#me and my basic opinions

[bythaefloch]

Sorry for the ai slop

Dont take this too seriously lmao

Jimmy is there 2 times in chp 4 cuz I hate earnest and jocks were sadly underused

[naturecalls111]

unorthodox murder mystery

[arcanegifs]

Here are some Season 2 Arcane GIF comparisons before and after I color and sharpen them! | Season 1 Comparison GIFs

[lazylittledragon]

so uhhhhhhhh. not to be cryptic and bitchy on main but congratulations to everyone in my messages for like 5 months on being right i guess

[arsenicflame]

Bonus round! Do you use a queue tag?

[briskchips]

Do you ship Purelily?

Sort of? Not really? I view their relationship through a very specific lens:

I think they mutually liked each other when they were young, maybe even had an actual relationship. But when Lily started to pursue her ideals of the origins of cookies, the witches' motivations, increasing the survivability of their species, etc, more and more, PV got worried. He dreaded who she was becoming, and his feelings for her began to wane. He didn't feel like this was "the lily he knew".

But PV is nothing if not forgiving. He convinced himself this was a phase she was going through, that she'd eventually figure out that this pursuit of strength and knowledge was fruitless and dangerous, and messing with dark moon magic was doubly so. But when Lily received her soul jam of freedom, her determination to learn more and be more only got stronger. She was (metaphorically) a new cookie now, but PV was still attached to the Lily he first fell in love with. He told himself that Lily was fine, just exploring things she shouldn't be for a little while, and then she'd get back to being the sweet, curious girl he thought he knew.

And then she died. Her pursuits led her to fall into the ultimate dough, and even then, PV refused to admit to himself that maybe Lily had changed before that.

When Lily was half brought back to life in the faerie kingdom, PV assumed she'd be herself again. She'd learn her lesson after dying at the hands of the witches, and everything could just be normal. But she still held her beliefs, and was still too different for PV. In an ideal world, they would've gotten the chance to talk through this, but some blue guy just crawled out of a tree to terrorize everyone's minds and that kind of takes precedent unfortunately!

Even now, with her being back, he yearns for who she used to be. He ignores the traits of hers that he finds undesirable, because he doesn't like that someone he loved so much has become someone who so adamantly craves something he disagrees with. I also think PV has a bit of a saviour complex as a subconscious defence mechanism against his own insecurities. He probably isn't aware of this specific feeling he has, but he doesn't like that Lily is so much more independent now. He liked being someone who could provide for her, who could protect her and guide her, and make her feel welcome when other cookies didn't, but she just doesn't need that anymore. She doesn't need him. And that makes him panic. Who is he if he is not needed? What's the point of him if he can't be useful? How can he possibly be of any worth to Lily if she doesn't feel the need to rely on him in some way?

He wants to be a benevolent, strong, kind leader; the kind of leader who loves all of his friends, no matter how they grow and change, but he just feels too differently about Lily to love her in the same way he once did. He's in denial. And he knows he is. Lily does too. That's the basis of their separation at the spire of deceit's entrance.

Their paths don't align in a literal sense, wherein they both have important physical goals that need to be achieved before the war kicks off, but their paths also don't align in a mental sense. They aren't partners anymore. They want different things. They care about different things. Neither wants to admit that they've both become cookies who aren't compatible anymore, but neither wants to change for the sake of the other, either. They still cherish each other, but not in the same way they used to.

So TLDR, no, I don't ship purelily. BUT I do think it was canon behind-the-scenes at some point in their past, and their feelings for each other is a critical part of both of their characters (and I think a lot of fan works are really sweet, I understand the appeal of the ship).

[housecow]

i need more sweaters/tops that cinch at my waist but i have to try them on irl bc there’s a good chance they’d basically just be a bra 😭😭

[aroaceleovaldez]

Nico and Percy's dynamic through the series is eternally funny to me, because it's just. like.

Percy's having a constant mental struggle between his fatal flaw of loyalty with a promise he made to Bianca to protect Nico, versus his Big 3 kid desire to maim other Big 3 kids / Poseidon descendant urge to totally maim Nico specifically. He hates Nico so so much. He thinks Nico's annoying and weird at best, and creepy/sketchy when he's older. The only positive thoughts Percy has towards Nico are "He's Bianca's brother and Bianca was my friend and I owe her/He's Hazel's brother and Hazel is my friend and would kill me if I was mean to him," "He's a powerful asset and useful ally (if questionable)," and "He's kinda pathetic and I feel maybe a little bad about it." Percy has multiple occasions throughout the series where he strongly considers - and on one occasionally actually goes through with - throttling Nico.

Meanwhile, Nico is following around Percy like a lost puppy. He explicitly can never bring himself to even dislike anything about Percy no matter how hard he tries. He has a whole bit in BoO where he's mentally going "UGH he's so stupid BUT IT'S ENDEARING HOW DARE HE." He's totally smitten. He's making deals with his dad for Percy. He's making convoluted plans to help Percy stand a chance against Kronos. During the entirety of BoTL it's like he's playing tsundere - "I'm helping NOT PERCY SPECIFICALLY with this quest! Me helping Percy would be SILLY because I DEFINITELY HATE HIM." Then he proceeds to show up to Percy's birthday party to basically ask him on a weird date and spend the entire next book scrambling around trying to help him or protect him or impress him. And Percy could not give less of a shit.

Just. That dynamic is so funny to me. Percy is the founder of the Nico Protection Club in that he's the one they're all protecting Nico from and meanwhile Nico is throwing himself at Percy to the point where the literal god of gay love calls him out on it.

[bittersweetyrn]

big fan of essek thelyss, not the fanon interpretation, which is either "smol bean, tiny fragile elf who's a sweetheart and basically a child" or people mistakenly calling betrayal of one's home country a "war crime" and then proceeding to be flippant about it anyway, but the real Essek

pretentious motherfucker that committed treason bc he though he was smarter than everyone else

learned to float literally just to impress other rich people

canonically neutral evil

basically head spymaster of his country and master of lies but sucks shit lying to his friends

stayed bitchy even after his redemption arc

"there is nothing I would love more than to not be around you all for the remainder of this day"

a space wizard that crushed someone with telekenesis just to show off (the person was already dying)

sexy feet, nice ass, overall hottie

fell in love with a traumatized wizard of his enemy country and it was mutual despite all the betrayal

faggot

gave away state secrets to enemy wizard bc he though he was sexy

discovered time travel with his boyfriend

proceeded to say they shouldn't use time travel (bc now he's a good boy) but was willing to sacrifice everything and help if his bf wanted to use it

once confessed he had such a bad fight with his dad that his dad ran into the demon caves and never returned (essek doesn't feel bad about this at all)

young for an elf but still 120 years old, he called his bf "young man" and flexed on him about how much more evil he is

[ogsherlockholmes]

I've been thinking about trying to form my own sort of order of the Holmes canon (yes, I've been very inspired by other current Holmesian content) since I'm trying to get back into the annotations that I used to do and I'm at a loose end as to what to do with my life at the moment, but I really find it difficult to read the stories as examples of chronology, if that makes sense.

I've obviously been proven wrong time and time again as many people have wrote their theoretical canon chronologies, but part of me seriously feels that that's impossible. If they were supposed to have an order, ACD/Watson would have wrote it that way (again, my own personal opinion, I'm not trying to impose rules in the fandom because that would make all this boring). But, since he's our favourite unreliable narrator, he mixes up dates, changes them- sometimes he tells us, sometimes he let's us figure it out for ourselves.

There's the whole idea of the game, the 'true' meaning of the Holmes books and what ACD was trying to tell us. I, of course, am inclined to think that the mysteries aren't the main story, it's Holmes and Watson's relationships that are supposed to be focused on, so dates just aren't important to me. I don't believe Watson when he feels the need to include exactly when something happened, because it looks like he's establishing an alibi. Diverting attention from something.

And, I don't know, maybe I am taking it too seriously, but half the time I read the 'cases' and I doubt they even happened (as in, within Holmes' London)- a good example is obviously The Blanched Soldier wherein two men are kept apart from each so they don't endanger their reputation... a very diluted version of events, I know, but a brief example of my feelings on this. The cases are metaphorical, symbolic- cover ups.

I'm being extremely cryptid because I'm reevaluating my reading of the canon, and finding it surprisingly easy to ignore virtually everything Watson tells us to find a deeper story running through it all (not that there's anything wrong with serial crime stories- that's why I started reading in the first place).

I plan on actually forming a little bit of work on this- I doubt it'll go any further than this blog, but it'll be entertaining nonetheless, and I hope that at least a few people will understand where I'm coming from.

[basket-of-radiants]

Why were you so disappointed by Rhythm of War?

This has been sitting in my askbox for years. I've taken several cracks at answering, only to get frustrated with the subject matter and burn myself out every time. I didn't like Rhythm of War. More than that, I didn't like it in a way that tainted my enjoyment of the entire series. And despite what it may seem, I don't actually enjoy discussing things which I don't like. I always want to talk from a place of good faith. Which is why now that my feelings towards the series are a little more positive, I think I can finally answer this.

I'm going to try to stay away from specific plotpoints and story beats for this post, because my goal isn't to nitpick (if for no other reason than it would take a week to write this post), I'm just looking to talk about my overall impressions. I think that might mean the only spoilers here will be structural? idk, if you haven't read Rhythm of War yourself then you should probably do that before looking for other people's opinions anyway. 

I liked Way of Kings when I first read it. I didn't love it at the time, but I liked it. Certainly enough to keep reading once I'd finished. One thing that made me a bit uncomfy, however, was the war against the Parshendi. They were this unknowable enemy which the book was not interested in knowing. An inhuman army. Their main purpose was to kill Kaladin's friends, or else be killed by Dalinar's armies. And yet the Parshendi, and the parshmen in the form of Shen, did show hints of personhood. And so it bothered me how Dalinar spoke so casually about how the Alethi had decimated their numbers, how the others used the war as a means to amass wealth and power. (It didn't bother me in a "this is a bad book" way but in a "these characters are bad people" way.)

One of my foibles as a reader is that when a book is very clearly treating one side of a conflict with more humanity, I tend to be a bit predisposed towards the other to account for that. And with the Alethi clearly being the invading party and superior military force, there was also some underdog favoritism. I didn't really like how the book treated the Parshendi. This is to say that going forward, the singers would be more important to me than any other through line.

So imagine my delight at reading Words of Radiance and meeting Eshonai, one of the Parshendi, who even gets her own point of view sections! They were no longer being treated as a faceless mass, we were getting to see things from their perspective as well. And it became plain to see the damage the Alethi had done to them. I couldn't really bring myself to root for Dalinar or really any of the humans against the listeners. I couldn't even bring myself to like most of these characters. I still enjoyed the book but once it became clear there wouldn't be a peaceful conclusion, let's just say that I wouldn't have wept for Dalinar and Adolin if Szeth had managed to off them. Like everyone in the book, I assumed that going forward all the parshmen would be turned into evil voidbringers in the everstorm and that the listeners were mostly dead. Except for Rlain, and Eshonai because I'd read or been told that book 4 would be Eshonai's book and thus had assumed she was fine. (Oathbringer spoilers, she was not fine.) So ultimately it was still a bit of a downer way to end the book. 

So imagine my delight at reading Oathbringer, where for the first time singers were being treated as people, full and real people, and where the human characters could no longer ignore or dismiss them. We met Khen and the others, common singers who were sympathetic and just wanted freedom from bondage. We see Venli grapple with the loss of her home. We see Leshwi and Moash connecting with and understanding one another. We learn of a history where singers were the original inhabitants of the planet. Parallel to this, Dalinar is having a truly excellent character arc about confronting one's past actions and acknowledging them to move forward and do better. I loved Oathbringer, for some years it was my favorite book, and I was excited as hell to see what came next. At the time, it seemed to me that there is a clear direction the story is going. Two books about needless war, and then a third where the main cast is forced to acknowledge the personhood of their enemies. This was so cool, all of my feelings from the previous installments were being validated, the characters were going to have to face what they've done in the past and outgrow their militaristic mindsets, I was so sure of that.

Imagine my disappointment when that does not even remotely resemble the direction the story went in Rhythm of War. RoW presented a clear, straightforward “us vs. them" narrative, where every character was totally fine with killing singers. Characters aligned with the singers were either flattened into wholly evil versions of themselves (Moash) or were expected to turn on their side in favor of the humans (Venli.) Because clearly there was no reason good people would be on the side that's all former slaves trying to stay free. Maybe there's some sort of accord or understanding between Navani and Raboniel that I might have found meaningful if the seeds of mutual understanding weren't already there in Oathbringer and then apparently ignored for a year by all the characters.

I have a lot of issues with how the listeners are handled in these books. (Here's some elaboration.) Following OB, I had thought that all my concerns were going to be addressed. Following RoW, I knew they never would be. 

Which is my main complaint, because that's the thread that matters most to me in this series.

I have a lot of other Things as well. Gonna just talk about a few big ones. 

One outsized source of disappointment that may seem a little petty, and which probably is, is that I felt mislead by the premise of the book. It had been announced that this book would center Venli and Eshonai, and I was unbelievably hyped for that. That did not really turn out to be the case. The purpose for their backstory chapters felt less about exploring them as people and contextualizing their arcs, and more about filling in gaps of world history. In the main plot, Venli was a POV character and she certainly played a role, but honestly not a very important one overall. To me she felt like a side character in her own book. I don't think it's controversial to say that the main character of RoW was Navani. A lot of people really like Navani and are happy about that. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people, and I found it all the more difficult to enjoy her when it felt like it was coming at the expense of some of my favorite characters. 

This particular gripe somewhat comes down to preference, obviously everyone prefers to read about characters they like more than those they don't, and it can go both ways. (For instance, on a craft/technical level RoW is probably the superior book to W&T, but I liked the latter a lot more because of my stupidly outsized attachment to Szeth and Nale.) But I do think there's something of a real criticism in how the book would rather focus on the feelings of a queen rather than those of a genocide survivor, and how the former's are given significantly more weight and import. It ties in with my main criticism, I think. 

And then there's how human/human racism had also been wholly cast aside as a plot point. Jasnah fixed slavery so that's resolved, and the only person who still cares about structural racism is the evil bad bad evil villain Moash/Vyre, who is now wholly irredeemable and who you're allowed to totally write off because he's sold his soul to Odium. I've already talked a lot about this. Other people have already talked about this, probably better than me. The writing was actually on the wall for me in OB, but again, RoW was when I fully accepted that this was never going to be addressed. 

There's something else that probably deserves its own discussion rather than being quickly tacked on at the end here, but here we are. This book changed how the series approaches war. 

In WoK, war was very clearly portrayed as a bad and inglorious thing. It was brutal, it was painful, those at the bottom died cruelly and unceremoniously and pointlessly while those at the top turned a profit. Every day was a new horror. The enemy were never evil, they were always just more people forced to go through the same thing. Through the next couple books, it felt to me that even if the characters had accepted war as necessary, there was still a tragedy to it. Conversely, in RoW (and W&T) war is basically a series of boss battles, in between which our protagonists can kill dozens of footsoldiers with barely a thought in the same way WoK had criticized.

Final note on all this, it sucks how we have no perspectives from the former-slaves-singers demographic. Those guys are really thrown under the bus, and seemingly get no self-determination now or ever. It was a glaring problem to me in RoW. Conscripted and enslaved humans and singers probably have just as much ground to form mutual understanding as a fused and a queen. (In fact they already had. In Oathbringer.)

In essence, RoW disappointed me because it left me with the distinct impression that none of the series's most important through lines (well, most important to me) were going to be resolved well. I liked W&T, but I haven't revised my opinion very much about the overall handling of these topics across the series. Maybe one of the reasons I was able to enjoy W&T so much more was because I no longer had such high expectations.

[m1ckeyb3rry]

what really fries me about people who use chatgpt on their homework in my classes is they get the wrong answer and then they text me and i tell them how to do it and they’re like “😱😱 how did you know how to do that ??” well maybe if you opened the slides instead of rushing to jerk off ai you would’ve realized that the professors tell you how to do what they want you to do 😭😭 you dumb fucks FKDKDNJSND LIKE ??

[cursoulla]

the urge to spill all my headcanons for Noir/Nier(Original) aka Shadowlord,, but holding myself back… actually what inspired this was- oh god. just a lot of body horror and… worship, reassurance… *vibrating at inhuman frequencies*

let’s just say. i’m in my feelings about them very OFTEN. i shan’t gush further and will let the emotion I tried to convey in this piece do it for me,

[atwas-gaming]

Here's what I think about Revali's SOS signal:

Now, most people say, "Oh, Revali, he was so full of himself that he didn't want to send an SOS and he got himself killed because he was too proud to call for help."

That's not how I see it. I love Revali, but let's be honest: he's a preening peacock at best and a narcissistic bully at worst (honestly, he's somewhere in between the two). But he IS as good as he says.

So I think that, by the time he sent his SOS, it was an act of desperation. Not a desperation born out of realizing that he, himself, was about to die, but a desperate hope born out of realizing that they had been utterly defeated.

Like I said, Revali is as good as he claims to be. And he knows it (hence his superiority complex). So if he knew he was about to be defeated, then he KNEW there was no one left to save him.

So I think he waited until the last second because he knew it was pointless. Not so much pride as realism. "If I'm dead, then we're all dead." My guess is that he turned on the signal as a last-ditch effort, some survival instinct kicking in and hoping beyond hope, for the first time ever, that he was wrong, that maybe someone else had survived.

[kaizokuou-ni-naru]

What's your opinion on the idea of the "chosen one" trope, and how it relates to Luffy in particular? Most of the controversy I've seen over Gear 5 seems to be about that specifically.

this is a really interesting question, and one i had to mull over for a bit! i think the idea of a 'chosen one' or 'destiny' more broadly can reasonably rub a lot of people the wrong way, especially in a story where freedom is such a strong thematic focus- the idea that luffy's actions might be preordained and not driven by his own will feels inherently wrong. (fortunately, i don't think they are.)

the short answer is that i think the use of prophecy in one piece works (at least for me) because it never feels like anyone else is making luffy's decisions for him. this is why it feels somewhat incorrect to me to call him a 'chosen one'- he very much makes all his choices himself.

there are prophecies surrounding him- about joy boy, about the dawn of the world, about nika- but luffy doesn't know about them, and if he did he wouldn't care. they don't define anything about him, how he acts, how he views himself. the world and narrative shapes itself around luffy, and not the other way around. you get the sense that even in the total absence of any prophecy surrounding luffy, he would still be doing the exact same thing he is doing because he only ever does exactly what he wants to do. he's as inevitable as the rising sun! the future changes to fit him!

one piece generally rejects the concept of unchangeable fate out of hand- if you tell luffy something can't be done he'll take it as a personal challenge- but it does have a lot to say about inherited will. i think it would be more accurate to say that all the strawhats and their allies, luffy especially, have in some way come to embody the inherited will and dreams of the people who came before them, whether they know it or not, both through their own experiences and because of who they already were as people.

like, the prophecies about luffy don't say he's destined to become the pirate king, or anything so specific as that. he decided on his own that he was going to do that, and that has always been his goal- to be completely free and have those he cares about be completely free. that's what he values. and it just so happens that that trait makes him fit the image of the liberator.

[essektheylyss]

did someone actually hate on your fave? or did they neutrally attribute a trait to them that you've unnecessarily negatively moralized and you hurt own feelings about it? or, perhaps, did you project too hard and now interpret even mild critique or simple acknowledgement of interesting character flaws as an ad hominem attack on yourself?