so much of the eighth sense is about the concept of being seen, or at least, the wish to be seen (and at times, not), of seeing yourself through others eyes and letting someone see the real you. like Jaewons need to be seen versus his evasion to let people identify the real him or Jihyuns avoidance of attention versus his surprise and gratitude when he gets included by people he chose to be close with. its also the realisation of picking someone out of the crowd to see them with a special kind of laser focus, and, on the other side, the experience and vulnerability of being that someone
a huge point in orv is the relationship between parents and their children, creators and their creations, writers and their stories, and i think we need to talk about how just as a child's parents cannot dictate who they become, just as god cannot rob humans of free will, just as a writer cannot control how their story is experienced, yoo joonghyuk is no less real just because he was created
Quackity: Lately, I have been participating in events and projects, and unfortunately it's become clear to me that my presence and name have only been used to attract the attention of my national and international community with the objective, as I see it, of generating more attention towards controversies - destructive controversies, and a rupture that is very clear in the community.
[...] In advance, I ask the organizers of any type of events and projects like this to please show more respect to me and my community, because I've shown lots of sympathy and cooperation in these various projects and events, but it's become clear to me that their only interest is in using my name. My name and my community have been used to attract all this attention for distorted purposes, and I will no longer allow that to happen. That is not what my content is about - not me nor my content nor anything I’ve done.
Here's Quackity's commentary on respect and his reasoning for distancing himself and his projects from future events and awards shows.
[ Full Transcript ↓ ]
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Quackity: Before I leave, I would like to talk about something that is very serious for me and something that I would like to tell you about. Because for me it is a very serious topic and it is a topic that- well, I had my mind on and I want to express it- [reading Chat] yes, thank you. Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas.
Anyways, lately I have been participating in events and projects, and in these events and projects, unfortunately it's become clear to me that my presence and name have only been used to attract the attention of my national and international community with the objective, as I see it, of generating more attention towards controversies - destructive controversies, and a rupture that is very clear in the community, and this is what I want to say: I'm NOT ok with these types of dynamics or stuff like this, and I want to make it very clear to my stream, my community, and everyone that, for this exact reason that I just mentioned, I want to make it clear that I want to distance myself and any of my projects from the Esland Awards, which you all know is coming up.
Sadly, the Esland Awards have been an event with a history of much controversy, a lot of division, and a lot of divisions within the community, and as you guys know, as you know, my content has never been characterized by seeking controversy or divisions or anything like that. It's for this exact reason that I don't want to be involved with these awards.
In advance, I ask the organizers of any type of events and projects like this to please show more respect to me and my community, because I've shown lots of sympathy and cooperation in these various projects and events, but it's become clear to me that their only interest is in using my name. My name and my community have been used to attract all this attention for distorted purposes, and I will no longer allow that to happen. I don't want it to happen. That is not what my content is about - not me nor my content nor anything I've done. That's what I want to make very clear here.
That's about it. I'm going to continue with the projects I'm doing and I want to thank my community so much for the support and love. I appreciate it very much, but I wanted to make this clear - I wanted to make this clear. This is just a topic I wanted to address quickly.
Thank you for all the love and support, I love you all so much.
i stand by that a better, more sensible, and more intriguing plot for TSATS would have been, instead of retconning literally everything:
Bob is dead (because he was very explicitly absorbed/killed by Tartarus Himself in House of Hades, alongside Damasen), and nobody is going into Tartarus to save him. He made his sacrifice and is gone. However. Remember how the Titans, including Bob, were just kind of kicking around for several years? Particularly. On a cruise ship full of mortals. And Bob happened to be kicking around in general for an extra year versus all the other Titans. And he mythologically sometimes has a mortal demigod son who partook in the Calydonian Boar Hunt (Dryas of Calydon). Yeah.
So turns out, Bob/Iapetus leaves behind a demigod (demititan?) child. And because Nico was pretty much his only friend, he named Nico his child's godfather. And while he's not being left in charge of the child, as a son of Hades and godfather to this kid, Nico is duty-bound to fulfill Bob's last will and go find this like 2 year old to make sure they're safe. So Nico has to undertake this very unusual quest (that raises many questions, such as "demititans are a thing?" and "DOES THIS MEAN THERE'S POTENTIALLY MORE-?!" and "SHOULD WE BE CONCERNED ABOUT THIS?") and is kind of freaking out because. He's the son of Hades! He's notoriously bad with living things, and animals, and definitely small children! Even if he does find this kid and assure they're safe, he is the last person who should be undergoing any kind of quest involving even potentially having to babysit. Fortunately, his boyfriend is the human embodiment of sunshine and calmness and good vibes, and also once helped a nymph give birth, so he feels Marginally More Confident in theoretical demititan babysitting and offers to come along on this Epic Journey of Figuring Out What In Hades' Name Is Up With This Demititan Baby Business.
Proceed with wholesome epic shenanigans quest of Nico and Will scurrying around trying to locate this random OP baby while Nico has an existential crisis about the nature of his powers because he doesn't want to let Bob down! Both for Hades Kid Honor Reasons and because Bob was his friend! But what if he's destined to fail this quest just because of who he is? Because he's simply not built for hanging out with the living/mortals? And Will reassuring him that He Will Probably Not Traumatize The Weird OP Titan Baby And It'll Be Fine, and simultaneously getting a peek into the weird other life Nico leads hanging out with immortals much more than the average demigod, which Nico considers his norm. Bonus shenanigans of both of them getting caught off-guard and culture shocked from where each other's respective worlds (Nico's mostly-immortal versus Will's mostly-mortal) cross over and learning to navigate those for each other - Nico finally starting to make some mortal connections and get glimpses at modern mortal American life, and Will trying not to get his brain literally incinerated while Nico's happily casually catching up with some of his old friends who happen to be literal gods.
Maud was the crown princess of Hytopia which led her to have a more arrogant and selfish persona. It was hard for the people to like her. Eventually she grew so selfish that her father passed the crown onto her younger brother, fearing what she’ll do to Hytopia if she had the crown. She was enraged by this of course and ended up disowning her family, leaving her home and settling down on the outskirts. She mostly kept to herself and even picked up a hobby of fashion and creating things, but with Styla being born and prepared to be queen of Hytopia, her anger has grown again and she has a hatred for her niece whom she’s never met before.
it’s interesting to me when people on tumblr who are learning chinese say you don’t need to learn radicals, because………i just don’t think that’s true? as someone who grew up speaking and learning it natively i may be biased, but there’s just…….so many situations when knowing at least basic radicals and meanings is very useful.
if you’re in an area that uses traditional or simplified and you’re used to the opposite set, then knowing radicals can be key to understanding the written language on signs in the area, menus, letters, etc. if you’re reading something and you know the meaning of the characters around a new character, but you don’t know what that character is because it’s unfamiliar to you, knowing radicals allows you to make a guess at the meaning of the character and possibly connect it to the spoken version of the character that you already know based on that context, as for example a radical often lends pronunciation clues to a character.
also, knowing radicals makes it much easier to remember how to write characters—it’s much easier to remember, say, 想 as wood-and-eye-over-heart (木目心) or 绿 as silk-record (silk radical 纟plus the word 录 as in 录音, audio recording) because those are patterns you already have than to remember the individual strokes necessary to write a character. and on the topic of writing—knowing radicals also tells you the order in which to write a character, which is absolutely key to writing legible, orderly characters in a minimal amount of time!
obviously the measure of how many radicals you “really” “have to” know is going to vary by the person you talk to, but i think it’s important to have at least a passable basis in radicals if you’re going to learn chinese, a language written with radicals as important components of words.
and, lest i be remiss—here’s some resources i managed to find with a quick search.
hackingchinese page on radicals with a number of links to .anki, .txt, and .pdf files of the 100 most common radicals
hskacademy list of 214 radicals
a fluentu page that includes 214 radicals and expounds upon the meaning of phonetic and semantic components and their difference from radicals
ltl-beijing page that includes links to a list of radicals, some history behind them, a quiz, printable pdf, and more
and finally, not a link, but a recommendation for an app: download TOFU learn and use the hsk level decks! this is a very easy way to get into the habit of writing and repeating characters daily, which is absolutely vital if you want to get anywhere with reading and writing. dot languages also has a written component to practices, but the app is multi-functional and not confined to writing, nor does it give information about component and radical meanings like TOFU learn does. additionally, i would recommend downloading pleco, which is a very thorough dictionary that has the option to view the radical/component breakdown of a given character (under the “chars” tab—for example it breaks down 音 as 立 and 日) i’ve also seen skritter recommended a lot, but i cannot vouch for that.
thinking about the 'load-bearing event' post and how nearly the entire post-1990s Bat mythos rests on No Man's Land happening, and it getting punted out of canon when the reboot happened irreparably fucked over both the "Batfamily" as a concept and multiple character dynamics until Death Metal/Infinite Frontier re-canonized it last year
i made a rough timeline for the clone^2 au, just for my own convenience sake when dating things. some things might be out of order from the episode date, and thats also for my convenience.
September 3rd: Danny, age 14, has the accident in the lab that turns him liminal
September 10th: Danny is discharged from the hospital and given two weeks leave from school
September 24th: his sick leave ends, and Danny returns to school
October 14th: Danny sneaks into his parents' basement and releases the ghosts they have trapped in cages. Official birth of the vigilante, Phantom
November 27th: Danny fights Pariah Dark, and wins
December 24th: the Ghost Writer torments Danny
February 12th: Danny's 15th birthday
March 3rd: its been six months since Danny's accident
March 7th: Danny fights his evil future self
May 8th: Danny meets Ellie [age 15] and they become twins
December 14th: Danny finds out from his parents that he's a clone
February 12th: Danny's 16th birthday
Early-Mid April: Danny meets Damian [age 6] :)
Mid-Late April: Damian runs off for the first time, damages Danny's hands the first time
May: Damian runs off two more times in the span of three weeks, he damages Danny's hands both times.
Early June: Damian runs off one more time, damages Danny's hands again, resulting in permanent nerve damage.
Mid-Late June: Damian finally gives up on the League coming to get him and joins the Fenton Family.
July: Damian finally coaxes Danny into letting him come along with him on patrol: Wraith is born.
This is really long so I'm putting a cut here, I've been thinking about Jason Todd's character motivations and the question of whether or not his actions are based in a Moral Code (I don't think so, not to say he's without any morality) and I talk about that in more depth here.
I saw someone say on here that Titans: Beast World: Gotham City was some of the best Jason Todd internal writing they'd seen in a while, and I've been a Red Hood fan for 8 years or so now? pretty much since I read comics for the first time, so I went and checked out and I thought it was good! The way the person I saw talking about it as if it was rare and unusual made me wonder though, because as well-written as i thought his stances on crime were, there wasn't really anything in it that went against the way I conceptualize Jason?
This kinda plays into a larger question I've been thinking about for a while with Jason though, which is that, do people think that the killing is part of a fundamental worldview that motivates him a la batman, and that worldview is the reason he does the things he does?? Because 8 years ago i was a middle schooler engaging with fiction on the level that a middle schooler does, so I simply did not put much thought into it beyond "poor guy :(" but ever since I actually started trying to understand consistent characterization, I don't really see Jason as someone who's motivated by a moral code in his actions the way batman or superman is!
tbh my personal read is that he's a very socially-motivated guy, his actions from resurrection to his Joker-Batman ultimatum in utrh always seemed to me like every choice made leading up to his identity reveal was either a. to give him the leverage and skill necessary to pull off his identity reveal successfully, or b. to twist the knife that little bit more when he does let Bruce find out who he is. Like iirc there's a Judd Winick tweet like "yeah tldr he chose Red Hood as his identity because it's the lowest blow he could think of." And I think that's awesome, I think character motivations rooted so deeply in character's relationships and emotions are really fun to read! I also think it's where the stagnation/flatness of his character comes from in certain comics, because if his main motivation is one event in one relationship that passes, and he is not particularly attached to anything in his life or the world by the time that comes to pass, it's a little harder to come up with a direction to go with the character after that, because there isn't much of a direction that aligns with something the character would reasonably want? But I do think solving this by saying "all of the morally-off emotionally driven cruelty he did on his way to spite Batman was actually reflective of his own version of Batman's stance that's exactly the same except he thinks it's GOOD to kill people" isn't ideal. To be fully honest, it seems to me like he never particularly cared one way or the other about killing people to "clean Gotham of crime," he just did everything he could to get the power necessary to pull off his personal plans, and took out any particularly heinous people he encountered along the way (like in Lost Days.) Not to say I think the fact he killed people keeps him up at night anymore than everything else in his life events, I just never really thought he was out there wholeheartedly kneecapping some dude selling weed or random guy robbing a tv store for justice.
Looping wayyy back to my question, Is this (^) contradictory to the way he's written/the overall average perception of the character? Because like I enjoyed his writing in Beast World i have zero significant issue with anything there, I just didn't believe it would be a hot take, like yeah, that is Jason. It's been a while since I've read utrh and lost days, but I don't think my takeaway directly contradicts either of those too bad iirc. Idk all this to say I think Jason killing and being alright with killing is an obvious and objective fact, but i guess i've always seen it as more of a practical tactic than a moral belief, and I think taking the actions made during the lowest points of a character's life where he is obsessively focused on this ONEEEE thing and trying to apply it as a Motivating Stance to everything he's done after that, doesn't really follow logically for me.
As a LaiKabuMisu enjoyer, I never thought I'd need to see desperate Mithrun->Kabru before in my life, thank you so much for the food in these dark times.
desperate mithrun just makes me GIGGLE like the meme i made takes it a bit far for comedy's sake but it's like. this guy who only recently began to live for something else other than revenge and it's thanks to kabru and suddenly kabru dissapears his from life because he has a "job" . we've already seen mithrun go sulky when kabru doesn't side with him despite having valid reasons not to LOL (sfx: hmph)
i truly can see the momentary disconnect (i doubt this lasts very long or at least doesn't manifest obviously. mithrun is a quiet and ultimately rational guy) where he's like "... i thought kabru was gonna stay with me though?" and not even necessarily in a romantic light (for starters anyway). just in the way that mithrun just counted on kabru's companionship, but when adult schedules and establishing a kingdom collide, i think kabru would also equally have a hard time giving up what he works very hard for (protecting humans/short-lived races and being able to help govern so that this is possible). i can absolutely see kabru accidentally neglecting his relationships for too long, and not realising until his party intervenes, or mithrun 'hmph's at him again and he's like '..what did i do.'
sorry for the essay . tldr: i would like to picture mithrun sulking :)