, valentino does like to engage in some faffing about too, but generally speaking he's only doing that when he's in close proximity to the race leader and can realistically get himself to the front of the pack fairly quickly. he's very efficient when he's actually working his way through the field. of course, this is something marc is similarly excellent at, as he has shown plenty of times this year... which. well. this is where we run headfirst into another problem: this sport has changed a lot over the years and some things are simply not at the same difficulty level as they were in past years. so, sticking with those two, which of these is a 'better' comeback? 2006 sachsenring, where valentino starts tenth on the grid after tyre problems in qualifying, at a track he doesn't really love and in serious championship trouble, but works his way to the front before having to fend off the chasing pack that is coming back at him all the way until the chequered flag? or 2024 sachsenring, where marc starts thirteenth on the grid after having been impeded in q1, at his speciality circuit that he's visiting for the first time on a new bike, and works his way up to p2 despite his fractured rib and finger in an era where overtaking is a lot harder than it was in 2006? well, first of all, congrats to both of them, very nicely done. but secondly, that's kind of the problem, right? while I'm sure prime valentino in this era would also regularly be doing that marc/pedro thing where they make the commentators go 'oh ho ho they said overtaking was impossible in motogp these days!!' - at the end of the day his approach involved some built-in faffing about that was also more feasible back in the day. if we're assessing w2w ability, we do need to make some kind of allowance for era - which also affects how often riders are likely to find themselves in 1 vs 1 duels in the first place

here's another plausible metric: last lap battles. this is ALSO something that is super era-dependent. casey in his whole time in the premier class gets involved in like? about four battles that are still going on in the final lap? there's definitely a few I'm forgetting, especially if they weren't for wins/podium places, but it's definitely not a lot. compare and contrast with how the 2017 to 2019 era played out. everything back then was tyre management, tyre management and more tyre management, and dovi in particular was big on the 'eh let's win this race at the slowest possible pace' thing, where everyone crawled around the track as slowly as they could get away with before pulling the pin a few laps before the end. obviously, the characteristics of that era were a) very beneficial to dovi, in that they rewarded both those who knew how to make those specific tyres work (and his decline in 2020 was largely linked to the changes in tyres) and those who were very good at managing last lap duels, but b) inherently were more likely to produce last lap duels than a few other eras. like, in the alien era, which regularly featured gaps of. idk. seven seconds between the front runners, the characteristics of those bikes (as well as those riders) just meant you had very few battles that lasted that long. so inherently, it's harder to judge riders like, say, casey on how good they are in that kind of situation, not least because you are working with such a tiny sample size. and those battles are a big feature of how we remember 1 vs 1 duels!! people love last lap duels!!

now, yes, obviously valentino's record in 1 vs 1 last lap duels is very strong, and there's really only a few he loses over the course of his entire career. dovi is another strong contender in that particular category if we're just limiting ourselves to riders this century (which we are). (unfortunately, those two kinda took turns to be competitive so we didn't really get much of a direct h2h, but off the top of my head I think it's a pleasing 2-2? dovi takes qatar 2008 and le mans 2011, valentino takes qatar 2015 and argentina 2019. I feel like I'm definitely forgetting something.) but again, you do end up in caveat central with this metric. look at marc, who was reliably finding himself in last lap duels specifically at tracks he and/or the honda were quite poor at - again, ragging on that record too much does feel like you're penalising him for managing to get there in the first place. on the other hand, is it really fair to take too much credit away from dovi in handling those situations - surely, at the point where you're arriving in the last lap together, you're at a stage where both riders have a decent chance of winning? on the third hand, it is worth pointing out that dovi is more often than not in the lead going into those last laps, and is fending off a sort of on-the-edge last gasp 'might as well have a go' marc attack. 'last lap battles' is inherently quite a loose term, and how much should who's leading going in be considered a criterion? does it matter if you actually have an overtake or not? does it matter when in the lap the overtake happens? it's obviously quite an arbitrary category... sete makes a mistake headed into the last lap at sachsenring 2005 that gives valentino the lead, while marc makes a mistake on the penultimate lap of catalunya 2016 that essentially ends his victory challenge towards valentino. how do you compare those?

and at a certain point, you need to get away from the headline numbers and start thinking about what it actually means to be good at 1 vs 1 duels. you get into categories like 'race management' - choosing when best to make your attack, balancing risk and reward, not making risky overtake attempts for no good reason when you could just wait for half a minute longer, making sure not to needlessly fuck your tyres while pushing too hard too early. there's ability to actually execute overtakes, which is a question of race craft, creativity, and also about being able to play the opponent. there's various defensive abilities - somebody like pecco exemplifies this, who is both very hard to initially overtake in part due to his ability on his brakes, but is also adept at immediately re-overtaking (a favourite trick of his mentor too, as it happens). to borrow from another sport's terminology, you can contrast 'conversion' and 'steal' rate - if you have the superior underlying pace at crucial stages of the race, are you actually converting that into your maximum achievable result, or conversely if you have inferior pace, can you steal a result your pace doesn't 'merit'? obviously, you get a massive blot in the copy book every time you fail to convert any kind of result by crashing out or by bagging yourself a severe penalty for your race conduct. what about the psychological dimension? your ability to put pressure on another rider, e.g. by showing them a wheel here or there, to force them into a mistake rather than 'just overtaking' them via pure skill? is reputation and intimidation part of your skill set when it comes to wheel to wheel ability? the off-track 'work' you're doing on the opponent, and the prior weight of their expectations for this fight... your ability to study and analyse riders to pinpoint where they are at their strongest and weakest, while also figuring out where they're going to expect an attack and where they won't - maybe even sucker them into thinking it will come from somewhere differently than it actually does... on sheer weight of his track record, you'd have to say valentino is pretty much peerless in some of these categories. and, yes, some of these skills are weighted quite clearly towards the '1 vs 1' element over the 'multi-rider dogfight' element of w2w skills. they're more about terrorising a specific rival than thriving in the chaos

so. what does all of this mean. what's the actual answer. is valentino the best at 1 vs 1 duels. well. who knows. even if we're ignoring the historical dimension and limiting ourselves just to this century, there's too many confounding factors - from different racing eras within that time span to different individual approaches to racing - to allow us to truly evaluate who the 'best' is. I think the cleanest way to summarise it is... from the great riders this century, valentino is the one who most depends on his 1 vs 1 skills (and w2w skills more broadly). that's his unique selling point in a way you wouldn't say it is for any of the others... the guy who gets closest is dovi - but I still reckon his biggest skill is his tyre management and that was the most important differentiating factor that made him so competitive in 2017-19. his ability to scrap w2w comes second (and is absolutely a constant throughout his career), but really that's the bit that allows him to take advantage of the tyre whispering skills... it lets him finish the job, if you will. whereas with valentino, his brains and cunning broadly speaking and his w2w more specifically - and especially the 1 vs 1 stuff - is like, his x factor. I mean... obviously he's also good at the other things - I called him a mid qualifier but of course it's worth remembering he has 55 career pole positions in the premier class, more than jorge or casey or dani. this is primarily a function of his longevity and all of them are definitely better qualifiers than him, but like. of course he's not slow. it's just that relatively speaking, when compared to the other aliens, he's the one who is winning the least via his actual raw pace. here's one metric for that: in valentino's seven premier class title campaigns, he only has the highest average grid position in only three (and during his super dominant 2002 season, it's joint with biaggi). in three of those title-winning seasons, he's the second best qualifier on average, and in one of them he's only third best. the only other seasons this century where the best qualifier on average doesn't win the title are 2015 (marc just beats jorge, valentino is quite a distant third), 2020 (joan mir icon winning a title with an average grid position of NINE POINT FIVE SEVEN lmaoooooo, only seventh best on the grid), 2022 (fabio is a little ahead of martin and then pecco) and... that's it

which kinda means that... can you say valentino's objectively better at 1 vs 1 battles than the other aliens? well, no. I mean, sure, I do feel fairly happy to say he's better than jorge and especially dani, more *wiggles hand* about casey and marc - because with those two there's enough confounding factors in comparing them to valentino and they've also challenged valentino often enough directly that you can make the alternative case. in the end you do kinda go... well, it's very much a 'all these guys were at their best in very different versions of motogp' thing. what you can say is that for valentino, 1 vs 1 prowess is a bigger part of his game than it is for his fellow aliens. his route to victory both on an individual race level and on a title fight level is built around engaging in a lot of these fights and winning them - and, given how successful he's been, of course you do have to conclude that bit of his game is clearly operating on a high level. so when you compare that to both casey and marc, those two really do have other bits of their games that are more important to their success. fewer of their race victories percentage-wise have been won through 1 vs 1 duels. casey is dominating enough races from the front he's not even doing all that much w2w tussling. marc might be losing plenty of these close duels, but he's relentlessly at the front enough that this consistency is what's giving him titles as much as anything else. whereas valentino's entire approach is tailored towards finding himself in those kinds of direct scraps, winning said scraps, and then using those scraps as a way to demoralise the opposition... unsurprisingly, he's got the biggest sample size of that style of battle and has a very high success rate. who knows if he's the best, but he is the most dependent on that specific skill. and he sure has had a lot of practise at those duels, which I imagine will have gotten him just a little closer to being perfect

[songstep4002]

Do you know what's really annoying?

When you call someone or something not human, people always assume you mean less than human. Which is stupid because of the majority of the time, I don't mean less than human or even more than human, I mean different from human. But the average person's tendency is to put humanity up on a pedestal as greater, which in their mind, makes different from humanity inherently lesser than humanity. Which is stupid and annoying and I hate it.

[nostalgia-tblr]

have to say one thing fandomwise i'm not enjoying about RTD2 is him getting/taking credit for positive moves when he'd previously been very much part of the problem and we're just pretending that bit never happened. davros shouldn't be a disabled villain, yeah, but you were fine with it before, even adding the wheelchair-using villain in that s2 cyberman story, and i want to know what changed and when. like that's actually a thing worth discussing, what kind of awareness-raising actually works and what didn't?

the tardis is accessible now. good! but the old tardis was just a flat studio floor, it was nu who (back at RTD1) that started adding pointless stairs to the set just because it... looked nice? apparently? so i am glad it has at last lost the useless stairs (for now at least) but why did it have them in the first place? cos i already know that the real answer is "because nobody involved in the production even realised it was an issue." which is normal! i accept that people mostly don't think of these things because they don't have to! even in fandom the fans who first noticed the ramps in the new tardis were the ones with some interest in disability rights (often because they or someone close to them is disabled - as i said most people don't have to be aware of these things (though it'd help tremendously if they were)).

idk there's a level on which i feel like i'm being gaslit? i mean good on him for having learned over time on a number of issues, but pretending he didn't learn makes it all seem a bit disingenuous and also takes away from the fact that he clearly has done some thinking on things and has come to new conclusions, which is good and the sort of thing we can praise without pretending there was no problem to begin with.

[phil-lesterfan]

What are your thoughts on Squidbob tell me now

HI!!! i know you said now and it's been a few hours but we'll put it up to time zones. anyway, i was thinking about this ask and ultimately it's that quote from dan in that interview, right? "best friends, arch enemies, husbands, business partners, partners in crime, soul mates, just mates, who the fuck knows?"

obviously it's antagonistic, but on spongebob's part, it's unintentional (my knowledge is rusty, and i'm not fully caught up on spongebob, though i've seen a few squidbob moments from more recent eps) and when he does hurt squidward, he genuinely feels bad about it – when he picks up on it, at least. but, like, when squidward says spongebob has hurt his feelings or when it's really obvious, spongebob takes accountability and tries to right his wrong(s). even if that means making the situation worse, lol

AT THE SAME TIME, yes, squidward can really hurt spongebob and even enjoys seeing him hurt, but he understands when things have gone too far, and it seems to me like he doesn't just want to be in spongebob's good books for the sake of his reputation. take "fools in april" for example: squidward really hurts spongebob with his "prank" and it's a very public prank where people make clear their disapproval of his actions. of course, no one wants to be seen as the huge asshole, and squidward even says "it hurts, doesn't it?" to plankton when plankton becomes the most hated thing in bikini bottom. BUT when squidward apologises to spongebob, while he struggles, it's clear he wants to (he just physically can't) and he doesn't know everyone else is at spongebob's house. he genuinely just wants spongebob to like him again. (plus, he finds it humiliating when it's revealed other people are there – clearly, it's not about reputation)

the other obvious one is "dying for pie" where he puts spongebob's life in danger and realises he doesn't want to be responsible for spongebob's death nor does he really want spongebob to die at all.

it's also insanely cute to me that he's, like, as far as i know, the only one who calls spongebob "sponge" – i don't think i've heard any other character refer to spongebob like that . . . except maybe patrick? but i might be confusing it with a – you guessed it – squidbob scene.

also the way squidward's voice goes all soft when he calls "spongebob sponge" :') and how he's protective of spongebob too. like in "pizza delivery", when the customer is rude to spongebob and spongebob sobs, we can infer squidward KNOCKED THE GUY OUT!!!!! and he went back over to spongebob and reassured him that the customer was happy with the order and everything was ok :)

squidward also gets flustered when spongebob compliments him and spongebob likes it when squidward is having fun. i think deep down, they both genuinely care for each other, and they both want the other to be happy, they just have different ideas of happiness and aren't sure how to get them to align. there's really great potential there, and i personally love relationships like theirs where it's just so fucked and they're more prone for divorce but they keep remarrying anyway

sorry for this mostly focussing on squidward . . . spongebob is a bit more complicated to me bc he's a mix of childish and mature and you're never entirely sure when which facet will be more prominent. ultimately though i think they have the potential to balance each other out but still have a good time together (as in, they won't settle right into "BORED old married couple"). when i have more thoughts on spongebob's side of the relationship, i will let you know o7

i know this spawned from the "to be loved is to be changed" post tags, but for squidbob's part i feel i was mostly joking or i probably made a tblitbc comment while watching spongebob with my irl and i've forgotten why, LOL – let me think on it some more and let me watch more of the show, and i'll get back to you on that. :)

[melivora]

Every time Phil mentions being from the north I get so northriotic even though I barely pass as northern lmao

[fox-mulder-gets-pegged]

Me when I see people reducing fictional women (especially woc and queer women) to The Bitch/The Mom/The Keeper Of The Braincell/The Reason Your Gay Ship Isn't Canon/The Sexy One/etc

[irawhiti]

do you guys fucking hear yourselves i'm just wondering. like be fucking for real here. everyone who says that millionaires aren't rich or some other shit because of inflation and prices going up owes every homeless person who has to read this shit $3000. guess what, things are just as expensive for the filthy poors WITHOUT a million dollars, too! usually a hell of a lot more expensive in the long run, actually! the cost of living getting more expensive affects EVERYONE. a flat $1000 is almost nothing to a millionaire while being a fucking life changer for many people living in poverty! come on now.

[autisticzedaph]

I need to change my major .

[beaversatemygrandma]

Interview. Interview. Oh Another interview. Interview. Interview. Guess what's next? An interview that a manager is like "Today at 2pm sound good?" which I took bc yeah, it was good...

I'm tired.

Now will ANY OF THEM ACTUALLY Call Me Back???