Something which really has me thinking while reading some takes on Hazbin Hotel and, especially, Helluva Boss, is that people ignore the warning at the beginning.
There is a reason why these shows are intended for an adult audience and it’s not the reason you are thinking about.
Younger people can understand violence (and realize it’s not something which should be imitated) and sex so that’s not the reason, the real reason is that they usually can’t understand the situations characters find themselves in.
I read soooo many “critical” posts blaming either Blitzø or Stolas and the reason was that the poster had never found themselves in a similar situation.
It’s ok, teenagers should have those rose-tinted lenses when talking and thinking about love and relationships (really, you want to have them, trust your friendly aromantic girl in her late 20s) BUT that doesn’t mean that you can understand how different relationships work, especially when you have none real life examples.
Stolitz is so complex because is real, but it shows ADULT problems, which not everyone can understand. You can’t judge it through a “all relationship must be fluffy and pure and perfect” state of mind, because real life relationships outside of “high school sweetheart” AREN’T fluffy and pure and perfect.
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ok so like 2 people said they wanted to see the "ford is the most realistic genius" post and that's all the encouragement i need. i'm probably gonna sound pretty full-of-myself on this post but that's just how it be like sometimes.
a lot of the time, "intelligence" is assumed to mean "knows more things." fictional characters who are supposed to be geniuses typically just...miraculously Know information they have no real way of acquiring, anticipate events that cannot reasonably anticipated, or every other character just suddenly gets stupid when the genius character is around so that the "genius" character just doing the logical thing comes off as particularly smart.
so you have a character who supposedly has a really high iq, but in practice they may as well be psychic.
as someone who actually has an iq of 147 (bear with me, because this isn't a flexing post), being "really intelligent" does not mean Just Knowing Things. what it means is that someone who's "smart" (in the traditional sense) can process more information, draw more conclusions, and do so faster than most people. it also usually means being really good at rationalizing things.
so if you're someone who's well-adjusted and well-informed, that can definitely look like knowing all the right answers...but if you're someone who's not well-adjusted or well-informed, it can, if anything, make you even wronger. you get better at rationalizing your mistakes and digging yourself in deeper. and heaven help you if you have paranoid tendencies, because it's that much harder to convince someone they're being irrational when they're on a whole 'nother level of finding information to back up their irrationality.
ford is a genius. he learns incredibly fast and thoroughly. but he's also constrained by the information he has available to him, and by his own biases and past trauma and people issues.
that one writing advice post that made the rounds saying that a character's biggest flaw is usually their biggest strength in the wrong situation is very true of people who are very intelligent. it's why, for example, you'll sometimes see doctors, academics, experts buy into conspiracy theories. it's not because they're stupid; it's because they're smart enough to recontextualize all their knowledge to support their biases and beliefs.
and so many people do not understand this because they still think of "intelligence" as "knowing & being right about everything." so you get people arguing that ford isn't really a genius, because he was wrong and he made mistakes. but in my opinion, the mistakes he makes make perfect sense because he's a genius. that kind of recklessness is exactly what you get when you combine abnormally high iq with ford's myriad of personal issues. you get someone who's great at rationalizing, great at taking in information, and great at finding surprisingly well-thought-out reasons why their paranoia and antisocial tendencies are totally just the rational response.
think of it this way; the smartest people alive in the medieval era believed in the miasma theory. they weren't too stupid to understand what bacteria and viruses are; they just didn't have the tools needed to observe them. so they came up with a theory based on the information they did know, wrote essays and papers about it, made medical practices based on it...and it was completely incorrect, because genius without correct information leads to spectacular and very well-thought-out mistakes.
anyway, all this to say, as someone who could nominally be considered a "genius" but has been hella wrong about a lot of things in my life, i think ford is an incredibly realistic take on what most "geniuses" are really like. impressive in the right situations, not so much in the wrong ones, and very much not magical beings capable of mysteriously knowing all the correct information because they're Just That Smart. and very much not immune to emotional and personal issues getting in the way.
thanks for coming to my "i-just-slept-for-20-hours-and-my-brain-is-a-bit-scrambled-right-now" ted talk
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Can I ask why you said the less we say about Mick the better on the post with Laila. I met Mick several times over the course of the weekend at Cota and he was lovely and so obliging. Laila is fab too
oh that’s so interesting!!! i got quite lucky meeting him on Friday first thing but i definitely caught him off guard a little i think. I asked him to pick a bracelet (i made 4 for him) and he was like “whichever” (compared to David and Pato and Callum who were all super thoughtful about it when i gave them the same choice) and just — honestly didn’t smile all weekend. he did one of the 2 autograph sessions with his airpods in, and while his teammates joked around with the funny custom glasses i made them, when i gave him his he just smiled tightly and said thanks. he didn’t really want to stop for any pictures during the rest of the weekend (though was apparently more obliging at the end of the day, i wasn’t there for those) and when we stopped Laila after the race he legit rolled his eyes.
in general i try to be thoughtful about when i’m catching the drivers — either it’s an official autograph session or it’s during a time when i know they aren’t rushing anywhere, because i know they have a job to do. and look, everyone can have a bad day or a bad weekend and that’s why i didn’t want to make a big deal of it, but basically everyone i was with also noticed that he just didn’t seem engaged or excited to be there at all. i understand it, cause i know this isn’t his series of choice and basically just lost 3 straight seats in F1 in the last 2 weeks, but i’ve had better drivers interactions for sure. i’ve also had worse!!!!!! in no way did i find anything that he did this weekend rude (other than maybe the airpods). just wish i could gush about him like i do every time i meet Callum.
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can i be honest i really wish the yoru ni kakeru cover was an alkaloid/switch collab instead of alkaloid/double face . or more unrealistically just natsume bc i need to hear him sing that song his voice is perfect for it
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Would you ever write genderbent devil’s minion?
gosh this is a complicated topic for me.
So despite being a lesbian myself, I interact with very very little lesbian/wlw media.
I'm at the masc/butch end of the spectrum and I just don't see myself represented in like 95% of wlw media. It's all femme4femme, or at best contains a 'woman with a haircut between a pixie and a bob, who still wears copious amounts of makeup but wears jeans from the mens section'. Or there's a butch character but she's treated as the butt of jokes. Hell even in art I can rarely find a woman like me. I unfollowed a really popular queer artist because they would draw literally every type of queer person/couple or throuple except for a masc/butch woman.
And I rarely interact with gender swap aus or art because like...it often seems to hinge on heteronormative ideals of femininity (and sometimes even feels fetishizing but that's a whole other rant). Long hair and lipstick and heels and skirts. I've yet to see a gender swap that includes a character whose identity is woman, but whose identity also hinges on being a butch/masc/stud. Seeing endless femme4femme stuff ends up making me feel sad.
I can't divorce my perspective from any piece of wlw media I would ever create, and it just seems like my type of perspective isn't wanted.
And like normally I'm all about creating the content I desire to see but it's almost too vulnerable a thing for me. I have enough trouble getting people irl to respect my identity and not thrust socially acceptable feminine things upon me, trying to do it via the medium of fic? Idk, if the piece wasn't appreciated I would feel so crushed.
Which is a shame because I can think of angles to work from that are interesting to me. But I just don't think it's what anyone is looking for when they ask for gender swap!
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