#or even ontologically possible

[togglessymposium]

I feel like theodicy is the place that (post-Plato? post-Zoroaster?) Abrahamic religions tend to really fail as systems of thought.

Like, spiritualism in general tends to be unpersuasive as a question of fact- there's simply no real empirical support for it, even though the construction itself is often powerfully evocative and beautiful. But the matter of evil in Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc. is something else, a place where this subset of religious doctrines just has visible and painful problems on its own merits. It's not just that I don't accept the factual claims- it's that the arguments don't add up at all. Theodicy is the crux where you have to fundamentally choose between doctrinal fidelity and the pursuit of truth, because it's where the doctrine is facially, deductively inconsistent and wrong.

At the end of the day, you just can't propose a flawless and omnipotent designer of the cosmos while simultaneously making evil a centerpiece of your analysis. You can be Manichean, and have evil arise from not-God or from some limit God has. You can assert that evil doesn't exist, though that can be tricky: Plato's evil-as-absence thing was largely unsuccessful as an attempt, both because positive evils like pain are regular features of human experience, and because pure deprivation as an ontology of evil still doesn't solve the theodicy problem. But what you cannot do is assert that the foundation of the cosmos is a perfect and all powerful entity incapable of error, and also that evil exists. The toddler's hand is well and truly caught in the cookie jar.

Most forms of modern Christianity and Mormonism try to use free will to thread the needle; mainstream Islam I think is a bit more Leibnizean, though it still leans hard on human culpability. But you can't actually do this! The claim, of course, is to say that the setting of the cosmos is perfectly good, that human volition itself is also perfectly good, but that volition has the special quality of sometimes (though not intrinsically) producing evil, which we all then have to deal with. But there's nothing in free will that actually makes it a suitable solution to this problem. The deity is necessarily extratemporal, and in that frame, volition lacks the special properties it would need to hold this weight; when you can flip to the end of the book any time you like, there's no such thing as indeterminism. Every human choice has one and exactly one result, just as with any other domain of reality; free will, like gravity and electromagnetism, is a process with wholly knowable outcomes. Hence, 'free will' is (in the context of monotheism) a purely linguistic construction that means only 'the consequences of this process are not God's fault.' It has no properties other than the shift in culpability itself, no proposed mechanism or relationship to other phenomena, no inherent virtues that can be explained in terms of any moral system. It's an entirely circular argument, a way to credit God for very tall apple trees but blame somebody else for the invention of applesauce.

[psycherprince]

third hot take of the day is that yes "boycott fatigue" is. yikes. but we're not doing anyone any favors by pretending large boycotts don't take any effort whatsoever. like we talk abt "invisible labor" in the household when talking abt feminism, which is the cognitive load of knowing what has to get done even if the tasks are divided, and having to keep track of who is doing what (wrt childcare) and the preferences of your family when cooking/grocery shopping/etc. Other ppl have explained this better than me but the point is. It does take cognitive effort to keep track of what you can and can't buy, and which companies own what, etc etc.

We can acknowledge that yeah it does take effort and yeah it can be annoying that you have to make some kind of change, but also still maintain that complaining abt that right now is insanely tactless and irrelevant. Like yeah you DO have to remind yourself not to buy sabra hummus or the starbucks brand creamer or whatever but like there's a genocide yknow get some perspective

[daydreamerdrew]

The Incredible Hulk (1968) #245

[demontobee]

Good Omens is queering TV/storytelling - part 1: GAZE

I would argue that part of why Good Omens is so refreshingly queer is because it does not cater to the male gaze (which centers around the preferences - aesthetic, romantic, sexual, visual, logical, emotional, political ... - of mainly white men in positions of power):

no oversexualization of groups or types of people: Women or characters that could be read as female presenting are not overly sexualized. In fact, some of them are shown to be grimy, slimy and not sexual at all. All of them are real characters and not just cardboard-cutout on-screen versions of male misogynistic fantasies. They portray real people with real people problems. They are human, or exempt from our categories when portraying angels or demons. There are no overly sexualized bodies in general (as has so far also often been the case with young gay men, PoC, etc.), no fetishization of power imbalances, and not exclusively youthful depiction of love and desire.

sex or sexual behavior is not shown directly (yet): All imagery and symbolism of sex and sexuality is used not to entice the audience but is very intimately played out between characters, which makes it almost uncomfortable to watch (e.g., Aziraphale being tempted to eat meat, Crowley watching Aziraphale eat, the whole gun imagery).

flaunting heteronormativity: Throughout GO but especially GO2, there is very little depiction of heterosexual/romantic couples; most couples are very diverse and no one is making a fuss about it. There is no fetishization of bodies or identities. Just people (and angels and demons) being their beautiful selves (or trying to).

age: Even though Neil Gaiman explained that Crowley and Aziraphale are middle-aged because the actors are, I think it is also queering the idea of romance, love and desire existing mainly within youthful contexts. Male gaze has taught us that young people falling and being in love is what we have to want to see, and any depiction of love that involves people being not exactly young anymore is either part of a fetishized power imbalance (often with an older dude using his power to prey on younger folx) or presents us with marital problems, loss of desire, etc. – all with undertones of decay and patronizing sympathy. Here, however, we get a beautifully crafted, slow-burn, and somehow super realistic love story that centers around beings older than time and presenting as humans in their 50s figuring out how to deal with love. It makes them both innocent and experienced, in a way that is refreshing and heartbreaking and unusual and real.

does not (exclusively) center around romantic/sexual love: I don’t know if this is a gaze point exactly but I feel like male gaze and resulting expectations of what a love story should look like are heavily responsible for our preoccupation with romantic/sexual love in fiction – the “boy gets girl” type of story. And even though, technically, GO seems to focus on a romantic love story in the end, it is also possible to read this relationship but also the whole show as centering around a kind of love that goes beyond the narrow confines of our conditioned boxed-in thinking. It seems to depict a love of humanity and the world and the universe and just the ineffability of existence as a whole.

disability as beautiful and innate to existence: Disability is represented amongst angels by the extremely cool Saraqael and by diversely disabled unnamed angels in the Job minisode. Representation of disability is obviously super important in its own right, but is also queers what we perceive as aesthetically and ontologically "normal". Male gaze teaches us that youth and (physical and mental) health are the desirable standard and everything else is to be seen as a deviance, a mistake. By including disability among the angels, beings that have existed before time and space, the show clearly states that disability is a beautiful and innate part of existence.

gender is optional/obsolete: Characters like Crowley, Muriel and others really undermine the (visual and aesthetic) boundaries of gender and the black-and-white thinking about gender that informs male gaze. Characters cannot be identfied simply as (binary) men or women anymore just by looking at them or by interpreting their personalities or behaviors. Most characters in GO, and especially the more genderqueer ones, display a balance of feminine and masculine traits as well as indiosyncracies that dissolve the gender binary.

Feel free to add your own thoughts on this in the comments or tags!

[least-carpet]

What do you like about jc? Why he is your favorite?

Anon, this has been sitting in my inbox because I was afraid to open this can of worms. I've rotated this character nonstop for, like, the past three years. I got on Tumblr because of this character. I'm not even that wild about MDZS as a novel! I'm a SVSSS main! I don't know how I ended up here!

He loves his nephew so much. I love what we get about Jiang Cheng's relationship with Jin Ling, who had what was probably an indescribably weird childhood, but who has never once thought to himself that his uncle didn't love him. Jin Ling is evidently spoiled and rude but also so genuinely courageous, forgiving, and loving in his horrible teenage way. I love these two and they love each other!

He's dutiful. I think people sometimes think of duty as a burden, and obviously it can be, but I also think of it as an expression of care towards others. He sincerely cares about his responsibilities, which include all of the people who joined the Jiang sect to follow him.

He's supremely competent. We see the poor guy fail a lot, but he restored a massacred sect to Great Sect status in 13-15 years with what seems like no familial support and no apparent close external connections. He must be really, really good at his job.

He's such a bitch. He's here to make things hard and unpleasant on purpose! He's witty and will say the meanest possible thing he can think of in a fight! Just like his mother, he can sense your insecurities like a bloodhound and tear into them at will! I think this is a good and endearing quality (for a character, obviously).

He is profoundly screwed by the narrative. Dude is, as @winepresswrath puts it, "ontologically cursed." He exists to fail. His creator made him the most determined little toaster and then put him in 1000 unwinnable situations. He is trapped in, like, a bespoke torment matrix, that he only really escapes at the end of canon (dignity in tatters but nephew in hand).

Killer style in CQL and maybe also the donghua from what I've seen of the gifs? Fashionable king. Deeply uncool despite the drip, which endears him to me more.

Wang Zhuocheng's crying face. Yes, it's that gif set again. It haunts my dreams.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Ok. It's pretty clear you are more welcoming of AI, and it does have enough merits to not be given a knee jerk reaction outright.

And how the current anti-ai stealing programs could be misused.

But isn't so much of the models built on stolen art? That is one of the big thing keeping me from freely enjoying it.

The stolen art is a thing that needs to be addressed.

Though i agree that the ways that such addressing are being done in are not ideal. Counterproductive even.

I could make a quip here and be like "stolen art??? But the art is all still there, and it looks fine to me!" And that would be a salient point about the silliness of digital theft as a concept, but I know that wouldn't actually address your point because what you're actually talking about is art appropriation by generative AI models.

But the thing is that generative AI models don't really do that, either. They train on publicly posted images and derive a sort of metadata - more specifically, they build a feature space mapping out different visual concepts together with text that refers to them. This is then used at the generative stage in order to produce new images based on the denoising predictions of that abstract feature model. No output is created that hasn't gone through that multi-stage level of abstraction from the training data, and none of the original training images are directly used at all.

Due to various flaws in the process, you can sometimes get a model to output images extremely similar to particular training images, and it is also possible to get a model to pastiche a particular artist's work or style, but this is something that humans can also do and is a problem with the individual image that has been created, rather than the process in general.

Training an AI model is pretty clearly fair use, because you're not even really re-using the training images - you're deriving metadata that describes them, and using them to build new images. This is far more comparable to the process by which human artists learn concepts than the weird sort of "theft collage" that people seem to be convinced is going on. In many cases, the much larger training corpus of generative AI models means that an output will be far more abstracted from any identifiable source data (source data in fact is usually not identifiable) than a human being drawing from a reference, something we all agree is perfectly fine!

The only difference is that the AI process is happening in a computer with tangible data, and is therefore quantifiable. This seems to convince people that it is in some way more ontologically derivative than any other artistic process, because computers are assumed to be copying whereas the human brain can impart its own mystical juju of originality.

I'm a materialist and think this is very silly. The valid concerns around AI are to do with how society is unprepared for increased automation, but that's an entirely different conversation from the art theft one, and the latter actively distracts from the former. The complete refusal from some people to even engage with AI's existence out of disgust also makes it harder to solve the real problem around its implementation.

This sucks, because for a lot of people it's not really about copyright or intellectual property anyway. It's about that automation threat, and a sort of human condition anxiety about being supplanted and replaced by automation. That's a whole mess of emotions and genuine labour concerns that we need to work through and break down and resolve, but reactionary egg-throwing at all things related to machine learning is counterproductive to that, as is reading out legal mantras paraphrasing megacorps looking to expand copyright law to over shit like "art style".

I've spoken about this more elsewhere if you look at my blog's AI tag.

[fallowhearth]

It's endlessly funny to me, that so many people read Nona the Ninth - a book where a group of indigenous people from a small nation in the southern hemisphere spend years trying to build a communal plan, begging anyone to take collective action, reaching out again and again for as many people to get on board as possible, only to be stymied again and again by the individually and structurally powerful, who simply didn't care (and couldn't care due to the incentive structures imposed by power) and just wanted to preserve their own power/lives at the expense of everyone else, only for one of their number to be singled out and given immense universe-altering power by a magical entity, which of course led to disaster and the collapse of their original goals because, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely and will magnify even the most minor human foibles - and came away thinking ah yes, the point is that John as an individual is ontologically evil.

[sexhaver]

I genuinely cannot tell, what is the reason you are doing this stuff with the ai? Is it just cause it’s neat? Or what

part of the reason is because it's funny to get an anon saying that AI art has no practical use case and is stealing money from artists, then answer it with AI art that never would have been commissioned otherwise to disprove both of their points at once.

a second, much larger reason is because i fundamentally do not respect 90% of people who call themselves "anti-AI" because they either have no idea how the tech works (no, there are not literal .png copies of all your artwork sitting on the Stable Diffusion servers somewhere), are ableist ("AI art is so ontologically evil that you should learn to draw by holding the pencil with your mouth instead of using it, no, really, it's not that hard, see, this guy on twitter did it so you know it's possible, if you don't learn how to do that you are literally robbing artists", "everyone can make art it came free with your fucking humanity/brain"), or have boring and/or fundamentally reactionary ideas on what constitutes "art" (anything mentioning the word "soul" even in passing, "this is the death of art", getting really mad about accurate comparisons to painting after the invention of photography, etc etc). not only do i not respect these arguments, but they are shitting up my inbox and replies. at a certain point i just want to piss these people off.

[monsterblogging]

So, it finally clicked that while the average person does in fact broadly comprehend that people are neither good nor evil - they're good and bad, and have free will - they also can't understand why some people would fully commit themselves to completely awful causes or to being a terrible person throughout their entire lives. They can't really picture how this works, because they can't imagine themselves choosing to die on a hill of Being A Terrible Person.

This void in their comprehension is where the myth of the Ontologically Evil Person is very likely to come and settle in sooner or later, because it seems to finally provide an answer that makes sense of otherwise senseless cruelty and violence. Agonizing questions like "Why would my boyfriend spend so much energy on making me feel like shit and breaking me down?" "Why would this historical figure decided to kill all of these people?" and "Why would this guy go start a cult and murder everyone?" are finally given an answer, and the formerly-bewildered person finally has some peace of mind.

Because of this, the myth of the Ontologically Evil Person is incredibly hard to get out of people's minds once it takes root. For one thing, bad ideas are like bad habits; it doesn't really work to tell people to Just Stop With Them, because without something else to take its place? They're going to fall back on it.

And if somebody's been traumatized from abuse? The last thing they want to hear is that they're basically dehumanizing their abuser and that's not cool, because it feels to them like the other person is taking their abuser's side and telling them to get fucked. Even if this not what's happening, the survivor's brain is currently operating on fight/flight/fawn/freeze mode, and a brain operating fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode is keyed to making snap decisions to try and remove you from the danger as soon as possible, which means categorizing everything into black and white. This person couldn't care less about the history of eugenics right now; literally all they care about is being safe.

"Okay, so if the Ontologically Evil Person doesn't exist, how the hell do you explain those fuckers over there?" some of you are probably asking.

Here's the deal. Literally every human being alive can and will do terrible things if they're sufficiently scared and desperate. They're in no position to appreciate that nearly all asshole behavior can be explained by a lack of critical social and self-management skills, or by a lack of access to self-improvement (including being too traumatized to trust means of self-improvement).

People who are scared, insecure, and under high levels of stress will often cling to anything that makes them feel better, because they want to feel safe and secure and not in psychological and/or physical agony. (Stress does an absolute number on your body, too.)

Being reliant on a shitty behavior, belief system, or product for some measure of feeling secure and safe is how you get people saying things like "If I didn't act mean, everyone would just walk all over me!" or "I was really depressed before I found this, so if I gave it up I'm going to get depressed again, and I might hurt myself." (And there might be some truth to this one! This might indeed happen if they give it up cold turkey, and without finding an alternative!) It's how you get people conducting """scientific""" studies to """prove""" that their bigotry is totally justified and not at all irrational. ("Well of course these people are genetically inferior, they wouldn't be poor and disease-ridden if they weren't... what do you mean, systemic inequality and uneven healthcare access? No that's obviously fake and made up by More Bad People.")

People also act in unhealthy ways to deal with personal insecurities implanted by parents or society. You have people out there whose parents drummed it into their heads that second place was for worthless losers, or that no one would love them if they didn't look or act a certain way. You have people who absorbed the idea that acknowledging the basic humanity of shitty people means that they have to forgive them and personally help them get better and just suffer through the abuse in the meantime.

This is how people choose to die on the hill of Being A Terrible Person. They weren't ontologically evil. They were scared, and they thought they saw a fortress on the top of that hill that would keep them (and perhaps also their loved ones) safe.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

The shorter version: Hey could you talk about stone tops more? Or anything like that, people who like giving but not recieving?

The longer version: I’m sort of going through that process of self discovery, I’ve been meaning to ask about it somehow- basically I am sexually attracted to people (I think??), I get aroused, I enjoy masturbating, even talking with my partner about stuff we could do is arousing to me. I enjoy some submissive kinky stuff. Hell, my boyfriend (transmasc, both of us are) recently let me go down on him and it was like a fucking religious experience, I LOVED it, but I find it really difficult to enjoy anything being done directly to /my/ genitals. Like, I can feel the sensations, and they feel good, but I don’t build any arousal, like I can’t get in the mood? I know I’m not, but I do feel fucked up and broken. Spiritually, I want my boyfriend to rail me into next week, but physically I’m afraid there’s like. Something wrong with me, like,, I don’t work??? Idk. I’ve got major anxiety, I’ve got dysphoria, I guess I always figured it was one of those things. There’s only so many times I can feel Way Too Seen by fanfiction about Noted Asexual, Archivist Jonathan Sims before I start to wonder what exactly they’ve hit directly on the head, if that makes sense. I’m not asking you to Diagnose Me Asexual lmaoo but I was wondering about more like… asexual adjacent things? My boyfriend suggested I look into “service top” too. I… don’t feel like a top? I’m very submissive. But I’ve heard it’s not always top= dom, bottom=sub… how can I be a submissive top?

Sorry this is… so much. It’s really been weighing on me. Even if you don’t feel up to answering this I thank you profusely for the sex ed content you’ve been posting lately. Demystifying sex and promoting sexual health is so incredibly important, and even just what I’ve read from you makes a difference in the agency I feel over my sex life.

hi anon,

weeeeeee!!! this is a fun one.

so, first off, I'm just gonna throw this out there: liking the idea of something - for instance, your boyfriend railing you into next week - is not an innate sign that that's something you'd like in real life. I'll jack off to the idea of getting railed like Thomas the Tank Engine, sure, but in real life vaginal penetration has never felt like much of anything to me + I haaaaAAAAaaaate the idea of doing anything with even a teeny tiny slight chance of getting me pregnant. some stuff is fine to stay in the brain!

if you do ever decide to tentatively explore it with your bf, that's also fine and wonderful, but let's focus on what we know about your likes right now. you don't want to get fucked (awesome) but you like going down (also awesome). none of that means you are or aren't asexual, btw, there are loads of asexuals in the world who love to get railed and hate going down and also feel every possible way about every other possible array of sex acts. you're only asexual if you want to be, keep that in mind.

you're also only stone or a service top or whatever else if you want to be. words exist to be useful, not as an innate ontological truth to discover within yourself. personally I think it's waaaaay more important for people to refine their sense of likes, dislikes, communication, and boundary-setting than finding the exact right word for their particular cup of tea.

as long as we're talking about terminology, let's get into dom/sub and top/bottom. you're absolutely correct that they're not interchangeable, whatever the hooligans on various hellsites would have you believe. dom and sub are terms for power exchange play, when two people enact a power differential in which one partner is consensually given a great deal of control over the other, be it physically, psychologically, financially, or what have you. top/bottom simply refer to who is acting vs who is being acted upon during a sexual act; while some people identify intensely as either a top or a bottom, it's also a simple matter for those roles to switch on a dime depending on what kind of sex you're into. it's completely possible to have sex without designating anyone the top or bottom, and I'd argue that most people have sex without there actually being a dom or sub involved.

so can dom bottom, or a sub top? of course; people can mix and match whatever pieces of sexuality they want in their own explorations. a dom can boss their sub around like a little servant, giving them extremely detailed instructions about exactly how to rail them, and perhaps punish them (in the fun consensual way, obviously) if they fail to meet those expectations and don't get their dom off the way that was wanted. you can, and I cannot possibly emphasize this enough, do whatever you want forever.

a service top, incidentally, is generally considered a separate thing from a dom (which is not to say they can't overlap!) in that a service top isn't always dominating, but is topping because they enjoy getting their partner off in whatever way they like. the overlap of service tops and folks who are stone is notable!

in your particular case I would recommend not worrying so much about which of these terms, if any, are the correct one for you and focus way ore on exploring and playing with your partner to find a rhythm that works well for the two of you. doms, subs, tops, and bottoms all have something useful to teach people about how they like intimacy, but there's no rush to figure out which category, if any, you fit in. just focus on what's fun and feels good to you and toss the rest.

[melancholia-ennui]

So the thing that I find fascinating about the ongoing debates around the "walrus vs fairy" poll is how much it reveals about the ways people reason and argue, and how those break down.

Like, on the one hand, I'm #teamwalrus, but the ways that some walrus voters argue about this poll are so hilariously disingenuous. "What if the 'fairy' is a gay man?" "What if it's Halloween?" "What if it's a medieval fae that just looks like some guy?" "What if I'm hallucinating?" - shut up shut up that's not the point and you goddamn know it. The question is only interesting at all if both the walrus and the fairy are instantly and equally recognisable as such. Otherwise you're just dodging the question. (As an aside, this is why I advocate for imagining the fairy as a kind of Tinkerbellish pixie creature, as this has all the desired instant recognisability and acts as a kind of opposite to the vastness of the walrus.)

On the other hand, a lot of fairy voters put forward the argument that "a fairy is impossible". But here's the thing: this represents a fundamental failure to adjust your beliefs under counterfactuals. If a fairy is knocking on your door, that fact in itself proves more or less definitionally that a fairy knocking on your door is not impossible in the possible world of the question, irrespective of your beliefs about the actual world, because it just happened.

And this is really where my walrus vote comes from, because the question was never "what is more probable (given your beliefs about the world", but "what would surprise you more".

If a fairy is knocking at my door, then yes, I have been fundamentally wrong in some assumption about what sort of things exist in the world - but otherwise, the fairy is behaving exactly as I would expect a fairy to behave, given what I have been told in fictional contexts about the behaviours of fairies. It would shake my world-view, force me to re-evaluate a lot of what I believe, but it wouldn't elicit surprise so much as confusion, self-doubt, and perhaps some existential dread.

By contrast, a walrus on my doorstep would be deeply surprising. There is not a single walrus in captivity in my country, so it must have come from the wild somehow. I do live by the sea, but I'm on a first floor flat with a locked door to the building, at the top of a hill, and on the other side of some flood defences relative to the water. While the walrus does not make me question any of my ontological beliefs, it does fundamentally undermine almost everything I believe about walruses, where they can be and what they do, which altogether will elicit much more surprise, emotionally, than a mere previously-thought-to-be-impossibility.

The issue with getting hung up on "but a fairy is impossible" is that to me it seems to function primarily as a kind of thought-terminating cliche. Because if there is a fairy knocking at your door, then obviously a fairy is not impossible, or else it wouldn't be knocking.

What I find interesting is how this really highlights how much people get emotionally invested once the category of "impossibility" is introduced - so much so that they extend that category across all possible worlds, even when the modal/counterfactual structure of the question clearly indicates that doing so undermines the entire premise of the question.

(Honestly, I could go on here about the ways in which the category of "impossible" circumscribing rational considerations impacts other areas of thought, especially politics, but this ramble has already gone on long enough and I don't want to derail it even more. Suffice to say that this seems to be a very general thought pattern, that once someone becomes invested in some sense in something being "impossible", this will, unless they are very careful, permanently colour every consideration they have about that something, often even over and above evidence to the contrary of this impossibility.)

[sassykinzonline]

ok i saw the post you guys meant when you were asking about platonic SNS aka "SNS should be platonic because that makes it selfless", heres what i'll say (some of these sort of rehash the ask, but with a more direct rebuttal to the specific point):

the manga explicitly shows how various types of love (platonic, familial, professional, romantic, sexual) can be "imperfect", therefore, the manga rejects the idea that one sort of love is implicitly "correct" or "selfless" or whatever ontological good you want to attach to the love of your choice

action/shounen's propensity to pose the love interest as the "reward" for the hero's journey not only doesnt apply to SNS (nor the naruto manga from an SNS lens), but this is also another example of attaching an ontological idea that is irrelevant to a concept. tropes are not what define a genre nor a story archetype, theyre simply a common device used within these things. for example, the "heroine as a reward" trope for the hero may be a device used to exemplify success, honour, or nobility. it likely stems from cultural patriarchal norms where what was "desirable" was a "brave" man with deeds to his name. the point of this trope is likely to inspire a reader to emulate the hero, thinking that they will also ~get the girl at the end of their "journey". but the trophy doesnt have to be the girl. the trophy can be riches. the trophy can be a title. the trophy can be peace itself. it can be all those things. why? because the core of a hero's journey is literally the hero's journey, how and why they get from point A to point B and what the effects of that are. and thats typically how you choose what trophy to give your hero at the end.

the naruto manga subverts this trope by making the "journey" the feelings themselves: do you have them, how to express them, are they enough, are they even appropriate to have, what does the other person feel, what can be done about that? thats why i said the trope doesnt exactly apply to SNS. by making the journey about the feelings, the "reward" of the heroine at the end is no longer a patriarchal holdover but a logical conclusion to a conflict. this is why i joke that naruto the manga works better as a YA novel from the twilight/hunger games era, because typically those kinds of books have room for this kind of complexity. this is also why "sasuke" is not primarily an antagonist, he is a deuteragonist. he is tangentially going through the same journey as naruto, he is not running counter to naruto's journey intentionally.

even if you wont agree that the feelings are the journey, and instead the journey is becoming hokage or uniting the shinobi world or whatever, by definition naruto's feelings have to change for the journey to be possible. otherwise theres no point in the journey, hed be able to be hokage at the start of the manga and everyone would agree on that despite him being weak. there is a reason why naruto's power-ups also come with some sort of emotional lesson, and that emotional lesson is what gets people on his side. every arc in the manga is naruto has to do something -> naruto has an idea -> someone tells him that his idea is immature -> he trains while pondering the idea -> he needs to use the idea to complete his training -> he voices his revised idea that he learned from the someone -> he wins. theres only one exception to this. i'll let you figure out why that is.

many people who make this argument about how "platonic love is better" are both understanding the point and not understanding the point. these people are taking platonic love to mean "friendship" and thats not what it means in the sense its used in the manga, nor in a classical sense. platonic love according to plato (the one its named after), is the idea that it is a love that transcends earthly ideas like carnal desire and physical unity and instead becomes desire for one's true essence and unity in the "truth" of one's being. this means platonic love isnt "love without sex" but "love that can be more than just sex". so these people understand that "platonic love" is above any other type of love, but not because its "friendship". platonic love is "better" because it is permanent and unchangeable. truth is inherent. a soul is inherent. thats why within SNS there are themes of reincarnation of souls, of sharing of pain, of cosmic unity, of reuniting after death, of inexplicable yet unavoidable attraction, of the recognition, understanding and acceptance of someone else's truth.

in summary: SNS' souls are having cosmic sex and thats what saves the world.

[revacholianpizzaagenda]

Crossposting from an old reddit convo because this beautiful post got me thinking about it again. How can we square the circle of Revachol begging for Harry's help in stopping the nuke VS the fact that not only Elysium's entire narrative structure hinges on the circumstances of that damn nuke falling, but also that Revachol herself is, on other occasions, dead certain that the world will end very soon ("THE AGE OF MAN IS OVER" etc)?

She knows what will happen and says as much in no uncertain terms. That doesn't mean she can't hope. Rodionov also knew what would happen, and Rodionov still hoped, still worked to help his fellow countrymen even in the face of annihilation. What did Revachol say to Dros's comrades, whom he saw speaking to her as they were being gunned down? She must have known that the Revolution would fail just as surely as she now knows about the nuke. I think she still put her faith in them, because what else could she do?

I'm also sure that her appeal to a RCM officer means that there WILL be some strange window of opportunity when this whole thing could theoretically be stopped here, in Revachol, on the ground (certainly not 22 years on, given the specifics of where the nuke comes from. No way to stop THAT, practically and almost ontologically). I just don't think it'll succeed, for a variety of reasons. There's plenty of precedent for characters wanting to accomplish something and failing. In the game itself, the narrative emphasis on the figurine, for one.

But there's also the possibility that she's referring to something stranger than what you or I could possibly imagine. Some weird extraphysical third option. For example the fuck is "I CANNOT PERISH WITH IT", how the hell is she expecting to keep existing past the very end of the world? In this branch of the nuke conversation in particular, it almost seems like she is expecting Harry to perform something that will not change the course of history per se, but rather preserve her essence somehow.

Sigh. I really hope we'll find out some day…

[saintsenara]

I know you responded with a meme, but if you're able I'd love to hear your thoughts on harry/hermione 👀

fine. i'll scream into a pillow periodically and get through this...

obviously, i don't actually find the concept of harmony sincerely upsetting - people shipping things is never that deep, and because, as i've said before, i subscribe to the principle that any pairing is possible if you just have enough nerve. i've been recommended some harmony fics by people who are fonder of the ship, and while i've not found them immediately compelling, i do appreciate that there are plenty of people who disagree.

but my feelings are basically the same for harmony as they are for dramione: that it's never done interestingly.

harmony is - like all hermione pairings except [broadly] romione - a breeding ground for fanon!hermione, who is perfect and flawless and so clever she can solve millennia-old mysteries in afternoon. i hate this version of the character because i find her boring - it's just standard self-insert stuff, which is fine but not something i have any interest in reading. i similarly dislike the version of harry who appears in these stories, who ends up - like all men in hermione pairings except [broadly] ron - being either this impossibly sophisticated and suave intellectual with the body of a greek god or a doormat who's happy to shut the fuck up forever and do whatever she says.

[i also hate - obviously, since he's my king - the way harmony stories are often even more egregious than dramione ones in writing ron as a cruel and violent misogynist who is ontologically indistinct from your average death eater. and i think it somewhat proves my point that neither of these ships work particularly well that this character assassination has to take place in order to make them plausible...]

and i think the flattening of harry and hermione's personalities within most harmony is the main thing which keeps the ship from being interesting. because - while i certainly don't go in for the common anti-harmony argument that harry actively dislikes hermione - it's undeniable that there is a lot about the two of them which wouldn't be conducive to a harmonious [lol] relationship.

their communication styles - hermione works through problems by debating them, harry prefers not to be challenged - are the obvious one. their ways of expressing affection - hermione shows people she cares about them by nagging them and meddling in their lives, harry very much does not - are another. they have extremely different views about authority, they decompress in different ways [harry is someone who clearly needs to keep physically active to clear his head, hermione is much more of a homebody], and harry's impulsiveness is a poor match for hermione's fondness for planning.

they are also similar in ways which would cause them to butt heads. both have a tendency towards obsessiveness, which they rely in canon on ron pulling them out of. both have a significant capacity for cruelty and extremely black-and-white moral codes - harry has a tendency towards forming judgements on people and situations based on whether they are people he likes or things he benefits from [i.e. how he's appalled by dobby's treatment because his masters are the malfoys, but doesn't give a shit about kreacher's because his abusive master is sirius], while hermione tends to regard any rule-breaking she does as justified even if she'd regard it as outrageous from anyone else [i.e. her fury over harry appearing to use felix felicis to improve's ron's performance at quidditch when she herself confunded cormac mclaggen to get him onto the team...]. both have a tendency towards giving people the silent treatment when they're angry. both are incredibly stubborn...

and so on.

obviously, they also have positive qualities in common too - a shared loyalty, for one - but it always seems to me that the standard move in harmony is for authors to completely ignore these conflicting traits, either really over-egging what makes harry and hermione compatible platonically in the books or just inventing similarities [especially intellectual ones] to justify the pairing. whereas i would much prefer to see just how difficult it would be for harry and hermione to fall and sustain being in love with each other, and i've never seen that done compellingly.

but the conflict i'd love to see explored in harmony fics most of all, but which never seems to be acknowledged by fans of the pairing, is that [despite the fanon slander that ron is the person who behaves poorly towards her] harry is often horrible to hermione and hermione is often scared of harry.

this is at its most profound after ron leaves the horcrux hunt in deathly hallows, but we see several times throughout canon that - if ron isn't there to mediate between them - harry often treats hermione in a way which can be considered downright cruel. if she criticises him in a way he considers unjustifiable, he tends to side with other people against her [ron in prisoner of azkaban over the firebolt; ginny in half-blood prince over snape's textbook]. if she tries to reason with him he often beats her down with the force of his emotions [i.e. when she tries to get him to think about whether his vision of sirius in the department of mysteries might be a trick] or his convictions [i.e. when he lures her into near-death by being certain that nagini is really bathilda bagshot], and she often ends up having to soothe or appease him when he's the one who's screamed at her.

hermione is also scared more generally of harry's experiences - she's by far the least amenable of the trio to talking about voldemort [even though she says his name earlier than ron does] - and mission, which puts up a barrier between them which will be difficult to bring down post-war. i think there's something which could be really interesting there - the most interesting dynamic in hinny, after all, is when harry and ginny's tendency to not actually be honest with each other is explored - but unfortunately at the minute that sort of character work is drowning in a sea of "ron is so stupid and harry and i just love talking about classic literature, come darling, put on your leather trousers and let us solve world hunger; i look like emma watson" nonsense.

dull!

[cemeterything]

Howdy. I know you probably have upwards of like 20k asks or some absurd number like that, but I have a question. My college comp 2 teacher always has philosophical prompts for our essays and the topic for this one is "What does it mean to be a good person? what makes a good person good?" and obviously I'm writing the most commonly listed stuff like open-mindedness and honesty and all that jazz. But all the articles I've read heavily point out Empathy, so wanted to write a paragraph going against that. I'm trying to talk about how having empathy doesn't automatically make you a good person, and that people with low/no empathy are not evil and can in fact be very good people. I'm asking for your thoughts on this because I think you're one of those people (you're also much better with words than I am).

hmmm i'd probably say something about how empathy is not interchangable with goodness, nor is it ontologically good, because empathy alone is just a tool, and tools have no inherent moral or ethical value, it's how we use them that does. you can feel empathy for someone and choose to do absolutely nothing with that empathy. empathy without the choice to show compassion, you can argue, hardly contributes towards a good life for anyone, even the empathetic person. and you do not need to feel empathy to choose to show compassion. i would highlight philosophical arguments which place emphasis on the importance of action/outcome over intention to support your point (although make sure to acknowledge possible counter-arguments).

[manicpixiedckgirl]

one thing i wish i had learned earlier in my transition is that you have to heal your relationship to masculinity. as a trans femme, a "binary" one at that (if that's even a thing, which I don't think it is),my natural reaction in transition was to push masculinity as far away from me as possible. it reminded me of all the things about myself I was trying to change. after all, masculinity is what I was trying to escape, and years in the closet had poisoned my opinions of masculinity in others.

but that's not good for you, it's not good for trans mascs, it's not good for your relationships with men in general. men overall can be good even though many suck, but masculinity itself can also be good! it's not a negative! masculinity isn't trucks, football and chauvinism, it's good, caring fathers, it's protective older brothers, it's grandfather's teaching you how to fish and dudes being goofy and silly with each other in that way that only men who have let go of fear and shame do.

it is very easy and tempting as a young transfeminine person to lean into the "manhater" stereotype, but both tactically and also for yourself personally, I think it's a mistake. as a trans fem, cis society is going to contrast you against men at best, and portray you as a fucked up kind of man at worst. in your own head, if masculine is evil and wrong ontologically there are going to be parts of you you cannot change that fall into that broad category.

for the sake of your own mental health, for the men & boys in your life, and for society at large, you have to move past that pain and revulsion you have towards masculinity.