#i've said this before but most of the characters feel like parodies of themselves in s1. they didn't really know what to do with them yet | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mdhwrites · 1 year

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You said before that Boiling Isles is basically our world but with more teeth, it's flat and flawed, also because there's tech in there despite already having magic that could do the same job. So I was wondering.

What would've made the world building more interesting? Or what Bl should've got rid of to not make it a copy pasted version of our world?

The short answer to this is that I don't really know. I will talk a LOT about why TOH feels like such a bare bones fantasy world but the issue is also part of its identity. There's a reason why I've also said that the writers feel like people who don't like fantasy who were forced to write a fantasy show. There's just no respect for the fantasy. And if that's where you're STARTING from for your fantasy world, there's already something wrong unless you're writing a full blown parody. And TOH is all too happy to borrow the easy outs that fantasy can give, especially to spectacle, to make that claim. It's just that if you don't have one side of the coin, your spectacle is going to struggle to feel meaningful. But let's first talk about the complaint. "Our world but with teeth." This is the fantasy equivalent to the horror genre complaint of "This is an action X but with zombies." Both effectively mean the same thing: It is wearing the skin of the genre but not understanding the draw of the genre. The core feelings and emotions and the like of the genre. After all, a scary design does not make horror. Dread, suspense, scarcity, disempowerment, etc. like that make horror. So that begs the question of what makes fantasy fantasy? Well... That's really hard because fantasy is INCREDIBLY complex. Yes, there's the version of wizards and goblins and orcs and elves and etc. but that isn't by any means the only version of a fantasy world. Magic can be limited to very few characters and it can still feel fantastical. You could in fact have ZERO fantasy elements and still evoke the fantastical and the other worldly through your story. That this is a new place with new rules. As an example, my favorite book series, Ranger's Apprentice, has very sparse actual fantasy elements outside of the first two books. And yet, I don't think it loses the fantasy title because of the titular rangers. How people react to them. Their reputation. Their limits and strengths that make them have the reputation of "One Ranger, One Problem." They're that effective at solving things and the joy in finding ways for Rangers to solve new problems is WONDERFUL. And a large component of that is that the myth of the Ranger, how the world sees the Rangers, is taken very seriously. Compare this to The Owl House. Outside of Belos, literally zero threat, if much of anything, is taken wholly seriously. Most of them, frankly, aren't magical. They may have a magical gimmick but they're a story that doesn't require magic. As an example, Tibbles' first appearance. Just swap it to the medication for Eda's disability isn't widely available right now, she has to go to the night market for it, she gets card sharked to give up King and then gets a gun put in her face. The only thing the fantasy elements adds is that you believe no one will object to Tibbles now owning a person.

And that's where the more teeth part comes into play. People are so much like our real world counterparts that it doesn't feel like a reasonably different culture. Just think about how Willow is introduced. Her strength in plant magic isn't what decided her path. Her path was decided because 'abominations have more career options'. It's a cute joke but like... Plant magic is TERRIFYING in most settings. TOH effectively boils it down to vines outside of one memory poison but think about all that plant magic can encompass. The sudden growth of potion materials. Pheromones and pollens by plants you make suddenly spring up. The hundreds of different poisons you can craft out of plants, OR THE ONES THEY MAKE THEMSELVES. But just from that one line, we're told that magic is incredibly de-emphasized in this setting. That it's so mundane that you learn what will get you a job instead of what you are capable of doing. Does the show do anything with that though? No. A LOT of S1 Boiling Isles actually has this feeling. This feeling of people being very mercenary and out for gain more than they are the wonder of their own world. It's shockingly similar to ours honestly and at first explains why instead of exploring the world, 90% of what Luz faces is some form of huckster or scam artist who's magic doesn't matter. I mean, just look at the twins. They have illusion magic which should allow them such a wide variety of options to mess with people and their grand plan for their sister? Steal her diary and share it with people. Yeah, that's... That's totally not something that could have just happened in a normal, school setting. Molly Mcgee has more fun with what you can do in those sorts of ways than TOH and its one fantasy hook is ghosts. Molly Mcgee is REALLY good though. I highly recommend it and I personally need to watch more. But let's back up to something you might criticize me on. While in Hooty's Moving Hassle, Eda's plot can easily be converted away from a magical setting, what about Luz's plot? Moving house, monster hunters, etc. like that?

Well, that's when we get into the other side of it: It's very functional. The Resident Evil games as they become more action oriented changed their zombies into versions that were much cooler to kill and fit into action rhythms. The horror elements no longer were something to care about but now bent to the will of the action verbs.

TOH does this with fantasy. The majority of Luz and co's plot line in Hooty's Moving Hassle isn't interested in the monster hunters or Hooty himself, enchanted by the magic. Those are to give action to Willow's anger towards Amity and to give Willow something to show how powerful she is against. None of this will be remembered. None of this will be called back to. None of this even portrayed in very interesting ways as the fight is effectively skipped at the end and yeah, they move Hooty but it's just for teenage hi-jinks. It's not bad but it's not special.

This extends to much more important episodes though. Teenage Abomination features Principle Bump putting the school into lock down with intricate runes and a complex system of magic. We never see anything like that again. The Power Glyph in Covention spits directly in the face of Luz's magic being special but it allows Amity to have a fighting chance against magic traps (another concept never brought back) that Eda places and for the emotional moment of her having been tricked into cheating.

Now this isn't to say that your fantasy/magic shouldn't bend to your narrative. There's a breaking point though. If the magic ONLY bends, instead of standing tall, it feels like a tool. It's actually part of what's important about early Hogwarts stuff in Harry Potter. Do the portraits need to be alive all the time? No. Do the staircases constantly have to be moving, especially when they aren't actually saving physical space? No.

But do you know what those things do add? They add the feeling that when a secret passage is shown to exist, you immediately believe it. This place is DRENCHED in unnecessary magic. So much of it defies logic because why the fuck not? This is magic. Let's have fun! So when you're told there's fifteen evil basements and roughly 27 BILLION secret passages, you just… agree. That is the world they've set up.

And I do want to mention that this isn't just in flowery ways. Dark Fantasy effectively asks the question of "How fucked up can we make magic?" What can you do with bones and blood that will just make a person's skin crawl? How much pain can we inflict on the mind because of pressure that couldn't be possible in any other way? What price is paid for magic?

TOH cares so little about its magic thought that it can't even keep something as basic as the spell circle consistent. Darius' abomination form has NO SPELL CIRCLE. Not even an attempt despite how strong that spell feels. He just focuses and casts. Why? I don't know. Probably because it's cool and it's less of a Danny Phantom ripoff than what you'd get with a transformation done with a circle. Most bard magic doesn't have spell circles for OBVIOUS REASONS.

And this doesn't need to be hard coded into its magic. Little Miss Rich Witch, my own series, is very loose with its magic. Instead it's through the society that I create the feeling of something different. The main characters are nobles, something we don't have as much of, and that fact permeates through their social interactions and the feeling of them not being just people from our world in costumes.

But with TOH... how many care about Luz being human? That she doesn't have magic or that the glyphs are special? She is a complete anomaly to this world and NO ONE CARES. It gets a little lip service by Amity and Eda but Boscha just calls it weird that a human is going to her school. She cares more about Luz being friends with Willow than anything to do with her being human or magicless. The glyphs themselves are purely mechanical even with little weight to most of them and little impact for those that do have weight behind their discoveries.

Or hell, how about the demons of the DEMON REALM? They act like anyone else and their biggest distinction is that if you're a demon, you're a villain or a background character. You're not pretty enough to be a part of the actual cast (despite Boscha being a bombshell but I mean... All she has is a third eye). The majority of character just look like elves but with only their magic instead of any sort of culture, ideals, etc. like that. When even your only two races in your fantasy realm are that basic... What's the point? Why not just them all humans with magic if that's effectively what they are? If they have no personality beyond that? And I know that's hypocritical of me since I wrote a 300k word behemoth that was exploring Luz, Amity and Boscha, two main characters and someone I elevated into have very real depth, inbetween S1 and 2 but that's also the thing: On accident, S1 appears to have a personality. Lots of questions about its magic that you may want answers to. Oddities to its world like teachers getting excited about kids fighting that stick out in the brain a little. And the setting is also just malleable enough that I could headcanon a LOT of different elements, like glyphs being linked to emotions and that causing problems with a witch's bile sacs so as to make them dangerous to witches but that's also why Luz is so powerful with them. S2 takes away SO MUCH OF THIS. The increased attention but also death of taking the EC seriously is a large part of this. Suddenly, we're being told that things like Child Endangerment laws have been in place since Eda was a child. Why is it like this now? The Savage Times were actually a utopia so now any negative element of the BI feels forced and incongruent for the simple message of "Belos bad" even while Gus doubles down on "ONLY ILLUSIONS FOR LIFE MOTHERFUCKERS!" So what could have been done? Caring. At all. But the writers hardly care about their characters and treat many of them like plot devices. Why in the world should we expect them to treat the setting with more care than that? Especially when King, arguably the most important character in the series, spends half of it as comic relief? And all of this doesn't even get into the subversive elements. I barely touched on how none of the threats arrayed against people are taken seriously for more than a minute besides Belos. But those elements themselves really push the idea that all is ephemeral. That you shouldn't care about any of it. That the moment you look away, it all vanishes. And one of Fantasy's greatest strengths, or the strength of any story, is to teleport you to new worlds that you can believe in. That feel real, despite the fact that you know they're not. And eventually, I found everything to be made of nothing more sturdy than cardboard with some glitter on it. ========

I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead, If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

And finally a Twitter you can follow too!

#TOH Critical #The Owl House Criticism

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infernia-inferno · 10 months

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One thing that I've noticed recently that's been pissing me off is when people who try to make a part or feature announced for a game before it's finished

I'm talking the "I made Minecraft tales and trails update in a week" shit, the fanmade deltarune chapters that pass themselves off as "Chapter 3" or whatever and the FNF mods of weeks that were leaked or announced

Admittedly the first one in that list doesn't piss me off that much because usually it's just an excuse to speculate on new features and at least the ones I like watching are usually "here's this update but I horribly bastardized it" which I genuinely love

But like

Straight up just making content devs have announced? No parody, no speculation, no nothing?

It rubs me the wrong way

Like, The deltarune example

Imma be honest I'm outside the loop of the fanmade chapters and shit, But I've seen certain characters that advertise themselves as bosses or characters of certain chapters, and I'm dead ass sure they're not the bosses of said chapters, unless there's some really weird aspect of this I'm missing. I think I've seen fangames or fanmade chapters. Toby is hard at work making his game and that's not the character of the chapter. If you're making a fanmade character for a fanmade chapter, or several, then make that clear. Don't just say it's like, chapter 3 or chapter 4 or something. That is something actively in development, and making a fanmade version of it that ends up being completely different is likely going to end up confusing a bunch of people

Now admittedly I might've got some things wrong with that, because again I haven't been paying attention much to that side of the fandom

But the final example pisses me off the most, or at least it did back when I still played it. People making mods of Friday night funkin of announced weeks or announced characters. Like, yeah fanmade stuff is cool, but when you're just straight up taking leaked game assets and creating the week before the devs have time to make it, then that probably feels like a kick in the stomach to the devs because they wanted to make their version as good at it could be before they released it, but you had to go make a version of it regardless of its quality. They're making a whole ass game with whole ass animations and everything, cut them some slack for taking so long to get it right. They shouldn't be punished for taking their time to make their game the best thing it can be.

A lot of the things I said in each of these apply to each other, I'm just listing my scattershot examples

I myself am an aspiring game dev who would sure as hell be pissed off if someone made a fan version of the story I was trying to tell and passed it off as what happens next like in my deltarune example

I'm not talking what ifs or anything by the way, I'm just talking straight up advertising it as what's next

Fan projects are cool but make it clear it's separate or it's own continuity or parody or whatever

Don't call it the next part or just outright make the next part from what's been announced

It's kinda scummy

Also to be clear, this isn't "fan content bad" this is "fan content that tries to make something before the original creator can is bad"

I hope I got my point across to some extent here

You could probably make a similar argument about people trying to compose the rest of a song after hearing a small teaser of it, but that's not my field. If you are a composer though I'm curious how you feel about that. Probably some other similar fields like that as well, like that dude who used an AI to finish someone's picture before they themselves were done with it, although not sure if that's even remotely comparable because that is just unarguably a dick move

#gamedev #video games #deltarune #friday night funkin #fandom #hot take #minecraft #content creator

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raspberrybluejeans · 2 years

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given the birth of a second hyperfixation in this new era of mine i decided to try and think of all of the ones i’ve had before lol. long ass post under the cut

I don’t know the exact order of some of these things but roughly, and mostly categorized by what school I was in at the time because its easier to remember where I was spending my time thinking about these lol:

Robin Hood. (just elementary school I think) Just in general. Consumed anything I could find about him. Somehow believed I was his descendent 💀 I actually visited Sherwood forest and I can’t remember if this Started the madness or if I was already starting lol

Warriors (elementary and I think going into middle school a bit too) The king. the big one. It was my fucking lifestyle. Believed I was a cat in a human body. I had my dad preorder the books as they came out, they’d come in the mail and I’d read the whole thing in a day. I literally prayed to StarClan. I prosthelytized these books to anyone who would listen. I still proudly display the books in my room they are a part of my soul even if I barely remember particular events of them anymore lol

Fushigi Yugi (middle school I think) I don't know how tf I found this anime and I've never heard of anyone else talk about it before. I don't even remember what it was really about anymore. But I know I was making OCs and drawing fanart and had books of notes and little fanfiction things that I never shared with anyone lol. I vaguely remember that this show actually had a trans character, though its anime so of course it wasn't done particularly respectfully lmao. But I think its part of why it stuck with me so much at this time that my gender was starting to trans lmfao. (All i remember is the protagonist was going to get the ability to grant wishes at some point, and one character who was mostly seemingly male asked if she would use her wish to term him(?) into a woman)

His Dark Materials (middle school) I ate these books up and I liked The Golden Compass movie too, but definitely not as much as the books. I made myself a daemon and I am so sad to say I don't remember his name anymore. At the time I was still identifying as female so the daemon was a male lol. I think I had decided his settled form would be a Jaguarundi even though I was still a kid lmfao. I remember gently forcing my friends to make daemons for themselves too lol

Hetalia (middle school. pretty sure the hyperfixation was about done before starting high school) I don't know that I want to share much details about these dark times but I was so insane 💀

Star Trek (high school) I watched The Original Series when I was younger with my dad and I loved it but didnt particularly hyperfixate until high school, where I started also watching The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Loved them all so much. Made OCs, fanart, etc. For some reason I never really got into shipping with Star Trek though. I've always said they feel like my family members so it feels wrong LOL. I do ship Spock and Kirk and stuff but it took me awhile to get into seeing actual ship fanart because it felt like seeing your parents kiss or something 😂 I remember I would draw little star trek things and look up lore and I'd talk about the different species and stuff to anyone who would listen lol

SuperWhoLock (high school) I sort of fixated on each of these more at random times, though I'm pretty sure that Doctor Who was the strongest interest of the three? I think I did cosplay stuff for all of them, fanart stuff for all of them. Read so much Sherlock fanfiction it makes me sick to think about now

Homestuck (high school) pain. OCs, fanart, cosplaying, everything. Parodies of real songs made to be about homestuck filled my song library. Madness

Marvel (high school and slowly tapered off into the medicated years lol) MCU, Xmen, comics, everything. I watched all the movies religiously and I had a subscription to the marvel comics app where you could read most of the comics or whatever. I LOVED The Young Avengers and I was sad that they never really made a movie or show for them, but I'm sorta glad they havent now. They would have fucked them up. I also loved the XMen First Class movie and was obsessed with Cherik. And I ate up all the MCU crap, I loved Thor and Jane. I just watched Thor: Love and Thunder which was my first MCU movie in quite awhile and the Thor and Jane stuff in it was kind of cathartic tbh

And then I was medicated 💀 The medication was good in some ways, but it seriously deadened all of my emotions. I just did not deeply care about anything or anyone and thought that was just part of maturing. The MCU movies getting worse and worse until they were unwatchable kind of crushed me and the urge to be interested in anything as well. The closest thing I had to big interests in this time was weirdly enough all games: Pokemon Go, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and Minecraft. Not full obsession but they took up most of my free time. But I sort of realized that most of my zest for life died around the time I started taking the medication. And the main reason that I stopped taking it was that when I forgot to take it the detox symptoms or whatever were so violent and it literally would make me sick for days just from forgetting ONE day. So I decided to stop taking them (I weaned off them slowly) and have mostly not regretted that decision. Now I get the thrill of hyperfixations again, which feel even more exciting after being numb for so long lmao

Our Flag Means Death. Obsessed obsessed obsessed. I think I may have read more fanfiction for these ten bitch ass little episodes than anything else before. I made the sideblog to allow myself to go full balls to the wall without flooding my main lmfao. I loved being a part of this fandom as it was born and it has been so much fun. I joined a discord server for this show and I love talking to them. Even though the hyperfixation has faded I still adore this show and I am SO happy there's going to be a season 2, I can't wait, and I hope the hyperfixation sparks up again when it comes out. I can't wait to tear apart every little detail again.

The Magnus Archives. This shit hit me out of left field. I was sad from my OFMD era being burned out and I was tired of all of my music and I decided to listen to this just for something to do. This shit grabbed me by the gooch and swung me around the room. I listened completely blind I had no idea what was going to happen at all and I am just fucking losing my shit. That ending literally has me eating drywall. And since it ended like over a year ago pretty much everyone else is over it now and I have no one to talk to and I'm losing my mind. Help. Help.

Notable shoutouts for things I really loved/love but they never fully manifested into like. obsession (at least they haven’t yet lol)

Animal Ark (elementary) I just ate up these books I read so many but didnt quite have enough lore to obsess over lmao

Animorphs (elementary/middle) not sure why this didnt really manifest into obsession. i own all of the books though, and still display them lol

Several random animes I no longer remember. (middle) There was some period where I'd watch any anime/read any manga I could get my hands on and have a brief little moment with that lol

Merlin (high school) loved it but alas. no insanity

Teen Wolf (high school) even closer to hyperfixation but not quite

In The Flesh (high school) I think this one almost could have been considered a hyperfixation but I got into it like. basically right when it got cancelled and it just SHATTERED my heart I did not recover for years I still live in terror from that

Welcome To Nightvale (high school) So I was MAINLY obsessed with the fact that the protagonist was gay and less so with the actual plot lol. I did cosplay for this though, I was even Cecil for Halloween one year. I want to restart listening to this soon, to give it another chance, since I have a new appreciation for spooky shit. Once my TMA era has faded lmfao.

Ice Planet Barbarians Series (I think I was reading these right around the time I stopped taking meds lol) I started reading the first one as a joke because it has a funny name and funny cover but I actually loved it. I loved the world and the lore and everything. It frustrated me in the end though because a) each book got too formulaic. Every book was a brand new couple. Girl I want to hear more about the established couples and their families and shit. and b) because gay stuff was almost impossible given the way things worked in this series lol. Anyways close but no cigar. I read at least 20 of those fuckin books tho

Howl's Moving Castle book series (Post Medication Modern Era) I fucking adored these books, they were so easy to read and the world was so delightful and funny. I wish there was more. But there was not enough lore or community for me to hyperfixate

The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings books (PMME) Fucking incredible even if they were very hard to read. I'm almost certain I would have had a full LOTR era if OFMD had not hit me like a train. So maybe this will happen eventually but I think I've been enjoying it The Normal Amount for a longer amount of time instead lol. I did also have sort of a mini era back in high school or something over The Hobbit movies but now that I've read the books those leave sort of a bad taste in my mouth lol

Black Sails (PMME) I was still too obsessed with OFMD when I watched this lol. This show was so good and had I seen it before OFMD I might have gone super crazy for it. I still think it was such a good story though.

Theres a good chance that I'm forgetting some stuff here but oh well lmfao. If you actually read all of this I give you a kiss on the lips

#ograt

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thetaoofbetty · 2 years

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I think at this point the writers will just keep pushing the bh ba love triangle bcs thats the only thing that give them engagement, so do you think ba could last until s7?

have they really ever pushed it as a triangle tho? i'm not really one for too many fandom conspiracy theories tbh so i'm not going to give the writers motivations that they themselves haven't been caught outright doing or admitted to but i will say roberto has teased a triangle multiple times and has yet to actually deliver.

if they actually do their version of one, i don't even think it would qualify as a real one in the end. this show doesn't do slowburns (sorry, b/as, what you're getting is not even in the actual realm of a real slow burn. it's more of a dramatic carrot used as a plot device bait which is why people roll their eyes when it's deployed seasonally) which i think people forget because of the 180 they did at the end of s5 and the long ass hiatuses since 2020.

is it possible they're going to do a triangle? sure. i can 100% see the set up for one (and i'm sure if they do one, tabitha will be as important to it as she was in the 100th...) and it's true that a triangle with 2 guys/1 girl (do not make the joke, don't make it, do not do it) is usually far more palatable for viewers than the other way around but my expectations on it are pretty low. now, the fact that they got veronica out of by way of her own choice has me believing it's slightly more possible than i would otherwise and that they're very obviously setting up a plot arc with the 3 of them makes me think if they're doing it, that it was actually maybe planned in advance and has me side-eyeing but again, we'll see.

the thing about b/archie is that they have a very specific way they treat them that almost makes me curious to see how they're going to handle it this time. they usually get what? an episode or 2 of focus before their separate plots have them barely sharing the screen and then they rarely talk. they've sexualized them almost to the point of parody since they're not writing them with any real intimacy. even when they had the chance to do it over s5 and in the event, they followed their own formula of paying the ship dust.

now, putting bughead back together onscreen with archie as an added sticking point can either be really smart (these characters never deal with anything until it blows up—and using bughead as a bomb with archie as a match is what should happen with them having a plot with the 3 of them) or they know enough to know that they need betty and jughead working together, at minimum, to maintain any sort of semblance of their own mystery plots moving forward. especially since they're giving archie his own brand new hiram (which has varchie plot vibes written all over it) and they've kept the tbk behind for betty—and we know who is going to be helping her with that.

i'm not saying they're going to do it well but i am saying that if you took out the last couple eps of s5 and only watched the 100th after being told that these new couples are dating, it feels like an extension of s5 into 6 with the same trajectory and i've never changed my mind on the predictability of what's going to happen eventually. that being said, if it were any other show i'd say that sure, b/a could go to s7 but riverdale doesn't even write them like they like them so if they go on longer past mid-season, them being written like varchie sometimes is/was when they're in their own plots instead of bughead feels more likely than not (and by that i mean that they might be "together" but will they share scenes unless it's needed? if betty is working on a mystery and archie is working on some town related thing, i'd vote probably not).

although, i think the most interesting thing about all of it is how it's definitely always felt more like it was a thing between betty/jughead/archie vs veronica/betty/archie and maybe they'll finally let it come full circle. that there are swaths of people in this fandom as a whole doesn't see the comic aspects they've brought in while also whining about the comic canon is...hilarious to me.

#besos!#anonymous #anti b*rchie #riverdale speculation

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classicslesbianopinions · 2 years

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Your insistence on shitting on Madeline Miller for no goddamn reason made me unfollow. Her books aren’t that bad and she’s far from the only person to ever write adaptations of myths. The fact that people complain about her in particular when she’s one of the only people writing about myths who actually bothers to use the source material at all, as opposed to say the dozens of romance authors writing about unrecognizable parodies of the Greek gods, is extremely frustrating. Also. Her books are pretty fucking good actually. I thought both circe and tsoa did a fucking excellent job of capturing some of the most interesting aspects of the characters in question and in general had extremely readable and compelling prose. Literally the only actual criticism I can see for tsoa is that the presentation was biased towards the Greeks and it could have used some better development of the Trojans. I think people who rag on them because it’s currently in vogue should take a step back and critically ask themselves Why.

you don't have to like what we say, nor do you have to follow us, but i think i've articulated repeatedly what my issues are with madeline miller's works, including the idea that using the source material is not in fact the only or even main criterion for a good adaptation. if the bias for the greeks is the only criticism you can see for tsoa i have a hard time believing you've actually been reading this blog because i've talked at length about my criticisms of how miller treats briseis, and we've had many conversations about her treatment of women in general. we've also had some really interesting conversations about her fitting achilles and patroclus into a pederasty dynamic despite the fact that they're a rare example of an m/m couple in greek myth that doesn't follow that dynamic. you don't have to agree with those criticisms but they do exist.

i did like tsoa the first time i read it, and i do always try to give miller's works a fair chance, which is also why i will read the next thing she comes out with before i start posting about it. i also think she has a very nice prose style, and her depth of research is impressive, even though i still disagree with her interpretations of the myths.

i don't think every critical post has to be super serious or explain every reason why i'm criticizing. at this point my target audience for those posts (our followers) has the context for the criticism, and i think it's okay if the posts are mostly for the target audience. i always explain myself or link to a previous post when challenged, anyway, because i do think an open dialogue is important. but my joke about not wanting madeline miller to touch antigone, for example, exists in the context of my other criticism of her and her stories.

also i've been criticizing tsoa and circe since long before it was cool sorry. i honestly don't know how you even got here if that was a dealbreaker. we have a #madeline miller discourse tag too so anyone can blacklist it for any reason.

i do think it does a disservice to people's critical thinking skills as well to assume people only hate something because it's cool. if people hating on something should step back and ask why, people defending that thing should do the same. that's how we get to actual productive conversations. but i do feel like much of what i say on this blog is either very thoughtful or a silly joke that i will back up with a thoughtful statement if pressed.

but like i said. you don't have to like or follow us. we are going to keep doing what we do.

#mod felix #i remember trying to explain my issues with circe like. the summer after it came out #(i don't remember if i explained them on here but like. just in conversation)#madeline miller discourse #okay also we haven't talked about madeline miller in ages. i reblogged like one post two days ago

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debbie-e-portfolio · 3 years

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Genre Analysis

Introduction

I consider myself as a Japanophile (someone who loves and admires Japan, often to the point of favoring Japan or Japanese over another nation or culture and sometimes beyond the point of rationality.) rather than a weeaboo or "weeb". To me who is in her early 20's, manga and anime are a part of life. It is breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, and midnight snack. It gave me a door to defining my identity. That is why it is important for me to be well-versed in how manga and anime play an important part in Japanese contemporary art and literature.

Modern manga took shape in the post-war decades. It has been historically and culturally influenced by the western countries and the events that followed after World War II. This led to a figurative outburst of artistic creativity in Japanese post-war society. Two of the famous ground-breaking works are Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy in 1951, heralding the man as the "Godfather of Manga", and Hasegawa Machiko's Sazae-san in 1946, as the "Godmother of Manga".

Astro Boy plays the antithesis role to the formerly propagated idealistic Japanese society during the years of imperialism. His kindness brought a new age of pacifism that was hugely popular with a society that was scarred both by the war itself and the imperialism propaganda that came with it. By contrast, Sazae-san is a strong character, a striking contrast to the officially sanctioned Neo-Confucianist principles of feminine meekness and obedience to the "good wife, wise mother" ideal taught by the previous military regime. Her cheerful resilience as she faced the world became what the Japanese call a "woman of endurance".

Since then, Manga wasn't depicted as a message. It became a form of medium in democratic ways that reflects the society from more angles than one. Like the western comics, it is a different kind of storytelling that uses visual style. That is why it catches the eyes of many. As it is originally inspired by the western, other manga writers and illustrators began to experiment before coming up with their own artistic style. And because Astro Boy became popular with the western audiences and Sazae-san to the whole of Japan, the two became highly influential in the anime industry that was starting to rise at that time.

Dragon Ball's Son Goku was said to play the father role of the three. One Piece's Luffy (left), Bleach's Ichigo (middle), and Naruto (right). I spent a huge portion of my life with Naruto, which caused a comedic rift in our family. My father and sister prefer One Piece while my mother likes Yamato Nadeshiko: Shichi Henge. We used to banter a lot about which series was better and I feel sorry for Ichigo being left out. I haven't watched One Piece as a whole but I watched an arc while I've only got to watch Bleach's Live-Action Film thanks to Netflix.

It was followed by a large number of mangas and anime we can call classics today. It was in 1986 when Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball (1984) was broadcasted in Japan that introduced the martial arts genre. It also became another highly influential work in the Japanese industry. It influenced Oda Eiichiro's One Piece (1997), Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto (1999), and Tite Kubo's Bleach (2001). Later on, the three aforementioned manga (that turned to anime), dominated the front pages of Shonen Jump Weekly and took over Japan. Despite the fact that Naruto and Bleach have ended and One Piece is still running, their popularity never fades and has been used as a reference in the new works, even has cameos in the manga and anime that followed them years later. To this day, they are called The Big Three, clubbed together for their popularity in their era, having similarities in each protagonist (either bearing resemblance from Goku's color scheme or his personality), and the length of the series, which has influenced the rest of the manga (and anime) industry. This includes:

Manga store

Manga cafes

Annual manga exhibition

Manga magazines

Doujinshi - is very much like fan fiction (a world I've been living in particularly as a fan of anime and manga. I'm found in Archive of Our Own and Fanfiction.net). It is a parody that includes characters from popular manga and anime series.

International market - Having manga publishing companies all over the world

Awards sponsored by manga publishers including The Tezuka Award for Best New Serial manga

Digital manga - there are two main ways in which mangaka's work could be published: taking their manga drawn on paper to a publisher themselves or submitting their works to competitions run by magazines. But nowadays, most of the mangakas (amateur and professional) post their works online (Pixiv and Twitter) where they gain popularity on the internet before being contacted by a publishing company. An example is ONE's One Punch Man, a form of Web Manga that was released online and later on received a professional remake and an anime adaptation. Another is Webtoon (my sister's kind of world as she's an artist posting her webtoon there. She has not shared her pen name with me and neither I), a new medium of comics in Asia where manga are released using this form. It has brought a new age to the manga by having all titles in color and some with special animations and effects. An example is Yayoiso's ReLife.

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somnilogical · 4 years

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transgenderer: okay so you know the trope where when you get too much eldritch knowledge and suddenly you start seeing giant monsters everywhere that are invisible to everyone else? that’s what being a trans woman is like.

this cluster of abilities keeps being instrumentally useful to model for reasoning about transfems. promethea and bendini independently talked about this:

[08:56] Bendini: This sounds like parody, but with californians it is difficult to tell

[image of fb post:

Daniel Powell: That report claims both that all entrances were blocked and also that a police vehicle entered and exited the camp; was that because the police vehicle was capable of offoad movement that typical vehicles are incapable of? My heart goes out to the kids on the high course who were subjected to unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering as a result of seeing people in Guy Fawkes masks, and all the people who had their personal liberty violated.

Like Reply 11h]

[09:02] Bendini: also this is a lot less credible if you haven't forgotten what happened with Brent

[09:02] Bendini: regardless of whether Anna is secretly a transphobe

[09:03] Bendini: rather than just scared of one particular trans person

[09:03] Bendini: the same sort of defence was trotted out for brent, and he was guilty

[09:05] Bendini: yeah, ziz is crazy and a lot of stuff posted is just ramblings

[09:06] Bendini: but I can see the model of everyone being sufficiently cowardly that the crazy bring forward the accusations before the courageous do

[09:23] promethea: gotta love how nobody can quite agree exactly how the people involved are Bad and Evil but people are nonetheless confident that they are schizophrenic/narcissistic/abusers/violent and must be confined and put on chemical mind control

[image of fb post:

Romeo Stevens: I'd recommend whomever has comparative advantage to familiarize themselves with the narcissism/bpd/aspd cluster, more evocatively called energy vampires. Such people are not stable and can grow violent when they are deprived attention they believe they are entitled to. The book Character Disturbance is fairly good for a start. It is a known falilure mode for communities of people who have faced their own social isolation to fail at filtering. To be clear, such people deserve compassion, but they need professional help. They don't benefit from a bunch of people whose time is valuable (one of the reasons they are attracted to such people because more validation) paying attention to their narratives.

9h Edited]

[09:24] promethea: there's been an awful lot of "not saying, but just saying" of a type that screams of monkeyball hysteria and attacking any characteristics that can be painted as vulnerabilities open for attack

[09:26] promethea: (also Ben the reason why you find Ziz's blog full of "just ramblings" is that you have a particular neurotype that is very... I don't have a good value-neutral way of expressing the difference but maybe "mundane" as opposed to "eldritch")

[09:35] Bendini: yeah the idea of someone saying get professional help is a strong sign they have not thought through what they are saying

[09:36] Bendini: like, a quick glance at what professional mental health treatment looks like in the US (therapy in the UK is afaik good for low hanging fruit, but not much else)

[09:37] Bendini: "these people should be reported to the mental health authoritities to be dealt with"

[09:37] Bendini: "Uhhh, I mean get the compassion they need"

[09:38] Bendini: I have to say, you would be the first person in the history of ever to call my neurotype mundane

[09:39] Bendini: I see what you are getting at

[09:39] Bendini: but it is like, how many standard deviations of weirdness are you on

[09:39] Bendini: and I said most, not all

[09:40] promethea: I think it's more like what direction your weirdness is in; "grounded" or "basic bitch" were other words I considered

[09:40] promethea: it's similar to the difference between EAs who want to find out how to best help the global poor, and the ones who get very preoccupied over whether insecticides are causing catastrophic suffering

[09:43] Bendini: "tethered to reality, somehow" would be an alternative

[09:45] Bendini: I think it's due to having like 50% really normie emotions

[09:45] promethea: "tethered to consensus reality" is how I'd adjust that phrasing

[09:46] promethea: it may be something to do with a sense that the world is fundamentally sane but just really bad at its job, vs the world being fundamentally insane and only aligned with the actual reality by little more than grace of gnon

[09:49] promethea: and probably some kind of a fundamental unshakeable-to-barely-shakeable prior rather than something that responds to ordinary reasoning

[09:50] Bendini: what do we mean by fundementally sane vs insane here?

[09:51] promethea: good catch, that's a nightmare to unpack

[09:53] promethea: a lot of the early LW stuff is comparatively eldritch in this sense, especially for the context of not having had LW yet

[09:56] promethea: in an environment where being trans isn't normal trans people have a certain inherent eldritch-ness, but a person fitting neatly into a third gender social role in a culture where that has always been a thing is not eldritch in that way

[09:57] promethea: it's the difference between "other people are trying their best even if their best isn't that good" vs. "other people are systematically gaslighting you about everything until proven otherwise"

[10:01] Bendini: ah

[10:02] Bendini: I'd put the difference down to people being really really crap at explaining things because the message is in there but it's between the lines

[10:02] Bendini: not intentionally, but because they don't know how else to do it

[10:03] promethea: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god this is probably the most explicit work by EY on what I've been calling the eldritch

[10:04] Bendini: and if you don't have enough of the fuzzy experience knowledge to do it, following what they are saying will be experienced as gaslighting

[10:04] promethea: and specifically, Beyond the Reach of God is trying to shake a component of the fundamental sense of security and move people towards the eldritch side

[10:05] Bendini: this sounds like the fundamental autist experience which cleaves into paranoia or extreme submissiveness to authority

[10:08] promethea:

I'd put the difference down to people being really really crap at explaining things because the message is in there but it's between the lines

not intentionally, but because they don't know how else to do it

and if you don't have enough of the fuzzy experience knowledge to do it, following what they are saying will be experienced as gaslighting

I'm thinking more of the thing about "seek professional help"

[10:09] Bendini: the yud post does not

[10:09] promethea: a mundane interpretation is "professional help isn't actually that helpful but I don't know that" while an eldritch interpretation is like "these people should be reported to the mental health authoritities to be dealt with"

[10:09] Bendini: as I'm rereading it

[10:10] Bendini: I do not believe the world is just

[10:10] Bendini: or that things will work out fine in the end because they always do

[10:11] Bendini: given, y'know, that I used to be a prepper

[10:15] Bendini: also I may have figured out how to reconcile "anna is a transphobe and admitted it outright" with what has been said

[10:16] Bendini: which I suspect pete knows based on what he said, but he doesn't say it outright

[10:18] promethea: "eldritch" isn't about just-world beliefs, it's closer to "a quality that makes one faster to disalieve things like just-world or other aspects of consensus reality"

[10:21] Bendini: I think there's some conflation between beleif in verbal consensus reality and belief that you can anticipate what other people will do probabalistically

[10:22] Bendini: I do not beleive in the former, but I think I had enough natural talent at the latter to reach a kind of escape velocity

[10:24] Bendini: i.e. have enough to build on/enough peices of the jigsaw put in that I could keep filling it in

[10:26] promethea: it's not about "eldritch means you can't model other people"

[10:29] promethea: if anything, mundane models are the ones that are sacrificing modeling ability

[10:30] promethea: ...seeing patterns where people insist is only noise but that noise just so happens to be awfully conveniently shaped...

[10:30] Bendini: if I am defined as the non-eldridch side, this sounds like something that could be falsified

[10:31] promethea: I'm feeling like this is a beautiful meta-level illustration of the difference between the neurotypes but way less useful on the object level or to someone who doesn't already have an unspeakable sense of what the difference is

[10:33] promethea: I don't know how to get the qualia across to someone who doesn't already have the thing and be thus able to possibly grok it from what I'm vaguely gesturing at

[10:34] Bendini: is there a way to demonstrate information transmission between 2 eldridch people?

[10:36] promethea: ziz's blog has a lot of content that makes perfect sense to people who have a quality that's probably strongly aligned with eldritch, but apparently looks like ramblings to people who don't

[10:38] promethea: some things are just ordinarily difficult to understand in that they require a lot of work, while others are actually mind-bending to properly comprehend, and eldritch minds are more bendy in that way?

[10:41] promethea: which also increases vulnerability to infohazards, cognitohazards, overfitting, demonic possession and generally going nuts, but the idea that eldritch is inherently less sane only applies to socioculturally mediated definitions of sanity

[10:42] Bendini: my immidiate reaction to "socioculturally mediated definitions of sanity" was "yes, and creditworthyness is a social construct"

[10:43] promethea: if reality is less well-matched with consensus reality then the bendiness of eldritch minds means that they can more easily construct accurate maps of the territory

[10:44] Bendini: can you think of a way to compare viewing that map to the territory?

[10:44] Bendini: as in, not being able to show the map is a given

[10:45] Bendini: but the outputs of the map

[10:47] promethea: seeing power, seeing prejudice and bias, seeing other things polite society pretends aren't real...

[10:49] promethea: and it's polite society all the way down

[10:49] Bendini: that's not really what I meant

[10:50] Bendini: I mean for example, using the ability to see those things to predict other things in a way that can be isolated from fuzzy confirmation bias

[10:51] Bendini: like I can very much believe ziz's blog is relatable and intuitive to you

[10:52] Bendini: and you have to do less interpretive labour to get a true insight from it

[10:53] Bendini: but the thing I'm pointing at as ramblings is seperate from that

[10:58] promethea: would it make sense if I rephrased it as "less cognitive filtering"? being able to see more signal in noise, especially where the signals are something you aren't supposed to be seeing for some reason or another, but at the cost that you're more likely to see signals where there is only noise

[11:02] Bendini: that makes sense

[11:03] Bendini: but it assumes that all people who don't do the eldrich thing can't go down the abstraction ladder

[11:04] promethea:

can't go down the abstraction ladder

can you elaborate?

[11:04] Bendini: what is salient to someone isn't completely a choice

[11:05] Bendini: but what you notice is based on what you've learned is useful to pay attention to

[11:07] Bendini: I could say something about forests leaves and trees

[11:07] Bendini: but it would be a bit cliche

[11:08] Bendini: something that might sink in would be more like someone paying attention to what is going on at the binary level as bits are moving between the hard drive memory and cpu

[11:09] Bendini: yes, it is useful to know what is going on so you understand other things

[11:10] Bendini: but hyperfixating on that while you are writing code on a much higher level of abstraction

[11:10] Bendini: in a sense, you are "seeing things that others have been trained not to see"

[11:10] Bendini: or don't understand

[11:10] Bendini: but doing that on a frame by frame level rather than an intutive "you know what's up" kinda level

[11:11] Bendini: is going to result in glaring errors from the stuff you aren't paying enough attention to

[11:15] promethea: it's not autism except possibly to the degree that autism weakens one's priors

[11:16] Bendini: agree, there are plenty of basic bitch autists

[11:17] Bendini: but like, the autistic catgirl cluster

[11:18] Bendini: it is a recurring pattern that some of them obsess over social reality in the way ziz does, yet keep getting into abusive relationships which were predictable from the outset

[11:18] Bendini: which idk, maybe this is a bit of a basic bitch take here

[11:19] Bendini: but this seems like the opposite of what should happen if they had reached the higher plane of knowledge that cannot be explained in words

[11:20] promethea: I'm not expecting all men to be able to do twenty pull-ups just because testosterone improves upper body strength

[11:22] promethea: the "eldritch" neurotype might also be called "psychoticism" but in the sense of a personality trait like extroversion and not in the sense of mental illness

[11:22] Bendini: no, but if those men claim to be much stronger because they have the magical testosterone elixir

[11:22] Bendini: and they keep getting beaten up by 5ft anorexic girls

[11:23] Bendini: at what point do you say "no, you do not have the thing you claim to have"

[11:30] promethea: no what I've been trying to say is that there appears to be a neurotype-level difference in how people process some types of information with predictable (in terms of not requiring loads of epicycles) upsides (having an easier time making accurate models where they contradict consensus reality) and downsides (having an easier time making inaccurate models where they contradict consensus reality)

[11:30] Bendini: the psychotiticism framing does help explain part of it

[11:31] Bendini: but that feels like the motte

[11:31] Bendini: it's the bailey I have trouble with

[11:31] promethea: I can't comment on the precise situation with the Bay catgirls because I'm not familiar enough with it to feel comfortable making non-obvious inferences

[11:33] Bendini: okay

[11:33] Bendini: I wonder how my experiences with psychedelics map into this though

[11:34] promethea: a bit of a shitpost-y formulation might be that high psychoticism-as-a-personality-trait is like having the safety guards off the [insert power tool that best fits the analogy] of your mind; it makes it easier to make some cuts that you'd otherwise struggle with, but it also makes it easier to cut things you wouldn't actually want to cut like yourself

[11:34] promethea: psychedelics would be expected to increase psychoticism-as-a-personality-trait

[11:35] Bendini: you'd expect them to do it while on them though

[11:35] promethea: both temporarily (very strongly) and permanently (from what it seems)

[11:35] Bendini: I seem to get neither in some important ways

[11:36] Bendini: like certain kinds of art and music

[11:36] Bendini: it was a sanity check of sorts

[11:37] promethea: (this also fits with my experience that when my dopamine levels are increased I get better at the thinks but also more likely to be overconfidently wrong, and that most antipsychotics are dopamine antagonists, etc.)

[11:38] Bendini: if I cannot see mediocre art as anything more than mediocre art while I'm hallucinating, it really isn't a case of me not being open to it

[11:39] Bendini: it's a case of wine in expensive bottles

[11:40] Bendini: I do think I have had some changes though

[11:40] Bendini: more sympathy to points of view people cannot express verbally

[11:46] promethea: I don't think "finding deep meaning in mediocre art" is any kind of a necessary characteristic of increased PAAPT (psychoticism-as-a-you-know-what), especially given that "mediocre art actually has deep meaning when on drugs" is the social reality

[13:28] Bendini: I mean more the ability to be open minded and see the beauty in things

[13:28] Bendini: because I could totally see the beauty of a brick wall

[13:28] Bendini: just some girl showed me her pretty mediocre drawings

[13:29] Bendini: and I was pretty speechless because the mediocrity was the salient characteristic

[13:30] Bendini: I find it suspends judgement for a longer period

[13:31] Bendini: but when my mind speaks out to me my concience is much louder

[13:32] Bendini: this does not seem to be the standard reaction to psychadelics

[13:32] Bendini: the basic bitch lurks deep in my lizard brain

(dont agree with all of promethea's characterization of the phenomena; but its clearly seeded from looking at the same phenomena that i am. bendini does not get whats going on at all here.)

ive referenced leveraging this to do what seems impossible or unpredictable to normies as creepy transfem mind powers. then people are like 'saraaah ccc somni said trans women have creepy mind powers thats crazy talk right?' and sarah c's like 'well yes its true trans women have a high iq'.

but this is kind of eliding over different kinds of intelligence as neurotypes and collapsing it all into "iq". transfems and ashkies arent just generically "intelligent" theres specific neurotypes behind the inteligence. like for ashkies the sort of things that get recorded in metrics are high "verbal" iq and "math" iq and average "spatial" iq. thats a specífic signature.

see: http://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf

"high intelligence" can look like hyperlexia and it can also look like dissociative mind powers that let people see through the matrix and be unnervingly good at reasoning over embeddings of yourself.

like as intelligence increases, general capacity at solving problems increases. but maybe you shunt symbols instead of rotate objects to solves a problem. which affects what kinds of problems you can easily solve, given some are more amiable to one approach over another. there are many instances where visual proofs without words are much shorter than doing lots of algebra and vice-versa.

these specificities allow high-inteligence subpopulations to collude within neuroclades along these lines of similarity. downstream of this is that a lot of ppl accuse both jews and transfems of conspiracy and being "friends" with each other when a lot of mutual information comes from neurotype similarity not meeting and deciding on a plan. (thats not to say, you know, that there are never meetings about how to take over the multiverse...)

its amusing how like transfems will talk with each other about stuff and then ppl will be like "arghh!!! my eyes! this writing is painful static! its an infohazard!! its a glitch in the matrix!! AIEEEEGYRGHLSMERGLEGLunk pshhhur" and then say they dont understand what you are saying but it probably means you are a creepy violent misogynistic deeply sick male who is experiencing a psychotic break or something. give me tokens of submission to prove me wrong. if you were really prosocial youd drop this act right now and "act like a human".

part of the reason im writing this is reading things like:

<<promethea: gotta love how nobody can quite agree exactly how the people involved are Bad and Evil but people are nonetheless confident that they are schizophrenic/narcissistic/abusers/violent and must be confined and put on chemical mind control>>

has a healing quality. like i independently derived this. people keep trying to erase these simple shapes of how things fit together. try to destroy peoples ability to build common knowledge and talk with each other. the authoritarians dont usually try to give good excuses about why they pretend its wrong besides saying "its absurd". when you are in a prison planet surrounded mostly by people who have decided to be cops or submit to them, reading this is like:

https://youtu.be/DSTknzzBT9Y

youtube

you have to fractally reason through warpy things like people distantly noting "patient appears to be suffering from delusions of persecution'. and people trying to tell you that you are psychotic when like hi im writing this and not "psychotic". and you dont even have the social reality of people doing actual info-processing and at the end saying "well yeah its pretty obvious you arent suffering from a psychotic break, weird that anyone would claim that".

what you have is people giving you strange looks and acting like what youve written is a tear in the fabric of reality releasing trillions of shrill screams from a place beyond time.

its not because they dont understand, its because they have chosen not to. with different social groups of humans, different things elicit this response. like in a plural server i joined i talked about maybe there could be something in between being plural and being a singlet and they acted like id spoken static until someone said "oh thats [short handle for this concept]" and then everyone relaxed and stopped acting as if they couldnt understand what i was saying because there was no longer any local social threat to dynamically processing this information in front of other humans. they learned from the exclaimer that it was a Thing in their culture.

when people cant anticipate a priori where dynamically processing information in front of a lot of people will land them wrt the local overton window, as a solution they will just refuse to do this. one way to refuse to do this is to say "im sorry i dont understand what you are saying its like painful static. ack! stop trying to explain i dont want to understand it might turn me evil or something!!" which is an accurate assessment if they were coerced into using the words good and evil to mean alignment and disalignment with local social consensus respectively.

like the strategy of people who want to contain those floricdly hemorrhaging eldritch knowledge all over the place is to have a constarnt investment of authoritarian power to suppress this:

<<Reject invest-y power. Some kinds of power increase your freedom. Some other kinds require an ongoing investment of your time and energy, and explode if you fail to provide it. The second kind binds you, and ultimately forces you to give up your values. The second kind is also easier, and you'll be tempted all the time.>>

https://squirrelinhell.blogspot.com/2018/01/superhuman-meta-process.html

unlike true things which will keep reforming and can be lazily evaluated from looking around you with no memory. you dont need as much energy poured into constantly refreshing the cache of who you are supposed to pretend is having a psychotic break.

the authoritarian strat loses out in the long term against anarchist cooperation between agents that have learned enough to be able to consistently exploit their knowledge of Dread Horrors of the Abyss. who no longer need to dodge bullets.

#i was going to reblog but then tumblr ate my reblog #and i OCR'd it from screenshots #which i almost always take before posting on tumblr #but then afterwards realized i wrote a post instead of a reblog

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