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#okay folks Look At The Follow Up Reblog for good screenshots
sparring-spirals · 1 year
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how better to describe my love for the Mighty Nein than "one of my favorite episodes was the one where they needed to stealthily climb up/get down a fucking huge tree only for it to get Very Loud And Chaotic Very Fast Due To Competitive Tendencies And Poor Decisions".
Except that describes TWO completely separate episodes (and trees), one involving romantic shenanigans, a baby roc getting hit on the head with a staff, and a shitty leaf costume, and the other involving a good ole footrace and also a bullet to the ass. No, no enemies had a gun.
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triflesandparsnips · 7 months
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Good Omens Book Club
So I have, in other fandoms, talked about the importance of what an audience can actually see on the screen. Specifically: When a constrained format (like, say, between 45 to 56 minutes of a single visual/audio input) is telling a constrained story (like, say, something that must start, climax, and resolve within some kind of structure), it's useful for the audience to pay attention to what gets given the valuable real estate of camera/story time.
So when time is given and effort made to show the actual titles of actual books... well.
Figure 1. Local bookshelf weighted down by an over-abundance of literary allusions.
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This is a screenshot from episode 3 of Good Omens's second season, as Jim is reshelving all the books in Aziraphale's book shop by the first letter of their first sentences. He's about to shelve Jane Austens's Pride and Prejudice ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.") and the red sideways book, that he is about to pick up, is Good Omens itself ("It was a nice day.").
But, unusually, we can see the title of almost every other book on the shelf. Several of them appeared in the advertising poster, too, as I outlined previously (if you click that link, be advised that I am very proud of several bits of that essay and also let's not talk about how my go-to for musical references is Middle English folk rather than, say, Buddy Holly). Anyway-- with this in mind, and the understanding that time, effort, and celluloid have been spent on getting this shot to the audience, it would behoove us, I think, to actually look at these books.
Figure 2. A pair of showrunners providing not-so-subtle ancillary notation suggesting the same thing, so really, this is a no-brainer in terms of meta fodder.
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Okay, Trifles, so what about the book club
Technically, this isn't my idea. It's Neil's and Douglas's, so jot that down.
What I figure is, I can provide a list of the books shown, their first lines, and a VERY brief summary of each. Those are below. And as I rewatch the show, I may reblog this post with additions, but also...
I've read some of these, but not all of them, and not recently -- with at least one of them, though, I remember enough to know that the first line and summary do nothing to showcase the heartrending possibilities the book may be alluding to for the overall Good Omens narrative.
And further-- as I collected these summaries and first lines, I started noticing some compelling commonalities. Which I, for one, would like to confirm and dig into more deeply.
So while I'm going to start reading these, it might be a Nice Idea for other folks to do so as well. The more write-ups we can get, the greater the concordance of Interesting Insights might be available. (And if you tag me in your write up, or otherwise draw my attention, I will gladly link your essay up here for the edification of others omfg.)
ANYWAY
The "Jim Shelving" Book List
From right to left (which feels odd, but it's the actual alphabetical-by-letter arrangement), and summaries from various internet sources:
Herzog, by Saul Bellows
"If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog."
"Herzog is a 1964 novel by Saul Bellow, composed in part of letters from the protagonist [...] The novel follows five days in the life of Moses E. Herzog who, at the age of forty-seven, is having a midlife crisis following his second divorce."
A Series of Unfortunate Events, (series) by Lemony Snicket
"If you are interested in happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book."
The first book in the series, The Bad Beginning, "tells the story of three children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, who become orphans following a fire and are sent to live with Count Olaf, who attempts to steal their inheritance."
The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
"The novel details two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield after he has been expelled from prep school. [...] From what is implied to be a sanatorium, Holden, the narrator and protagonist, tells the story of his adventures before the previous Christmas."
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since."
"Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan."
The Bible, (anthology) by God et al.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
"25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying 'Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?'
26 And the Angel said, 'I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.'
27 And the Lord did not ask him again."
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
"It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills."
"Private investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wealthy General Sternwood to stop a blackmailer. Marlowe suspects that the old General is merely testing his caliber before trusting him with a bigger job, one involving Sternwood's two amoral daughters."
Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
"In George Orwell's iconic and prophetic masterpiece, 1984, a haunting vision of a dystopian future unfolds. Set in a world dominated by the all-seeing eye of Big Brother, the story follows Winston Smith, a lowly Party member whose very thoughts are scrutinized. As the Party manipulates history and suppresses truth, Winston's yearning for individuality and connection pushes him into a daring dance on the edge of rebellion."
[A title I cannot, unfortunately, read-- if anyone who HAPPENS to be familiar with the show and HAPPENS to perhaps also be on tumblr just HAPPENS to say what this book might be, that would be Very Much Appreciated]
"????"
[WOW I WISH I WAS A SUMMARY OH WELL]
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
"It was love at first sight."
"Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him. Joseph Heller's bestselling novel is a hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man's efforts to survive it."
Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
"The story, which treats the themes of love, aging, and death, takes place between the late 1870s and the early 1930s in a South American community troubled by wars and outbreaks of cholera. It is a tale of two lovers, artistic Florentino Ariza and wealthy Fermina Daza, who reunite after a lifetime apart."
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon
"It was seven minutes after midnight."
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a 2003 mystery novel by British writer Mark Haddon. [...] The novel is narrated in the first-person perspective by Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old boy who is described as "a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties" living in Swindon, Wiltshire. [...] Christopher sets out to solve the murder [of a neighbor's dog] in the style of his favourite (logical) detective, Sherlock Holmes."
The Crow Road, by Iain Banks
"It was the day my grandmother exploded."
A Scottish family drama about a perfect murder against the backdrop of the 1990s Gulf War. "This Bildungsroman is set in the fictional Argyll town of Gallanach, the real village of Lochgair, and in Glasgow, where the adult Prentice McHoan lives. Prentice's uncle Rory disappeared eight years previously while writing a book called The Crow Road. Prentice becomes obsessed with papers his uncle left behind and sets out to solve the mystery. Along the way he must cope with estrangement from his father, unrequited love, sibling rivalry, and failure at his studies."
No Woman No Cry: My Life with Bob Marley, by Rita Marley with Hettie James
"I was an ambitious girl child."
"Fans of reggae legend Bob Marley will welcome this no-nonsense biography from his wife, Rita, who was also his band member, business partner, musical collaborator and the only person to have witnessed firsthand his development from local Jamaican singer to international superstar."
I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."
"I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love."
...and because I happen to know and love this book, I'm aware of the devastating last lines...
"Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you."
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pyaasa · 3 years
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lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers is racist; she thinks she understands racism better than poc, stands by racists, and attacks poc for trying to speak to her about racism
Tw: racism, rape mention, incest mention. also possible transphobia 
For the full story, you first need a bit of background: if you’ve been following me for a while then you will be aware I have called out @ayeforscotland’s racism several times. I would recommend reading this post for a full explanation.
In addition to the incidences mentioned in the post I have just linked, ayeforscotland has also had interactions with neo @androidgynes who is Romani and another person who is black (but didn’t want to be named) and they’ve both also called him out for his racism.
Anyway so. @androidgynes​ saw that lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers was reblogging from ayeforscotland, and that the op of the post was @/getpoliticaluk (who defends incest). Androidgynes messaged lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers (who I will from now refer to as lagstm) and informed her that ayeforscotland is racist and getpoliticaluk defends incest - the conversation that followed went like this. (the below screenshots are posted with permission from @androidgynes​)
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The post that neo (@androidgynes) linked of mine was this. And I mean... clearly that particular post by ayeforscotland was very racist, he literally just sat there laughing about anti-black racism as if it was a joke. When @mangopickled​ tried to speak to him about how offensive this post was, he removed her comments from the notes of the post (like. to be clear: ayeforscotland, a WHITE MAN, made a post about racism, and then removed a WOMAN OF COLOUR’S commentary from that post when she told him that his comments were inappropriate). When I saw that, I called that out, and he blocked me. There’s many levels to his racism here that I don’t have the energy to explain, and if you don’t understand why it’s so problematic then you should probably stop reading here cos you clearly know nothing and probably care even less about anti-racism.
So on that particular post that neo linked to lagstm, there is ayeforscotland being racist, and 2 woc calling out his racism. And yet on having this post shown to her, this is how she chose to respond
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lagstm literally says that she thinks my views on racism lack nuance. I am a woman of colour, I am visibly muslim, and I’ve experienced racism pretty much all my life. And here is a white woman saying that she thinks my views on racism “lack nuance”. I,, I genuinely don’t have words to convey how angry this makes me. Literally who does she even think she is. Not even is it racist to dismiss my literal LIVED experience of being a woman of colour in this country, but she is literally saying “look at these stupid brown folk, they don’t know what they’re talking about cos they’re so stupid :)”
neo points out firstly that as a white person lagstm doesn’t have the right to make that call, and also that there is ofc another woc on that post saying that exact same thing, and androidgynes themselves are roma. lagstm is not just dismissing me as a stupid savage who is too stupid to form complex thoughts, but she is also indirectly saying the same thing about 2 other poc, and saying that her judgement, as a white person, is more sound than all of ours.
It’s also worth mentioning that neo, who is Romani, was polite to lagstm during this exchange, and lagstm was rude and dismissive. I find this deeply hypocritical. Lagstm has been talking a lot about the policing bill and how it will affect GRT communities, but when she’s talking to someone who is actually *from* the Roma community, she is dismissive and condescending. All this shows is that she’s fake AF. She pretends to care about the Roma community on her blog and then speaks down to them in private.
And again this is worth repeating: AYEFORSCOTLAND WAS BEING RACIST ON THAT POST. IT WAS RACIST. WHAT HE SAID WAS RACIST. So lagstm isn’t just ignoring 3 poc, she is also ignoring,,,, you know,,, the actual racism,,,
And she also says ayeforscotland is borderline racist? Like she acknowledges ayeforscotland is borderline racist but she’s still happy to follow him? Like that alone would be enough for me actually
neo then blocked lagstm and messaged me and told me what happened, and showed me the above screenshots - btw prior to this neo and I had never interacted. Anyway I was obviously a bit disgusted but instead of going straight to blocking lagstm or making a callout post straight away, I messaged her to explain herself and take back what she said. That is now two poc who tried to resolve the matter privately - clearly a lot more than lagstm ever deserved. Androidgynes messaged me last Friday, and I messaged lagstm the next day on Saturday
My convo with lagstm went as follows:
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So you can see that initially she was apologetic and said she “didn’t mean to imply that that my judgement on racism was flawed” (even tho that’s literally what she said) and defended herself by saying “I react poorly in interactions like this” - genuinely not a defence but whatever. She then proceeded to say that what she doesn’t trust my opinion on is Scotland and Ireland - which completely irrelevant. Firstly I am ambivalent to Scottish nationalism and have always said I don’t know much about it, and I support the reunification of Ireland. And secondly, my issue with aye has got literally nothing to do with Scotland or Scottish nationalism; he is racist all on his own. And the post neo linked was barely even about scottish nationalism, it was just him being anti-black. So lagstm saying “I don’t trust your judgement on Scotland and Ireland” is ridiculous considering that Scottish/Irish nationalism have nothing to do with this.
Like akjfbkjdfbs this is actually so ridiculous. It doens’t make any sense. Lagstm clearly says “I don’t trust pakisstani’s judgement on THIS issue [the issue being racism] and her views on THIS issue [the issue being racism] lack nuance” but now turns around and says “I wasn’t talking about racism, I was talking about Scotland/Ireland” like she must really think I’m dumb
And you can see Lagstm bringing up unrelated hypothetical scenarios, and saying “in this situation, you can’t tell me to defer to poc” which i found ??? Like why are you bringing up scenarios in which you think you are allowed to educate us poor and stupid black and brown folk?? I then told her she was straw-manning and that her points about Ireland/Scotland were ridiculous, but then she claimed it was me that was engaging her in bad faith. Like SHE, the white woman who practically said that I am too stupid to understand racism, and when confronted on it started straw-manning and bringing up unrelated scenarios, said I am not engaging her in good faith. AFTER both neo and I tried to speak to her privately about this. Like I tried to speak to her privately AFTER I FOUND OUT SHE HAD SAID RACIST THINGS ABOUT ME. BUT I’M NOT ENGAGING HER IN GOOD FAITH? LMAOOO
And then the accusation about rape threats which is actually the most disgusting part of this entire thing. I shouldn’t have to explain that accusing 2 poc of conspiring to send her rape threats (without any evidence whatsoever. Frankly I think she’s lying about the rape threats 🤷🏽‍♀️ it’s quite a transparent attempt to distract from her own nasty behaviour and deflect onto us) is actually extremely racist. She is invoking her white fragility and painting me and androidgynes as aggressors who are threatening her safety and inflicting/threatening to inflict sexual violence on her. It is beyond disgusting 🤮
What’s more, neo is trans, so when lagstm is baselessly accusing them of issues related to rape, she is also playing up to transphobic tropes.
One more thing worth mentioning is that there are several lies peppered throughout lagstm’s comments. Firstly when she claimed to have briefly unfollowed me - she didn’t actually. I was checking regularly, and she never unfollowed me. This was a small lie that I picked up on striaght away but because it wasn’t relevant I didn’t say anything about it. But I just think it’s interesting that she would lie for no reason. And another lie - feigning ignorance about ayeforscotland’s racism, and actually even asking for receipts is incredibly disingenuous when on this particular post, if you scroll through the notes, you can see she has literally liked it. Like she had already seen the posts where me and mangopickled called out his racism and literally LIKED it, and when neo says to lagstm that aye is racist, lagstm says “receipts please :)” YOU’VE ALREADY SEEN THEM! AND LIKED THEM! screenshot in case she unlikes it (sorry for including dumb comments by dumb scots but i need to prove it’s the same post so):
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LASTLY. Last point I swear. When lagstm said “it was also coloured by the statements they’d made about another tumblr user, which didn’t relate to racism, which I didn’t address with them because I didn’t want to upset them” <- she must mean getpoliticaluk defending incest? So like what is lagstm saying here, she didn’t want to bring up that she also herself defends incest?? Like is she tryna say she’s a pro-shipping freak?????????????????????? What other way is there to read that statment
Okay that’s everything.
I’m not interested in discourse on this post - if you are white and think lagstm isn’t racist or you’re inclined to defend her then save your breath, I don’t need white people telling me what is or isn’t racist. I gave her the chance to defend herself, which is way more than she deserves, and this is how she responds. Her actions and indefensible and she can choke ☺️❤️  I will be unfollowing/blocking anyone I see reblogging from her because I deserve better than to follow people who are ok with racists ❤️ 
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actor-mark · 3 years
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Red Candles Pt 7
Assist (CW: Some spoopi stuff ahead. Knife mention and image, gun mention and image, twisting/spiral hallway image and detail, slight hands horror. Be safe <3)
While you slowly get your bearings from the visit to Dark, you agree that he’s right and Mark needs to be stopped before you get too deep into his new manipulating game. 
Quickly you hurry up the steps to the upper floor and slip out of sight into the hallway. A long stretching path of doorways and an over the top Rich Boy carpet.
Before you are 7 doors. 3 on either side and one at the very end of the hallway.  You don’t remember this hallway from what you’ve seen of this place, and the longer you look towards that end door the more the hall seems to twist in a spiral, as if you’ll start walking on the ceiling if you followed the carpet. 
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Shaking your head you try not to focus on the twist of the hall and venture towards the first door on your left.  Red Candles... That’s all. Just gotta find some funky looking candle holder with red candles in it and somehow figure out how to make a “Hollow Flame” that’s blue. Easy peasy right?.... Right?
The first room is a small washroom, toilet, shower, sink and a fluffy towel on a rail. Not much of interest, not even things like toothbrush and such, its spotless, unused.  You back out and cross the hall to door number 2 on the right hand side.  A small study, a little searching reveals not much at all either.  Door number 3 on the left, a guest bedroom. Bed, desk, wardrobe, night stand, a trunk at the foot of the bed, nothing too fancy. Door number 4, locked.  Door number 5, another guest bedroom pretty similar to the first.  Door number 6, locked. Finally you reach the door at the very end of the hallway and out of instinct you turn to look back at where you came in.
The hallway is straight again... 
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It’s a little jarring but you know this house likes to mess with people. You feign being unphased by it and proceed to the final door. 
It opens with a slow creak and the room inside is bathed with a strange greenish glow, little particles float through the air like dust, like orbs, there’s whispers and intangible movement. The feeling of hands grip at your ankles, your shins, trying to drag you downward. 
There’s the feeling of a hand grasping around your throat, cutting off air, but you push forward. More and more hands and shadowy shapes passing in your peripheral vision. You’ve heard of them before, whether briefly or in detail. Hollows.
Empty shells, bodies without a soul, reanimated and left to wander. Mark’s puppets.  ɥⅎ ʌʌᴉn
You keep pressing forward and  finally reach the desk in front of you, hands phasing through it before you manage to place them and the room slowly bleeds back into reality again.  The glow gone, particles gone, whispers gone. 
“We’ll fight you in the harbor, we’ll battle you on land but when you meet singin’ pirates they’ll be more than ye can stand~ A pirate I was meant ta beeee, trim the sails and roam the seaaa~” 
You can hear Mark singing down the hall, odd.. wasn’t he downstairs? Is he looking for you? No... The room moved, of course it did. You’re downstairs again? Or is Mark now upstairs? Either way he’s close...  qoʌɥɹp ʌɥʅʅsx ʍɯz ɯʅɹƃⅎzx sƃɹp ʍzʌᴉ⅁
You opt for stealth and begin to search the room you’re in quietly, the house lead you here so best to check. But once again, there’s not much to see. Books, papers, a lamp, a chair... Why did it bring you here? To throw you off course? The house needs Mark after all. An eternal puppet, a toy, a play thing, kept alive for all eternity, and for what?
You curl your fists a little and go for the door, and enter the- kitchen? Okay. 
The kitchen’s how you imagined, same as what you had seen before, little Buddy was no longer here, but the kitchen had been left spotless by its previous inhabitant.  Maybe it would be a good idea to arm yourself..  y’know.. just in case?
Hunting around you find the knife rack, but in one of the draws it seems there’s also a hand held gun. Something feels off about them both but it’s one or the other.
Your choices are as follows: 
Take the knife If something were to happen, it’s the least lethal option at least. The blade is impeccably sharp though, glossy and reflective but it calls to you in a strange way. For some reason you hear the faintest notes of a music box in your head?
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Take the gun
Why is there even a gun in here? Who left it here? Is it Chef’s? Marks!? Better in your hands than his at least. A gun seems a bit extreme, but it will quickly keep your assailants at bay from range and you wont need to get close. Like the knife though..it seems to call to you in a way that feels unsettling. 
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sƃzʌʍ ⅎʅq ʇɯɹᴉʎ ooɹp sƃʅ⅄
OOC: Bit of a strange one this time but a little glimpse at the house and my concept of Hollows. For those who dont know what Hollows are, you’ll find out soon enough. 
Reminder to new folks joining, you can vote by sending an ask to the blog! Votes in comments or reblogs do not count as I wont be screenshotting them for the tally up as I do not get notified of these. I only get notified of asks (thanks tumblr) 
thanks again to those who have been voting through this story! 
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rrrawrf-writes · 4 years
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lordy lordy loo it’s been a hot minute since i’ve made an original post, i forgot where the button was
so. some of you may have seen the stuff running around about violetvineyard and mvcreates, some of you may not have. i’m just gonna lay out my experiences here, now that other people are talking about it and now that the server has been deleted. i’m gonna try to present a fair and nuanced version; i’m not gonna include screenshots (right now) bc i’m lazy, mostly.
there are several other people who are putting up way better breakdowns than i am. i just figured i might as well toss mine onto the pile bc why not? but if you’re hoping to hear from me a story about how i’ve been wronged, per se, you won’t find much of one, because i played mainly a spectator role, and never had much trouble there. i will have a vague, lukewarm defense of some of the people involved that other people may not agree with, but again, this is all just the whole VV deal from my point of view.
@nuwuhorizons (i haven’t said how dang much i lOVE your url) and @sapiencenotes have very good receipts and breakdowns. if you want a more in-depth (and dramatic, forgive me for using the word, i’m not trying to downplay this), check them out. @time-to-write-and-suffer also has some great stuff on their blog about all of this.
all righty. so. i joined VV not right at the beginning, but soon after it was started. there was an application process, i got accepted, i was looking for a community to help me start writing more. (it didn’t help, but that’s not their fault, that’s mine.) the person who owned the server was called mina, and on tumblr, mina’s url was mvcreates. mina is a nonbinary Muslim woman of color, a professional who i believe works at harvad and deals a lot with things like infectious diseases, iirc. she was doing a whole lot of work when the pandemic came around, and so the past few months wasn’t quite as active as she had been at the start, both on the server and tumblr. 
the very first time mina came on my radar, before i joined vv, was because she had corrected someone’s typo on a post, and it stirred up a minor drama about “don’t give unsolicited criticism” and “is pointing out minor errors like that okay” and blahblahblah. i ran across that on a friend’s dash, and also ran across the promo for vv from that friend’s dash, as well, and joined bc y not.
everything was p cool for a while. it was nice to meet some new people and some of my mutuals on there. mina seemed like a fun person. she was about a year, year and a half, maybe, older than i am. the first things that kind of started rubbing me wrong at the start was how she would kind of dismiss suggestions for the server than i and a friend had, and how she kept bringing up her age - she would often say things like “well i wouldn’t do that but i’m an Old(TM) so maybe i just don’t get it” and i can’t really explain why that bothered me. i think it felt dismissive, like Younger Folks Don’t Know How Things Should Work. also, like. she kept bringing it up. as if it meant something, as if plenty of us on that server weren’t actually around her age. there was a convo on vaccinations where i wanted to make the point that a lot of anti-vaxxers should be educated instead of ridiculed and shamed, but i never really got to making that point bc she jumped in very sharply and explained that anti-vaxxers all come from a class of people who are generally educated. i didn’t bother saying anything else. 
at the start, it was tiny little things like that. i chalked it up to her personality and mine just not quite matching up. i sat down a lot and examined my own internal biases, bc i knew something was bugging me, but i couldn’t tell if it was legitimate, or if i was jealous and petty, or if i was being discriminatory towards her identity. i still wonder that a lot; i want to be careful that i’m examining her actions here, and not the person who made those actions.
because the other thing that bothered me was that she was perfect at pretty much everything. she was a decent, if not good, writer, from what i read. i thought her “art”/edits were neat, even if sometimes i looked at them going “that just looks like an edit, not your own art, but u kno, edits are art too, so i’m not gonna say anything.” she had a lot of motivation, a lot of ambition. soon, this kind of transferred over into me feeling like she acted like she had to be perfect at everything. i think this is probably one of the more “lisa is just being petty” things, rather than a judgement on her character, but she seemed to flaunt her own skills and accomplishments a lot. not that no one is allowed to brag sometimes! but it was just another layer of “this bothers me.”
then there was the hero worship.
people in the server loved mina. i liked her. i had no problems with her, even if there were a few things i was a little “ehhhh” about. vv got pretty big, pretty quickly, and i assume there was a decent amount of turnover and people who just joined to lurk or sometimes share things in the promos channel or elsewhere. but the most active folks just. they adored mina with every fiber of their being. mina could do no wrong. no one ever called her out on anything; everything she did was hailed as fantastic and wonderful. and honestly, for the most part, it wasn’t like she was doing crappy stuff. some of the praise was well-deserved, imo, but it just bordered on embarrassing for some of these people, how much they just worshipped the ground she walked on.
and she didn’t really like, discourage it. like, at the start, i think i remember her being more modest, but in general, she just let it go, and so did i, bc like. i aint that kinda jerk.
the stated purpose of violetvineyard was to have a community that valued reciprocity. reciprocity was mina’s biggest thing. there was a channel for people to post their stuff on, so the rest of us could browse and read and reblog. i, admittedly, didn’t do as much of that as i wish i did, but part of it was because i do have a life outside of the internet, a memory and attention span the size of a gnat, and because like. 90% of the stuff that people put in the promos channel were things like edits, writeblr intros, wip intros, etc etc, when all i wanted was to just read some actual writing. but that’s neither here nor there. what got hilarious to me, though, was whenever mina’s fervent admirers would talk about how mina was, quote, a pillar of the community. how vv was doing something No Other Writeblr Group Had Done Before. how Important and Special this server was.
folks. i’ve been on here for several years now. we don’t have a community. we have a bunch of little cliques who reblog from their friends and complain about people not reblogging them. noah fence, but come on. vv got pretty dang big, but it was still a small corner of a small section of tumblr. like. sorry, all y’all, but them’s the breaks.
also, this was hilarious to me bc there are several big writeblrs who have been running around long before mina and vv showed up. yet, according to these people in the server, mina had Single-handedly Brought Hope To This Desolate Wasteland.
in the end, vv became just another little clique whose members reblogged from their friends. i don’t want to devalue the good that did come out of vv. a lot of the picture being painted rn was that the majority of the server were scary dog-piling people. the majority of the server were just writeblrs looking to promo their stuff and talk about their writing. unfortunately, few bad apples, bad rep, negatives outshine positives, etc etc. but i think it did do some good re: exposure for a few folks, even tho it didn’t turn into what it could have been. 
another one of the things that was a minor irritant to me was that they eventually started archiving the vent channel, which was probably the most-used channel. that didn’t sit right to me, but as always, i was a coward had nothing to say about it, so i didn’t. the reason given was that there were often things in the vent channel that people might regret being there, so it was periodically archived and a fresh channel started.
so i’m rambling a lot about stuff that’s probably boring and inconsequential. that’s 90% of this whole vv thing, tho, you need to understand that. 
the biggest thing that bothered me about mina, i think, came about from the constant hero worship from her adoring fans. and i know there’s a whole argument to be said about expecting labor from people with marginalized identities, which is an argument i agree with - don’t expect someone of a minority group to educate you or to face trauma or to shut down bigots, etc etc. but by now, mina had a lot of followers in general, and in specific, she had quite a few people who would defend her at every single perceived slight.
she made a lot of those fun writeblr reblog games, like “send me a fruit that says this about my writing.” those were cool, i’ll admit that. but she was super into “you have to send an ask to the person you reblog from, RECIPROCITY!!!!!!!!!!!” and seemed to struggle with the fact that sometimes, people don’t follow her established rules on her posts for these games. she’d complain about it every single time that happened in the vent channel, which, again, that’s fine? that’s what vents are for, it’s annoying to not get cool fun asks when you do these games, but also, that’s life for you. she could depend on her fans to send her plenty of asks, whereas the much smaller blogs who reblogged these games would probably get f-all, half the time. if you’ve gone through nuwuhorizons or one of the other blogs i mentioned earlier, you’ll have run across the incident where mina’s friends harrassed an 11 year old for not doing her ask game right.
an eleven year old. 
and this is my biggest grief with mina. she only stopped her friends from dogpiling people... once? maybe twice? that i remember. and not only that, but there were SEVERAL occasions where she would get on the vent channel, complain about someone who had said something wrong on one of her posts (and sometimes, again, these were legitimate!), and then ask if someone in the server wanted to reply to them. reasons for such ranged from “i’m too busy rn” to “they would probably listen more to a white person than me.”
again. this, on occasion, is not necessarily a bad thing. we cannot expect labor and response from minorities. my issue was that she kept doing this. and sometimes it was fine, just someone who would drop a note on the post or send a polite anon. but this, to me, the whole asking someone else to fight your battles for you? that really bothered me. mina is a grown adult. either ignore it, like the rest of us chumps, or deal with it yourself. having friends support you is not a bad thing - if i was attacked on tumblr and my friends jumped in to defend me, i’m cool with that. but i wouldn’t ask them to, and then not do anything myself.
to me, this attitude just encourages dogpiling. this felt like she was taking advantage of the people admiring her so whole-heartedly, and using them to deal with minor grievances. (again, i don’t want to downplay some of the actual racism and xenophobia she experienced on this website, because there was some pretty sketchy stuff that did need someone else stepping in to object to. but then there was “ugh this person asked me what program i use to make my music and i don’t want to answer them bc that’s rude,” and stuff of that caliber. like, mina, you built yourself a pretty big following here on tumblr, you don’t get to complain when people are trying to ask you questions and engage with you when you set yourself up as a knowledgeable person on a subject.)
i’m going to mention @gingerly-writing because she already made a post on the subject, but there was an instance where we were in the vent channel and watched a lot of mina’s friends send anons and reblogs of a hurtful nature to one person. eventually, ginger stepped in to say “hey, i don’t think we need to keep doing this, they are a minor,” and after she did so, i also jumped in, saying something along the lines of, “yeah, i’ve seen this kind of stuff blow up in another server and end in a really regrettable situation where no one was happy, can we stop.” both ginger and i received a private message from the mods (individually) saying that we shouldn’t police the chat, etc etc. not during that message, but on the vent channel, another mod jumped in to say that the people dogpiling the blogger were also minors. as if that makes it okay, and isn’t actually extremely worrying in its own right.
after that, i pretty much took a stance of “all right then i just won’t say anything at all.” i stuck around vv because i hated myself actually really liked a few of the others in the server, including a couple of the mods who are actually really cool people, not all the vv mods are sketch, and because honestly? i lowkey knew that vv was going to crash and burn sometime, and i wanted to be there to watch what happened. due to the pandemic, and her line of work, mina became less active, and the whole server died down a bit. 
then someone reblogged one of mina’s ‘art’ posts and accused her of tracing. mina’s admirers immediately jumped into action. nuwuhorizons has it pretty well documented on their blog. there was nothing in the server about it, except one of the others said “oh man i saw that and it pissed me off,” there was some minor chat, and then i woke up and wanted to know what had happened, and was told “don’t worry about it.”
so, naturally, bc the only thing i thirst for is water and Drama(TM), i went looking for it.
found it on some of mina’s friend’s blogs, where i found who had reblogged and said mina was tracing, and followed those reblog chains, where several of mina’s followers attacked the accuser and made fun of their name and age and defended mina, pulling out progress videos and stuff of mina’s work. the accuser was trans and still a teenager, even if technically an adult, so that made things a lot worse. mina eventually posted something explaining that she was pencil tracing and had a very cheery, false-positive tone to the whole thing.
things sorta ended at that, but then maybe the same day, or the day after, user hyba made that big ol post about the Big Scary Tumblr Mirror Website Copying All Your Good, Hard Work. mina and her friends jumped on this. they threw it in the server and talked about things like intellectual property rights and “i don’t like how this makes me feel :(” and from there, went in to how tumblr was a terrible garbage site and then mina and most of the mod team decided that it was time to pack up VV and leave tumblr completely. 
pretty much everyone i know were mina’s besties have vanished off tumblr. mina made an announcement that VV was “migrating” off tumblr and discord(???) and dropped another application to join the great vv migration. i did not apply bc i just have too freaking much going on in my life and needed to get out of this for the sake of my own mental health. it was tempting as hell, tho, i will say that. 
a couple things about this - at the time, mina is also having some pretty bad things going on in her family. she was very vague on the details, but i think that really contributed to wanting to leave; on top of the pandemic and everything else, she was probably heckin stressed. but also like. she never called out her followers for attacking her accuser. she never made any sort of post talking about it. she never told her friends on the server “hey don’t do that.” she never took accountability for it, or, honestly, for anything else she or her friends have done that didn’t feel too good. the mirror sites aren’t really a big deal. 
after the server was archived, it was left up a couple days so everyone could grab contact info, etc. during this time, i was checking the ‘violetvineyard’ tag and saw someone post “what happened to mvcreates they haven’t answered my application to vv,’ and i responded with “oh, the server closed down bc of the copy cat sites.”
the same day, i got a tumblr DM from one of the former mods asking me not to give away any details about vv leaving tumblr. it was very politely worded and everything, but it was still just like
okay? vv is over? why are you asking me not to say anything. and it wasn’t like i was even spilling any hot goss, i was just repeating the excuse (and i do mean excuse) mina gave us. 
anyway, that mod is off tumblr, too, as far as i know, or else they stealthin. which is fine, u do u, buddy.
uhh conclusion time, i guess? i have a few scattered screenshots of things, but i’m not posting em bc i’m lazy and also running late for a thing. but really, for me, i didn’t have a whole lot of beef with mina or pretty much any of the other folks on vv. i thought that mina and her friends were a bit too eager for blood, and that really bothered me. i’m annoyed they shut down vv completely, because it could actually have been something great. if mina wanted off writeblr, i wish she had given the whole network over to people interested in running it; instead, what was a good thing for a lot of people is now completely gone, with no existing framework for people to build on. sure, anyone can go make their own network/family for writeblr, but now it’s just going to splinter into a bunch of different, smaller groups, and we’re all back to square one.
but whatever. i didn’t get to see the server go down in flames, instead it just ended with a hasty retreat and a few whimpers, and quite honestly i wished my staying in had paid off.
i do want to reiterate - there were quite a few people in vv who i think are great, and this does include some of the mods themselves.
i’ve also gotten a couple messages from a few other folks who had been in vv who have their own real, real sketch stories, which are making me rethink how i feel about mina and her friends, and all the good credit i gave them. i just wanted to present this bc it’s my blog and i do what i want, fight me.
and if anyone wants to chat about vv, hit me up. i keep things as private as you want them to be, and i love love love talking about this nonsense. Give Me The Deets.
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ms-demeanor · 5 years
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I don't know if you'd prefer this here or at your psyops page, but have you seen not-safe-for-democracy and if not may I garner your opinion on legitimacy? I followed it bc they don't talk too much (less drama for a low braining app) but some of what you said made me question myself. It's minimal, but tagged, screenshots but links if article, etc. Since you seem to dig into this I thought you'd have a better feel than me. If you have spoons I'd appreciate your opinion.
Okay, so I looked through the blog.
First off, folks, if you DO suspect a blog please send it to me off anon or through a DM so that I can respond without publishing the post because if at all possible I’d prefer not to publish any names that I suspect until I’ve got a significant body of evidence against the blog.
BUT the reason I’m okay with publishing this is because not-safe-for-democracy falls in with liberalsarecool, thetrumpimpeachment, and berniesrevolution as blogs that I consider “feelgood facebook spammers.”
Congratulations, you hit a nerve because blogs like this have been irritating the shit out of me for years now.
I don’t necessarily think that these blogs are malicious and I’ve not seen them reblog much misinformation (though sometimes they exaggerate and a lot of their content never had any context in the first place - they do definitely pattern-match in the “original content is largely screencapped offsite” category) but they’re just kind of useless yes-man blogs that I kind of tend to think of as hopelessly democrat.
They focus a lot on russigate and collusion and how the election was stolen and impeachment and.
You know what it reminds me of? The John Mulaney “horse in the hospital” bit. Midway through the bit he says something like
“And then you go to brunch with people and they say ‘there shouldn’t even BE a horse in the hospital’ and it’s like ‘YEAH, we’re way past that.’”
These blogs give me significant “pwning the republicans” vibes. They feel smarmy and self congratulatory and useless. I am reminded of the friends I have who still call Trump “Cheeto Hitler” or “45″ or anything other than his name as though that’s a meaningful protest.
These blogs all have “Resist” bumper stickers on their cars but roll up their windows if there’s a homeless person in the crosswalk. These blogs own “Nasty Woman” tee shirts and are glad Backpage got taken down.
Sometimes the things they post make you smile, sometimes they make you angry and want to get out and vote. Sometimes they’re lacking the nuance that you’d really need to make a cogent argument or have a good discussion.
They’re like political cartoons.
They’re irritating but probably pretty harmless and I’m not finding any evidence of misinformation or (extremely weird) networking or posting patterns.
BUT - a handy point of comparison!
Useless-Anti-Cheeto blogs reblog from each other, take content from other sites, don’t write much commentary, and minimally tag but they do not self-reblog at high rates, reblog much from noticeably human tumblr users, or reblog meme/cute animal/awesome art viral posts, which are some of the hallmarks of the kinds of blogs I’m talking about. They’ll totally make fat jokes or talk about how Obama was a “real man” but they’re not pretending to be the private blog of a real person and they’re not carefully constructing the conditions for virality.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually, you know what! This is some data I need! If you have been followed by liberalsarecool, makedonalddrumphagain, berniesrevolution, republicansareterrorists or any of these types of blogs please let me know!
One of the things the other blogs I’m tracking do on a regular basis is like/reblog/follow regular tumblr blogs which gets them lots of follow-backs and there are several people who have commented “yeah, I initially followed blackqueerblog because it followed me and liked some of my posts but then I got irritated with all the reblogs and I was confused about if we were actually mutuals” - as yet I have *not* seen that kind of behavior from Useless-Anti-Cheeto blogs and if you’ve been followed by one or interacted with one I’d like to hear about it!
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gegenji · 5 years
Text
Shadowbringers Ending Tangent
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----------------- WARNING!! -----------------
This is all highly spoilery and talks about the information provided during the last stretches of the expansion up to and including both the final battle and the aftermath thereof. Therefore this is all going in a Read More, and I highly advise not clicking unless you’ve completed the Main Scenario. Or you don’t mind spoilers, of course.
You have been warned!
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Okay, now that we have that out of the way, I want to discuss two plot points and an amusing musing to wrap things up. The big two, however, are as follows:
Who is the Warrior of Light?
What is the Nature of the Echo?
One leads into the other, and I’ll include a couple screenshots for reference. At least for the first part. The second is more personal theory than anything that was overtly (or perhaps subtly) provided by the expansion itself, and thus has no real evidence to screenshot. Still, I want to throw it all out there for folks to think about (or just tell me I’m dumb and thinking way too hard about things, either or)!
So, to begin...
Who is the Warrior of Light?
With the lead-up to the final battle with Solus/Emet Selch/Hades, a lot of things got thrown at us very quickly. But there’s a few things that got mentioned both here and in Amaurot (the section of the Tempest, not the dungeon itself) that I think give us some insight into who the Warrior of Light is - as well as who they were.
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First and foremost, we learn that Ardbert is basically the First’s version of the Warrior of Light, or - more precisely - a sundered fragment of them. It was mentioned that his aether has the same hue as the WoL’s by the Amaurotine shade who talks to them in the “Amaurot DMV” as I like to call it. We already know - thanks to Solus’ demonstration in the Crystal Tower - that Hydaelyn’s power is such that it can split one into many, lesser fragments (which is what caused the Sundering). The Warrior of Light made up of seven fragments of themself rejoined - and it’s the eighth from Ardbert himself that allows them to be able to contain the overwhelming Light of the five Wardens they absorbed and bring it to bear against Hades.
But it’s the other bits that follow hints to what the original form of the Warrior of Light was prior to the Sundering:
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This is more subtle, but the clincher is the moment I’m sure everyone remembers (as it’s a supremely awesome scene!):
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Given this scene after Ardbert’s rejoining with the Warrior of Light and - more importantly - Emet’s reaction to it along with the hintings our shade friend made, I think it’s pretty obvious who the WoL was prior to the sundering: Emet’s friend who spoke to you in the DMV - Hythlodaeus.
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Perhaps there was more to the Shade being aware than Emet just thinking “oh, they’d figure it out.” Perhaps there was a bit of resonance as the Amaurotine recognized itself in the Warrior of Light, and in the faint echo of Ardbert. And it was that which helped allow them to become aware enough to gain awareness despite being an arcane doppelganger. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it and Emet thinking Hythlodaeus would figure it out was enough.
But there’s other tidbits that I think also provide a bit more context on who this Amaurotine is beyond just “Emet’s Pal.” During the exploration of the area, it’s revealed that one of the Fourteen - the leaders of the city - is doing something heretofore unprecedented and stepping down from their position. This leader is never named and nothing is ever said about them. We know from Solus’ side-conversations that the rest of the Fourteen (of whom our Big Three Ascians were members) imbue the star with its own will and create Zodiark - and are tempered by him in the process.
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The Fourteenth, however, escapes this. Whether they’re involved in the summoning of Hydaelyn to counter Zodiark, I do not know. I believe not, but the Amaurotine in question being tempered by Hydaelyn could explain the Blessing of Light. After all, Ifrit claims the WoL “belongs to another” - though the Echo itself seems to block tempering in general anyway.
This could explain why the Warrior of Light is so strong. It’s not just that they’re 8 rejoined Amaurotine fragments, they’re the fragments of one of the Fourteen - someone on the same power level as the Big Three. Perhaps that’s why they’re so darn good at everything.
And, to lead into my next point - and my personal conjecture - why they have the Echo.
What is the Echo?
We know that all the Ascians have the power of the Echo, and the Echo is a keystone for how their powers work. We also know that the Big Three are the survivors of the Sundering, and they flaunt how they know how we don’t truly understand what the Echo actually is. And I think I know why:
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The Echo is a manifestation of Amaurotine aether.
When the Amaurotine died or were sacrificed or still living at the point Hydaelyn caused the Sundering, they and their aether were split across the Reflections. And it’s the fragmented manifestation of them that results in the Echo. At least, that’s my theory anyway.
After all, the Amaurotine were ageless and undying prior to the Sundering according to Emet. Wouldn’t an imperfect version of this allow for, say, one’s essence to survive beyond death and move to a new host? The soul is “too powerful” to return to the Lifestream. 
Also, the Amaurotine’s aether was so great that they could Create (read: summon) and have their creations (read: Primals) live just off their aether instead of needing to take it from people and the planet. And without being tempered (as I believe Zodiark and Hydaelyn were just on a scale so vast that their Will overwhelms even Amaurotine resolve). Having even a bit of that aetheric capability - or overbearing Will - could be what prevents people with the Echo from being tempered. And it could explain why Ysayle - who had the Echo - was able to so easily manifest as Shiva as well as maintain her sense of self during it.
Thirdly, even despite speaking a language that no one present at Amaurot could speak, all the Scions understood what was being said. And the Amaurotine shades understand what is being said in turn. A preternatural ability to speak and understand all languages. Sound familiar?
It was my original belief that to have the Echo manifest requires that the original Amaurotine involved to be exceptionally skilled or powerful (hence why Ardbert apparently also had the ability, which links to my “one of the Fourteen” theory) and/or that enough Amaurotine aether is in a person that the skill/power threshold needed is lower. Hence why we are seeing people manifesting the Echo on the Source - seven rejoinings means that people are nearly half-Amaurotine at this point, so the more powerful Amaurotine souls are manifesting the Echo.
Taking this further, it’s feasible that all the Echo-users are the souls of the strongest of the Amaurotine - the Fourteen. Which would also explain why they’re so rare - as there would be just fourteen souls (barring uplifting through Ascian interference or replicating that aetheric energy through Resonance - though I have a pet theory that Zenos might actually be one of the Fourteen as well and was “inactive” due to being born a Garlean) that could be strong enough to make it manifest. After all, we only know of five (the Warrior of Light, Minfilia, Krile, Arenvald, and Ysayle) that were 100% not induced (unlike Fordola and Zenos, and the sahagin priest could very well have been uplifted by the Ascians, though could be the sixth if not). Adding the Big Three, that’s eight out of fourteen - leaving six unaccounted for.
Six (or five, if the sahagin counts) who might get revealed as the story unfolds - perhaps as Elidibus’ ‘Warriors of Light’ he threatened to send at our heroes at the very end of the MSQ. And I wouldn’t put it past SE to have the biggest players all be of these original Fourteen. Hence my pet theory of Zenos being one as, after all, he had the same treatment as Fordola yet has much higher capability - such as the body-hopping. And, if we want to go full theorycrafting and believe that being born Garlean inhibits Echo capability like this, perhaps our other major Garlean player Gaius is a latent Fourteen member.
Again, this is all conjecture based on what’s been presented thus far and has no real concrete proof behind it. However, I think I might be onto something with all this and thus my desire to just dump it all out for others to see and think on. Maybe provide more information that could prove or disprove my theory! I’m honestly curious to see what people think about it, so feel free to comment/reblog with your own thoughts!
And now for that Amusing Musing.
With that very last cutscene in Garlemald at the end of the MSQ, I’m getting a funny feeling that Zenos is going to try to do what he did with Shinryu but on a much bigger scale. After all, he just found out that Hydaelyn and Zodiark are Primals. And he’s out to get the Best Battle Ever with his War Crush, the Warrior of Light.
So I’m banking on him absorbing and (perhaps attempting and failing to) controlling Zodiark. And the Warrior of Light is forced - either by Zenos himself or as the only possible way to deal with him - to do the same with Hydaelyn. Which, of course, leads to the climatic final battle between the two. A titanic clashing of two god-men wielding the powers of the Two Greatest Primals.
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... Please look forward to it.
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cuddleslutloki · 5 years
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I have a genuine question. How often do you actually deal with antis? I've been following you for a bit now and it seems every so often you bring up antis. I've certainly kept my interest about thorki shut and locked away in a box from my friends for the simple fact that all of them think it's incest. It's not an easy topic of conversation but you just seem to handle all the antis so well? Also on an off note about beast!Thor, his favorite pass time must just be rutting into Loki 24/7 🤔
when someone tells you that you're romanticizing abuse [bc i made a stockholm moodboard for a fic] I don't know what I'm supposed to say other than I don't condone it but I write about it? Is writing about abusive relationships bad in writing??? you're the only person i ask for advice so thank you for anything in advance
i’m honestly really glad you came to me. i really do like discussing this topic in this kind of way bc i’ll never reblog an anti or answer an anti ask. even if you’re arguing against them, i don’t think it’s worth it to argue against them if it means also spreading what they’re saying
the basic premise of all anti behavior and ideology is censorship. that’s all it is. 
“i don’t like this topic, you need to stop writing it and making art for it. if you don’t stop there will be consequences.”
that is censorship and that is the kind of shit fandom has had to fight ever since there’s been fandom. women, poc, lgbt+ folks have been dealing with people telling us what we can and can’t write and enjoy for... well, probably forever. but we’re still here, creating the kind of content we want to see and indulge in.
as far as how to deal with antis, my advice is to ignore, ignore, ignore. they want what any bully wants: attention
you stop paying attention, you stop giving them time they don’t deserve from you, they’ll die off. there’s no point in fighting them directly. produce the content you want to see and enjoy what you want to enjoy. drown them out. you don’t owe them a response just because they come to you. they don’t have any qualms about being rude to you, so be rude back and just ignore them. i love blocking antis, personally. take out the garbage, y’know?
antis use the words ship and support as synonyms because they think that shipping is some radical call to action for lgbt rep instead of entertainment
shipping is not activism. shipping is about entertainment and enjoyment, nothing more
so this is why i have this very blasé attitude about antis. i just don’t give a fuck about them beyond making posts trashing their idiocy. because that’s what it is. it’s idiocy, but going deeper it’s puritanism at its finest. antis use fox news scare tactic logic under the guise of some pseudo feminist agenda because they don’t understand and don’t want to understand that enjoying dark fiction as entertainment isn’t equivalent to some greater moral stance
they use the same argument about shipping and fanfiction that WASP moms use against video games and loud music: that enjoying and consuming it will make you think it’s normal and there’s nothing wrong with it irl
okay, well, vlad the impaler never played CoD or far cry and caligula never watched hentai but we know why i’m bringing them up in this context without even heading over to wikipedia, don’t we?
they use the words abuse and pedophilia waaaaaayy too liberally and they’re doing more harm than good because they’re twisting and warping words that should have very specific meanings by using them so goddamn vaguely and irresponsibly 
my own personal theory is that these people are terrified that if they don’t yell in opposition to these topics 24/7 and actively attack content creators that they’d probably enjoy it, and they’ve been so programmed by the echo chamber of tumblr and twitter that they think this means they’re bad people. 
spoiler alert: that’s not what it means
i literally watched a circle jerk on twitter where screenshots of some mafia starker au got tweeted and retweeted w/ pictures of someone pouring bleach into cereal and people had asked to see more of the post. if you really don’t like something, you shouldn’t hate-read about it. it’s not productive, it does more harm than good if that’s the actual issue rather than some reverse psychology-style enjoyment they’re probably getting out of it.
they claim to hate this shit so much, but they’re reading hundreds and thousands of words and putting these images in their heads of their own free will. i don’t do that with shit i genuinely dislike. i avoid it.
i see antis say they enjoy thorki fanart because they think it’s cute, then they see it’s tagged thorki and they have an over the top reaction because the nature of anti ideology states you should never enjoy something like that, so if you do then you have to make the excuse of ignorance to prove that you’re still innocent and pure. enjoyment is apologism to them because they aren’t content to simply attack fan creators, they want to try and drive away the people who consume our art as well because they know you’re the cornerstone of fandom. consumers are why creators create. yeah, i write because i enjoy it, but i also write to connect to my readers and have people commenting on my fics when they like them.
it’s also worth noting that antis only ever talk about shipping. they only talk about sexual and romantic ships. i’ve never seen an anti talk about (often extreme) levels of violence in canon source material for the ships and characters they want to froth at the mouth over. 
seeing someone bleed out and choking on their own blood after being stabbed or shot or bludgeoned? meh
seeing a character who was once a child have a sexual thought about a character who was also once a child and is also their close friend? omg why are we trying to make fandom unsafe for people?
personally, i’ve also noticed that fandoms with darker canon material tend to have more chill fandoms most of the time. i think it also depends on the average age in a given fandom. there’s a major difference between fannibals and steven universe fans, let’s just say that.
creating a moodboard for a dark fic is not “romanticizing abuse” and at this point antis honestly have no fucking idea what that phrase is. they use those words the way a bored CEO uses social media buzzwords and hashtags in a staff meeting
if antis want to see true romanticizing of abuse then they can go to serial killer thirst tags and spot the fucking differences between shippers and people who forget that ted bundy was weak, flaccid, cowardly piece of shit
writing something dark or violent or whatever else and condoning the act or doing the act are different. this is why stephen king isn’t under government surveillance or in prison.
make no mistake, this anti shit only applies to fandom. they’re attacking creators here because creators out at the professional levels don’t give a fuck. they’ve tried, and they’ve failed. 
creators at the professional level understand something antis don’t: that being able to reconcile your enjoyment of dark media can be a sign of emotional intelligence and good emotional health. it’s cathartic. it’s allowed to be cathartic.
the most common consumers of dark fiction are members of minority communities and people who’ve been emotionally and/or sexually repressed for one reason or another. 
antis want to say that fiction doesn’t exist in a vacuum and they are 100% correct! because writing fanfiction and original fiction that relates to parts of my life that nearly killed me gives me control over something that was beyond me in the original context. writing about fucked up codependent, violent romance allows me to process my shit in a way that’s healthy and produces something fun and enjoyable.
my therapist knows i ship thorki, she knows i write thorki. i’ve had her read pieces of fanfiction i’ve written in addition to pieces of original fiction. y’know what she said? “wow, baylen, that’s vivid. you have a way with words!”
i read her a line out of smart boy and told her what the story was about and this trained professional said “well it’s a productive way to process some emotion that you clearly need to let out”
but you know what? if someone doesn’t have the trauma i have? let them write it, too! let them create and enjoy the fictional content they want! more cake, y’all!
finally getting around to one of the first parts of your ask, lol. thorki is incest. thor and loki are brothers. they were raised believing they were blood brothers, even. loki being adopted doesn’t change a thousand years of personal history where thor looked at loki and thought that they came out of the same woman, y’know? 
that’s his brother and in the comics his attachment to loki is even more intense. the mcu nerfed that shit. loki’s life has been intrinsically tied to thor’s ability to feel a full sense of joy. 
enjoying an incest ship isn’t some sign of moral depravity. writing abusive relationships isn’t bad. gone girl was made into an award winning movie. art should look like life, and sometimes life fucking sucks. dark stories, sad stories, fucked up holy shit idk if i can go to sleep after i read this stories exist for a reason. we need them. we have to have an outlet for our frustration, our anger, and especially our fear.
so which is the healthier option of these
to write up a piece of fanfiction where two siblings are in love in a way that might be cute and soft or might be destructive, depending on your mood?
or
attacking strangers you don’t know online and threatening violence against anyone who doesn’t think like you do?
i know what kind of person i want to be.
ship and let ship, thanks for reading my doctoral thesis office hours are always
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iwatobies · 5 years
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That’s right folks, the Reigisa Creative Works Exchange is finally here!!!!!!!!!
For those of you just joining the party, this exchange is a free-for-all, gift-giving extravaganza for anyone and everyone to participate in and enjoy! And if you have been listening to me go on (and on) about this since September, kudos to you and you probably know this by heart but I’ll repeat it anyway~
The rules are very simple: if you have a gift you wish to give to the Reigisa fandom, simply post it here on tumblr.com and tag it as #reigisaexchange. (Please remember to put it in the first 5 tags you use or we won’t see it!) We here at @iwatobies​ will reblog your gift for all our followers to see, and hopefully everyone just has a really great time! The event starts on Friday the 14th of December (which just happens to be Rei’s birthday) and runs until the 24th. There is no pressure to create a particular gift for a particular someone because we will love and appreciate every single fic, fanart, amv, meta post, gif, graphic or ANYTHING ELSE you wish to create! And the more gifts given, the more we all receive! 
Everything will be stored under this tag on our blog for easy access!
Please check out the details under the cut for any questions or contact mod Kyra here at @iwatobies​ for any additional help!
Thank you for your creations, everyone, and let’s have a great event!
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-mod Kyra
Here we go, the nitty gritty!
First off, since this event runs until the 24th, it is not too late to participate! Gifts are accepted and appreciated the whole time! And there is no rush at all to post gifts all at once—in fact, it’s probably more fun to stagger gifts so that the event keeps going for all ten days!
If you find yourself strapped for ideas, some wonderful followers submitted a few ideas to consider that you can see HERE. There’s also some broad suggestions for themes listed at the bottom of this post HERE. But really, go wild with your own ideas as well! And if you don’t happen to finish on time, that’s fine. We will of course accept late submissions! This event is built on the idea of being a low-stress, plain old fun explosion of new Reigisa content for us all to enjoy!
How many gifts you give is up to you! (And if you don’t have it in you to create something this year, then I fully hope you enjoy seeing other people’s creations!) Works of the (ahem) not so safe for work variety ARE ALLOWED. However, with the new tumblr rules coming into effect soon, please post a censored or incomplete version of your work to tumblr and host the main event on a different website, otherwise we cannot reblog it here. Archive of our Own and fanfiction.net are good sites to post erotic fanfic. Pixiv, Twitter, Patreon, and Deviantart still host erotic images, so those are some possibilities for artists to use as host sites. If any questions or concerns come up, feel free to contact us immediately. 
Please post each gift with the tag #reigisaexchange. You can also tag #iwatobies as we’ll be checking that tag regularly as well. You don’t need to mention this blog or the exchange directly in your post if you don’t want to—as long as you tag it with #reigisaexchange, we’ll know it’s a gift! Although if you are making a gift to fulfill a specific request, it might be nice to mention that so that the requester can find your gift more easily!
We will reblog each gift THREE TIMES to make sure they all reach a broad audience. If you posted your gift and do not see it in the EXCHANGE TAG after a 24hr period, then please let us know so we can correct that immediately! Any questions or clarification posts will also be in that tag if you happen to send us an ask. 
In the case you don’t want to be attached to a gift directly (shy artist or a really smutty fic maybe) you can submit the art or a link to the fic to us and we will post it, crediting an anonymous donor. Anything to make people feel comfortable!
Everything after this is examples of posts for anyone who hasn’t participated in exchanges before, so if you could use some help with that, keep reading, but otherwise, I hope to see your creations!!
Okay, so if this is your first time doing anything like this, it’s pretty easy! You can host sfw gifts on your own blog, but if you feel like using an outside site, even for sfw gifts, here’s an example to help out.
Since fic will likely be the most common submission, here is a screenshot of an example link for a fic I posted last year:
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This was done by choosing to create a LINK POST, and then setting that link to the fic on my Ao3 account. I chose to include the fandom, pairing, and word count info because...that’s just what I like to do, but you can include whatever information you want. In my experience, putting word count and (I didn’t do that in this example, whoops) rating is a good idea to give potential readers an idea of what they’re looking at. Adding a summary or excerpt can also help draw readers in. And if you’re writing for the exchange, tagging #reigisaexchange would be the priority at the end there. 
If I was dealing with a photo that needed to be censured, instead of a linked post, I would suggest posting the sfw version of your art as a photo post (cropped or using those thick black lines to cover the naked bits), and then putting the link to the full thing in the description. 
If you have any further questions, please let me know. No such thing as a dumb question. Just remember that this event is designed to be low-stress, so if anything is stressing you out, I am all ears!
Have fun guys!
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fair-fae · 7 years
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You know, I'm not a drama person, I don't like it, but it came up on my dash so much that I kind of had to read it. All of that nonsense could've been avoided if you didn't even take it to the public. Judging people for THEIR characters that THEY made and can do WHATEVER the hell they want with them? Oh woo ho good job, you're so popular for taking the "barrage" of it. No. all it did was prove that you're a D-bag and I've got a nice, long list of people to block now and avoid contact with.
Okay, anon. I haven’t bothered setting the record straight with most of this shit, because I know folks like you will continue to believe what you want to believe and hear what you want to hear, just like you’re doing now. But I’ll bite. You’d think all of you getting onto your soapbox about how you shouldn’t judge or attack others wouldn’t keep talking shit about a situation you know nothing about and/or are terribly misinformed about. So I’ll enlighten you with what actually happened.
A while back, the person in question got into an argument with some people on the RPC, trying to tell them that their interpretation of the lore was wrong. Rather than leaving it at that, when he effectively got shut down there, he proceeded to take a screenshot of the conversation and post it on his tumblr, complete with a rant about the people who disagreed with him, their opinions are so wrong and awful, how dare they disagree with him, etc. essentially playing the victim when he was the one to try to badger them for their opinions in the first place. He also left their names, icons, signatures, etc. in full view.I responded and told him he probably shouldn’t be trying to harass any other people about the lore considering his own character concept (thus, you would think, making my opinion on his character pretty clear). Why? Because it’s fucking true.I don’t give a shit about the lore or whether anyone follows it. Probably every single one of my own characters at least bends the lore. But at least have the self-awareness and respect for your fellow role-players to say “yeah, my character breaks the lore” or not get your jimmies rustled every time someone says “oh, yeah, his character is lore breaking.” You wanna break the lore? Cool. Own up to it. And if you do break the lore, don’t try to force everyone else into following it–especially when you can’t even admit you break lore and instead stretch the lore to try so hard to justify your entirely lore-breaking character concept. Don’t try to heckle people for presumably doing what you do but won’t admit. Granted, these people weren’t even breaking lore anyway, which makes his insistence that they were even more ridiculous.So after some excuses about how he was trying to start some intellectual discussion or something and not just drag these people despite featuring their identities and primarily just complaining about them throughout the post, he admitted he should have at least edited out their names and apologized. Great! You’d think that should be the end of it. I didn’t have anything against him at that point, but also had no desire/reason to associate with him, so I didn’t. A couple months go by. Some post comes across my dash. A girl in the community is doxxing her online ex-boyfriend in a callout post about him for unexpectedly breaking up with her because she “thinks” he was lying to her about serious issues and “believes” he was cheating on her. Because I’m a loud and opinionated person, and because that’s some heinous thing to do, I spoke out against it (via a post on my own blog without naming names, mind you, because I’m not going to hijack someone else’s post with negativity or call them out by name). The girl found it, assumed it was about herself, flipped out, and then of course I was the bad guy for saying doxxing isn’t okay. And then the person in question joins in. Not even to discuss the topic at hand, but to dredge up the old drama about how I was so mean to him and he did nothing wrong, etc. A pretty crappy 180 turn for a person who apologized and made it seem like there were no hard feelings, but whatever. Someone saw that he obviously didn’t like me, and seized the chance to try to talk shit and spread rumors because they knew he’d give them the platform. They sent him some anon about how I hate women (lmao). And of course, he published it, with no skepticism or disagreement, only more commentary about how I’m mean and awful. I went to respond, only to find myself blocked. So I went on about my life because it’s not that big of a deal, but hey. The moment you talk shit about me, especially in a venue where I can’t respond, especially facilitating some lies and BS rumors, especially after leading me to believe we’d made amends–you aren’t off limits. You don’t get spared niceness and politeness. Is that mean and petty? Probably.¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’ve never claimed to be a nice person.Now, to the horrible, awful thing I did to make this “public.” Fast forward to yesterday. I’d kept my mouth shut and left him alone. In a section of the RPC that doesn’t get a ton of traffic, largely because you have to make an account on the website and then manually opt in to this specific forum, several of us were discussing an absolutely awful person which is an unrelated story I won’t get into. Someone asked something along the lines of, “Are you guys talking about Underaged Looking Allagan Voidsent Chimera Demon Guy?” I responded with basically “No, we’re not talking about Underaged Looking Allagan Voidsent Chimera Demon Guy.” And that was it. We moved on with the conversation because he wasn’t who we’d been talking about. His name, tumblr, server info, in game race, class, etc. was all never given. No identifiable information beyond a very brief and tongue-in-cheek description of his RP character comprised of words taken directly from his own wiki, tumblr info, talk of his own character and RP posts.Someone saw the conversation, and based on our intentionally shitty description, was able to accurately guess who we were talking about and send him an anon to tell him about it. You’d think that would be pretty telling about his own RP, and this anon’s interpretation of it. He answered the anon in a long rant about me that featured both my in game name and my tumblr handle. In case you need me to spell this out for you, he went public with it first. I’ll also remind you that I was blocked, so I wasn’t/couldn’t be following him, and I was not properly @tagged in this rant, so I never would have seen it unless someone told/linked me, or someone I follow eventually reblogged it. And I honestly can’t imagine the level of narcissism it takes to write a long personal post full of wangst and victim-playing every time you hear a person had something negative to say about you or your RP character (not even by name–and by picking words from his own descriptions of his character), especially a person you have had issues with in the past and who you openly shit-talked yourself prior. Who does that? Lord knows my blog would be overflowing. Not everyone will like you, especially not people you jabbed at first. Especially not with an off the wall RP concept. Especially not with you trying to pass that concept is lore abiding and just “unusual.” Especially not with you trying to tell other people they’re “wrong” about the lore. Especially not with your character being a squicky, walking fetish and immortal jailbait. And that’s not even touching other things people have told me about this person that rubbed them the wrong way. Move on with your life.However, I found out about the post thanks to the OP himself when he unblocked me just to send me the link to the post and then before I could even read/respond to the post, sent me a barrage of IM’s still playing the innocent victim which is grating enough on its own but also included him straight up lying about ever posting/saying anything about me, insisting he’d done nothing to me, had nothing against me, this was so out of the blue and uncalled for, etc. When I pointed out this wasn’t the case, that I had seen and read the posts firsthand because blocking me doesn’t prevent me from seeing his posts, he began to lie instead about the contents of said posts and pulled some gaslighting bullshit about how I had just “misread” them, all the while either willfully or coincidentally not seeming to understand anything I said to him (I mentioned him publishing the anon about how I hate women at least twice and the response was always “I never said you hate women!!” Well no shit). He kept insisting that I had “gone behind his back” and that if I had a problem I should “say it to his face” despite the fact he’d had me blocked and that I’m not a douchey enough person to try to contact him despite that, and despite the fact that he had “gone behind my back” and not “said it to my face” twice now prior, and had done just that with his post about the folks from the RPC as well.He also insisted that the tumblr post was meant just to innocently “bring the issue to my attention to clear things up” despite me having no way to see it on my own unless by coincidence, and despite him proving to be willing and able to send me IM’s instead, which you’d think could render the need for a public post moot. When I pointed this out, he promptly deleted the post, lest anyone else see through his bullshit to what he was really trying to do.After my initial response to his wall of IM’s, he sent another wall this time with more insults and accusations, and promptly blocked me so I couldn’t respond. So yes, I made a vaguepost, I know, how awful, how dare I. A vague post vague enough that only someone who had seen his post, or who heard about it from him otherwise, would know who and what it was referencing. Until he responded to it himself, that is and unblocked me again to send me more angry messages to which I responded by permanently blocking him instead because this game of blocking and unblocking sure was getting old.Cue his charming friends sweeping in to tell me to eat a dick, making false accusations against my RP partner and I, sending me threats on Discord, telling people I flashed my breasts for money, etc. And the other person? The one who brought him up in the first place who I had only been responding to? Whose name he was given, was aired in the same public post on his blog as mine? As far as I know, she hasn’t gotten any hate, probably not a single message. And I’m glad, because she shouldn’t get any, she doesn’t deserve it. But at the same time, sure seems sketchy that the person who did the same exact thing as me–and who did it first–has not provoked anyone’s ire, not even been messaged. The public post in reply to the anon who named her, even, was aimed 100% at me. Now isn’t that funny. It’s almost like this was an excuse for people who already had beef with me to try to take shots at me and pretend it was justified. It’s almost like all you anon keyboard warriors don’t even know how this started or what actually happened.And now I’m going to talk about something else. You cannot do “whatever the hell you want” with your character. RP is a two-way (or more) street. There is a real person behind each and every character. These people are looking for fun just like you, and are every bit as deserving, and your fun shouldn’t impede on theirs. We are all allowed equal parts of fun.So when people play their weird ass lolicon/shotacon/pedobait characters, who is having fun? What if the other person in the RP was sexually abused as a child and you’re dredging up terrible old memories for them and making light of their pain? What if they’re a parent worried for their child, or worse, the parent of a child who’s already been abused? What if they’re an actual pedophile and seeing you RP this is tempting them, making them think they’re desires are normal and okay? Hell, what if they’re a goddamn ordinary person who finds it creepy and uncomfortable?What if the fetishized, futa ERP avatar is interacting with someone who is trans or nonbinary or intersex IRL? What if it’s triggering them (in the genuine, real sense of the word)? What if the walking affront against the lore character talking about being an Voidsent Half-Primal Garlean Spy in the middle of the Quicksand is ruining everyone’s immersion–particularly when they refuse to play along as others respond realistically IC and try to kill them or arrest them or kick them out? What if the OP af infinitely-stronger-than-everyone-else-around-him character is making the RP unfun for every other RPer involved because their characters can’t do anything but get beaten up or bow to his whims unless they stoop to godmodding or suddenly beefing up their own character?People can and will judge your character. Those judgments are usually best left kept themselves or quietly shared between trustworthy friends. But when your character trespasses on the OOC fun of the role-players around you? Sorry, my guy, people have every right to speak up. And all this nonsense? All this nonsense was a small handful of people who were already pretty nasty showing their true colors and getting told to pipe the fuck down. A pretty good outcome, if you ask me. So, please, block me, anon. My life will be better without idiots like you in it, and the same probably goes for anyone else you intend to block. Your nameless, ignorant, anonymous presence will not be missed–or noticed, for that matter.
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