#restatement

[agnescoldwaterdnd]

But wait.... Can we talk about how much the LEGO Fortnite is like The Forest!?!??

[gastonjerry]

LESSON 20 RESTATEMENT OF GOD'S COMMANDMENTS

Deuteronomy 5:1-33; 6:1-25 Commandments are authoritative directions or instructions to do something. In this situation, they are God-given rules. On the other hand, restatement means repetition or reaffirmation of something. Our study, therefore, centers on the reaffirmation of God’s word to the children of Israel. When people grow old and are about to depart from this world, they sometimes call…

[mhb-oficial]

🇺🇸 We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

- George Orwell

[computercreature]

something i see a lot in the dungeon meshi fandom is attributing izutsumi's personality traits to her being a cat. and while ryoko kui definitely gave her cat-like traits intentionally, she's a talented enough writer to also give her a backstory with reasons for those traits. for example, her tendency to only do and eat what she wants.

izutsumi's character arc revolves around freedom. she grew up caged in a circus. and although she was fed enough to survive, this was only because a living catgirl attracted more customers than a dead one.

[id: first image is izutsumi as a child framed behind bars and standing on all fours, making it clear how skinny she is. a hand in the foreground holds out a bowl of what appears to be kibble. narration says “thrown in a cage and given food every once in a while… is that what you would call ‘being raised’?” in the second image she is now sitting on the floor of her cage and eating a rat. end id]

look how skinny she is! we see her eating what appears to be... kibble? oats? and then a rat that she possibly caught for herself. she had no choice but to eat anything she could.

[id: part of the dungeon meshi manga. a slightly older izutsumi is tied to a post and tade sits next to her to say "we've got a roof over our heads, beds, food, and clothes. they've got everything here. is there someplace nicer than this out there?" izutsumi thnks for a moment and says "i hate that someone's already decided what i'm going to eat tomorrow. my name, the clothes i wear, where i sleep, where i go next... here, all of that's been decided by another person... even though, come tomorrow, i might want to eat something else instead. that's why i'm leaving." at this, tade cries out in shock. end id]

when she's taken into the nakamoto household they begin to treat her much better. she's on about equal footing as tade, who also had a rough living situation before being taken in, and tade loves it there! they get healthy and tasty food and they're not sleeping in cages. but izutsumi still isn't free. she can pass off her chores and vegetables to tade and disobey in any way she can but she can't leave. maizuru even put a collar on her, further dehumanizing and trapping izutsumi.

when izutsumi joins laios's party, she's finally 'free', but it's not the kind of freedom she wants. she has to eat even more food she doesn't want or else she'll starve. but the difference now is that she's can leave at any time, and if she stays, she's treated as an equal. they're not feeding her monsters because they see her as inferior. they're all eating the same food so they can reach their goal(s). and this is part of izutsumi ultimately learning that in order to do what she wants, she has to be willing t do the things she doesn't want to

[fictionadventurer]

Pop culture reduces It's a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn't exist and a little girl saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

If this movie has light and hope, it's not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It's just about as realistic as it gets.

[absolutechaosss]

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how elves are shown to handle grief and trauma and how that relates to Mithruns character.

The Canaries care for Mithrun is mostly well intentioned. They legitimately like him! But it is also kind of terrible at times? Most of their care is focused on the Bare Minimum that keeps him alive and his care and comfort isn't really considered because well...to them, he's not capable of understanding it anymore.

We know this because Kabru is assigned as his care taker and Lycion comments that his hair is shinier. This means even in the stressful survival situation of the dungeon with Kabrus terrible cooking and scavenged meals, he is physically healthier than he was with the canaries.

I think it's relevant Kabru was the one to care for Mithrun this way and the one eventually realize he can be capable of new desire because Kabru is intimately familiar with how elves treat trauma. Not only was he a traumatized child but I think the most important parallel here is actually Rin.

If you haven't read her section in the Adventurers Bible, Rin is also a sole survivor of a tragic event and was taken into elven custody. She is catatonic and deeply deeply traumatized. And the elves handle it *terribly*. She's treated as goods or as an animal and she's shown to be unresponsive and not able to speak. Her recovery is directly linked to her meeting Kabru when he's brought in to help her.

Rin and Mithrun are opposites in elven society. Rin is barely a person, Mithrun isn't only an elf, but a prestigious and wealthy one. But both are survivors of horrific circumstances that hurt their ability to care for themselves and perform daily activities. And for both, it's pretty clear that it was assumed that this would become their fixed state, one where care and gentleness was pointless, because they had lost the faculties to process it.

Anyway I guess I wonder if years later when Kabru hears Mithruns story and how his condition is incurable and thus denies him personhood he thought of his. I wonder how much more quickly Mithrun may have been able to adapt to his circumstances if he wasn't told he was "broken". To me at least, Mithrun was always able to react to new things and adapt, but if everyone in the world is acting like you're basically dead and unable to ever do anything than be a weapon again yeah why wouldn't you assume that. No, I don't think Mithrun will ever be back to his former self and have all his desires back but he is able to carve out space for himself so quickly with Kabru, compared to his extensive and leas effective initial recovery with the elves. Perhaps this too is an area where their lifespans hinder them as they assume 20 years is a totally normal recovery period so why would they need to try more.

[foone]

You're allowed to rest.

[charmac]

Your interactions with Charlie and Glenn are making me tear up, thank you thank you, I'm so excited for you

This is literally the greatest evening of my life. Like I can't express more deeply how sincere Charlie Day is and how he truly does *get it* and he very much believes we *get it* too. He stuck around because he wanted to talk to us, and I'm not saying that to brag at all:

He let us ask literally anything we wanted. He talked a lot about caring so much about making sure the episodes focus on who the characters are instead of swinging for big ideas.

My favourite answer he gave us was when I asked if he was ever going to direct an episode and he told me "Probably not" and explained it was because he already does so much behind the scenes and there are so many people in their crew who want to direct and deserve the opportunity and experience to do that, and he doesn't need any more credit on Sunny.

When it was time for them to leave he grabbed each of our hands and said he thinks we get the show better than anyone else.

Straight up surreal. Doesn't feel real.

[stranger-detective]

Me when Odysseus and his men are the pack of wolves that are swimming with the shark now. And Telemachus is a Little Wolf.

[yesandpeeps]

Copia can be a bitch, as a treat :-)

[cipher-fresh]

Guy who has only watched Good Omens and Doctor Who, watching a third thing in David Tennant’s filmography: When does David Tennant say he’s non-binary

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

wooooo warlock Wally and his delightful totally normal patron

[computercreature]

mob’s “i’ve always known what my master is” vs reigen’s “i didn’t know”. someone remove these people from my head

[fictionadventurer]

In Emma, the incident that sparks the story isn't a death or a loss of fortune or even someone new coming to town. It's a wedding. A happy event, usually the end of a story. But I like how this acknowledges that even a happy event like a wedding can bring its own kind of sorrow. Emma's happy for Miss Taylor, but she still mourns the way that her life has to change. Marriage can massively alter social circles, especially for women, taking them away from the home sphere and into a new life, and forcing the people they leave behind to deal with the loss. Here, it's a good change, but it's still a change.

Emma's in a unique position among Austen heroines. She's got money, a comfortable home, a loving father who would prefer she stay in his household for the rest of her life. She doesn't have to consider matrimony as a business arrangement the way some heroines have to. If she marries, it's going to be almost solely for companionship.

Because that's the one thing Emma lacks. She's lonely. She loves her father, but he's not someone she can engage with socially or intellectually. She ranks above everyone in town, so there's no one who can be on an equal level with her. Her father won't travel, so she can't get involved in social events with people who are of her rank and happen to live a little further out. Her attachment to Harriet is a desperate attempt to create a companion of her own social rank, and then marry her to Elton so she can remain in Emma's social circle. Mrs. Martin would be just another farmer's wife who sits below Emma's level; Mrs. Elton can be her equal.

But we can't overlook the fact that Emma makes the situation worse through snobbery. She's not only of a higher social rank than the people around her--she feels herself superior to them. Her father has plenty of friends, but to her, Mrs. Goddard and Miss Bates are just "prosy old ladies". Which is fine--they're more of her father's age, not hers. But it does indicate a wider personality problem. There's more than a hint of Mr. Darcy about the way she goes about detaching Harriet from Mr. Martin because he's so "coarse and vulgar", and trying to raise her up to Emma's standards of what's acceptable.

So, anyway, Emma's uniquely positioned in a story where friends-to-lovers has to be the character arc. And in the process, she's got to overcome her sense of superiority that makes it so difficult for her to classify people as friends.

[puddleofpins]

people who misgender g3 Frankie while “critiquing” g3 designs and then ignore everyone correcting you in your comments, I’m swinging at you with my sword.

A popular media franchise makes a they/them-using nonbinary protag and it’s actually canon and they still can’t get any respect.

[apocalyptic-byler]

IF BYLER’S FIRST KISS ISNT LIKE JANCY’S FIRST KISS THEN I DONT WANT IT