#in their own personal unique way

[ssaraexposs]

SHUT UP, THEY'RE COMPETING HAVING A DATE

[mirrorhouse]

This is a rather high-risk romance we've embarked upon, isn't it? Brings new meaning to the term 'strange bedfellows'.

[puhpandas]

I like to think that Freddy getting dirter compared his squeaky clean glamrock star appearance + his paint/glamrock makeup rubbing off throughout the game actually symbolizes his developing sentience and gradual deviation from his default programming as he develops his own identity by just. living. by just exploring the pizzaplex with Gregory and their adventure together

[bonefall]

Hi Bones!! Thank you for you hard work on this project and for sharing it with us!

I've seen your posts about weird representation of society (regarding the "natural order of things") in xenofiction, especially in lion king, so I wanted to ask:

could you recommend any xenofiction media that has all (or most of the) animal species sapient? Or is the only solution to make just one or two species sapient while the others (especially prey) are plain animals?

Really sorry if you've seen this ask from me before - my account had a weird laggy period when I couldn't send or receive messages and asks, so I don't know if you got the previous one! I just know that now it's fixed so I double all the asks sent haha

Honestly I'm not totally sure! If any 3rd person has some good recommendations for "every being is alive" xenofiction types, feel free to weigh in.

If you want to jump in with me though, I am following the webcomic Africa. It updates every Wednesday. Africa is about a mother Leopard on the verge of a great ecological disaster, the relationship between her children and the animals around her, and the strength of both instinct and choice as the characters face an uncertain future.

Since it's ongoing, I still don't know how it's going to end and can't judge it as a full work! But it's absolutely fascinating and I think the author is doing a fantastic job so far. Bonus points for the way it portrays humans, btw.

No more spoilers though, if you're interested, it's on Webtoons.

(I'm also planning to read Oren's Forge soon. Ask me about it again in a few months over on Bonebabbles and I'll give you my thoughts)

As an aside though, funny you mention it because like... ever since I was a kid I've had a story I want to tell with the premise. It's a scintilla I've kept close to me for well over a decade but haven't done anything official with. So this is actually a theme I've thought about a lot.

It's rare to see it done well though because like... its very premise butts heads with reality. The "natural order" that an animal follows is not something it moralizes. A tiger doesn't have the capacity to think about how fucked up it is to kill to stay alive, the deer doesn't know that if its population isn't controlled it will destroy the forest.

They're animals. They don't HAVE that agency. Your dog does not care about being sterilized. A snake doesn't differentiate between a pinky and an adult mouse except in terms of if it will fit in its mouth. But the minute you put human morality in there... they have the ability to reason, create and agree on the rules of a society, make choices about MORALITY.

If nothing is going to change about their world, you just end up putting human arguments about "natural order" in their mouths and, well... start telling a parable justifying this "natural order."

(Genuine) Does what I'm saying make sense? Animals DON'T rationalize or negotiate. HUMANS do.

So the minute you're approaching a world with that logic, like it or not, you are invoking those "arguments from nature." And you're putting them in a being that is not fully an animal or a human, but an anthropomorphic mix which CAN rationalize but WON'T make an effort to change their world.

(Which is why tbh the best examples i know of are works with a theme of "change.")

OH WAIT I also remember another that's interesting!! Leafy: Hen into the Wild actually has a fascinating take on it. It's not interested in "moralizing" or really being about an animal society. It's a very emotional sort of movie, and it's about joys in adversity, the freedom that choice gives you, how bad things are going to happen and you can never completely prevent them.

INTENSE movie emotionally, the ending will wreck you (especially in the English translation which leaves out a really important theme making it feel abrupt x_x) but it's really good. Check that one out.

OH and also You Are Umasou. That one has more pitfalls imo (it does try to moralize a bit) but it's super unique as a movie. And is about dinosaurs.

[tangledinink]

my least favorite thing in the world is when people go "oh,,,, 🥺 god must have needed an angel,,,," in the wake of a loved one's death. like,,, fr???? the all-powerful god, lord of everything, maker of the universe or whatever the fuck, just,,, DESPERATELY needed a 25-year-old dumbass SOOO bad RIGHT NOW??? was there a car he needed someone to identify the make and model of without anyone asking???? like???? did they just REALLY need someone to drink bud light and play COD for him???? heaven just DEEPLY needs someone to come up and pet cats and this was the ONLY OPTION????

[nativehueofresolution]

it stands out to me how armand frequently uses endearments for daniel ('beloved', 'my love'). it's something i can't recall him ever doing with his other lovers - typically, he expresses his affections through grand romantic speeches (which has its own appeal, to be sure). but with daniel, he's a little sappier, a little sillier. they will spend nights together people watching or putting on a movie they've seen a dozen times already. there are still grand gestures, like giving daniel night island or showering him with precious items, but daniel is also the one buying all the airline tickets for armand as he makes them fly around the world and explain things like long distance phone calls and tax brackets. the sweeping romance also exists alongside the mundane acts of existing together and indulging your loved one's weird habits and using petnames. it's very humanizing and sweet.

[commsroom]

the "big picture" - whether that refers to some detached, calculated greater good; ruthless ambition and progress for the sake of progress; or even the dear listeners' cosmic indifference - as an antagonistic force in wolf 359 is so fascinating to me because of the way eiffel as a protagonist is set up to oppose it, just by nature of who he is. eiffel retains his humanity even under the most inhumane circumstances. his strength is in connection, and with that he's able to reach others who share his core values, but he's operating under a fundamentally different framework from the show's antagonists. he can never understand where they're coming from or be swayed by their points of view because, for better or worse, he can only see the world through a close personal lens.

it's an ideological conflict he has with all of them, but notably with hilbert: "you talk about helping people, but what about the real, live people around you? [...] that's your problem. you're so zoomed out." eiffel will never, ever see that "big picture" because he is so zoomed in. at his best, he puts things into perspective and grounds the people around him. at his worst, his perspective narrows so drastically inwards that he becomes blind to everyone and everything else. his failings are deeply, tragically human - they're personal, they're impulsive, they're self-destructive. they're selfish. no matter how much he might try to narrativize or escape from himself, he's still left with doug eiffel: "it's taken me this long to realize that running from everyone else means that you're alone with yourself." eiffel could never be convinced to harm others on purpose, but he has hurt people, and it's never been because he didn't care. the very fact that he cares so much, that he's incapable of reconciling the hurt he's caused with the things he values, is what keeps him from real growth for so long. where many of the other characters in wolf 359 will justify their cruelty in service of something they consider more important, eiffel is so caught up in vilifying himself and the fear that he's always going to harm the people he cares for without meaning to that he shuts himself off from the people who care about him and perpetuates his own self-fulfilling prophecy.

[tragedykery]

another small detail in adofn that has been haunting me is the fact that wulf takes the newly born princess sabran to the tomb of an inyscan princess. not inysh, inyscan. keeping in mind how eller meant to mould glorian into “a queen of inysca” but failed—how incredibly poignant is it, then, that wulf seeks protection for his daughter in a place that symbolises the death of what she could have been.

[silenceinternalmonologue]

Somebody asked me to talk about the misconception that Loki is always trying to kill Thor, so here are some thoughts.

When Loki and Thor are children, Thor is the one who expresses bloodlust: "I'll hunt the monsters down and slay them all". We can infer from this scene that Loki was not violent or murderous as a child (unlike a certain scene in Thor: Ragnarok would suggest which, let it be remembered, was completely improvised and therefore not written with Loki's actual character in mind).

Loki never expresses a desire to kill Thor (except on Svartalfheim, and we all know that was a trick).

The closest he comes to this is his command to the Destroyer: "Ensure my brother does not return. Destroy everything." Notice how direct the latter part of the sentence is, while the former is vague and left up to interpretation. This is a partial reach, but I wonder if Loki wouldn't have just told the Destroyer to kill Thor if that's what he really wanted.

Loki had the opportunity to use the Destroyer's death ray on Thor, and he didn't. He chose to slap him instead. Yes, this proved to be nearly fatal, but he could have been much more direct. The Destroyer is a literal killing machine.

Even knowing Thor was mortal, I sincerely doubt Loki believed he would actually die. To Loki, Thor has always been his strong and unbeatable older brother. He has probably seen him mortally wounded hundreds of times and it was probably impossible to imagine him dying from a slap.

Remember that at this point, Loki has no reason to believe that Thor won't try to kill him as soon as he finds out he's Jotun. Thor had been happily killing hundreds of Frost Giants just the week before, and had likely been doing so for the last several hundred years. So even in this "him or me" situation, in the midst of a mental breakdown, moments away from attempting genocide, Loki isn't able to directly attempt to kill Thor.

Loki never even comes close to killing Thor at any other point in the films. They fight on Bifrost, but they're fighting more for control of the mechanism here than with intent to hurt (let alone kill) each other.

In the Avengers, Loki doesn't even pretend to try. He stabs Thor once with a tiny dagger that looks like it affected Thor as much as a bee sting.

In TDW he takes it a step further and sacrifices himself for Thor (or at least tries to). Is the opposite of trying to kill someone trying to die to save them? I feel like it might be.

In Ragnarok he tries to... turn him over to the Grandmaster? I guess? And we get the snake story, but like I already said, that was improv done with no regard for Loki's actual character. And then Loki literally saves the entirety of the Asgardian people and supports Thor becoming king which doesn't seem very murderous to me.

In Infinity War he sacrifices himself for real this time, first throwing away a goddamn INFINITY STONE to tackle Thor to the ground with no thought for his wellbeing and then having the life choked out of him by his greatest fear and tormentor and also oh my god it's been FOUR films since the last time he sort of maybe subjectively tried to kill Thor and he's been actively trying to save him in three of those

This got a bit long and rambly but yeah. No matter how you look at it, Loki's attempt-to-kill-Thor count is either one or zero. That simply doesn't add up to any number high enough to qualify as him "constantly" trying to kill his brother. Also his attempt-to-save-Thor count is by my calculations AT LEAST six, and that's only on-screen and obviously not counting the hundreds of years they spent together before this.

[obsidianstrawberrymilk]

Tbh a huge amount of the issues MHA has could have been fixed had Bakugo just been expelled from UA in the first season or not gotten in at all

[caitlynmeow]

I dunno I feel like— ugh. I honestly don’t have a favorite I love all three of them equally even when I think of any scenario / headcanon it’s ALL THREE of them because they’re all so valid and lovely I love you all equally my BABIES

[nesurii]

diosa is so cute AHH

[hephaestuscrew]

A book asks the reader to imagine any sensory input of the story, whereas a film or TV show provides both sound and visuals. Audio fiction lives in the space between these two approaches. I think there's a unique power to that middle ground. I love how audio drama asks the listener to co-construct their sensory experience of the story.

Audio drama allows me to simultaneously experience 'This character feels real to me because I've heard their voice' and 'This character feels real to me because I've pictured them myself'.

What the characters are experiencing is both directly presented to me and left to my imagination. There's no page or screen between me and the story. It's there in my ears. It's there in my mind's eye.

There's a strange sense of intimacy to that, the intimacy of feeling like a fly on the wall during a conversation or of hearing a character speaking as if directly to me. Perhaps it sounds contradictory to say that experiencing a story only through sound allows me to feel uniquely connected to that story, but that's one of the reasons why I love audio fiction so much.

[wildflowercryptid]

resisting the urge to be annoying and ramble about how kieran's arc wouldn't really work if transplanted onto hop or wally without changing core parts of their own personalities + stories + motivations, essentially ( most likely unintentionally ) pigeonholing them as the " weaker rival " archetype despite how all three grow far beyond that.

[invisible-brandy]

people need to learn to enjoy things for longer periods of time and not try to make all their past interests cringe just bc they feel that the teenage/kid version of them was cringe about said interest