#it is evil itself

[chex-nix]

🍉

Im on twitter and instagram a lot more these days, ill come back to post art every so often (and comic updates on @mmvcvs ) but follow me @ applesaughce on twitter and @ corfnlakes on insta

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

I'm a simple bitch. i believe the purpose of government should be to improve the lives of its citizens and protect its most vulnerable members. unfortunately i live in a day and age where this gets me labeled an enemy of the state

[ionomycin]

inhale, hold

[stars-obsession-pit]

Not Quite his Twin

Danny Fenton is not Danyal al Ghul. They’d wanted him to be, but he wasn’t.

He still remembers when he first woke up, his whole body feeling raw and ill-fitted. Even his mind felt wrong, his memories not quite his own.

Which, he supposes, they weren’t.

Because Danyal is still dead. Executed on the orders of the Demon’s Head for failing to live up to his twin.

But the spurned heir would make a perfect figurehead to build legitimacy for a coup, so a splinter sect of the League stole away some of his remains before they could be disposed of. They may not have had permission to access the Lazarus Pits, but they could still turn to some more unorthodox methods of attempting resurrection. A combination of cloning, a few stolen and processed samples of Lazarus Water, and pieces of necromantic rituals.

And it almost worked.

Almost.

The body they constructed did indeed come to life, and clearly possessed at least some of Danyal’s memories, but it wasn’t him. The memories were locked behind a barrier, present in abstract but not felt. This thing they created could never pass for the deceased heir, and thus could never be the figurehead they wanted. So they decided to dispose of him.

But the clone’s memories had shown him this sort of betrayal before, and he did still have some of the original’s skills. He struck first, killing several of their agents and managing to escape the lab.

He had no idea what to do next, but at least he was free. Free to form his own life, to become someone unique rather than just not-quite-Danyal.

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[snail-speed]

I don't get why the broader fandom is so terrified of the idea of Dandy being evil (and by association moonflower, the most popular ship with him, being toxic yaoi).

Like bro even Qwel is guilty of this. It reads like those newgen types that are so deathly afraid of liking a "problematic" character that they do all these mental gymnastics to prove they're not obsessed with a fictional character that's villainous.

There's nothing in the game that proves that dumbass statement that he's "morally gray". His reserach description just says he's responsible for the ichor operation. He gets angry when you don't buy from him, tries to kill you, then taunts you after the encounter. He's implied to have coerced Astro into silence. He refuses to confront people like Vee and Sprout, who WOULD chew him out unlike Astro. He refuses to tell anyone in general what's going on.

[goldfishinaplasticbag]

magma with friends (-: sudden urge to draw kory mainly bc big poofy hair

[roses-and-revolutions]

Tell me, Superman, what is it that makes one man a hero and the other a villain? Is it his actions, his goals, or his ambitions? Nah! It's whoever stands on the winning side of history that gets to determine that...

Let's fight Big Blue.

OR!!!!

The DC universe is Amity Park's personal rage room and Casper High's senior year is going through it.

[hiding-under-the-willow]

POV: You are Xisuma receiving a message from your brother for the first time in months at 9pm on a Sunday

[natalieironside]

Btw when I tag stuff "#the big machine" I'm more or less comparing it to this thing:

they're gonna lock u up and put u in The Metaphor

[fellthemarvelous]

"Hurt people hurt people. The difference between good and evil is what we do with the pain."

Belinda Chandra, ladies and gentlemen.

[walkawaytall]

Also, also, why is it that Yoda straight-up says the Luke's anger reminds him of Anakin's in The Empire Strikes Back and the movie very subtly shows Luke's face under Vader's helmet and fandom just glosses straight over that and says that Luke is just like his mom, but Leia yells about a plan being dumb and likely to get everyone killed a few times, and suddenly she's got the same anger in her that turned Anakin evil for twenty-some years?

[finndiseicla]

Young Justice and especially Superboy should get more credit for (accidentally) blowing up Mount Rushmore.

Possibly the greatest use of Tactile Telekinesis ever.

[trappedinafantasy37]

I went to a very old save of mine in which I knocked out Minthara in Act 1 and I talked to her again in the throne room. If you knocked her out, this is how she looks at you when she questions you:

She seems genuinely disturbed over your actions. Can you blame her? You were the one who knocked her out. You brought her harm for reasons that she cannot understand. She can understand someone killing her as that is what she expects of those around her. She will criticize your choice of sparing an enemy and showing mercy to someone you have greater reason to kill. Even though she has doubts about you, she shuts herself down, thinking she should be more grateful rather than doubtful of you.

You can tell her that you saw her as a potential ally, but she will call you a hypocrite as Gut and Ragzlin were not shown the same mercy, nor was any other True Soul.

You can even tell her, "You were simply too stubborn to die" as a means of trying to take any culpability off yourself. To try to turn the situation into a little jokey joke. However,

Minthara does not take it as a compliment and she knows you are full of shit. Even though you took the "good" path, she does not trust you.

Minthara understands mercy and even she believes some people are deserving of it. Sadly, she does not see herself as one of those people and is disturbed as to why you gave her mercy. There is no answer you can give her here that will make her trust you. She knows you went out of your way to spare her and only her, and that frightens her.

Remember, this is not the first time in which Minthara's entire army was killed right from underneath her and she was deliberately left as the sole survivor. Orin slaughtered all of her men in a blink of an eye, and Orin's "mercy" only brought her pain and torture. Later down the road, Minthara criticizes herself for not paying more attention to Orin when she first arrived at Moonrise. And so she is giving you a lot of attention, she is watching you, studying you, because she fears that you are going to hurt her the moment she takes her eye off you. Because you already have. Your "mercy" gave her a concussion, your deception had her found guilty of incompetence, and she was then subjected to even more torture by the Absolute in which she was given permanent brain damage. She is afraid that the only reason that you spared her, is because you want to torture her. Even when you show up in Moonrise and enter into her mind prison, she is expecting you to kill her and begs you do it quickly. She is not expecting mercy from you, only death. She is only in that predicament because of you. Why would she think for a single second that your mercy comes from a place of good intentions?

She knows fully well that she owes her life to you and that her life is entirely at your mercy, one you can revoke at any time. She doesn't trust you, she doesn't trust the rest of the companions, but she cannot leave nor walk away. There is no good way out of this for her and she's afraid of the cycle repeating. She is not going to make the same mistake again. Instead of her oath to you being from a place of affection, her oath to you comes from a place of fear.

[anininas]

Little idea for double sided "charms" I had back in january

This isn't supposed to be merch or something though, just a project I started for fun and kinda forgot about