#ok that's all i have to say about the first twelve chapters lmaooo

[canmom]

entropy and life//entropy and death

This is a discussion that spun out of a post on web novel The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere. However, it's mostly a chance to lay out the entropy thing. So most of it is not Flower related at all...

the thermodynamics lesson

Entropy is one of those subjects that tends to be described quite vaguely. The rigorous definition, on the other hand, is packed full of jargon like 'macrostates', which I found pretty hard to wrap my head around as a university student back in the day. So let's begin this post with an attempt to lay it out a bit more intuitively.

In the early days of thermodynamics, as 19th-century scientists like Clausius attempted to get to grips with 'how do you build a better steam engine', entropy was a rather mysterious quantity that emerged from their networks of differential equations. It was defined in relation to measurable quantities temperature and heat. If you add heat to a system at a given temperature, its entropy goes up. In an idealised reversible process, like compressing a piston infinitely slowly, the entropy stays constant.

Strangely, this convenient quantity always seemed to go up or stay the same, never ever down. This was so strictly true that it was declared to be a 'law of thermodynamics'. Why the hell should that be true? Turns out they'd accidentally stumbled on one of the most fundamental principles of the universe.

So. What actually is it? When we talk about entropy, we are talking about a system that can be described in two related ways: a 'nitty-gritty details' one that's exhaustively precise, and a 'broad strokes' one that brushes over most of those details. (The jargon calls the first one a 'microstate' and the second one a 'macrostate'.)

For example, say the thing you're trying to describe is a gas. The 'nitty gritty details' description would describe the position and velocity of every single molecule zipping around in that gas. The 'broad strokes' description would sum it all up with a few quantities such as temperature, volume and pressure, which describe how much energy and momentum the molecules have on average, and the places they might be.

In general there are many different possible ways you could arrange the molecules and their kinetic energy match up with that broad-strokes description.

In statistical mechanics, entropy describes the relationship between the two. It measures the number of possible 'nitty gritty details' descriptions that match up with the 'broad strokes' description.

In short, entropy could be thought of as a measure of what is not known or indeed knowable. It is sort of like a measure of 'disorder', but it's a very specific sense of 'disorder'.

For another example, let's say that you are running along with two folders. Each folder contains 100 pages, and one of them is important to you. You know for sure it's in the left folder. But then you suffer a comical anime collision that leads to your papers going all over the floor! You pick them up and stuff them randomly back in the folders.

In the first state, the macrostate is 'the important page is in the left folder'. There are 100 positions it could be. After your accident, you don't know which folder has that page. The macrostate is 'It could be in either folder'. So there are now 200 positions it could be. This means your papers are now in a higher entropy state than they were before.

In general, if you start out a system in a given 'broad strokes' state, it will randomly explore all the different 'nitty gritty details' states available in its phase space (this is called the ergodic hypothesis). The more 'nitty gritty details' states that are associated with a given 'broad strokes' state, the more likely that it will end up in that state. In practice, once you have realistic numbers of particles involved, the probabilities involved are so extreme that we can say that the system will almost certainly end up in a 'broad strokes' state with equal or higher entropy. This is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics: it says entropy will always stay the same, or increase.

This is the modern, statistical view of entropy developed by Ludwig Boltzmann in the 1870s and really nailed down at the start of the 20th century, summed up by the famous formula S=k log W. This was such a big deal that they engraved it on his tombstone.

Since the Second Law of Thermodynamics is statistical in nature, it applies anywhere its assumptions hold, regardless of how the underlying physics works. This makes it astonishingly powerful. Before long, the idea of entropy in thermodynamics inspired other, related ideas. Claude Shannon used the word entropy for a measure of the maximum information conveyed in a message of a certain length.

the life of energy and entropy

So, everything is made of energy, and that energy is in a state with a certain amount of thermodynamic entropy. As we just discussed, every chemical process must globally increase the entropy. If the entropy of one thing goes down, the entropy of something else must increase by an equal or greater amount.

(A little caveat: traditional thermodynamics was mainly concerned with systems in equilibrium. Life is almost by definition not in thermodynamic equilibrium, which makes things generally a lot more complicated. Luckily I'm going to talk about things at such a high level of abstraction that it won't matter.)

There are generally speaking two ways to increase entropy. You can add more energy to the system, and you can take the existing energy and distribute it more evenly.

For example, a fridge in a warm room is in a low entropy state. Left to its own devices, energy from outside would make its way into the fridge, lowering the temperature of the outside slightly and increasing the temperature of the inside. This would increase the entropy: there are more ways for the energy to be distributed when the inside of the fridge is warmer.

To cool the fridge we want to move some energy back to the outside. But that would lower entropy, which is a no-no! To get around this, the heat pump on a fridge must always add a bit of extra energy to the outside of the fridge. In this way it's possible to link the cooling of the inside of the fridge to the increase in entropy outside, and the whole process becomes thermodynamically viable.

Likewise, for a coherent pattern such as life to exist, it must slot itself into the constant transition from low to high entropy in a way that can dump the excess entropy it adds somewhere else.

Fortunately, we live on a planet that is orbiting a bright star, and also radiating heat into space. The sun provides energy in a relatively low-entropy state: highly directional, in a certain limited range of frequencies. The electromagnetic radiation leaving our planet is in a higher entropy state. The earth as a whole is pretty near equilibrium (although it's presently warming, as you might have heard).

Using a multistep process and suitable enzymes, photosynthesis can convert a portion of the incoming sunlight energy into sugars, which are in a tasty low entropy state. This is a highly unfavoured process in general, and it requires some shenanigans to get away with it. But basically, the compensating increase in entropy is achieved by heating up the surroundings, which radiate away lower-temperature infrared radiation.

the reason we don't live forever

Nearly all other lifeforms depend on these helpfully packaged low-entropy molecules. We take in molecules from outside by breathing in and eating and drinking, put them through a bunch of chemical reactions (respiration and so forth), and emit molecules at a higher entropy (breathing out, pissing, shitting, etc.). Since we constantly have to throw away molecules to get rid of the excess entropy produced by the processes of living, we constantly have to eat more food. This is what I was alluding to in the Dungeon Meshi post from the other day.

That's the short-timescale battle against entropy. On longer timescales, we can more vaguely say that life depends on the ability to preserve a low-entropy, non-equilibrium state. On the simplest level, a human body is in a very low entropy state compared to a cloud of carbon dioxide and water, but we generally speaking do not spontaneously combust because there is a high enough energy barrier in the way. But in a more abstract one, our cells continue to function in specialised roles, the complex networks of reaction pathways continue to tick over, and the whole machine somehow keeps working.

However, the longer you try to maintain a pattern, the more low-probability problems start to become statistical inevitabilities.

For example, cells contain a whole mess of chemical reactions which can gradually accumulate errors, waste products etc. which can corrupt their functioning. To compensate for this, multicellular organisms are constantly rebuilding themselves. On the one hand, their cells divide to create new cells; on the other, stressed cells undergo apoptosis, i.e. die. However, sometimes cells become corrupt in a way that causes them to fail to die when instructed. Our body has an entire complicated apparatus designed to detect those cells and destroy them before they start replicating uncontrollably. Our various defensive mechanisms detect and destroy the vast majority of potentially cancerous cells... but over a long enough period, the odds are not in our favour. Every cell has a tiny potential to become cancerous.

At this point we're really not in the realm of rigorous thermodynamic entropy calculations. However, we can think of 'dead body' as generally speaking a higher-entropy set of states than 'living creature'. There are many more ways for the atoms that make us up to be arranged as a dead person, cloud of gas, etc. than an alive person. Worse still should we find we were in a metastable state, where only a small boost over the energy barrier is needed to cause a runaway reaction that drops us into a lower energy, higher entropy state.

In a sense, a viral infection could be thought of as a collapse of a metastable pattern. The replication machinery in our cells could produce human cells but it can equally produce viruses, and it turns out stamping out viruses is (in this loose sense) a higher entropy pattern; the main thing that stops us from turning into a pile of viruses is the absence of a virus to kick the process off.

So sooner or later, we inevitably(?) hit a level of disruption which causes a cascading failure in all these interlinked biological systems. The pattern collapses.

This is what we call 'death'.

an analogy

If you're familiar with cellular automata like Conway's Game of Life, you'll know it's possible to construct incredibly elaborate persistent patterns. You can even build the game of life in the game of life. But these systems can be quite brittle: if you scribble a little on the board, the coherent pattern will break and it will collapse back into a random mess of oscillators. 'Random mess of oscillators' is a high-entropy state for the Game of Life: there are many many different board states that correspond to it. 'Board that plays the Game of Life' is a low-entropy state: there are a scant few states that fit.

The ergodic hypothesis does not apply to the Game of Life. Without manual intervention, the 'game of life in game of life' board would keep simulating a giant version of the game of life indefinitely. However...

For physical computer systems, a vaguely similar process of accumulating problems can occur. For example, a program with a memory leak will gradually request more and more memory from the operating system, leaving more and more memory in an inaccessible state. Other programs may end up running slowly, starved of resources.

In general, there are a great many ways a computer can go wrong, and few that represent it going right.

One of the ways our body avoids collapsing like this is by dedicating resources to cells whose job is to monitor the other cells and intervene if they show heuristic signs of screwing up. This is the evolutionary arms race between immune system and virus. The same can be true on computers, which also support 'viruses' in the form of programs that are able to hijack a computer and replicate themselves onto other computers - and one of our solutions is similar, writing programs which detect and terminate programs which have the appearance of viruses.

When a computer is running slowly, the first thing to do is to reboot it. This will reload all the programs from the unchanging version on disc.

The animal body's version of a reboot is to dump all the accumulated decay onto a corpse and produce a whole new organism from a single pair of cells. This is one function of reproduction, a chance to wipe the slate clean. (One thing I remain curious about is how the body keeps the gamete cells in good shape.)

but what if we did live forever?

I am not particularly up to date on senescence research, but in general the theories do appear to go along broad lines of 'accumulating damage', with disagreement over what represents the most fundamental cause.

Here's how Su discusses the problem of living indefinitely in The Flower That Blooms Nowhere, chapter 2:

The trouble, however, is that the longer you try to preserve a system well into a length of time it is utterly not designed (well, evolved, in this case) for, the more strange and complicated problems appear. Take cancer, humanity’s oldest companion. For a young person with a body that's still running according to program, it's an easy problem to solve. Stick a scepter in their business, cast the Life-Slaying Arcana with the 'cancerous' addendum script – which identifies and eliminates around the 10,000 most common types of defective cell – and that's all it takes. No problem! A monkey could do it. But the body isn’t a thing unto itself, a inherently stable entity that just gets worn down or sometimes infected with nasty things. And cancer cells aren’t just malevolent little sprites that hop out of the netherworld. They’re one of innumerable quasi-autonomous components that are themselves important to the survival of the body, but just happen to be doing their job slightly wrong. So even the act of killing them causes disruption. Maybe not major disruption, but disruption all the same. Which will cause little stressors on other components, which in turn might cause them to become cancerous, maybe in a more 'interesting' way that’s a little harder to detect. And if you stop that... Or hell, forget even cancer. Cells mutate all the time just by nature, the anima script becoming warped slightly in the process of division. Most of the time, it's harmless; so long as you stay up to date with your telomere extensions, most dysfunctional cells don't present serious problems and can be easily killed off by your immune system. But live long enough, and by sheer mathematics, you'll get a mutation that isn't. And if you live a really long time, you'll get a lot of them, and unless you can detect them perfectly, they'll build up, with, again, interesting results. At a deep enough level, the problem wasn't biology. It was physics. Entropy.

A few quirks of the setting emerge here. Rather than DNA we have 'the anima script'. It remains to be seen if this is just another name for DNA or reflecting some fundamental alt-biology that runs on magic or some shit. Others reflect real biology: 'telomeres' are a region at the end of the DNA strands in chromosomes. They serve as a kind of ablative shield, protecting the end of the DNA during replication. The loss of the telomeres have been touted as a major factor in the aging process.

A few chapters later we encounter a man who does not think of himself as really being the same person as he was a hundred years ago. Which, mood - I don't think I'm really the same person I was ten years ago. Or five. Or hell, even one.

The problem with really long-term scifi life extension ends up being a kind of signal-vs-noise problem. Humans change, a lot, as our lives advance. Hell, life is a process of constant change. We accumulate experiences and memories, learn new things, build new connections, change our opinions. Mostly this is desirable. Even if you had a perfect down-to-the-nucleon recording of the state of a person at a given point in time, overwriting a person with that state many years later would amount to killing them and replacing them with their old self. So the problem becomes distinguishing the good, wanted changes ('character development', even if contrary to what you wanted in the past) from the bad unwanted changes (cancer or whatever).

But then it gets squirly. Memories are physical too. If you experienced a deeply traumatic event, and learned a set of unwanted behaviours and associations that will shit up your quality of life, maybe you'd want to erase that trauma and forget or rewrite that memory. But if you're gonna do that... do you start rewriting all your memories? Does space become limited at some point? Can you back up your memories? What do you choose to preserve, and what do you choose to delete?

Living forever means forgetting infinitely many things, and Ship-of-Theseusing yourself into infinitely many people... perhaps infinitely many times each. Instead of death being sudden and taking place at a particular moment in time, it's a gradual transition into something that becomes unrecognisable from the point of view of your present self. I don't think there's any coherent self-narrative that can hold up in the face of infinity.

That's still probably better than dying I guess! But it is perhaps unsettling, in the same way that it's unsettling to realise that whether or not Everett quantum mechanics is true, and if there is a finite amount information in the observable universe, an infinite universe must contain infinite exact copies of that observable universe, and infinite near variations, and basically you end up with many-worlds through the back door. Unless the universe is finite or something.

Anyway, living forever probably isn't on the cards for us. Honestly I think we'll be lucky if complex global societies make it through the next century. 'Making it' in the really long term is going to require an unprecedented megaproject of effort to effect a complete renewable transition and reorganise society to a steady state economy which, just like life, takes in only low-entropy energy and puts out high-entropy energy in the form of photons, with all the other materials - minerals etc. - circulating in a closed loop. That probably won't happen but idk, never say never.

Looking forward to how this book plays with all this stuff.

[m1ckeyb3rry]

LMAOO im also chronically online this is a safe space for the chronically online dw (i also respond at chronically online speeds sooo) but FR THE UNHOLY TRINITY LMAOO if we add Raichi it’s the four horsemen of the apocalypse (bro has never played anything other than defense though and we like. NEVER see him touch the ball basically so uh sorry bro no sexy soccer time yet)

Honestly I don’t know why more people can’t just let people exist?? Like fr just leave them alone and live your life why make it so miserable for everyone sheesh…also please those twelve year olds on tiktok can’t even tie their shoe laces nor should they be on tiktok learning “potty mouth phrases” LMAO I think they need a reality check DESPERATELY

Never apologize for writing too much Karasu.

But LMAOO OK IM GLAD HAHA so real for that I can’t do what Reo or Barou do for him like I will not be the Anri to your Ego!!! Please put your socks in the laundry!!!! But this isn’t irl so he’ll still be a squishy bear to me

LMAO REALLL side character supremacy >>> Honestly I didn’t hate the animation either although I did notice some funky scenes it wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone made it seem…I’m glad to hear that they’re putting their eightbitussy into it though

He’s so captain it’s literally insane (quick we gotta talk more about this and manifest Karasu captain for u20 World Cup) Aiku honestly a good option too (I wanna see my man in action though) if it’s Isagi I’ll lowk riot

BESIDES AN EROTIC LEFT LEG GOODBYE that made me snort as I read this

I LOVE READING THE REFERENCES LMAOOO if they fit into the story keep them coming!!! (KARASU DROWNING SHDGSHSH IM NOT READY)

Ok yeah I also kinda ballparked that amount in my mind LMAO I forgot to mention this more in my last response but the ON SALE THING >>>> I laughed it was so goofy too like she caught him red handed THE NEXT DAY like bro those were NOT on sale…$50 for advice boy you’re not slick

Chefs kiss mc written wonderfully WITHOUT the typical overly used cliches as much as I love a stupid mc sometimes it’s quite an overused trope I feel where it’s the teehee dummy reader so again, this was refreshing LOL (I always love how you give your y/ns substance as characters and like humans..?? Like they all feel like actual people and aren’t your just your average w*ttp*d UwU MCs…I mean writers have to start somewhere so maybe I should stop bashing them like this but uh)

Honestly it’s such an interesting language which is why it takes me a bit to translate/transcribe sometimes because I can’t capture the underlying meanings or emotions as well in English LMAOO (the first time I tried was the hiori light novel and finding the correct phrasing was definitely a learning curve LOL) but omg slay you’re outperforming people living in the motherland!! That’s honestly really impressive, do you get to speak it frequently?

Snuffy’s backstory is actually so sad I can’t :(( also the SONG CHOICE??? Bye. But this is why I can’t even say “no one dies in soccer anymore” man

NO FR you know it’s bad when I’m impressed by a healthy family in bllk shdshhs HAHA FAIR TRADE INDEED o7 I have chapter 2 ready it was longer than I expected but I sped up the process using dictation as I read it LMAOAO so again if you catch any typos or weird punctuation lmk LOL (when I tell you I almost died dictating this I LAUGHED and reacted like omfg and it caught me saying that and wrote it down but ANGWAYS I’m not sure anything is beating this chapter) I know I said summary earlier but I don’t think I’m capable of doing that LMAOA so this is basically just the entire chapter I just reformatted it in a kinda summary like format because I don’t wanna keep pausing to type so many quotation marks HAHAHA anyways enjoy! I’ll come back to discuss after you read it so I don’t spoil anything yet hehe

Signing off early so it doesn’t weirdly attach to the end of the LN section LOL

-Karasu anon

2-Honor Student:

In elementary school, Kenyu was an honor student. Although he was a little cowardly, he was first and foremost, a kind, hard-working kid. he always did his homework and happily greeted everyone. Got along well with his peers and never fought. He was someone that both his classmates and teachers could rely on. When it was time to choose class president, Tomoda nominated him, and everyone joined in agreeing to nominating Kenyu. But after half a year, something shocking had occurred.

Little by little Kenyu had become better friends with his seatmate Tomoda, frequently going to his house after school. Tomoda had a kind sister three years their senior. She would often give them candy and play games with them. One day, Kenyu had gone over to play with Tomoda, to be told by his older sister that he hadn’t gotten home yet and was possibly taking a detour. She told Kenyu to go ahead and wait upstairs for him, but he wondered if maybe he was meeting with other friends in the park. He wondered if he too should go to the park, but it’d be troublesome if he had assumed incorrectly. While he was lost in his thoughts, Tomoda’s sister suddenly came up to him and brushed away his bangs. His hair had always been soft, and his mom had always helped him style it, so the Tomoda’s sister had always complemented him, saying his hair made him look so handsome like a model. It wasn’t unusual for her to touch his hair, but that wasn’t all that happened that day. In addition, she kissed his forehead. His eyes widened as his brain was left short-circuiting. “Huh?”

“My beloved Kenyu, let’s play together” she had said with sparkling eyes. Kenyu could feel his heart racing. “…I’ve gotta go to the park..!” His face turned bright red and he ran out. He didn’t end up, going to the park, but instead of ran back home to his room, waiting for his racing heart to still.

“My beloved Kenyu” He had repeated her words in his mind. he didn’t really understand it all, but he was happy that she said she liked him. He was a bit embarrassed, though that she had kissed him. He thought himself, “I’m never telling anyone about this.”

The handsome class president and honor student. By the time he became a second year, he had grown taller, adding to his versatility in giving him athletic potential. as he continued growing, he came to be one of the tallest in his grade. He was fast at running, and he was always the last one left in dodgeball. Then, of course, came Sports Day. After comparing all the times in their PE Class, Kenyu’s high ranking had gotten him chosen for the relay race. Everyone was in agreement. He was tall, fast and the perfect fit for the job. He was to be the anchor for the relay race. Was it really all right for him to play such an important role? he felt a bit uneasy, but he would give his best once again for the people relying on him. Until the day of the sports festival, Kenyu would run every day. He’d wake up early to run and practice dashes on the field after school. Every Sunday, he’d have his father time him. Finally, it was time for the class relay. Under the clear sky, the fastest runners would compete while the cheer squads cheered them on. Kenyu’s class, 2-1, however, would compete in vain. After each grouping, members of his team would slip down the ranks. By the time Kenyu got the baton he was in last place. There is a huge gap between him and the top, all the people running in front of him are the fastest in their class after all. But Kenyu had to try his best. Everyone had chosen him as anchor after all. He steadily started accelerating, passing by another player in just a quick moment. With his large physique moving vigorously and his feet firmly stomping against the ground, he gradually closed the gap between the other runners. His classmates all cheered for him, and as they continued supporting him, he continued gaining speed. Even the announcer from the broadcasting club got caught up in the excitement. With the loud cheers under the blue sky, Kenyu passed the final goal, bursting past the four other racers and finishing first. It’s the first time he’d ever run so fiercely. His chest heaved as he caught his breath. Kenyu had finished first for the sixth graders. His classmates had showered him with praise, wearing a big smiles on their faces as they crowded around him. Kenyu thanked them for their support, feeling that their cheers had powered him on. Kenyu was honest and sincere. He didn’t know he could run that fast. It’s because everyone had believed in him that he was able to discover a new part of him. To Kenyu, it was an incredibly joyous moment. A few days after that, when he got home, a shiny soccer ball was waiting for him in the doorway. Kenyu was surprised and had wondered what it was for. His parents had thought it would be good for him to give soccer a try, seeing how he was so fast. It would make him more popular too. After seeing that their child had such amazing speed they suggested that he try out a sport and bought him a soccer ball. Of course his mother also wanted to see him popular. Immediately, Kenyu went outside and tried kicking the ball. As he ran with the ball, he found that he couldn’t stop. He’d kick it forward and chase after it continuing on. “This is fun!”, he thought to himself. In all honesty, being able to dribble without losing speed is a technique that’s difficult for beginners, but Kenyu, blessed with incredible athletic ability, was able to do it from the start. That’s how Kenyu “met” soccer, his parents had blessed him with the opportunity. As if it was fate, Kenyu found himself absorbed in soccer.

i wonder what sexy soccer even is 😭 like what does it entail yk…HAHA chronically only gang rise 🤩 tumblr truly is the site for people of our kind i love it

the craziest to me is when they freak out about non-teenagers watching shows and writing fics meanwhile they are openly thirsting for old ass characters?? why are you at fourteen writing paragraphs abt every position you want to fuck toji and nanami in 😭😭😭 look i’m not going to judge too harshly because wtvr i get it but also like some of them need to realize that those in glass houses should not be throwing stones

the karasu tabito tag is basically mine atp DJSKDK i think every karasu fan has probably seen at LEAST one or two of my posts (whether it’s a fic or just one of my karasu shitposts)

EXACTLYYYY YOU WILL NEVER CATCH ME BEING AN ANRI there’s only room for one high maintenance person per relationship and that role is fulfilled by me 👆🏻 that’s why my other favs are karasu barou and reo…you know those kings are NOT letting their partners suffer 😫 however in fiction nagi is my squishy cuddly fluffy dog bf so he is still number one in my heart 😩

if it’s isagi i’ll be mad because he doesn’t even feel like he has any interest in being captain 😓 i think aiku could work but agreed we def have to see more of him plus i don’t think he’d be made captain as he’s not an og blue locker yk?? OMG but if the trend continues we should be able to manifest karasu as captain…holding a prayer circle now 🕯️🕯️🕯️ (lowkey it would be funny if ego made like kurona or niko captain just because they’re the only ones that aren’t batshit insane and typically keep their speeches and vocab relatively normal 😭)

the way eita didn’t think she’d check if they were actually on sale too is so funny like she’s been dying to go there did you think she wouldn’t go and ask if the sale was still going on?! SO not slick omg i love him though…but $50 FJKSKS idek where he got that type of money from

i do enjoy writing a good old dumb/oblivious reader every now and again but i do think they have to be done right to feel believable!! personally all of my y/ns and mcs are based off of aspects of my own personality — some closer to my actual self than others ofc — which i think makes it easier to flesh them out because it’s just like “okay what would i do in that situation” LMAOO most of my side character ocs are based off of people i know too which again makes it easier to make them feel complex because it’s like “right so how would ___ react to that happening to them”…sometimes they end up not even being that similar (tullia in pomegranate ink is NOTHING like my irl best friend that she’s “based off of”) but just thinking of them as real people helps me treat them as such in the narrative!!

haha yes everyone does start somewhere so i never try to hate to their faces but i think it’s okay to acknowledge a general trend/pattern!! like there’s a difference between saying “your specific fic sucks i hate how you wrote your main character” versus being like “i think a lot of fics in x fandom have this problem with characterization”!! to me it’s not hate because people can decide whether that applies to them or not yk?? and yeah the wattpad uwu mcs are truly smth…or the ones that are meant to be “badass” but are really just loud/rude/make overly sexual jokes and swear a lot 😭 a lot of the times at first it’s easy to make characters as stereotypes/caricatures of themselves or have them composed of cliches but i do think most people grow out of it i quickly!! just a phase we must all go through i suppose…i will be the first to say i was cringe when i started writing that’s why half of my old works are private now 😩

HAHA OUTPERFORMING INDEED it’s so funny whenever i visit india my relatives tell me it looks like my voice is being dubbed over because i speak such good hindi but i’m very pale by indian standards so i look like a foreigner 😭 which omg ik that’s such a stereotypical thing to be saying like “no i don’t look like my race” when you very obviously do but just this last january i visited india for the first time in six years and people IN INDIA (including literally people i’m related to) thought i was either irani, afghani, or from spain 😓 they’d get jumpscared when i’d speak to them in hindi KSDJKSAN their lives would flash before their eyes as they tried to remember if they had talked shit abt me 😩 i speak it a bit at home and with all of my extended family that’s kind of the only language they know so when i call them i speak it!! i also just have a really really good memory (hence the lack of studying) so i don’t forget things which helps me pick up languages rlly quickly

SNUFFY’S BACKSTORY KILLS ME it’s so sad yet also realistic??? like it really feels like smth that could’ve happened irl yk (idk if it’s based off of smth or not) but on the other hand yuki’s is so normal i love it 😍 the fact that he got into soccer in such an average and chill way too LMAOAOAO my unproblematic goat!! although the sister thing is so funny…i’m assuming this is a different friend’s older sister than the one he fell in love with at age 10 because according to egoist bible she was 16 😭 and this girl is only three years older than him so they must be diff?? lowkey crazy as hell omg even in elementary school yuki was pulling 😰 i always interpreted those two facts (his first love was his friend’s 16 year old sister and his first confession was when his friend’s sister kissed him on the forehead) as being abt the same person and it being like the 16 year old sister was just kissing him because he was a cute little kid and he misinterpreted it/got embarrassed because he had a crush on her if that makes sense?? but ig they’re different people entirely!!