#regardless of their reasons of being a whole bunch of horrible things for creating

[dowhatteverer]

I think everybody that has a good guy Hetch AU deserves an ice cream or an ice cream equivalent.

[cassandraclare]

I'm sorry to hear that your hard work was leaked but I was curious about what happened. I hope the person faced consequences because that was a very selfish thing to do leaking your work like that :(

I haven’t taken action against the person who leaked the book. I know who they are, since they uploaded the page I signed for them, and I was able to match that against my records. 

I haven’t refrained from taking action because I feel sympathy for them. I don’t. It’s beyond shitty behavior to receive an early, signed book as a gift, and to then leak the entire book online. It’s a shit thing to do to the authors and an equally shit thing to do to other fans. However, I don’t want to put myself (and Wes) through the exhausting, grim and expensive process of legal repercussions. It doesn’t mean what this person did isn’t horrible, and it doesn’t mean they haven’t cost the entire fandom any chance of there ever being an early contest giveaway like that again. They did. There never will be. There will be no ARCs of Chain of Iron, either, and you can thank them for that, too. 

Part of what makes piracy such an issue for authors goes far beyond the individual assholes who upload and distribute and translate stolen books. It’s that the whole system is set up to make it incredibly difficult for us to do anything about it. Publishers do little to nothing to prevent piracy, and authors shoulder the entire burden of searching out and reporting illegal copies of their books. And even then, we’re dependent on whether or not the reported website feels like complying with copyright laws or not. Twitter is incredibly slow to respond, Tumblr is about fifty-fifty on bothering at all. They’re legally required to take action, but they also know that the effort of doing something about it if they do not falls on exhausted, overburdened artists who often can’t afford to follow up with a lawyer’s letter.

And like, I get being broke and wanting to read books; there were a lot of books I had to pass up reading when I was broke (I will be forever grateful to the library system of New York and Brooklyn, which is how I read books at all from about 2001-2004.) I was broke enough that I slept on a bare mattress because I couldn’t afford sheets, but I’m pretty sure if I broke into Bed, Bath and Beyond and stole a bunch of fitted percale bedding I wouldn’t have encountered much sympathy if I got caught. 

I talked about this on Twitter before, and I’ll say it again here though I know it will make very little difference: pirating books doesn’t just hurt the author of those books. It hurts everyone at the publishing company, where the margin of profit is razor-thin (and yes, publishers should do more to protect themselves against piracy; I agree there); it hurts bookstores, especially indie bookstores (I remember doing an event at a store that told me, sadly, that they were likely going to have to close because people “came into the store, looked at the books, took notes, then went home and pirated them.”) It hurts libraries, who rely on circulation for funding, and the shutting down of libraries hurts people who actually can’t afford books.

Now, I know is no way to talk people out of piracy; the internet has normalized it, and besides, people will generally do the cheaper, easier thing — you can’t talk people into not doing something they want to do by telling them it’s wrong, in my experience. They’ll find ways to justify it, whether it be that they can’t afford the book or it isn’t yet available in their language or that they find the author “problematic” and this is the way they’ve chosen to punish them. 

The reason I put “problematic” in quotes is because yes, of course you can read and enjoy work that has problematic elements. Pretty much everything has some element that’s going to be found problematic by someone — which is exactly why deciding that it’s morally excusable to steal from people you think are creating flawed work is more than problematic. Holding creators accountable for their work means critiquing that work, not stealing it.

I listen to a lot of political podcasts, and some of them review work by extreme right-wing politicians etc. who have written books that the podcasters find morally despicable but wish to, or need to, review and discuss. Since they don’t wish to give money to the authors, they buy second-hand copies or take the book out of the library. They certainly don’t steal, translate and distribute copies of the books because they genuinely do not like them and do not want more people reading them. That’s what it looks like when you have an actual moral problem with a book or author. 

However, running multiple fan accounts for a book series, naming your internet identity after characters from that book series, and talking endlessly about “your favorite parts” and how this is “your favorite book” entirely invalidates any argument that you’re doing this because you think the books are bad, evil, etc. If you claim a book is actively homophobic or racist but are so desperate to read it that you’ll steal it, so excited about it that you’ll share that stolen copy, so obsessed that you’ll illegally translate a whole book and provide that stolen translation to as many people as possible, and so dedicated to the fandom that you’ll name yourself after the characters in the books and write poetry about them, I have to tell you: the last thing that looks like is that you actually find the books problematic, regardless of what you say to the contrary. It looks like you like them but don’t want to pay for them, because in fact, that’s the case. (Either that or it looks like you’re really into racist, homophobic books, and making sure as many people read them as possible, which is your problem.)

One of the issues I have with piracy is that it teaches you to hate creators. You have to hate them, because you’re doing a fucking awful thing to them and you have to justify it. This results in lying about creators — about their process, their translations, their research — as if somehow, even if they were bad researchers, that would justify widespread theft. (It doesn’t.) Those who steal books wind up in a headspace where they are obsessed with the content of the books, and entirely unwilling to accept the reality that those books were created by a real person that they’re really harming. It encourages the mentality that I didn’t create Jem or Magnus or Will or Cordelia: they came from some kind of sparkly outerspace planet and I was just lucky enough to get to write down their adventures. It invalidates the hard work creators put into what they create, and in fact, erases their very existence. The internet attitude toward creators is already incredibly toxic (especially if they’re women, LGBT+ and/or BIPOC) and the feeling of entitlement to free content, and vicious hatred toward those who aren’t providing it (even though a lot of creators, me included, provide a great deal of free content) contributes to that. Genuinely, if you’re stealing someone’s work, the least you could do is not also be an asshole about them. (Or pretend you’re Robin Hood. He stole from the rich who had taken property and goods from the poor, and returned that stolen wealth. He didn’t steal from artists and independent bookstores and use that stealing to benefit himself and his friends. The idea is actually kind of funny.) 

 I understand there is a pressure to be up to date on the books that are being released so as to participate in fandom, and I do get that. Unfortunately, piracy has real consequences that stretch beyond just hurting me and Wes. Because LGBT+ books are pirated at such an incredible rate, and we’ve definitely seen that with TEC, I am left wondering if there will ever be an actual Spanish translation of TEC, or whether the publisher will decide not to bother because it’s already been so thoroughly pirated in Spanish. I have to wonder if there will even be a third book of TEC at all, or whether publishers will feel it isn’t worth doing. And I have to wonder why the people who create this situation so often have usernames that include Jem or Magnus or Alec or Cordelia or Julian or Tessa. What an incredible misunderstanding of those characters, to imagine a world in which Will Herondale or Magnus Bane or James Carstairs would approve of stealing books and harming writers. And why name yourself after a character who absolutely couldn’t stand you? I don’t know. I don’t get it, any more than I get hating someone who provided you with something you claim is your favorite book. 

That was a much longer answer than you were probably expecting or hoping for, and I know I’ll get yelled at quite thoroughly for writing it. Writers always do, when we engage with the issue of piracy. I know most of you reading this acquire your books honestly; most of you are not like this at all. But like most things on the internet, a small amount of people really do have the power to make things pretty rotten for everyone else.

[equalseleventhirds]

hm. i know it's rly rly early but i am contemplating the argument for 'aracial' podcast characters that goes 'well beginning podcasters don't have money to hire actors, so they just use their friends, so their casts are very white, so it's better for them to let fandom create representation with their aracial characters'

and i think... maybe back in 2012, when podcasts were so small? but maybe not rly... and especially not here and now in the year 2021, and let me tell you why:

audio dramas are SO damn popular nowadays that you can put a casting call for a totally unpaid podcast on twitter or tumblr and get HUNDREDS of auditions. is it better to pay your actors? yes of course. are people totally willing to do this work for free, or for the promise of patreon pay if your patreon takes off? yes absolutely.

there are a lot of all-white or majority-white podcasts which are, nevertheless, WILDLY popular. sometimes this is bcos of fanon depictions, but often it's just! people like their stuff! regardless of rep!

representation should not be a marketing tool. it should not be something you do (or leave vague) in order to appeal to your audience. representation is about telling the stories of marginalized people, it's about marginalized people being able to find WORK in the creative industry, it's about just! normalizing our existence in the world by showing us in media! faux-representation in 'aracial' characters will NEVER actually do this, and you're not actually helping anyone (except perhaps the popularity of your show) by not acknowledging the whiteness of your cast.

why are all your friends white. no seriously wtf. this does not make things BETTER. you need to talk to some poc i think.

if you are white and all your friends are white, possibly you have no business writing about poc at all actually? not even vague 'well they might be poc'? like, are you going to WRITE about us or use us as an aesthetic or create horrible mangled stereotypes based on media you've consumed?

(don't say you've gotten a sensitivity reader. if you can't pay cast members you can't pay a sensitivity reader.)

and, if you apparently don't know any poc, when you write your 'aracial' character, you are simply writing whiteness and refusing to put a name to it, making it the default. again, not helpful for real representation.

this argument is always, ALWAYS used to justify 'aracial' writing for white casts, bcos white is the fucking default. this isn't just in podcasts, but poc in the creative industry don't get to like... escape their race. it's always there. it's considered in casting, it's considered in people accepting your writing; we're expected to be the representatives of our races/tell our 'cultural story' every time we write/provide a 'different perspective' on the industry/whatever. i will never be just 'a writer' or 'an actor' or 'a director'. i will be the filipino writer/actor/director, and expected to be telling THAT story at all times, and used as the diversity checkmark by white people. and in some ways this is a responsibility poc have! when we are able to reach these places, when so few of us get to, we have a chance to be the representation people need, so we do! but unlike white people, we will never be considered 'aracial' or the default. and not only is this wildly fucking unfair, for white ppl to get this benefit of just! writing a white person without saying so! and people manufacturing representation in a way that makes their shit popular! while poc cannot! it's also like... we're always expected to tell our damn racial story. white people can fucking own up to the fact that they're telling theirs. who knows, that honesty might even make your writing better.

...that got very kind of angry and passionate and also i'm sure there's more reasons? it is VERY early like i said but i. i'm real tired of seeing that same old 'well but they're just beginners so it's fine to be so fucking white!!' thing. maybe once upon a time it was, when podcasts as a whole were still finding their ground. now, when you're breaking into podcasting, there is a whole bunch of groundwork laid out for you. you can grow past that.

[bondsmagii]

WG kink anon here again. Since my original asks disappeared i thought i'd resend them. basically i've fully embraced your love of drama and have welcomed the eye into my life... i love how unabashedly you love learning about horrible things and so i'm manifesting that into my own life. one of the ways this has manifested (outside of watching the entire chris chan documentary in a week or two) has been through me browsing the kiwi farms forums. i started with stuff about chris chan, but have started exploring other creators as well. one of the creators i've been reading a lot of posts about is nikocado. off all the ~lolcows~ i saw, he was the only one i recognized. the forum is...bad. people are mean, no surprise there. While reading through the main nikocado forum, i saw a comment that stood out to me. basically it was someone saying like "i'm lgbt too but this faggot gives us a bad name" they had a furry icon and for some reason the way they typed/their icon just made me think...this is a young person. i was curious, so i went to their page to see their other comments. it was. a lot. they had dozens of pages of comments on a TON of different lolcows. there was so much variety in their comments and where they were posting and it just made me so sad..... seeing someone so invested in this community, so invested in hate, was hard. and i felt for them! i feel like i could've been them with the right (wrong) influences. i can't imagine what i would've been like if i would've found kiwi farms as a teenager instead of tumblr. it's weird to see. it just made me so sad. i hope they get out of this eventually. Kiwi farms in general is just so odd..... but i love reading it

god, I get what you mean. I've been thinking something similar recently, now I'm up into the 40s of the Chris Chan documentary. it mentioned something about her 32nd birthday and how some videos of her were leaked by a troll on that day and it occurred to me quite suddenly -- and I knew this before, but it hit me with real clarity -- that this has now been going on for years and years, and it's going to go on for years and years more, and these trolls... to put it bluntly, they have just as little of a life as they accuse Chris of having.

there are so many people out there who dedicated so much time to trolling Chris, and harassing her, and it just hit me that they were so invested for so long in something that only caused harm and misery. they watched Chris just disintegrating on camera, her life going to hell, her passions drying up or being used against her, and it was fun for them. they didn't see any hypocrisy in criticising Chris for spending all her time online, but they were doing the same thing. and in the beginning, Chris was online to share things she was passionate about. she had a comic going on, she had OCs she loved and fandoms she was involved in and created for. she was there because of hobbies and interests, and these trolls jumped on her because all they were ever online for was an opportunity to amuse themselves with the pain of others. regardless of how Chris turned out (and these later videos do expose her as having serious issues that are under her control and that she does refuse to do anything about; she is no longer a very nice person at all) it began with Chris as an autistic young adult sharing creations she was passionate about, and a bunch of losers with nothing better to do tormenting her because of it. how these trolls can think that they're not equally as cringe is beyond me.

I feel the same way when I see hate accounts on here, too. there are people on here who run discourse blogs, or hate blogs for ships or characters, or who otherwise seem to only interact with the whole internet in an aggressive, malicious, uncharitable way. I literally cannot fathom what it must be like to spend day after day immersing yourself in things and topics that only bring you rage and make you hate people. like. I just do not get how people can just wallow like that. it seems like a cliché, but like... this is what you're doing with your life? your very limited time on this earth, and you want to sign on to a silly little absolutely inconsequential website and spew hate at someone for liking a character you seem to think committed irl atrocities irl, in real life, irl? you want to spend any amount of your time engaged in real, honest to god hatred? not complaining, not bitching, not any of those normal and fun things you do with friends -- but actual, honest to god hate? you want to spend your time causing strangers pain? I literally do not get it. I just do not fucking get it.

a lot of these people are young, and I get that. I get angst, I get feeling lost and confused and scared, I get lashing out. but here's the thing: I've never been a great person, and I've made mistakes like anyone, and some of it's been because of me and some of it has been because of my circumstances. I grew up in an abusive home, I had a really shitty upbringing, I was made homeless three times, I've really been the fuck through it, I've hated life and I've hated the whole world and everything in it, and at the same time as I felt this way, I ran with trolls at the exact time period this Chris stuff was kicking off. at the same time as I felt this way, I've been on this website. and not once -- not once -- have I ever trolled anyone even remotely like how Chris has been trolled. not once have I ever felt the urge to run a hate blog. not once have I ever felt the desire to immerse myself in nothing but negativity and hatred and tormenting others. the trolls I ran with did silly little pranks that, while genuinely infuriating at the time, were inconsequential in the long run. and I feel that I can say this with all the experience that allows me authority in the subject, both as someone who is Fucked Up and someone who was present during the troll heyday, I suppose: no amount of pain makes it acceptable for you to harm others. that's it. no arguments. and I just do not get why people dedicate themselves to this shit. I really don't.

[dreamties]

Brahms Heelshire W/ an Artist S/O

A/n- For some reason every time I start making headcanons, they seem to turn into short drabbles. So...with that said, these got a bit long.

I feel like Brahms would have a bit of a higher level of taste than most of the other characters ( save for Candyman, of course- and maybe JD? )

He was definitely taught to appreciate the value of art- there is no debating this. Now, I’m not sure how much of that would have imprinted on him- but he knows a enough to know your paintings are truly masterpieces.

And, no, that’s not just him being your boyfriend and loving everything you do regardless of what it is. No, he genuinely sees the value in your work.

He may be bratty and childish- but still ( somewhat ) a man of culture.

That being said...I think he knows not to request a bunch of things ( when you don’t give him permission to do so ). But that will not stop him!

He will not ask you to draw him, because he’s insecure of his face behind the mask. However, he will giddily ask you for a portrait of yourself. It takes a lot of convincing ( begging ) from him, but you eventually draw yourself.

It’s just a quick sketch, but it feels so special to Brahms.

Okay, let me just set this up a bit. Realistically, I think Brahms would want to stay with you constantly, and that includes sleeping. So let’s say this little imagine takes place early on in the relationship- where your still getting used to the fact your new boyfriend has just been living in the fucking walls the whole time.

He tries his best to be gentle with it, but his habits ( which you’ll see shortly ) make it harder to achieve that.

He keeps it near his bedside- staring at it as sleep slowly creeps upon him. During the day, he carries it around with him.

Eventually though, from it’s frequent traveling, it appears crinkled and smudged, torn at the edges. And Brahms is so upset about it.

1. because you made this piece just for him and you probably won’t make another and just :(

and 2. he just ruined art! you don’t just do that! That’s horrible! You’re going to be so mad at him!

You notice he appears off that day. “How about we draw in the kitchen, while I get us some breakfast. Does that sound good, love?”

Brahms simply nods in return. His lackluster response only further worrying you. He takes a seat at the table, almost nervously fidgeting with his hands.

You focus your attention on the stove, cracking the eggs gently against the pan, and watching as they splash into it. The soft sizzling nearly distracting you from the silent form of your boyfriend. At this point in the morning, he would of at least wanted a hug or a meek kiss from you- he’d been acting so oddly this morning.

You plate the eggs, and place one on the table in front of Brahms, and one in front of you. You keep an eye on him as you eat- he’s playing with his eggs, poking his fork around them. You sigh, taking a break. “Brahms, dear. What’s the matter?”

He shrugs, uncertain- almost afraid. He reaches into his pocket, taking out a crumpled piece of paper- he tries to smooth it out before shakily handing it to me. You’re not sure what is at first, before suddenly recognizing it as the piece you had made just weeks ago.

“I’m sorry, Y/n. Please don’t be mad at me,” he whines in his small, quiet voice. 

“Aww, dear,” you smile. “I’m not mad at all.”

“Really?”

You nod, pressing a chaste kiss to the top of his mask- but he still looks upset. “I can make you another one,” you offer. “But you’ll have to finish your breakfast first.”

He gives a giddy nod in return, an equally excited grin adorning his face behind the mask. He quickly begins to dig into his food.

Okay, back to headcanons !!

As much as Brahms appreciates your art and loves seeing you work...he is a needy little thing, and will be a constant nuisance while you create. He just wants to cuddle  >:(

Compromise?

He won’t be too happy about it, but you do come to a compromise with him.

If you paint? Well, your certainly not doing it during the day. It’s just nearly impossible to paint with him up and about. You’d know...you’ve tried.

He still likes watching you paint sometimes, but he can be a bit impatient.

If you sketch in bed or other lounge worthy spots, Brahms is allowed to stay perched between your arms, or head resting on your thighs. This way he gets the warmth of being so close to you.

That, and occasionally your unoccupied hand will lazily run a long his head, twiddling his curls between your fingers.

(I feel like the last thing I wrote for Brahms had you playing with his hair but like,, it’s such a simple and easy way to give him attention, AND I think we’d all love to run are hands through those curly locks of his 🥺🥺)

[ninjabelle]

Key-points in Berserk if Guts was allowed to act on his emotions where Griffith’s involved - Meta

There is a theme with regards to Guts always wanting to run to Griffith when he is feeling emotionally shaken up and vulnerable and though it happens a bunch of times in a lot of subtle ways all throughout Berserk the 3 that majorly stand out to me are - going back in time - the hill of swords, primrose hall and after the Zodd fight when Griffith’s recovering.

Let’s start there, and this is also a direct (long winded lmao, forgive me) response to this reply by @bthump about what I wish had gone differently.

When Griffith gets injured after fighting Zodd together Guts wants to see him. I forget the exact timeline but I’m pretty sure this is effectively immediately after. As soon as he’s able to, but he’s stopped by Caska and whatever it was that he wanted to say or do gets put on hold until his talk with Griffith outside later on when, surprise surprise, they get interrupted again. This is also a theme and another recurring, deliberate one. Guts never gets to have a true heart to heart with Griffith and vice versa and this is something that drives the plot forward because otherwise those two would’ve run off into the sunset together long before the eclipse ever had a chance of happening. The whole of Berserk rests on the fact that Guts and Griffith have unfinished business and the entire story takes a nosedive into the dark and depressing once Guts overhears Griffith’s speech to Charlotte at primrose because, again, he’s stopped by Caska (again!! poor girl gets done so dirty every time she gets used like that but that’s meta for another time) and he does not have the opportunity to speak with Griffith about how deep that affected him either.

So, back to just after the first Zodd fight, though he doesn’t seem as deeply wounded and emotionally raw as he was after accidentally kebabbing Adonis while trying to get to Julius, I believe he was deeply shaken up by the whole Zodd encounter regardless, not to mention the thought of Griffith being injured, the guilt - god, the guilt, between the two of them I don’t know who would win when it comes to sheer amounts, but the key difference is that Griffith’s guilt morphs into self-loathing and ruthless actions and Guts’ guilt manifests as self doubt and a recklessness and disregard for his own safety that gets thrown back into his face when Griffith shows time and time again that he’s willing to put himself at risk to protect Guts in spite of all that. Imagine what a shock to Guts’ system that was, to be seen like that. It’s what he still wants, even now wayyyy post-eclipse.

If he hadn’t been stopped that very first time, I imagine him storming into that room and demanding Griffith explain why he risked his life again. His handling of the guards earlier and the fact that he never, not once during the golden age gave a single shit about politics and standing and propriety and would only participate for Griffith's sake speak volumes, because in that moment of intense feeling and on a quest for answers he moves on emotions alone, like he does in battles, where he goes with his gut instead of strategizing, and it helps the Hawks win, because he is the perfect wild card and so complementary to Griffith's more analytical nature. You could argue that emotive Guts = best Guts, but when it comes to directing them at Griffith in a productive way he always gets stopped one way or another, and I mean every. single. time.

In a perfect world Guts gets to storm into the room, where they’re alone and they do not get interrupted and instead of a non answer like ‘do I need a reason?’ Griffith would tell him exactly why, and the only you made me forget my dream is said to Guts’ face instead of thought during Griffith’s despair event horizon. Guts probably wouldn’t even know how to process that and would promptly leave the room to think that over, or not think about it and swing his sword some in frustration, but crucially that would have created an opening and a version of Berserk where Guts is mercifully allowed to seek out Griffith when his emotions dictate that he should.

So then, even if the story unfolds the same after this and Griffith still makes his speech to Charlotte and Guts still wants to see him that night because he just did something horrible and needs comfort, even if Caska gets thrown in front of him again to stop him there would be an opening - because it was allowed to happen before, and last time he learned he meant more to Griffith than he could have ever imagined, maybe he would know to take Griffith’s words about equals and see them for what they really are instead of feeling so horribly incompetent and resolving to leave.

In a perfect world he seeks Griffith out afterwards, and tells him he overheard, and Griffith would probably panic and start babbling politics as damage control, and Guts would throw in a ‘what are we?’ and Griffith would look into his eyes and say ‘you’re so much more to me than an equal’ (I’ll write the fic someday, I promise) and then... well. All I’m saying is when Guts is allowed to be emotionally vulnerable when he’s alone with Griffith that would give Griffith the boost of confidence he needs to finally open up and tell the truth about his own feelings. Because Guts isn’t alone there, Griffith’s just as emotional, just as fragile, if he allowed someone close. He’s just better at pushing all that down until his indifference becomes a mask he wears and a weapon he wields.

He could overcome it, but it starts with Guts, he’s the catalyst, as the only one that could have ended Griffith’s dream that’s only fair.

Now last but not least, the hill of swords.

In a perfect world, the eclipse never happened because Guts, knowing his true worth in Griffith’s heart, would never leave. And even if he did, for whatever other reason, having opened up to someone would have made Griffith a hell of a lot less repressed, and less likely to hit a point of despair so strong it triggers the behelit. After all, it wasn’t the torture that broke him.

But.

The eclipse does happen, and even then, with all the bad blood between them and al that hurt and anger Guts still want to run to Griffith. There is a reason why my favorite moment in the whole entire manga is that scene. It’s just- mwah. Kissing my fingers. So good. I almost have no words. Almost.

Guts, for a moment, forgets that he has to kill Griffith. And I say has because wants does not feel right to me. I don’t believe Guts, nor Griffith, nor Caska or anyone in the story for that matter really ever gets to do what they want. In the world of Berserk desire is a ticket that leads straight to tragedy. But Guts has to kill Griffith, and he forgets himself for a moment and is ready to run to him, and in that moment I see the echo of all the moments before where he wanted to do the same thing and was stopped.

Again it’s Caska that jolts him back to reality and his rage and away from Griffith, who even as Femto draws Guts in. Who even after everything he’s done has Guts standing there with wide eyes and the whole of his body straining towards him. Now if this sounds overly romanticized to you I say this, look again. That’s Guts, again, vulnerable and raw and hurt, and to who does he want to go? I guarantee if Zodd hadn’t whisked Griffith away when Guts went on his mad dash to run him through with a sword under the pretense of rescuing Caska it would not have been her he’d locked eyes with first.

Do I believe they would have talked heart to heart, even in that setting? I doubt it. But if Caska hadn’t been involved, and Zodd was nowhere to be seen I wonder what could’ve been said. I imagine Griffith as Femto wouldn’t have let Guts come close enough to physically harm his brand new body, but perhaps if he was slightly less in denial about no longer feeling anything he would have let Guts rant and rave and cry out all his anger instead of flying off, and maybe in seeing the pain in Guts for what it truly is - betrayal over hatred, a broken heart over unstoppable righteous fury - that would have made it easier for his heart to thaw, and perhaps then at least he would know that he meant more to Guts, like Guts meant more to him. And Guts, would he admit that to himself? That it’s not just anger and hatred he feels for Griffith? It gets hinted he knows that damn well several times post-eclipse, that the anger and hatred is just a front, the beast of darkness whispers it to him all the time. But it never gets to go somewhere, because he’s not alone with Griffith when it happens. Even now, even as enemies instead of comrades he’s still not allowed to be near Griffith when his emotions demand of him that he should be.

And that’s a damn shame.

Ninja out~

[lunatic-fandom-space]

Okay, you know how I said I wanted to watch all these german minecraft series and then watch 3rd Life SMP? Yea, I actually dont have the attention span to watch a bunch of white bread boys fuck around in minecraft with little to no story, regardless of wether theyre american or european so Im just gonna write this post and them start watching 3rd Life SMP so yeah.

First, I kinda want to discuss what Im hoping for on like, a meta-level I guess. The only other minecraft RP Ive watched that seems similar to this is Dream SMP so expect lots of comparisons.

I like to split dsmp into three major parts: no story/non-rp, story/non-rp and story/rp.

The first part was literally just a live streamed vanilla minecraft let's play and it was boring as shit. It felt exactly like watching a bunch of dudes play minecraft and unless they acknowledged the people in their donations (who could uncomfortably pushy and even shippy at times) you did not at all get the impression they were even aware of the stream. And as much as I appreciate some level of authenticity in this type of content, I also expect to be entertained by it and this did not even meet my bare minimum standard of entertainment. Admittedly, my attention span is very low so that definitely has something to do with it, but still. I personally have never felt anything but boredom and occasionally intense discomfort while watching anything from this 'era' of dsmp.

The second part was the start of the first conflict, and thus the start of some semblance of a story. They were kind of 'roleplaying' already (both in the sense that they obviously have their personas for their content and in sense that they didnt actually have grievances with one another and were just playing it up for the sake of entertainment) but it was more on the fly, even less focused and less serious. However, it was already legues more fun to watch.

And then we had the third part, where, starting with Wilbur Soot joining and deciding to larp Hamilton, they started to plan things out more and have more complex and/or dramatic conflicts. Needless to say, this was/is the best part in my opinion and what made me see the appeal of dsmp.

What Im hoping for 3rd Life SMP is, that they skip atleast the first part. From what I can tell, it was created sometime after dsmp has been in that third part for a bit and it is a minecraft rp, so Im assuming the people behind it wanted to do something similar, just with the story aspect there on purpose and from the get-go, if you know what I mean. And by the way, I dont think thats wrong or even "copying" in the slightest. Dsmp very much seems like a case of "they did it first, not best" and if anything, I think it would be a shame if people didn't want to do their own spin on this basic concept.

What Im personally hoping for in terms of the 'style' of roleplay itself, I really hope that they dont seperate it as rigidly into lore and non-lore as they did in dsmp. Ideally, they would do it like Ranboo (Wilbur when he was playing Ghostbur to an extend too, but he didnt actually stream and have his own POV back then), where he's always kinda 'In-Character' even when there isnt really anything happening in the plot at that moment. Again, I just dont have the attention span for no story in series like this anymore, so I'd appreciate it on a personal level, but I also think that it could humanize the characters more and potentially add additional depth to them. Especially since it looks like 3rd Life is made by the Hermitcraft group and if the stuff Ive read about Hermitcraft (especially in comparison to dsmp) it wont thrive off intense conflicts and wars in quite the same way, so that could also be a way of making a calmer rp interesting.

And now, some actual plot predictions!

So, the way I found 3rd Life SMP was this really neat 'Pitiful Children' animatic by ZylisticArt. I didnt actually 'watch' it because when I look up animatics I just kinda stare at the screen, not processing anything because Im too busy imagining my own OC animatic to the song, but I did read the description and was mildly intrigued, and its the main reason I wanted to watch 3rd Life so Im going to properly watch it now and post my predictions for the plot below.

***

The description mentions something about the animatic being based on some kinda theory, but I only skimmed it in order to not get spoiled so idk what thats really about. Im mostly intrigued by the fact that the description mentions it being a hardcore SMP (with a twist!), that, combined with the name and the visuals of the animatkc lead me to a couple conclusions;

I dont really know how Hardcore mode works in multiplayer, but in singleplayer you just get permanently kicked out of your world when you die, so Im assuming it works like that on a server too, except on a server, Im pretty sure you have the option of being 'reinvited' onto a server by the admin(s) so you could theoretically have three lives while keeping it a hardcore project where you cant regenerate without potions or golden apples and all that. Again, idk if thats actually how hardcore works but I sure hope it is, because thats what Im basing pretty much all of my predictions on.

In the animatic there were like green people, yellow people and a red guy who was like, the antagonist I guess. I think the green guys still have all their lives, the yellow ones are down to two and the red lads are all down to their last one. Maybe theres gonna be a thing thats like, if you lose a life you lose a part of your soul and that makes you evil or something? Yknow, like the whole "character comes back wrong" thing, except its the conflict of the entire series. Pitiful Children is very much a 'Manipulating Others Into Doing Harmful Shit' kinda song, and I feel like that would be very in-line with a plotline like that, yknow?

Im not expecting there to be wars/conflicts on the scale of dsmp (no blown up countries here bois) but I am expecting to get ridiculously attached to a place that inevitably gets blown up/set on fire by an antagonist.

Speaking of antagonists, theyre definitely also doing the whole multiple POV thing, which means everyone is an antagonist in one way or another and Im a solutely watching every POV from every characters so that I know the full context and story of everything, so I can have the most correct opinions on them, which is both normal to want and possible to achieve.

Since these are the Hermitcraft guys Im expecting some beautiful builds that make me feel insanely untalented and the same thing with redstone shit.

Ghosts. If they havent added some kind of ghost mechanic/lore at the time Im writing this, they will add one in later, mark my words 3rd Life fandom, mark my words...

Thats pretty much it. This is all going under my mcyt tag too, and I dont think I'll be live blogging it, but it really depends on how interesting it is.

Also, if youre a 3rd Life fan who already watched all of it, the only thing youre allowed to respond to this with is a meme that is horribly incomprehensible to anyone who hasnt watched it.

Have a nice day!

[terramythos]

TerraMythos 2021 Reading Challenge - Book 17 of 26

Title: The Other Wind (Earthsea Cycle #6) (2001)

Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

Genre/Tags: Fantasy, Third-Person, Female Protagonist (Kinda)

Rating: 5/10

Date Began: 7/8/2021

Date Finished: 7/12/2021

The sorcerer Alder is haunted by a recurring dream. Every night he stands at the border of the afterlife, and the dead call to him from the other side, begging him to free them. Fearing that he may unleash evil upon the world, Alder seeks out Ged, a living man who once escaped the land of the dead. Alder finds himself central to a vast mystery; the origin of the afterlife and how it relates to mankind’s ancient connection to the dragons.

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “That when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed." 

Content warnings and spoilers below the cut.  

Content warnings for the book: Death, suicidal ideation, references to child abuse, reference to misogyny, mentioned animal death, mention of slavery.

Man oh man do I wish I enjoyed this book more. It’s not horrible, and there’s stuff I liked, but I found it really hard to get through at times. The Other Wind feels different than anything else in the Earthsea series— to its detriment. There are three main issues I have with the book, all of which I’ll get into.  But ultimately I consider it a mediocre conclusion to an otherwise great series. 

First, this book has unusual pacing. The Earthsea books are generally slow, with a gradual buildup and gratifying conclusion that ties the themes of the story together. The Other Wind is more like a reverse bell curve; it has a great beginning and finale, but the middle meanders and stalls. The novel is split into five chapters, roughly the same length, and the middle three are a slog. There’s the barest whisper of an interesting plot, but not a lot happens— and what does happen isn’t very compelling.

The closest thing to a story in the middle is a subplot involving Seserakh, a Kargish princess. She’s sent to King Lebannen’s court with the expectation he’ll marry her to secure an alliance. A stock idea to be sure, but I can see how it might provide political intrigue. But it’s just aggravating. Tenar is in this storyline for some reason, and she feels contradictory and out of character. She wants to live a simple life and leave palace politics behind— but she also wants to push the literal king into a marriage he doesn’t want. Lebannen gets framed as The Absolute Worst because he (1) doesn’t want to get married to a woman he’s never met, and (2) is distracted by other stuff. There’s an implication that the match is a great choice, yet Seserakh and Lebannen don’t have a conversation until near the end. Of course Lebannen falls madly in love with her the moment they talk. No need to… develop their relationship? Normally I can gloss over a weak subplot, but since so little happens in the middle, that’s impossible here. It’s irrelevant to the main story, so it’s a shame Le Guin spent so much time on it. 

There’s a lot of talking in this book, but little action. Dialogue-heavy characterization isn’t necessarily bad. Le Guin is usually great at that kind of writing. But here, it emphasizes my second problem with the book: there’s too many major characters. Previous books focused on 1 or 2 people, allowing for intimate connection and character growth. LeGuin clearly tries for that here, but there’s so many people and relationships that everyone is underdeveloped. Perhaps this would come off better with a single perspective character, but Le Guin instead chose a shifting POV between 5+ characters. An alternating POV isn’t inherently bad, but it wasn’t a good fit for such a short book. I found myself wishing for focus on Alder (the protagonist!), who’s a genuinely compelling character. Alas. 

My third problem with The Other Wind is exposition. This book resolves several plot threads from previous entries. Obviously, there needs to be some context from the series to tie everything together. But the sheer amount of recap is unreal. So many scenes boil down to a character explaining something that happened to them in a previous book, then connecting it to the current plot. It’s not subtle and sometimes happens with the same event multiple times. It genuinely feels like Le Guin didn’t trust the reader to infer ANYTHING on their own. Having just read the rest of the series, this was especially irritating. I can cut a little slack here; this series began in 1968, and perhaps some returning 2001 readers wouldn’t recall key events. But regardless, The Other Wind is one of the most over-explained things I’ve read in a long time. It’s especially odd because the previous books aren’t like this.

There are things I genuinely like about The Other Wind. On a prose level, Le Guin's a great writer. Even the plotless parts of the book are full of interesting writing choices and philosophical observations. One nice thing about Earthsea is the characters age over the course of the series. Ged started A Wizard of Earthsea as a young boy, but as of The Other Wind is a seventy-year-old man. It’s cool to sit back and see just how much each character developed over time. Earthsea itself changed with them; each book’s events have serious repercussions for the world as a whole. And this book has the most significant change of all. 

When the The Other Wind’s plot is relevant, it’s one of the most interesting in the series. I think it’s a fascinating way to tie up two disparate plot threads. As much as I love The Farthest Shore, it does present a glaring conundrum regarding Earthsea’s core themes. True immortality is only obtained through death— not because of an afterlife, but because the dead become one with the rest of the world. So why does the Archipelago have an afterlife at all? Why is it so bleak and depressing? Why are there no plants, animals, or dragons there? Speaking of, there’s the revelation that dragons and humans were once the same species. Tehanu introduced this idea with various folktales, and the eventual reveal that Tehanu/Therru is a dragon. This idea is newer to the series and thus more malleable, but I like the idea of an entity being two creatures at once, and the mystery behind that.

I think the integration of these two ideas is interesting. Dragons and humans were once the same, but decided to split into two species to pursue different goals. They formed an ancient bargain to rule different aspects of the world. Fire and air represent the dragons’ realm, freedom— and water and earth represent the humans’ realm, ownership. But some humans learned magic and broke that covenant, binding everything to its true name. This established a form of freedom— immortality via one’s name. The afterlife is a result of that; it shouldn’t exist, which is why it feels wrong. Everything links back to the desire for immortality without change as introduced in The Farthest Shore. On a meta level it’s weird that none of this came up in that book; the explanation that dragons suddenly remembered this great wrong is a little retcon-y. But I understand Le Guin probably never intended to expand on these ideas, and it’s nice to see the contradiction of Earthsea’s afterlife resolved in the end. I went into this book expecting the titular “other wind” to be the other side of Earthsea, not another plane of existence; and I think that surprise is pretty cool! I like the metaphysical aspect of this other realm and how it connects to the  dragons. 

Even though I didn’t love the book, I do think it works as a series conclusion more than Tehanu did. Tehanu drops such a huge, unresolved bombshell in its ending that I’m surprised Le Guin intended it to be the final book of the series. The Other Wind does create some open-ended mysteries, but they’re the kind that don’t need a resolution. 

Despite that, I find myself wondering if this book was necessary. The Other Wind ties together some threads, but I wasn’t a fan of the execution overall. If the dragon and afterlife plot was a heavier focus, maybe I’d like the book more. Instead there’s a bunch of filler and extraneous detail. The book feels forced, like a novella stretched into a full novel— yet also like something’s missing. Perhaps The Other Wind works better on a reread, but I’m inclined to skip it in the future.

[xoxo-ren-xoxo]

smptwt as of 04/07/2020

Right. You asked for it, so you shall recieve. Below the cut is probably one of the most thought-out, in-depth, hopefully unbiased (but probably not) and above all helpful accounts of what the fuck is happening in the smplive and lunch club fandoms right now. I will be covering everything I can- but in the case that I’ve forgotten something, please let me know so I can have a crack at making an update.

Before the cut, I’d just like to link my first three posts about this same topic, covering my thoughts and the events of the last couple of months of drama. It feels so strange that I’ve made so many of these, but as long as they help people, I’ll keep making them.

Part 1: https://crunchy-corvid.tumblr.com/post/619547090403622912/the-cscoopsmptwt-drama

Part 2: https://crunchy-corvid.tumblr.com/post/619746266158661633/more-on-smptwt-long-post

Part 3: https://crunchy-corvid.tumblr.com/post/619886809143476225/smptwt-part-3-030620

I’d like to preface this with a huge thank you to everyone who helped me collect and compile information for this post- and those who helped censor twitter handles and edit screenshots. Without you, this post would have never been made. 

Thank you to everyone on the Cancelled Heaven discord server:  https://discord.gg/emrh2u

Now, onto the thing.

So we’ll start at the beginning with the easiest ‘drama’ (I hate calling it that) to cover. Charlie (slimecicle) tweeted on his second account and it caused a little upset. It’s not much but it feeds into a greater conversation that I think is relevant here: 

We’ll start with Charlie’s original point, then move on to the reply. Obviously, this post was poorly timed, because everyone thought it was about the Cooper (cscoop) drama, when in reality it was just a general comment. I saw a lot of replies along the lines of ‘it’s okay you can @ cscoop’ and similar things. If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll know how I feel about the Cooper situation, but regardless, there are a few reasons why this is a Bad Take/poor interpretation of what Charlie said.

Charlie and Cooper are friends. They haven’t fallen out as far as we know. Charlie is left-wing, and definately doesn’t seem like the kind of person to be friends with someone who is racist/transphobic/sexist etc. So why would he be talking about Cooper in this post? 

Also, Charlie is clearly talking about people who still say slurs, not people who have said slurs in the past. This is how I read it, a jab at streamers and gamers who use ‘dark humour’ to justifty their actions. A lot of people seemed to relate this to Cooper, despite him never trying to justify his use of slurs. The people who did try to justify his actions this way were fans, not the man himself. So again, this post doesn’t relate to Cooper.

On to the reply, which sparks a different conversation all together. While I see where the commenter is coming from, and agree with them to an extent, Charlie is allowed to have his own opinion on the matter. And he is right. Using insulting language against heterosexual people does create a larger divide and doesn’t get anyone on our ‘side’. It just makes us look immature and causes a lot of straight cis people to assume that we hate them. 

On the other hand, I do think that saying things like ‘disgusting hets’ can be a funny joke if you are saying it to your friends who don’t have any issue with it. You probably shouldn’t get into the habit of saying things like that though, just in case you actually hurt someone with your words. Both sides of the argument have pros and cons, so anyone angry at Charlie for his opinion really have no reason to be.

Charlie’s reponse to this comment was reasonable, responsible, and mature, and he is clearly showing that he understands the concerns of his audience. This is all I’ll say about Charlie in this post. Honestly, he’s generally unproblematic and ‘safe’ to keep watching, if you enjoy a very drama-free environment. Have fun!

Now I’ll move on to Ted. He’s made some great points recently about cancel culture which I strongly agree with. Here’s his first tweets:

I don’t have much to add here, this is perfectly valid in my opinion- though I feel like sometimes you can tell a lot about a person by the people they follow. For example, if someone follows Trump, Ben Shapiro, and a bunch of right-wing youtubers, they probably agree with a lot of the things they say. But I think the point Ted is trying to make is that he shouldn’t be harassed about drama his friends fall into. If he isn’t involved, leave him out of it. 

Next we’ll take a look at his tweets on stans, probably sparked by the drama with Carson, which I will be talking about later. 

Again, I have no issue with what Ted is saying here. His idea is a good one, and a fun way to distinguish casual fans from people who create art, content, and (appropriate) fanfiction for the ‘flandom’! 

Basically, how I see it, is that a ‘fan’ is a casual viewer who doesn’t really get involved in the flandom, maybe posting about smplive and/or lunch club occasionally, but not being too involved. A ‘flan’ is someone who interracts a lot, creates art and fiction that respects boundaries, and posts more about the boys than a casual fan does. A ‘stan’ is a stalker-fan, creepy and obsessive, too invested, maybe creates art and fiction that crosses boundaries, and obsessively posts about the boys.

I think this new terminology is really cool and Ted is smart for coming up with it (also, probably hungry when coming up with it too). I think that the term ‘stan’ should be thrown out and used to describe the ‘bad’ side of fandoms. There is a risk that people will hide behind the term ‘flan’ to disguise the fact that they are a stan, but this is still a good step foward. 

But you’re not here to listen to me ramble about Ted or Charlie. You’re here for Carson. So let’s get on with it.

Carson made a series of tweets talking about stans, much like Ted did later. He seemed tired of stans harassing him about his friends, a sentiment shared by Ted (who faced very minimal backlash over his tweets). Here’s what he said:

Which is something I fully agree with. For big content creators like Carson and his friends, stan culture is absolutely insane. Recently they’ve been trying to ‘catch out’ many people who are part of smplive and/or lunch club, most obviously with Cooper and Schlatt but I’ve seen the others getting ‘called out’ too. Carson’s anti-stan stance is well-known in the flandom (yes I am using that word get used to it) so these tweets didn’t surprise me. 

For some reason stans seem to think that if one creator is okay with their behaviour, every other creator is too. This is not the case. Carson was within his full right to say these things about stans.

Obviously the replies got out of hand. People became horribly angry very quickly, and clearly Carson had already had enough because pretty soon he started blocking stan accounts- which only made them more mad.

Of course, there were supporters and anti-stan comments out there too, such as this fun exchange:

But a whole lot of people got angry. Carson was trending for a while, too, after he started blocking stans. Unfortunately some people did get wrongfully blocked, which sucks, sure, but use of an alt account or logging off of twitter can solve that problem (this can also be said for stan accounts. Carson didn’t stop any of them from viewing his content, just blocked them so that he didn’t have to see their tweets).

Carson did this for his own mental health. After a long conversation with older people who have been in fandoms for decades, I can tell you that being at the top is always hell. New threads created about you every day, friends you can’t trust, and people giving you shit for things other people said. I can’t imagine how someone as popular as Carson has dealt with this for so long.

People who were blocked started to claim that they were having panic attacks, that they hyperfixate so they can’t help being obsessive, and that Carson doesn’t care about mental health for these reasons. They said some pretty toxic and manipulative things and a lot of people clearly didn’t know what they were talking about:

First of all, these comments on the Katerino and Fitz situation are honestly disgusting. These people are only proving Carson’s point that stans will be super supportive one second and turn around to hate you the next. To bring up something like this, something completely unrelated and highly personal- knowing Carson will see- is disgraceful. To speculate about a relationship that Carson has explicitly stated he doesn’t want people to speculate about just to try and make a point? Horrible.

A lot of stans seem to have this ‘we made you famous so we dictate how you feel’ mentality, which I hate. Exactly as the reply says, they sound like toxic parents with these words. To think you deserve ‘respect’ from someone after accusing their friends of horrible things and harassing them to the point that they block you is so manipulative and quite frankly cruel.

Again, Carson has the right to block anyone he wants. Creators are not your friends, they are entertainment. If you are making them upset and harassing them, you shouldn’t get mad when they block you. 

Listen. It can be tough, finding out that someone you look up to has blocked you. Yes, I’m sure people had a not-so-nice time with their mental health when it happened to them. But in most cases, they were blocked for a reason. Some people were even literally asking to get blocked and then got mad when they did. But again, no one has been barred from viewing Carson’s content. He simply blocked people who he didn’t want to see in his comments section.

You have freedom of speech, but you don’t have freedom from consequence. If you say something that hurts someone else, you’re not always going to be free from their judgement. 

Carson has been very open about his own struggles with depression and imposter syndrome recently, and people are viewing his actions as... hypocritical? This is flawed logic. Carson blocked stans because they were bad for his mental health, the fact that some claim to have had ‘panic attacks’ as a result is not on him. He has the autonomy to block who he wants to block. 

Wilbur Soot made some comments about the situation, which can be found in this video from 7 minutes 30 seconds in, and goes until 10 minutes and 11 seconds in:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/667971714

What Wilbur says here is completely understandable. He doesn’t have a problem with stans, but doesn’t speak for anyone but himself. Just because one person is okay with something doesn’t mean someone else is, too. 

Also, a lot of people think that it’s okay to hate on someone like Carson or Schlatt, then turn around and stan Wilbur, which is kind of fucked up, because they’re friends in real life. How would you feel if someone was super nice to you, then turned around and harassed your friends?

A lot of people claimed to have ‘hyperfixations’ on Carson or lunch club, which they used as an excuse to be obsessive and creepy. This is bullshit, but someone else explained it a lot better than I could:

And I absolutely agree with this. You cannot use neurodivergence to explain away your creepiness. That’s just offensive to people who do hyperfixate, and leads to even more problems and misunderstandings.

Carson did a stream much later where he talked about all of these things, and boy did that go well (not). Here is a clip of him talking about hyperfixations:

https://m.twitch.tv/clip/SuaveBlushingDotterelBCWarrior

Now, here’s where my support for Carson falters. He should have done more research on what hyperfixations really are before he said things about them. He hurt some people with what he said, and just saying he’s uneducated on the topic isn’t really an excuse.

HOWEVER. Carson was given very little time to research (about 24 hours between his original tweets and his stream) and, more importantly, it is very obvious that the use of the term ‘hyperfixation’ has been warped and manipulated by stans who are misusing the term to excuse their behaviour. Carson probably saw stans using it and assumed it was something synonomous with ‘obsessions’.

What he said was poorly worded, but the point he was making is the same as the (much more researched and informative) tweet above. Anyone getting mad that he is somehow ‘invalidating mental health or autism’ with his comments clearly don’t understand the point he was trying to make in the first place.

And here’s a clip of Connor talking about it, too, as well as defending Carson’s right to block people as he wishes:

https://www.twitch.tv/connoreatspants/clip/YummySlickPlumageSpicyBoy

https://www.twitch.tv/connoreatspants/clip/JazzySpotlessMelonMoreCowbell

What he said here is completely valid, a little poorly worded in the same way as Carson’s statement, but overall something I stand behind.

Some people are claiming that Carson is being manipulative or ‘gaslighting’ fans and stans:

Carson is not against fans who create cool stuff for him and his friends. He is against the people who harass him, accuse his friends of horrible things, and try to look for every little thing they’ve said and done wrong. This is what he said, and people got mad at him for it, and so he blocked them. That is it. There is no gaslighting. There is no manipulation. I’ve seen much more manipulative things coming from the stans’ side of things.

Now we move on to Noah’s reply to Carson’s tweet. Which, yes, caused a whole new can of worms to be opened.

Now, for those like me who have trouble figuring out Noah’s way of speaking, let me translate: ‘stans are insecure people who start to feel entitled because they’ve started to view a streamer they like as a friend/someone who shares their pain.’ 

For those of you who don’t know, this is what ‘don’t negotiate with terrorists’ means:

However, almost predictably, stans saw the word ‘terrorist’ and lost their goddamn minds. That, coupled with the complicated phrasing of Noah’s words, caused a lot of stans to freak out.

This conversation is full of Bad Takes, but my main issue is that they are trying to diagnose Noah with an actual mental illness. That is not only offensive to people who have that illness (especially calling him ‘insane’ in the same sentence, as well as implying that having said illness makes you a bad person) but is also highly hypocritical since so many stans claimed to all be neurodivergent themselves. 

Also, 90% of his fans aren’t stans. They’re mostly fans or flans. You are a loud minority. You aren’t as powerful as you think you are. Noah even started to retweet hate comments, that’s how few shits he gave. He also shows that he is concerned about people making things up about him, which is understandable.

Plus he outright said that stans are not fans of him, which in most cases, they’re not. Noah’s content isn’t as widely watched as some of his friends’ stuff, and a lot of stans don’t watch his streams.

But anyway, here’s one good take I saw floating around:

After this, before his stream, Carson deleted his original tweets and spent some time with his family, which was a sensible and mature thing to do at this point. 

During Carson’s stream, someone notified him that his ‘fans’ had started to doxx stans. Here is his reaction:

https://m.twitch.tv/callmecarsonlive/clip/SpicySassyGerbilArgieB8

A lot of people got mad that he didn’t do more to stop the doxxings, but I want to raise the question: what was he supposed to do? He can’t control his ‘fans’ (another breed of stans who don’t call themselves stans were doing the doxxings, to be honest) and he said not to do it. He was streaming, he didn’t know how serious it was or even if it was true, at that moment, what was he supposed to do?

It did get serious. People I know were doxxed. Anyone posting anything (positive or negative) about lunch club, smplive, and Carson were in danger. It was not fake like some people claimed. The twt handles in this post are blurred out because of the doxxing threats. I am making this post at my own risk, but I do feel that tumblr is safer than twitter at the moment.

This being said, it is in no way Carson’s fault how out of hand this has become. He has been against doxxing in the past and his sentiments haven’t changed. He has said more about the doxxings in replies to tweets such as this one:

Also, here’s what the mods on Carson’s discord server had to say about the situation. They’ve clearly talked about this with Carson, and are strongly against anyone who is doxxing these people (especially since a lot of the people being doxxed are minors).

A similar sentiment was shared on Ted’s discord server:

Here is what ItsAsaii had to say:

So that’s basically where everything stands right now. If you want an even fuller update on everything, check out Carson’s stream ‘afternoon fellas and fellettes’ where he talks about everything.

Here’s the last tweets I have from Carson regarding the whole situation:

And I agree fully with what he has said. And again, Carson doesn’t owe stans anything. Just like what was said here, he had subs and fans before he had stans, they did not ‘make’ him, and they cannot control him.

This is all I have to say, for now. If I have missed anything or you’d like me to cover anything else, please let me know. If I have hugely missed the mark and said something super wrong/offensive, let me know. If you’d like me to talk about a streamer or youtuber not related to lunch club, throw me a DM or an ask and I’ll try to compile some things, even if I don’t watch their content or know who they are.

If you’d like up-to-date information about drama in smptwt, streamers, and youtubers, join the Cancelled Heaven discord server- which I linked at the start of the post. 

I thank you all for reading, and suggest that you reblog this so that as many people as possible can see it. If you want to risk it, go ahead and link this post in a tweet or something, but please do be careful. 

For some ‘extra reading’ (watching) I highly recommend Contrapoints’ video on cancel culture: https://youtu.be/OjMPJVmXxV8

And Philosophy Tube’s video on artists and fandoms, there’s some really insightful things about parasocial relationships: https://youtu.be/3IG0Y63LkDM

Lots of love, and have a great day <3

[ot3]

wait wait wait can you explain more how to be funny and what makes humor work preferably a la essay form if you’re up to it. I’m reading a comic and the jokes aren’t sticking so I’d love to be able to properly be able to figure out what makes some joeks works but others not so I articulate what I hate about it

This response got kinda long so i’m sticking it under a readmore. TL;DR: I don’t think I can tell you how to be funny and what makes comedy work, I don’t think anyone can tell you that. However, I can give you a bunch of advice and guiding questions on how to go about figuring out these answers for yourself

Honestly I don’t think that’s something I’m capable of doing this in any sort of reasonable amount of time. It’d either have to be something really short and really general like what I wrote in the rvb0 post or it’d have to be incredibly long and incredibly specific where I pick specific good and bad examples of comedy and break down what I think works and what I think doesn’t. It’d take a lot of slow and meticulous work I don’t really have the time for, and I’m also not sure how helpful it would be, because once again, comedy is super super subjective and I don’t want to risk overemphasizing my own tastes/general observations as any sort of gospel.

the best advice i can give you would be to try and properly figure out for yourself why these jokes aren’t sticking! because processing something as Funny is much more of an innate reaction than, like, engaging Cerebrally with Narrative Developments it can be much harder to actually realize why something works or doesn’t. I’m going to start by sticking in what I said in my original RVB0 post here in case anyone is reading this without context. 

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

When you see a joke that doesn’t land - try mentally rewriting it. Is there anything you could do to make it funny? Can you bring to mind any similar jokes from other pieces of media that you did like? How does the joke effect the pace of the story - is it an awkward and unnatural pause within the flow of events/dialogue? Is the joke well implemented - that is to say, regardless of how ‘objectively’ funny or unfunny the actual meat of the thing is, is it coming from the right source and directed at the right target? Does it add to your understanding of events/characters/setting, do nothing in this department, or does it detract from/contradict them? Is it immersion-breaking (and if so, is this intentional or meaningful?) or does it pull you deeper into the world you’re being shown?

Once you start asking these questions of both media you like and media you dislike you’ll start to recognize patterns in what lands and what doesn’t, and I don’t think they’re questions anyone else can really answer for you.

I think it also is a question of whether comedy is the intended final destination of a piece of media or just a step along the way. Media that exists solely as a vehicle for jokes is going to have comedy that looks very different than the comedy present in media that exists for heavy narrative purposes but includes moments of levity. 

Here are two examples of shows I think are really good and are also about as different in concept, execution, and intent as humanly possible: phineas and ferb and breaking bad.

Breaking bad is probably the most emotionally taxing television experience I’ve had in my life. I mean this as a compliment. breaking bad is supposed to be grueling to watch. It also has jokes in it. the scenes that are funny server to really meaningfully increase the immersion, not break it, and they do this by bringing a very realistic sense of human interaction that grounds the high-stakes melodrama into something that looks a hell of a lot more like reality. There’s one scene in particular i think does just such a great job of exemplifying this. here we’ve got jesse having dinner with walt and his wife while they are, as always, fighting with each other viciously and creating such a horrible and suffocating miasma of tension over the entire narrative, and jesse is trying to break some of this tension very poorly.

Then, in literally the complete opposite vein, you’ve got the phineas and ferb episode ‘lets take a quiz’ which i consider incredibly formative in the development of my sense of humor. The entire Bit of literally this whole episode is that they’re doing this terrible quiz with no rules that makes no sense and candace is trying to win but nobody knows how to play this game. 

Phineas and ferb is an episodic children’s cartoon that deals almost exclusively in unreality and the absurd, and so this kind of bit works here.

Saying ‘whats good comedy’ is really hard because it’s just like saying ‘whats good narrative’. There’s no one set of criteria; it boils down to what is the intention of your comedy, and how successfully were you able to act on these intentions?

This really got away from me sorry I am working on extremely little sleep i hope this helped even a little bit. My final piece of advice is: go watch hot fuzz. seriously. go watch hot fuzz (2007) dir. edgar wright and look at how the jokes in that movie are because theyre perfect and i love hot fuzz and it’s fucking funny

[luvdsc]

Hey Cat!! I hope you're doing well as always ! 💖 AHHHH huhu I closed the form last Sunday since I've collected enough responses dy! (NOOOOOOOO ToT) I got a total of 221 responses at the end of the week, which is 3x the amount I initially needed! :o I'm beyond grateful and appreciative ToT I've cleaned the data and have proceeded to run some data analysis, but I ran into an issue whereby the scores on the subscales are equal (it has never been reported in past studies! :O) so I'm waiting for my supervisor's feedback on how to proceed. Hopefully it's nothing too serious ToT

Hehe finance is interesting indeed! I just started reading a book on finance for young adults (Rich Dad Poor Dad) and I look forward to learning more from the author's tips! The Coursera introductory course has also made financial terms a lil more familiar, even though it's just the basics and it's really helped w my financial literacy 🥺 I can push myself to study but it's also the numbers and calculations I'm worried of cuz I am rly a nong (idiot) when it comes to numbers * - * it runs in the genes I guess AHAHAHAHA my mom and sister aren't good at numbers either keke

Aww I'm glad yr professor made financial accounting enjoyable and a fruitful experience for you! Some lecturers / professors rly just have that spark in them to inspire ppl and I'm blessed to be surrounded by a bunch of em in the psych department!🥺😭 it truly makes a difference and I'm sure we both are living proofs of that!

After debating for a while, I've decided not to take a minor mainly because I'm so tired HAHAHAHAHAHA and I'll just do my own self-studying and exploration whilst working! Go out and explore the world, live life! Whilst ironically still staying in my room because of the COVID-19 situation in our country (cases are abt 20+k every day :') ) My proposal has been finalized and it's been accepted! It's just that some elements of my proposal is also part of my actual report, so I have some guidance to refer to in terms of structure! :3 and yes don't worry! I got plenty (sometimes a lil too much) rest during the sem break whilst remaining productive! Plus, I got to catch up w some friends and had game nights (maybe too much of game nights hehe) and movie nights w my friends which was truly refreshing! Also cuz I might not see a lot of them again after we graduate so we gotta cherish every moment 🥺😭

I'm a freelance graphic designer for my uni's newsletter! Occasionally, they'd ask us to create both the content and design! I'll place the link to my recent work below if you wanna check it out! UwU I'm trying to incorporate the same practices during sem break in my last sem (current sem) too! cuz yes mental health is so so important and I'm just tired of being academically tired you get me? :(

What makes me most trilled abt learning abt psychology is how to apply it in daily life too! I find it so fascinating and awestruck at how relatable and within reach these things are like wow we can be influenced in such ways?? :o can be both good and bad but imma stick w seeing it as the development and evolution of us humans UwU

Also, the vaccine has fixed my sleep schedule HEHE (another perk of getting vaccination :3) I got some rly good rest and managed to reset my usual sleeping time, thank you science ToT oooo I see I see, we've had cases of nurses injecting empty syringes hence the recording :( but GHIOGHWEOGIOHW I could never do that, I can feel the liquid entering me as it is so that's good enough ToT (* plays Love Talk * I can feel it coming)

OMG YOUR ART PIECES ARE SO BEAUTIFUL, ADORABLE AND ELEGANT! 💖🥺🥰 it must've required a lot of hard-work and effort AHHH thankiew for showing me yr work!! it's truly unique in its own manner despite it's simplicity UwU is there a reason or backstory to yr chosen theme and objects? :3

I just Googled Somi Somi and omg that's such an UwU ice cream AHHHH 💖🥺😭 ice cream is my fav food of all time and it looks like an ice cream haven omg imagine eating it after a loooong hard day's of work ToT and OMG THE SATISFACTION OF EATING THAI MILK TEA ICE CREAM ON A HOT DAY YASSS 😋🤤 hehe if you get the chance to try milk & biscoff, do try it! It's amazing !😍 and ooo i haven't tried alcoholic ice cream before but I will one day!! :3 my alcohol tolerance is rly low though, will I get tipsy over alcoholic ice cream? We shall see UwU (i can only drink half a bottle of apple cider before my face gets red and I start getting a lil tipsy + headache)

and lovie....knowing yr school schedule now...OURS IS DEFINTELY BRUTAL OMG a 3 month long sem break huhu that's only the total amount of sem breaks we get in a year ToT i thought uni was hard but not that hard ToT

Always glad and honored to have you onboard! and AHAHAHAH the contractions about to start soon 👀 I enjoy talking to you huhu you're such a sweet and supportive person 💖🥺🥰😙 huhu for my period cramps, I've been having them since I was 12 ToT my doctor prescribed me some panadols but sometimes I can't even swallow them cuz I'd puke them out ToT I've settled w heatpacks to reduce my reliance on medicine, but I finally got some upgraded and safe to eat medicine from my gynae! She said it's fine to take it every month to keep my womb healthy and apparently my ms. lil uterus is suffering from inflammation, hence the super crazy bedridden cramps :( the upgraded medicine worked for a while, but after time it kinda didn't help either :/ but I realised that exercise rly does wonders to reduce the cramp too (gynae also recommended exercising) so i take walks and do my back stretches more frequently now! my period in the previous months (2 months ago) have been almost painless and bearable, it's so weird not seeing my bedridden ._. when I was in high school, there would always be a day in every month in which I don't attend classes, and that's solely because of my cramps. It just isn't worth suffering in school, plus we don't have a sick room :/ I hope the pain continues to subside! ToT

And ayy internship is also working experience, yr advice would be of great help to me regardless! 🥺 oh yes, I always remind myself that interviews are similar to the speaking test I took for my Cambridge English exams! That kinda help calm my nerves down a lil, but w nerves comes bigger smiles, so I guess it takes on a rather practical form of coping mechanism (sublimation) AHAHAHAHA

WAAAA WHAT A QUEEN you got an offer from every interview?? I aspire to be like you! 💖🥺🥰 huhu skill wise I believe I have lots to prepare esp in terms of case studies, and I perform rly poorly on certain assessments (*ehem * esp those concerning numbers) so I took the chance to study a lil during sem break too ToT but noted on that! I will work on that too and try to maintain that me element in interviews and overall just be myself keke

That's all from me for now! Imma wait for my supervisor's feedback and journey on w my last semester. Bon voyage! Link to my recent work: https://www.instagram.com/p/CTBqGzjr6sN/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link Other works: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPpv-IyM7Gi/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link https://www.instagram.com/p/CL55EG-MbL2/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

hi hello honey bee !!! 💓 omg i'm so sorry for the belated response, i finally got on my laptop 😭 i'm gonna put my response under the cut since it got a little long 🤧

omg 221 responses !!!!! that's so many 🙀 congratulations aaaaa it's amazing that you were able to get 3x the data you needed !!! was it difficult to run data analysis? were you able to solve the issue with the equal scores on the subscales? i hope it didn't create too much additional work for you ):

omg yes finance is really interesting! i enjoyed the classes i took for it :') how is rich dad poor dad? did you learn a lot from it? i know it was a book my prof recommended, but i never got around to reading it 😶 did you learn any helpful tips? and ooo i'll have to look into coursera! yeah, there's quite a lot of terms for finance, and it can be a little intimidating paired with all the math formulas and such, but it's pretty useful imo! how are your financial studies going so far? 💕 omg nong is such a cute word?? i would never think it meant idiot asdkfhlkajsdf omg my whole family is good at numbers and really like math, but i didn't like it 😭 my mom made me study it a lot everyday though rip are the financial calculations getting easier for you as you practice more hopefully?

yessss omg i absolutely agree with this!!!! like you can just feel when a professor loves to teach and is genuinely so excited to talk about their subject, and it just makes the most boring horrible subject into something you learn to enjoy and hate less :') and i'm really happy to hear you have tons of professors like that in the psych department 🥺💗

that's great to hear!!!! 🌷🌷 i'm glad that you're prioritizing yourself and your health, which is so much more important than taking on a minor. what fun subjects have you decided to explore and self study so far? 💞 oh my gosh, the rising cases are so high?? i hope it's gotten better there for you ): are you able to go outside yet?

big congratulations on your proposal being finalized and accepted, lovebug !!!! 🥳🥳 i'm very proud of you and hoping one day i can read your published studies in a scientific journal :') aaaa i'm so glad to hear that you got to rest and enjoy your time with your friends!! i definitely feel that omg i regret all the times i skipped out on movie nights or game nights with my friends because now we're all scattered across the country and the only way we can have them again is over zoom calls 🤧

I SAW YOUR DESIGNS AND THEY'RE GORGEOUS OMG I LOVE THEM SO MUCH !!!! 💖 I'M IN AWE AAAA IF PSYCH DOESN'T WORK OUT, I HOPE YOU BECOME A GRAPHIC DESIGNER 🤩🤩💖 and yes i totally get it ): i really felt the academic burn out when i was in college and it was really difficult at times 🤧 but i hope it's going better for you nowadays, sweetpea 💝💝

omg yeah i absolutely agree !!!! whenever i read about psychology, i keep it in the back of my mind and then when i see something irl that relates to it, i'm like :O amazing. it's so cool to learn about different psych tricks too and see how it works when you test them out yourself and whatnot. and it's really crazy to see how the human brain is so easily influenced at times ??? it truly is an amazing subject !!!

ah what a great side benefit of the vaccine - a better sleep schedule 🤩 i'm happy to hear that your schedule has been fixed 💘 and omg what ??? they're injecting empty syringes wth ????? 😭 that's absolutely horrible, are they getting sued?? lmaooooo that love talk reference askdfhlaksjd

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL YOUR KIND COMPLIMENTS 😭😭💗💗 there were many late hours spent in the art studio to finish them, but i'm really happy with the end products :') i thought light bulbs are an interesting subject to do, and my prof said that cutting out circular objects or sculpting them is the most difficult since they're made up curves and not straight lines and i was like ok bet i'm gonna do it aND I'M SO GLAD I DID BECAUSE I REALLY LIKE THEM 🥺 and i love honey bees !!! that's why i decided to paint them and we were supposed to paint them in a combined style of two artists so i tried monet's impressionist style with the short brush strokes and pop art triptych style like marjorie strider 💕

somi somi is sooo good and i just had it again a couple weeks ago :') omg ice cream is your favorite food? :o and YES ice cream is so satisfying after a long day of hard work, like it's such a nice reward to look forward to at the end of day ✨ aaaaa i have to try thai milk tea ice cream one day now !!!!! it sounds amazing 🤩 and YES i must look for places that sell milk & biscoff ice cream !! i have milk ice cream from somi somi, but i need to try to combined flavors 💘 i don't think you'll get tipsy over it !!! it's a really faint taste of alcohol, like i didn't even notice it at first, and i don't think they put very much of it in there! aksljdfhals omg you're a lightweight :o at least that means you save money on alcohol LOL i need like nine shots to get drunk 🤧

your school is too hard 😭 you need more than just 3 months of break !!! 😡 we get a week off for thanksgiving in fall semester and a week off for spring break in spring semester too and then the month long winter break and three month summer break. and we have the one day holidays off too like labor day, memorial day, etc. i can't believe they give you so little time off after working so hard???

asdfhlkajshdlksja loool are the contractions over yet? has it been born? what's the current status, doctor? 👀 i really enjoy talking to you too !!! i'm very sorry for the late responses, work is really taking over all of my time, and i never have enough time to get on my laptop to reply to my asks 😭 and thank you for saying such kind things about me 🥺🥺💝 oh my gosh, i'm so sorry to hear that you have such terrible cramps 😭 i can't even imagine going through that - mine are nowhere near as horrible 😖 do the heatpads help a lot? i'm relieved to hear that you were prescribed better medication though! but yeah, your body does eventually get used to the medication and you have to continue taking stronger meds for it to work, but that's not a very healthy solution /: but i'm really glad to hear that exercise has been helping out a lot!! 💖 hurray for almost painless and bearable periods 🥳 i'm sorry to hear that you had to go through that in high school ): that sounds absolutely horrible 😭 periods are just awful, but it's like i'm grateful that i have my period because that means i'm not pregnant, but also please go away aslkhdfaklsj

omg what was the speaking test for the cambridge english exams like? :o it sounds so formal and a lil intimidating askdjfhalsd do you know of any psych tricks that can possibly help calm your nerves? :')

aaaa yes i did !! i was really surprised that i got an offer from them all because at the time, i was not in the right major and i think i was one of the most underqualified applicants 🤧 one person who interviewed me asked why i withdrew from my engr physics class and i explained it in a kinda funny way but in my head, i was like "oof i'm not gonna get this offer anymore" but then he laughed at my response and told me about how his prof told him he should drop a guitar class he was taking because he was doing very poorly and we bonded over that aklsjdhfkals omg how do interviews for psych jobs go? do you have to discuss a lot of case studies? do they give you a list of possible case studies they'll ask about? :o what sort of assessments do you have to do? good luck on all of your interviews, honey bee 💛 i'm rooting for you, you're gonna do amazing !!!! 💘

omg what did your supervisor say about your case study? and how is your last semester going? are you almost done now? 🌸 (also how have you been? what have you been up to? thank you for taking the time to leave such detailed messages for me, i'm really excited to see all the fun updates in your life, lovebug 🌷🌷)

[strugglingyetvibing]

I gotta talk about something because otherwise I’ll send an email to my professor and he won’t care because it wasn’t the point of the lecture

OKAY SO LISTEN UP THIS IS A MILE LONG BUT IF I DON’T SAY SOMETHING I WILL EXPLODE

I’m in a college-level history of film class, and as such we’re going through and watching lots of old movies and reading about the historical contexts for various cinematic movements, right? And for a long time, there wasn’t any sound in movies. We as a whole started making movies in the 1890s and premiered synchronized sound in the film The Jazz Singer in 1927 (it’s a terrible movie, but hey, it had sound!), but sound wasn’t really utilized until the 1930s. So when people went to watch movies prior to the 1930s, they didn’t just sit in silence like a bunch of weirdos. The theaters (often called Nickelodeons because it was a nickel to go watch a movie (the -odeons comes from the Greek word for film)) would employ either a phonograph or a live musician to provide musical accompaniment to the day’s films.

An interesting little tidbit, it’s believed that around 95% of the early silent films have been lost, either due to irresponsible caretaking of the film reels or intentional destruction for various reasons (see: Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) and A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902)). So in reality, we’re very lucky to see any of the silent films we do get to see. Along with that, there weren’t many musical scores for these silent films that survived, either. So it’s up to us in today’s modern age to make up for the lost musical score and accompaniment.

This is where I start to get upset.

There are many versions of silent film scores that fit very well with the film and the time period they come from.

My film teacher chose none of these to show the class.

At first, I thought I could take it. Early on, we watched A Trip to the Moon for our recitation, and it was a lovely film! A true classic, and very fun to watch. It was the precursor for the science fiction genre that we all know and love today, which is pretty rad! However, the accompanied score was made in 2010. And the group that made this particular score saw the phrase “science fiction” and took it way too far. There was all sort of electronic beeps and blips and boops to accentuate the scenes of the moon, and it was very out of place. People in 1902 had no context in which to know what these modern sounds were, and it was rather jarring to hear them in this film.

I just sighed and said “fuck it, whatever,” and went along with it because it was in the name of ‘science fiction.’ They’re on the moon, after all!

But this week, my professor took it too far.

This week, we delved into the world of Soviet Montage filmmaking. Basically, this style comes from an art style called Constructivism and was very popular in 1920s Soviet Russia. They thought that the film should serve a purpose, and that the filmmaker was like the engineer putting the film together. The whole movement came out of their trauma of World War I, and it’s a super neat genre. It really focused on the editing of a film rather than individual shots, and something called the Kuleshov Effect came out of the era. The effect strives to show how meaning of a sequence can be drastically changed based on which shots are included and the order that the particular shots are in.

To accompany this discussion, my professor had us watch a film called Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). It’s a really interesting film that doesn’t focus on specific characters, but instead the life of a modern 1920s Soviet city throughout a day. It uses a lot of different shots and editing patterns, and it’s a really great watch if you get the chance!

But the score is just atrocious. This particular version’s score was made in 2003, and it shows. Musically, 2003 was a time when jarring electronic noises were very popular, both in songs and in musical scores. The people who wrote the score for this 1929 film decided to include sounds very obviously from 2003, and it physically hurt to sit through. I did my best to give the score the benefit of the doubt during this film, but I literally had to mute the sound halfway through because it was just so horrible to listen to. This particular score made me so angry that I legitimately couldn’t sleep, and it was the only thing I could think about during recitation.

There are multiple points throughout this film that give musical and thematic cues, and the composers flat out ignore all of them. I understand that the film is rather old and can be hard to comprehend, I don’t fully understand it myself, but if you’re going to be the composer for it, then you better take the time to understand what’s going on. The score takes its own trip throughout the film and disregards the visuals of the film entirely. There’s a sequence in the film where there’s music being played (the viewer can’t hear it because it’s a silent film), and if a composer were to slow the film down, they could figure out what was being played and incorporate it into the score. But no, these composers wrote their own tune and slapped it over the scene, and it takes the viewer completely out of the viewing experience. The score takes the viewer out of the viewing experience throughout the entire film, but it’s very prominent in this particular sequence.

And another thing. If you’re going to write a score for an older film, it would make sense to put the score through a filter that made it sound like it was coming from the older generation. To elaborate, when you hear sound that was recorded in the 1900s, there’s always an auditory static grain around it, and the sound is rarely crisp like we hear recorded sound to be today. There are filters that we can use to make the films we shoot today look ‘vintage,’ and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s also filters we can put over audio tracks to make them sound ‘vintage.’ Matching the auditory grain of the score with the visual grain of the film should be an integral part of fitting newer scores with older films. Sadly, many composers don’t do that which makes the score, regardless of how well it fits with the film thematically, feel very out of place. However, other filmmakers do achieve this, and it blends the score into the film beautifully and makes for a very engaging experience.

Of course, the composers for Man With a Movie Camera didn’t do this, and just slapped their crisp, modern sounding drums and electronic garbage over the grainy silent film, making the experience abhorrent to sit through.

If the composers for this film had just sat down and really thought about the film they were making this score for, they could have been very successful. In an experimental film like Man With a Movie Camera, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to get experimental with the scoring. However, when you score a film that is 92 years old, you have to take into consideration the context of the time during which the film was created, and compose the score around that context. It doesn’t make sense to put 2003 electronic sounds in a 1929 film because director Dziga Vertov most likely never heard those kinds of sounds in his entire life, or at least when he was making his film. It also doesn’t make sense to put crisp audio tracks into an older film because older film’s audio tracks were grainy and sometimes hard to understand (see: The Jazz Singer (its audio track was very garbled and you couldn’t understand what the characters were saying)). Instead, composers should create their scores to cater to the film and the time during which it was made, instead of what new cool technology we have at our fingers in the 21st century.

To conclude, Man With a Movie Camera is a great visual film that you should definitely watch if you have the moment to spare, but just make sure that you don’t pick the version of it my professor gave to me. You’ll save many brain cells and you’ll have a grand old time too. I apologize for this post being so long, but if I sent this to my professor he either wouldn’t care or would fight me on this because he liked the score and I would like to pass that class without having to fight my professor on why he’s wrong, thank you very much.

[theradioghost]

...ok what's up with corsets?

I mean, mostly just a lot of misconceptions about how they worked and what they were for. I’m going to ramble a lot here, but please know that I am not by any definition an expert on any of this, just a 19th century lit major who’s studied a lot of historical context stuff for research and fun purposes.

One clarification is, to simplify the complex and annoying evolution of language over centuries, if it’s from the  early 1800s or later, it’s a corset. If it’s from the 16th-18th centuries, it’s “stays” or a “pair of bodies.” (I think bodies was an earlier term more commonly used for outer garments while stays were undergarments, but don’t quote me on that.) Stays were basically conical with quite a long torso, and you couldn’t lace them particularly tight because metal eyelets weren’t invented until the 1830s and the fabric couldn’t take that strain. Depending on the fashion at the time, their basic function was to create a perfectly smooth, very long silhouette, push your boobs up, or both. Typically their structure came from cording, reeds, whalebone, or layers of paste-stiffened fabric; steel stays from this period are essentially orthopedic devices (or, and I’m obsessed with this idea: fakes created by 19th century fetishists. There’s a reason the 19th century is my favorite historical period and it’s because everything was absolutely nuts, all the time). They also fell in and out of fashion at times – if you look at the naturalistic, Grecian styles of European dresses in the 1820s, for example, many women were wearing either very light stays just to push their bust up, or none at all.

Some nice examples of stays from this period are this, this, and this, from the V&A’s collections. Looking at most portraiture of women from the 16-1700s also pretty clearly displays the conical silhouette that stays produced, but I’m going to refrain from adding images to this post because I already suspect that it’s going to be incredibly, frustratingly long.

Women basically weren’t wearing structured undergarments before the Renaissance, so medieval stays are not a thing.. Although on a fascinating side note, a few years back someone found a bunch of medieval bras, which we had no idea were a thing until then, so that’s really cool. 

Regardless of whether you’re talking stays or corsets, two important things. First of all, they were not worn directly against the skin what the hell, firstly because that is incredibly uncomfortable, and secondly because in periods where most people owned fairly little clothing and a lot of that was wool, having a linen or cotton undergarment under all your clothes helped keep them cleaner by separating them from your skin. Historically most often that was a shift, basically just a big long undershirt thing.

The second important thing is whalebone, historically always the number one material for corset boning. Whalebone is an incredibly misleading name, and I hate it, because it took me forever to learn that “whalebone” is not bone but baleen, the bristly stuff that filter-feeding whales have instead of teeth. It’s made from keratin, same as our hair and fingernails. It’s light, flexible, and becomes bendable with warmth, meaning that over time, the boning of a corset would conform to your natural body shape as it was warmed by your body heat, and would stay in that shape. All-steel boning only really became A Thing in the last couple of decades that corsets were an everyday garment for most women, and that wasn’t because of superior structural properties. It was because it was cheaper, given that after centuries of whaling, there were a lot fewer whales to hunt, and acquiring baleen became more expensive and difficult. Even then, a lot of manufacturers just moved to things like featherboning (made from the shafts of feathers), coraline (made from a plant whose name I cannot remember), cane, or just cording (often cotton or paper cords), rather than steel. They also tended to use spiral steels, which can flex more, as opposed to solid steel bones. The main use of steel in corsets was actually to reinforce the closures, the front busk and the back where it laced.

(Most modern corsets are either all-steel waist training corsets or “fashion corsets” boned with flimsy plastic, but there’s actually a modern product called synthetic whalebone which is a plastic designed to replicate the properties of baleen as closely as possible.)

Then we get to the Victorian period, and that’s where pop culture really kind of loses its shit over the idea of corsetry? All the fainting and shifting organs and women getting ribs surgically removed (what) and generally the impression that Corsets Are Horrible Death Garments.

Tightlacing is one of the big things here. Yes, there were Victorian women who tightlaced to reduce their waists to dramatic extremes, and it was not healthy. There are also women today who put themselves through dangerous, unbelievable things to achieve the most fashionable body possible (tw in that link for disordered eating, self-harm, and abuse), and that article only covers the extremes of the professional modeling industry, not everyday things like high heels, for example. Most women who were tightlacing were young, wealthy, and fashionable, not worrying about being healthy enough to work as long as they could achieve ideal beauty – the same people who do this kind of thing now. And part of the reason we know so much about it is that it was extreme and uncommon even then. Medical experts ranted about the dangers of tightlacing, people campaigned against it. It was definitely not the case that all women were going around suffocating in tightlaced corsets all the time.

It’s worth considering our sample of evidence. You see a lot of illustrated fashion plates, which don’t look like real women now, and didn’t then either. By the late 1800s, photographers had already figured out plenty of tricks with angles and posing to make a model look as wasp-waisted as possible. They would also just straight up paint women’s waists smaller in a lot of pictures. And when you consider surviving garments, a disproportionate number of them are from rich young women who hadn’t yet married and had children, because for a variety of reasons those tend to be the clothes that are preserved and survive. The constantly-swooning women of Victorian literature are for some reason presumed to be representative of real life and the constriction of corsets – let me tell you, as someone who studied 19th century literature specifically, everything is exaggerated and melodramatic, especially extremes of emotion (and men also swoon a lot too). It also seems weird that we nod along unquestioning with the most extreme claims of 19th century panics about the medical harm of corsets (rib removal? with 19th century surgery???) and then just mock those silly, stupid Victorians when we read about things like bicycle face or the claim that fast vehicles would make women’s uteruses fly out of their bodies or whatever.

In fact, corsets were a pretty sensible garment in a lot of ways. They seem really restrictive to us now, but historical garments in general didn’t stretch the way modern knit fabrics do. In addition to supporting the bust just like any modern bra, corsets could actually make moving and breathing easier by helping to support the weight of ridiculously heavy dresses. Women did in fact live everyday, active lives wearing them, including lower-class women who worked physically demanding jobs. Late-Victorian women actually started doing a lot more sports, including cycling – that cyclist at the top of the bicycle face article is definitely wearing a corset, for example. They were used to them, too, and used to the specific ways you move in those kind of clothes, which most modern folks who try to wear that stuff one time are not. One interesting thing I’ve heard is that while corsets helped posture a lot – a lot of people today use them medically to help with back pain and support for just that reason – over time that understandably means that if you’re always wearing a corset, your abdominal muscles won’t be very strong because they’re not doing as much work keeping your posture straight. No ab crunches for Victorian women I guess.

Looking at extant Victorian-era clothing, the fashionable wasp-waisted silhouette actually had a lot more to do with the optical illusion achieved with extensive padding, which widened the hips and turned the upper body into a smooth, Chris-Evans-esque triangle. In comparison, the waist looks smaller. (Seriously, look up some photos of late 19th century ladies, their whole front upper body is this perfectly smooth convex curve. That’s all padding.) Silhouette was what the Victorians really cared about, and padding is a lot more sensible and comfortable than tightlacing.

My basic point here is just I guess that there’s a common and weirdly moralizing perception now that the historical corset was, invariably, this horrible constricting heavy steel cage thing that damaged your health and was a Tool Of Patriarchal Oppression. There’s also a lot of really bad costuming in historical dramas. I just think the reality is a lot more interesting. Also that modern steel waist training corsets kind of terrify me?

If you want more info and some good primary and academic sources from people who actually study and recreate historical garments and Actually Know Things, I recommend Bernadette Banner’s videos (here and here) on corsets – also just her stuff in general, I’ve been incredibly happy to see her gaining a lot of attention lately because she’s delightful – this video by historical costumer Morgan Donner wearing a corset daily for a week and talking about what it feels like, and this article, which cites among other things a really interesting late-19th-century study by a doctor trying to actually gather data on corsetry and its effects. Also for that matter, the aforementioned YouTube costumers have respectively made 17th-century stays and a late 19th-century corset, and seeing how these garments are put together is really interesting.

(I feel like I heard somewhere once that S-shape corsets from 1900-1910ish might have been more potentialy harmful because they did weird things to your back posture, but honestly my historical knowledge and interest drops precipitiously when you hit the 20th century.)

[taramaclaywasaterf]

Do you think BTVS is a feminist show?

Ooo fun question, anon! Thanks for asking!

Short answer? Nah

Long answer? No, because it was written and created by a man, and while there are some feminist themes that do pop up throughout it, there’s also some downright blatant unforgivable misogyny, too.

Look, I love the show. I really do. And I think the concept of slayers, watchers, the watcher’s council, and the “making” of the original slayer is still all a pretty good metaphor for sex based oppression. I think the end of the series is incredible, and I know this word gets tossed around a lot, but Buffy’s monologue in Chosen really does feel ~empowering~. No it’s not *actually* empowering, but it very much gives me the feeling of Hell Yeah Fuck Yeah I Love Women Lets Save The World And Kick Some Ass I Can Do Anything I’m A Fucking Badass Motherfucker And Nothing Can Stop Me Now, ya know? It still makes me cry all these years later, every single time I watch it.

It’s still not a feminist show, though. The fact that it was written by Joss immediately just nips that question in the bud right off the bat, even before we start to analyze the actual content of the show. For one thing, he’s a man, so it’s impossible for him to be an actual feminist, but on top of that, he’s also a giant fucking scumbag piece of shit misogynist whose incapable of writing women that aren’t in relationships, yet he insists that the only type of interesting drama that exists in storytelling is relationship drama, therefor he makes every female character he writes jump from terrible relationship to terrible relationship, regardless of whether it’s best for the plot or for the female character’s own development, or if it even makes sense/is in-character for the female character to do....so, like...yeah.

Then you throw in Angel being an almost-30 year old man for the past 200 years who stalks, dates, feeds off of, then fucks a literal teenage girl (his first moment of True Happiness™️ is statutory raping a teenager. Like, come on. ***Spoiler for Angel’s spinoff, don’t read if you haven’t watched Angel the series and don’t want a major plot point spoiled***: He doesn’t even get that happy the first time he holds his literal goddamn miracle of a newborn son, for christ sake!!)

Then there’s also:

•Xander AKA the misogynistic creep who gets away with literally trying to rape Buffy with 0 consequences (all pro-Xander stans love to forget The Pack, where he lies and says he “forgets” everything that happened while he was possessed just so he could avoid all accountability, and it’s literally never addressed again)

•Buffy being made to feel bad that Riley was threatened by her strength

•Honestly, Riley’s character as a whole...

•Buffybot. Just...ew.

•Dru’s backstory never really getting the....idk...attention it deserved??? Like, they gave her all this trauma, this horrible, awful backstory, made Angel the reason for it all...and then never really cared enough about her to use her as anything more than a plot device when convenient.

•Spuffy as a whole. I don’t even want to go into how Bad their relationship was because this post is already long as hell and that would end up turning into a damn novel. (And yes, I know I’m Spuffy trash, but that doesn’t mean I’m not aware of how insanely fucked up the whole relationship is.)

•Seeing Red. I mean. Like. Need I say more...

•Tara getting killed. Yes, I know the Seeing Red point covered this, but it needed its own point, too. Don’t even get me started, because this WILL turn into a ten page rant.

•Literally everything that happened to Cordelia/Charisma. This all happened on Angel the Series, and I don’t want to spoil the spinoff for anyone that hasn’t seen it, but what I can say is that Joss was fucking awful to Charisma Carpenter. He essentially destroyed Cordelia’s whole entire character just to get back at Charisma for getting pregnant without asking HIM fucking permission first. It’s vile.

Aaand a bunch of other shit that if I took the time to write we’d be here til next Tuesday.

But honestly, it’s a 20 year old show. It doesn’t really matter if it’s feminist. If it was brand new and airing now, i could never stomach it. But it’s not. I grew up watching it, and it’s a massive piece of my childhood. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. And if you’re able to look at it through the critical lens of someone 20 some years later, I don’t see anything wrong for enjoying it for what it is.

No, BtVS isn’t feminist. But it is a fun, cheesy, sometimes frustrating, other times gut-wrenching, 90s teen drama show that was a lot of girls like me’s first intro to women kicking ass. And that’s something that shouldn’t be forgotten.

[mllemaenad]

Why is everybody keep forgetting that elves had quite some forces and were not some helpless souls? Why do ppl forget that it's their own racism that initially caused the war in the Dales? Why everybody dismisses Minaeves' story about how her clan treated the unwanted mages? I mean Chantry sucks big time, but can we please stop making elves into some magic creatures that only do good. They do not. None of the races and religions in Dragon Age is perfect, yet one has a particular bias from fandom

Hi Anonymous person.

Um. Sorry, but … what? That’s … a lot of vitriol. I’m … going to do this point by point.

Why is everybody keep forgetting that elves had quite some forces and were not some helpless souls?

No one is claiming that the elves were ‘helpless’ in the sense that they were children, or somehow unable to fight. Elven sources are a bit spotty, for solid ‘in universe’ reasons, but there’s enough on the Emerald Knights to understand that they kicked some serious arse.

But. By the time Orlais set its sights on the Dales, it had already steamrolled over a bunch of other nations, effectively doubling its original size.

The grand nation of Orlais occupies a full quarter of the Thedosian continent and extends its influence far beyond its shifting borders. In ages past, Orlais flexed its military muscle, threatening territory belonging to Nevarra and Tevinter and outright invading Ferelden. One could argue that the Emperor or Empress of Orlais, regardless of competency, is the second most powerful person in Thedas – the first, of course, being the Divine.

…

Together, the two [Kordillus Drakon and Area Montlaures] transformed Orlais from a few squabbling clans controlling their own city states into an empire. Hand in hand, they conquered well into modern-day Ferelden and Nevarra, stamping out any worship of the Old Gods as well as lingering Alamarri and Ciriane Deities.

– World of Thedas Volume II

Sure, we have an account of the massacre of a pacifist nation (note that they are also vilified by the text, even though they are literally ‘helpless souls’ being overrun and slaughtered by an empire), but that is going to be the exception to the rule. Most of these ‘squabbling clans’ would have had warriors and fortifications. It didn’t matter. Orlais invaded, defeated them, forced them to convert – and absorbed the survivors. The Orlesian empire is The Blob.

Do you … not get how massive this thing is? A quarter of Thedas is under direct Orlesian control. That’s what came for the Dales. An almost endless supply of soldiers and weapons and supplies against one newborn nation. That’s what’s so scary about empires, once they get going: they can take the resources of the people they conquered yesterday – including the bodies of the actual people to be used as soldiers or workers – and use them against you today.

So yeah: big picture, they were ‘helpless souls’ being knocked down by the biggest bully in Thedas. They put up a hell of a fight – even took Montsimmard for a while – but they didn’t have the resources of an empire to sustain them, so they were screwed.

Why do ppl forget that it’s their own racism that initially caused the war in the Dales?

Okay so … racism. I feel like I keep saying ‘empires are bad’ and ‘conversion by the sword is bad’ and … these are somehow controversial statements that people want to refute? That’s … just a little bit scary, you know?

The elven people quite famously worked with humans. Specifically with the Alamarri rebels who took down the Tevinter Imperium. You know: Andraste?

At Shartan’s word, the sky

Grew black with arrows.

At Our Lady’s, ten thousand swords

Rang from their scabbards,

A great hymn rose over Valarian Fields gladly proclaiming:

Those who had been slaves were now free.

– Shartan 10:1.

– Dark Moon

There’s even a whole fucking verse about Shartan and his people making a bloody suicide run on the entire Tevinter army to try to rescue Andraste:

The Liberator drew the blade at his side

And charged the pyre, the freedom of the Prophet before his eyes,

But from the legion came a storm of arrows

Blacker than night. And the disciple who had fought side by side

With the Lady fell, along with a hundred of his People.

And among the Alamarri ten thousand swords fell to the ground in a chorus of defeat.

– World of Thedas Volume II

That’s pretty heroic! And pretty tragic! Elven slaves and human rebels standing side by side, fighting an empire. Winning, in the end, although at great cost. And yet what you’re trying to tell me is that the elves are ‘racist’ (also: not a great word to use in reference to an oppressed people because racism requires social power) rather than, say, justifiably worried about the growing power of a nascent empire?

He [Kordillus Drakon] began his holy quest at the ripe old age of sixteen by taking to the battlefield. At the time, each clan had its own variety of the cult of Andraste, its own rituals, traditions and versions of Andraste’s words. Young Drakon unified them by the sword.

– World of Thedas II

Orlais is aggressive and fanatical. It is running around slaughtering people who disagree with its religious beliefs. If you are a non-Andrastian nation sitting more-or-less on the Orlesian border, watching other nations fall and be forcibly converted – and those people just believed different things about Andraste – you have to know what’s coming. This really only goes one way. Are you really going to call closing your borders and prepping for conflict ‘racism’? Is that really the word you want to use?

Halamshiral, “the end of the journey,” was our capital, built out of the reach of the humans. We could once again forget the incessant passage of time. Our people began the slow process of recovering the culture and traditions we had lost to slavery.

But it was not to last. The Chantry first sent missionaries into the Dales, and then, when those were thrown out, templars. We were driven from Halamshiral, scattered. Some took refuge in the cities of the shemlen, living in squalor, tolerated only a little better than vermin.

– The Dales

Relations broke down completely when the Chantry sent missionaries. Because of course they did. The fact that Orlais fundamentally does not believe in religious freedom is the very thing that the elves are afraid of. It is also, you know, a pretext. Provocation meant to push the elves so they start something and Orlais can say it was their fault. There is almost always a pretext. The empire says it’s coming in to resolve a local conflict, or they’re dealing with an incident on the border, or they’re ‘liberators’. And then they stay. And they take.

Do you really mean to blame the elves for being conquered?

Why everybody dismisses Minaeves’ story about how her clan treated the unwanted mages?

No one has forgotten or dismissed Minaeve. Everyone is keenly aware that – on a meta level – Bioware did some quite ugly retconning in Inquisition to make both elves and mages look less sympathetic. Many people have noted that Minaeve’s story is the exact opposite of Lanaya’s story, and that neither Velanna nor Merrill talk about anything like that. Nevertheless, it is raised at least three times in Inquisition: by Minaeve, by Vivienne and by The Iron Bull. So yes, that is a deliberate retcon made at a late stage in the series in order to allow people to do exactly what you’re doing: yell that the elves are ‘just as bad’. It’s gross.

In universe, of course, it’s worth noting that Minaeve was seven when this happened. Whatever it was, it was terrible – but it may not have been what she thought. It’s also worth noting that the Dalish are wandering nomads with few resources, under constant threat from humans in general and templars in particular, and if they did find themselves forced to throw one mage child to the templars to protect the rest – that is fucking horrible, but says more about the world Orlais has created than it does about the elves.

But I have to ask – why do you think it’s so important that everyone remember a twenty-second pro-templar conversation with a minor character, instead of extensive conversations about elven society and losses with Merril and Velanna? Those are two grown women who have lived their whole lives as Dalish and have a keen understanding of the culture of their clans. Or whole novels about Fiona and Briala, respectively the leaders of the mage and elven rebellions?

I know the novels are supplementary material so I’m certainly not blaming anyone for being unfamiliar with them. But if there were things I wish people could always remember when talking about the elves – it would be those stories of oppression and revolution.

I mean Chantry sucks big time, but can we please stop making elves into some magic creatures that only do good. They do not. None of the races and religions in Dragon Age is perfect, yet one has a particular bias from fandom.

It’s … interesting that you brought ‘race’ into this. Because I didn’t. I haven’t been writing criticisms of ‘humans’. I’ve left the Rivaini alone; usually mentioned Fereldans favourably; I haven’t been talking about Antiva or Nevarra. They haven’t come up.

I was talking about the aggression of the Orlesian empire and its Chantry. The elves were brought up as possibly the people who have lost the most to Orlesian aggression. They’re certainly the best sourced of those people. I’ve talked about the Chasind and Avvar where I can (humans!). I’ve talked about dwarves and Qunari. I bring up the Daughters of Song and the Disciples of Andraste where I can, because I have references for them. I know that a whole lot of other cultures were destroyed by Drakon and his Chantry – but alas, I can’t say anything meaningful about them because there are no codex entries, in game dialogue or other reference materials for them.

Of course the elves are not ‘perfect’. While Zathrian’s rage is understandable, his decision to keep the curse going even when it began to threaten his clan was terrible. Merril’s clan was far too easily led to bully and exclude her; they were her family and someone should have stood up for her. Historically, the Dales probably made a mistake staying out of the Second Blight. I mean – I get it. The Blight softened up Tevinter enough to let the rebels take it down. It could have worked again against Orlais. But in retrospect – bad idea. Didn’t work.

Those are just examples. Of course there are more. But it doesn’t matter. That an elven character fucked up at some point does not change the fact that they face racial persecution as non-humans (and are pretty clearly coded as a combination of indigenous, Jewish and Romani people), that they face religious persecution as non-Andrastians and that the Orlesian empire stole their land and forced them into slums.

And I note all of this because of the … tenor of your Ask. Had you said something like “This elven stuff is great, but I’d like to chat about how the dwarves are basically facing an apocalypse and no one will help them, and also wouldn’t a story about a casteless revolution be great?” I would have said “Yes! Let’s talk about that!” Had you said something like “Isn’t it fucked up that the Qunari are treated largely as savage invaders, operating as an ‘Other’ it’s okay to hate?” I would have said “Yes! Yes, it is!”

But … this reads like a list of ‘reasons why people should stop pretending the elves don’t deserve to be oppressed’. And … somehow equates ‘Orlesians’ with ‘humans’?

I mean – surely you aren’t saying that our sympathies should not be with the frequently enslaved minority group who are forced to live as second class citizens in appalling slums, and who have been forcibly converted to a religion they don’t want to follow … but rather with the empire that took everything from them?

Because … I really hope not.

[jazy3]

Thoughts on Grey’s Anatomy: 16X17

I really liked this episode! My favourites are always the faster paced ones. Last week’s episode was soul crushing so it was nice this week to have an episode that didn’t make me feel like I’d come face to face with a dementor. The episode begins with a nice opening conversation between Meredith and Amelia that establishes where a bunch of the characters are at. We see that Meredith and Jo are crushed by Alex’s sudden departure and Amelia is shocked. Meredith spends most of the episode treating a patient who’s diabetic and has been rationing her insulin. We find out that she’s been rationing because she’s just had to put her parents in assisted living and that’s not cheap so she’s been doing a bunch of gig economy freelance work to make ends meet. She’s super nice and likeable so of course she dies!

Meredith obviously feels for her and works very hard to treat her and save her life. She’s distraught at her death and expresses her anger once again at how screwed up the U.S. Medical System is and how unfair it is that rich people get whole floors to themselves without even asking just because they’re rich, when nice good people like her patient die from trying to do the right thing and take care of their parents. I like that they’ve continued with the storyline of Meredith fighting against a broken system and working to try and make things better for those who can’t afford it and do her part. It’s interesting to watch and makes some really important points along the way. We find out that Jo is still sleeping on Link’s couch and for most of this episode they are feeling very sorry for themselves and are hating on love. They especially don’t like PDA or the amount of it at the train station in the morning. I mean I don’t either, but clearly they have more issues than I do.

They spend most of the episode wallowing, but towards the end Jo gets inspired. She tells Link that she’s been trying so hard to hate Alex but it just isn’t working because she keeps seeing daily reminders of how much he loved her. She’s mad at him, she’s angry, but she doesn’t hate him. I don’t think that Alex threw Jo away like trash, but I do get where Jo is coming from. That line felt a bit harsh, but at the same time Jo has been abandoned and tossed aside a lot in her life. I loved her line about how Alex loving her the way that he did made her realize that she is worthy of that kind of love and that truth is hers to keep and that she is going to rise so high that Alex will look like a fool for leaving her. I hope she does rise. I’ve really come to like Jo in the last couple of seasons and I don’t want to see her go down a dark path again. I also loved her speech to Link about not letting love pass you by.

Link tries to object and say that Amelia pushed him away, but Jo corrects him and says that Amelia is scared and hormonal and that if he loves her, which she knows he does, he shouldn’t let love pass him by. She tells him to stop being an idiot and go do something about it because everything can change in a second. He takes her advice and goes to see Amelia. He stands in the rain on her porch and says that he tried to write her a love song, but he doesn’t write songs, but that he loves her and the baby and he doesn’t want to be alone and miserable if he doesn’t have to. Amelia asks him if this is truly what he wants and if he truly wants her and the baby regardless of who the biological father is. Links says that he does. That he loves her and wants her.

Amelia rushes forward and kisses him and hugs him and tells him that she’s glad because she loves him too and she took the test. She holds up her phone. The baby is Link’s!!!! Gosh I’m so happy for them! I’m also really happy this ‘who’s the father’ storyline is over because they dragged that on way too long! I’m glad that Link decided that he wanted Amelia and the baby regardless of whether or not the child was biologically his and that it turned out that he was in fact the father and that Amelia loves him and wants to be with him too.

I hated Amelia as a character for a very long time because I found her insufferable, but even when that was going on there’s no denying she’s been through a lot! Post-brain tumour I really like Amelia as a character. She’s fun to watch, Caterina is a great actress who plays her with amazing range, and I love her and Link together. After all she has been through, she deserves good things. I’m glad that she finally seems to be getting some. I’m surprised that we haven’t seen Meredith and Jo interact much since Alex’s departure storyline began. We keep getting conversations that imply that they’ve talked and they are friends, but we haven’t actually seen them interact since the mid-season premiere. I’m hoping that now that Amelia and Link are back together we’ll start to see them hanging out more and leaning on each other and talking about Alex.

On the other side of this equation we have Owen and Teddy and now Tom and Maggie being put in the middle where she does not want to be! Why does someone who hates secrets keep getting put in the middle of their mess? Also why does Teddy keep putting her there? I mean Maggie’s been pretty clear she wants no part of this mess from the moment Teddy showed up pregnant so why does Teddy keep revealing information to her that she clearly does not want to have? They are not friends and Amelia is Maggie’s sister. Teddy needs to find someone new to confide in I think. Any who, thanks to an extremely awkward elevator ride we find out that after that shocking kiss two weeks ago Teddy slept with Tom. She hasn’t told Owen who is blissfully unaware and doesn’t understand why Teddy wants to hire a wedding planner instead of planning the dream wedding she’s always wanted with him herself.

At first she tells Tom that the whole thing was a mistake and tries to blow him off. Then Maggie asks to speak to her because the tension was so thick in that elevator you could have cut it with a knife and even Maggie, who’s known for being super oblivious, could feel it. She’s worried that things are now bad between Teddy and Owen because she told Teddy that she’s not crazy to think that Amelia’s baby might be Owen’s and wants to clear the air. Instead Teddy chooses to tell her that she slept with Tom, give her information that she does not want or need to know, and puts her smack dab in the middle of the drama that Teddy has created for herself. Maggie wants no part of it and immediately regrets asking what was going on. Throughout the episode Teddy avoids Owen until he confronts her about it. Instead of telling him that she slept with Tom and is having doubts about their relationship she instead tells him that she thinks Amelia’s baby might be his.

Owen doesn’t know what to do with this information and freezes. Can’t blame him for that honestly. Teddy takes this to mean that he’s still in love with Amelia and storms off. Later, she runs into Maggie at the OR Board. She tells her that she told Owen the truth. Maggie is instantly relieved as she thinks she’s talking about her and Tom. But then Teddy corrects her. Maggie is furious. Teddy goes off and says a bunch of horrible things about Amelia and her toying with people’s emotions. She ends her tirade with, “I was just starting to really like her.” To which Maggie responds, “And I was just really starting to like you.” Iconic. That was such a mic drop! Maggie is here for none of Teddy’s hypocrisy or her dragging of her sister in front of her nuh uh! She tells Teddy as much and reminds her how long she waited to tell Owen that she was pregnant with a baby she knew for sure was his and how she behaved and all the lies that she told. Teddy is remorseful and apologizes for dragging Amelia to which Maggie responds, “That’s my sister you’re talking about,” and sashays away because truth.

I’d like to point out here that Amelia actually hasn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t like Amelia much until recently so I would be the first person to point out if she was, but she’s not. All she’s done at this point is wait to get some test results. That’s it. Her and Owen split up and a short while later she got together with Link and then a short while after that she found out she was pregnant. She went forward on the assumption that the baby was Link’s and they began building a life together because she had no reason to think otherwise. Yes, she should have gotten an ultrasound and had the tests run earlier, but after everything that happened with her son Christopher and her fiancée Ryan I understand why she didn’t. Shortly after she found out that she was further along than she thought she told Link. She didn’t tell Owen because at that point, until she’d had the test, there was nothing to tell.

She should not have toyed with Link’s feelings the way that she did, but it was also pretty clear that she wasn’t feeling well emotionally or physically and wasn’t thinking clearly. Also, at that point the issues she was having were between her and Link as a couple. She didn’t tell Owen because a) she wasn’t in her right mind and b) she didn’t want to mess things up for him and Teddy over something that might not even be an issue. And as it turns out that was the right call to make because it’s not an issue. This week Amelia came out of her funk. Maggie and Meredith as her loving sisters helped her back on her feet and she got through it. She returned to work and moved forward determined to raise her baby with her sisters who love her unconditionally. During this time she also got the paternity results back.

The baby is Link’s and not Owen’s which means there is absolutely no reason to involve Owen or Teddy in this mess at all. Their only point of connection or contact at this point is about co-parenting Leo and that’s fine. Both of them seem happy with that. Teddy kept acting in this episode like Amelia had done something to her. Like her actions were all Amelia’s fault which simply isn't true. Amelia didn’t do anything to Teddy or Owen and Teddy never even talked to her. She went and talked to Maggie. Who told her that what she was fearing was a possibility and that’s it and then instead of talking to Owen about her fears or Amelia about her concerns she went and slept with Tom. That’s on her and nobody else as Maggie was quick to point out. Speaking of Tom he got an interesting storyline this episode. He spent most of it treating a tech billionaire who was convinced there was something wrong with him because he made a critical error with the calculations for a rocket launch that exploded over a gas station.

He’s a patron of the Catherine Fox Foundation and seems to be an old friend or at least acquaintance of Tom’s. Because he’s there a whole hospital floor gets shut down for him which backs up the ER and patient care on the ground floor. Tom pages Meredith to assess the guy and she is not happy at all. Her patient is sick because she’s had to ration her insulin and this guy gets a whole floor when there’s nothing actually wrong with him? Yeah no. Meredith Grey is not here for that. Not by a long shot. She speaks her mind and tells them as much. Then she passes the case off to Jackson so she can get back to her patient because as she says, “Your Mom, your mess.” But Jackson can’t find anything wrong with him either so the case reverts back to Tom again. Tom panders to the guy all episode because of what he believes he can do for humanity. It turns out in the end the guy knows that there’s nothing with him medically, but he wants Tom to say that there is in exchange for a donation so that he won’t have to go to jail and can keep trying to solve the world’s problems.

Tom has to decide whether or not to take the money and he spends the rest of the episode labouring over the decision. After Meredith’s patient dies in the OR he comes to talk to her to ask her advice in a roundabout way. She tells him she’s not in the mood to babysit a billionaire and to take a hike. He asks what she would do if she had his money. She says she’d use it to help people who couldn’t otherwise afford or access the care they needed and riles off a list of projects and solutions that she’d implement if she could. This causes Tom to have an epiphany. Meredith would use the money for good. He asks her as an award winning rule breaker how she decides what rules to break and which ones to follow. She tells him she follows her gut and just has to hope that whatever good comes out of what she is doing is worth the risk. As a result, Tom decides to take the money, but makes it conditional on the size of the cheque the Foundation and the hospital will be getting.

I liked this storyline. It’s the kind of morally complex dilemma that’s fun to watch and raises good points that there are no right or wrong answers to. I spent the whole episode chanting ‘Don’t take the money’ every time this issue came up, but in the end I understand why he took it. He does care and he does want to do good and he realizes that ultimately if he doesn’t take the money someone else will. The difference is Tom is a part of the Catherine Fox Foundation and can dole out money at Grey Sloan to people who can actually use that money to make a difference. People who actually care and want to do the right thing and help people who otherwise wouldn’t get treatment or the care that they so desperately need and deserve. Meredith is one of those people and from talking to her he can see directly how within his own hospital he could take that hush money and turn it into something good that would honestly help people who need it. And as long as he doesn’t tell Meredith or anyone else the circumstances surrounding the donation they can use it to do good without being liable or compromised.

So he takes the money to try to do something good out of something bad. We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out, but I for one am excited. Tom is a very complex and layered character and for me that’s what makes him so fun to watch! So that’s what Tom is up to in his professional life this episode. Then there’s he’s personal life. After getting blown off by Teddy at the beginning of the episode she comes to see him at the end of the day. Tom’s in his office, it’s nighttime, and the office is dark. Teddy comes in and apologizes for her behaviour earlier in the day and says she’s sorry for using him. She then proceeds to talk on about what a good man Tom is and how much Owen loves her. Tom is not interested in that and he tells her so. She’s wrong. He’s not a good man and he really doesn't want to hear about how in love her and Owen are and who can blame him? Who wants to hear the person they are in love with but can’t be with wax poetic about how great they are and how much they are in love with someone else?

But then this scene takes an even weirder turn because Tom goes to leave and Teddy is blocking the door. He leans in and kisses her. She turns away so he tilts her face up and kisses her again. She starts kissing him back, they lock the door, and it’s implied that they have carry on and have sex. There is so much to talk about here wow. First off, this scene takes a one night stand and a stupid mistake and turns it into a full blown affair. Getting freaked out and sleeping with someone one time and regretting it is something many people can and I think in some cases should forgive. But actively making the choice to sleep with someone more than once while you are engaged and raising children with someone else is a different story. That’s an affair. I also think that there’s an interesting parallel between the first time and the second time. Because the first time Teddy comes to see Tom at his hotel she kisses him and then he pulls back and it looks like he’s going to stop her, but then he leans in hungrily and kisses her back. To me this showed that Tom had reservations and knew it was wrong because she’s with Owen, but then decided to go for it because he’s so in love with her he just can’t help himself.

For Teddy’s part she seemed desperate and upset and I felt like she took advantage of how in love with her he is. The second time is different though because Tom initiates this time. He walks up and kisses her and then she turns her head away and then he pulls her back in and that’s when she reciprocates. I don’t think Tom should have done that, but on the other hand Teddy knew exactly what she was getting into. She showed up at his darkened office late at night and waxed poetic about what a great guy he was and how much Owen loved her and how broken she is and conflicted and confused. And she did all of this while actively blocking the door. In order to leave the room Tom would have to ask her to move out of the way. That is not how you stand or where you stand if you just want to apologize to someone. She also overstayed her welcome. She could have just apologized, said goodnight, and gone home to her fiancée.

Instead she showed up at his office, blocked the door with her body, and kissed him back. At this point Tom and Teddy have gone from two people who are taking advantage of each other to two people knowingly and willingly having an affair. And honestly, as a viewer I’m kind of here for it. I think it’s awful, but I also think it’s interesting to watch. I also think there’s a good chance they are going to stretch this out and have the truth come out in the finale. I’m also curious as to what’s going on with Teddy. She was absent from several episodes because she was sick with a cold and the kids got sick too and then she shows back up and is having second thoughts about her relationship with Owen, worrying about Amelia’s baby, and starts having an affair with Tom. Clearly something is going on with her as she’s behaving really erratically and seems very lost and confused. I also think it’s interesting that she’s now finally experiencing the fallout from her past actions and inaction with regards to Owen. She watched him stay engaged to Beth even though they weren’t a good fit and she hated her and did nothing. She watched him marry Cristina and abuse her and did nothing.

He then married Amelia and abused her and again she did nothing. She turned him down both times when he wanted to be with her when he was still with Cristina and Amelia. She lied to him about being pregnant and watched him choose Amelia over her again. She got into a wonderful loving relationship with Tom as a result and then broke his heart and got back together with Owen because he made her feel passion like no one else. Now she has everything she has ever wanted. She has Owen. He finally picked her. They are engaged. They are co-parenting two children together. Beth is long gone. Cristina is happily living her life in Switzerland. Amelia is happily co-parenting Leo with Owen, just got back together with Link, and is having a baby with him. They found Megan. She’s okay. She has a wonderful life with Nathan and her son in California. She’s finally gotten everything she’s always wanted and now the ramifications of not doing anything all those years has finally caught up to her.

She said nothing and did nothing when he passed her over and repeatedly choose other women over her and now that she has him she can’t shake the feeling that he’s still in love with them, Amelia specifically because she’s in Seattle and having a baby, and so she’s cheating on him with Tom out of panic. Or maybe she’s trying to hurt him first before he can hurt her again I don’t know. I also love how Teddy said nothing all those years and supported Owen when he did all of that terrible stuff and now it’s biting her in the ass. Not because Owen doesn’t love her. Not because he’s not committed to her. But because psychologically she can’t shake the feeling that he’s in love with all these other women, one of whom she has to work with every day, because he is and always will be. Beth, Cristina, and Amelia had to deal with the fact that Owen was in love with Teddy the entire time they were together and eventually its part of what tore them apart.

Now Teddy’s getting a taste of her own medicine and she does not like it. She doesn’t seem to know what to do about it either. So instead of talking to Owen about her feelings or seeing a therapist or going to talk to Amelia or calling Cristina up she’s having an affair. She’s having an affair with a man who loved and supported her when Owen choose Amelia over her and found her the perfect apartment for her, rented it, and then built her a crib for a baby that wasn’t even his. The woman’s got issues. Also I would love to see the conversation Meredith will be having with Cristina and Amelia about this nonsense when it all comes out. I can hear Cristina cackling from here. She called it in that parking lot all those years ago and Amelia called it at that party and Meredith called before each of their weddings. Owen and Teddy are a hot ass mess that don’t seem to know that they are a hot ass mess. I also love how Teddy has taken Tom from a loving involved partner to a hot hookup in two seasons. What the hell?

In other news, Richard is not doing well at all! Bailey runs into him in a hallway yelling at some movers. Catherine had all of his office stuff from Pac North brought to Grey Sloan and he is not having it. Richard says he doesn’t want it and Bailey says she’ll take care of it. A while later she pages him and we see that in an effort to help him feel better has had all of his old office stuff from Grey Sloan moved up from the basement. Bailey thinks this will help, but it doesn’t. Richard loses it and yells that what he wants is an empty office. Bailey says she’ll take care of it, but Richard says he’ll do it himself. Later Bailey comes to see him. He’s sitting in his empty office with only two chairs in it. He apologizes for the way he acted and says that he’s decided to step away from surgery and focus on his Path Pen and other medical innovations. Bailey is distraught and wants to know why. Richard refuses to tell her about his hand and instead says that he wants to go out on top and would like her support.

After we find Bailey and Meredith in the Attending’s Lounge. Meredith is miserable because her patients has died and at times like this Alex was always the one to cheer up with gallows humour. She says she misses him and doesn’t know how to do this without him or if she wants to. Bailey talks about how after that speech that Richard gave on their first day as interns she envisioned herself as the last one standing. She thought it would feel great, but then when Callie left and moved to New York she said it just felt lonely. Meredith thinks she’s talking about her and Alex, but she’s not. She tells her about Richard’s decision and now they’re both lonely together. I really liked Meredith’s comments here because Alex’s departure raises some interesting questions for her. Meredith moved back to Seattle because Ellis got sick and she stayed because she came to love working there and all of the people she loved most, her friends and later her family, were there. The other characters always wanted to move on, but she never did. It also brings up the question of if she’s going to move where does she move to? Moving to Switzerland or somewhere in Europe moves her closer to Cristina but farther away from Alex and all of her loved ones in Seattle. Moving to Kansas or somewhere near there moves her closer to Alex, but farther away from Seattle and Cristina.

It’s a Catch 22. No matter where she goes she’s moving closer to someone and farther away from someone else. That’s the issue that Meredith seems to be grappling with right now and I’ll be interested to see how it plays out. In other news, DeLuca has recovered from giving himself frostbite and it looks like Jackson was able to save his hands. Because of his off the wall behaviour Bailey has suspended his operating privileges. He’s now in mandated counselling with a therapist and can’t operate or treat patients until she signs off on him. She hasn’t because as we see in this episode DeLuca has taken no responsibility for his actions and is still in complete denial. He talks to her about how if he’d behaved differently those patients would have died. Which is both true and not true. Him giving Suzanne the drugs and going to get the liver saved those patients’ lives that’s true. That’s not in question. No one is questioning that. The problem is how he did it. He gave Suzanne the drugs without talking to Meredith about what he was doing in a manner that could have killed her if Meredith had already restarted the drug regiment. In order to retrieve the liver he voluntarily went out into a blizzard in below freezing temperatures without gloves on, gave himself frostbite, and almost lost his fingers in the process. That’s the problem.

He tells his therapist he’s not manic or experiencing any signs of mania. As his therapist points out if he didn’t think that was a possibility he wouldn’t be mentioning it. On some level, he knows he’s not well but he can’t admit it outright and that’s the problem. In the meantime, Bailey is having him transport patients and do menial tasks around the hospital that need doing. This is actually a pretty good idea as the hospital is currently over staffed in certain departments and understaffed in others and it allows the hospital to cover its ass. My guess is that they’re building to some big blow up where he’s going to wind up killing or severely injuring a patient or himself. I’m hoping they’re going to wrap this storyline up soon as I don’t care for DeLuca as a character, but there’s a chance that they’ll draw it out to the season finale.

Oh and just when you thought DeLuca couldn’t possibly be more of an ass than he already is? Hold onto your hats people because yes apparently he can! Before the episode ends we see Jo drinking a beer at Joe’s Bar. DeLuca walks up to her with a shot he bought for her that she clearly does not want and proceeds to completely trash Alex and call him an idiot and suggest that they take away each other’s pain and go to bed together! Jo is having none of this and clearly wants to be left alone. He says that Alex doesn’t respect her and that Meredith doesn’t respect him. He then reaches out to grab her chin and try to kiss her and that’s when Jo finally loses it and tosses that drink right in his big stupid face! Go Jo GO! Yes Jo! Slay! I cheered! 

Jo tells him that he’s not okay and he’s not acting like himself. That you need to listen to people when they tell you that and get help before it’s too late. She then grabs the beer she bought for herself and her purse and walks away. Oh my god! This scene made me scream with rage! There were a lot of people speculating that the writers would put Jo and Link together or Jo and DeLuca together and this episode squashed all of that and I’m so happy! DeLuca is such an ass! This scene makes me cringe just looking at it. Also, what is with DeLuca and the ‘no respect thing’ and comparing himself to men way out of his league? First Derek and now Alex. What the hell? DeLuca’s a resident who hasn’t picked a speciality and can barely do his job. Derek was a world class top 10 neurogod! Alex is the country’s best peds surgeon and an incredible doctor. 

He’s not on their level, he never will be, and no one respects him because he doesn’t respect himself and can’t do his job. Also, who does that? Who hits on someone and buys them a drink they didn’t ask for when their husband just left them for their ex-wife to live on a farm in Kansas because they found out that they had two kids they never knew they had? DeLuca apparently. Also, Jo totally called or texted or went to see Meredith and told her about this nonsense the first chance she got. As soon as she sobered up she told her because Queens support Queens. I think this scene also really speaks to Jo’s character as DeLuca behaves like a complete monster and in response she tells he’s not well and to get the help that he needs. Even when someone is hurting her she’s still trying to help them. The resilience. I stan. Oh and in other news Vic and Jackson broke up. I didn’t care for them as a couple and I honestly don’t care that they broke up. I’m totally apathetic on this one. 

Until next time!fjacks