#this is completely subjective by the way

[desperatecheesecubes]

All righty y’all! As a celebration of passing 3K comics read and the new year here’s a list of comics I personally think are Worth Your Time. I only included runs I’ve read at least a good chunk of so if you’re personal favorites aren’t here I might not’ve read em yet, or just haven’t read enough to pull of my favorites in the case of longer runs

In (mostly) alphabetical order:

Another Castle by Andrew Wheeler and Paulina Ganucheau : A fun cast of characters, a princess who kicks ass what more could you want, really.

Aquicorn Cove by Katie O’Neill: in fact just go ahead and read everything Katie has written. It’s all lovely and heartwarming, full of diversity and genuine characters. I could not recommend enough. Great for all ages!

Avatar Katara and the Pirates Silver/ Suki Alone/Toph Beifongs Metal Bending Academy: These standalone stories have been excellent. They really fit in with the tone and pacing of the show. I can’t wait for Azula’s solo to release.

Avatar The Lost Adventures: On the sillier side of what ATLA was (mostly) but a good fun time over all.

Avatar Free Comic Book Day Issues: they’re free!

Batgirl (2000): Cass’s batgirl run is phenomenal actually. Really, for real, you should try it.

Batgirl (2009): Stephs batgirl run is shorter and you can pick up the entire thing in TPB form easily. This era of Batfam comics also has a special place in my heart, I feel like a lot of writers found their stride here. There’s room for hope and all that.

Batgirl (2011- the Gail Simone half): if you’re on Tumblr im sure you know the problems with this run. I just really love Babs, this was one of the first comic series I ever read, my introduction to Babs, and also Gail is an excellent writer and some of the stories in this run are just phenomenal all around- looking at you issue 30.

Batgirl Special (1988): you want some QUALITY BabsGirl content?? This is an excellent start!

Batgirl The Greatest Stories Ever Told: collects a number of classic BabsGirl stories from the pre-crisis Batman comics. As well as some post crisis comics I’ll be putting on this list on their own anyway.

Batgirl Year One: The definitive post crisis Batgirl origin story! I loved all the nods to what Babs goes on to do (work with black canary, become oracle etc etc) and the art is very fun.

Batgirls: Can you tell I like the batgirls? The art is fun, the stories are low stress. It’s a fun run to just pull up and have a good time with. The earlier runs definitely dealt with heavier narratives but not everything has to be doom and gloom to be good.

Batman Cataclysm and No Man’s Land: You’ve probably heard people talk this arc up before. They’re not lying to you! It’s long, and there’s a lot of batfam members active in it but it’s absolutely worth reading if you enjoy the bats

Batman Second Chances: collecting Jason’s post crisis origin (issues 408-416) plus a few other stories this is definitely worth the read if, again, you like the bats.

Batman Death in the Family: the one Jason dies in and Tim’s pre N52 origin!

Batman Knightfall: Bane comes in and absolutely wrecks Bruce’s shit what’s not to enjoy

Batman Court of Owls/Night of Owls/City of Owls: man the Court is such a cool enemy concept for Bruce. Some of the only good things N52 gave us IMO

Batman Death of the family: I just really enjoyed the whole family having to come together I won’t lie

Batman Fear State: this was an absolute mess but it was a FUN mess

Batman and Robin (2011): alright don’t murder me but I though this run had more depth of writing than the 2009 run did…. Like both are good but I kinda think this one’s better…. In fact just go ahead and read the whole Robin Requiem arc

The Batman Chronicles 5 and 10: some absolutely stellar Babs stories!!!

Batman Eternal: look at the whole batfam (at the time) go! Makes my brain go BRRRR

Batman Incorporated (2012): also known as the one Damian dies in and the one where Jason pisses himself and it becomes a plot point for some reason! Fun!

Batman Batgirl: More good Babs content!!

Batman Battle for the Cowl: All hell breaks loose in the batfam. Good chaotic fun really

Batman One Bad Day Two Face: I think Two Face is the best Batman villain and I’m tired of pretending otherwise

Batman Urban Legends 1-6: Jason almost adopts a son, Tim comes out as bi, Grifter gets up to some stuff

Batman Wayne Family Adventures: literally all fluff!! Everyone can use some fluff now and then

Birds of Prey (1999) I’m a black canary Stan I don’t know what you expected

Black Canary (1993): the best stand alone ack Canary solo. Dick and Helena steal a tank in this run, there’s a story that talks about Dinah putting on her mom’s uniform for the first time it’s all good stuff

Black Canary (2007): this is less stand alone and needs some arrowfam knowledge to truly enjoy but I want more people to love Sin (I still want her to be red canary)

Black Canary and Zatanna Bloodspell: a BC/ZZ graphic novel what more do you really need to know?

The Brave and the Bold (2007) issue 33: I will never emotionally recover. Another good Babs story!

Christmas With the Superheroes (1988): a collection of stories that are holiday inspired! Some great moments in here and a nice variety

Convergence Batgirl: I really enjoyed stepping back into Stephs batgirl run. A nice what if scenario

Convergence Superboy: Kingdom Comes Supes pleading with 90s Kon just got to me OK?

DC Festival of Heroes/DC Pride: more short story collections

DC First batgirl/joker: another Babgirl story recommendation? It’s more likely than you think

Earth Prime 4: this is a fun stand alone Stargirl story. You don’t have to watch the tv show to follow it (I say this with certainty because I myself don’t watch the show)

Extraordinary by V.E. Schwab (if you’ve read Vicious the novel first): hard to talk about this without spoiling the plot of the novel but if you read and enjoyed that this is also good yes

The Final Night: the 90s had some real bangers didn’t they? Also known for the time Hal died (for realsies)

The Flash (2011): flash fans will probably passionately inform me there’s better flash stories prior to N52 but I haven’t read em and *I* think this run is damn enjoyable. And this is my list and I can put whatever I want in it

Gotham Academy: zany wacky hijinks ensue

Green Arrow by Mike Grell: Grell knows his shit

Green Arrow (2001): look at the Arrowfam get together!!!

Green Lantern/Green Arrow Hard Traveling Heroes: politics in comics can be good actually

Green Lantern Legacy/Alliance: some of the DC graphic novels are excellent really

Identity Crisis: this story made me insane I love it

Injustice Gods Among Us: it’s not a ‘what if Superman were evil’ story so much as a ‘what if Superman lost his way and broke everyone’s hearts and then also the world’ story

Legends of the DC Universe #6-11: some great stories of Dick Grayson, Clark Kent, Hal Jordan, Oliver queen and Barbara Gordon!

Let them live! Unpublished Tales from the DC Vault! #2 and #5: great Dick and Ollie content

Marvel Adventures Superheroes #1: Spidey, Hulk and Ironman have to dog sit, what could go wrong!

Nimona by N.D. Stevenson: I would die for literally every character you don’t understand

Nubia and the Justice League Special: Nubia has a really long day and we get to vibe with the Justice league gang circa 2021/2022 I’m certainly not complaining

The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang: very cute. Family friendly!!!

Robin Year One: Dick Grayson as a young Robin!

Sensation Comics featuring Wonder Woman/ Sensational Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman stories can be something so personal actually

Shadow of the batgirl: CASS!!!

Showcase ‘94 #12: more Babs!!

Starfire (2015): Kory deserves more on goings I’m not kidding

Stargirl/ Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E./Stargirl spring break special : I love Courtney she’s such a good character

Supersons: I will mourn the loss of Jon forever

Superman the death of Superman and all its subsequent parts: yeah this is a certified banger storyline. Plus it gave us Kon-the boy of all time

Superman the wedding special: whoops Clark got kidnapped and Lois has to save him!

Superman/Shazam first thunder: and then Clark adopted Billy…. Right?

Superman smashes the Klan: yeah I see why this is called required reading

Task force Z: I am willing to die on this hill

Teen Titians by Kami Garcia and Gabriel Picolo: they’re not the TTs of main comic continuity and that’s OK

Teen Titans year one: who gave the artist to draw all the kids so small and remind me that oh my god they’re just children

Thor (2014) and The Mighty Thor (2015): I love Jane

Truth and Justice (2021) #4 and #6: more batfam stories

W.I.T.C.H.: nostalgia isn’t blinding me this is good comics

Wonder girl (2021): we deserve Brazilian characters actually reflecting the culture correctly but I also really enjoy Yara.

Wonder Woman (1987) #90-100, 160-161, 206-213: definitely not the ONLY good WW stories but some very good Wonder Woman stories

Wonder Woman agent of peace/Wonder Woman black and gold/Wonder Woman come back to me/Wonder Woman Hiketeia: More Wonder Woman stories!

Worlds finest (2009): 2009-10 batfam my beloved

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

[icewindandboringhorror]

I know this is just a silly bad quality random screencap of a screencap that I found on facebook lol, BUT it's a succinct enough image to easily describe the concept in a quick/accessible way hopefully :

-

(and of course, feel free to elaborate in tags, etc.! (especially elaborating about other senses as well.. can you "hear" in your mind just as well as you can "see"? taste? etc.) It's an interesting topic to me, as someone who's like a 4.5 at MOST lol. I'm curious what option will be the most common :0c )

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

[blackhholes]

teen wolf meme: [3/5] motifs -> resurrection

It's different now. I think dying did something to him. It did something to me, too. But none of it was good.

[uncanny-tranny]

This might be controversial to some, but you cannot "tough love" your way to preventing suicide. You cannot have the attitude that people who complete suicide are selfish or are ungrateful or immature. If your mindset about suicide isn't coming from compassion rather than judgment, it won't help suicidal people. You will never help us with a slap on the wrist and a lecture about how we're awful for even thinking about completing suicide.

Suicide intervention starts with compassion and care.

[rinbylin]

okay... idk at all if this has been discussed or that I'm just stating the obvious. I'm posting any way to get more feedback.

so. can we be sure that the last boat scene even happened (in the way we saw it at least)

yeah the letter was delivered to the intended recipients. the letter also did say 李相夷绝笔 lit. the final writing by li xiangyi. there's a brief exchange between him and the assumed "boatman" asking him where he was going. and we see he spat blood while writing yeah but:

llh/lxy's eyesight had been failing for some time.

Professional Letter Writers are a thing in the past in service to people who can't write their own letters (idk enough to verify the historical accuracy in this specific context though)

what has been bugging me since forever is the manner of speech of the letter. yeah it's different from their everyday speech, but that's actually perfectly fine since this is A Letter so I'm good with it being more formal. but... there's something I just can't quite pinpoint. especially with the use of the 君 jun pronoun by llh/lxy to refer to dfs when there could be other pronouns with less connotations of intimacy (and scholarly/imperial court system) implied and still conveyed cordiality, marking a shift in their relationship. (I'm not well versed with wuxia as a genre enough to know what are the conventions. someone else who does can say something though.)

whatever these put together means (eg. he may not have written the letter personally, or he wrote it in a different situation from what we saw, etc etc.) alongside:

this scene existed only as part of a visualisation as the letter content is revealed to the audience (or assumed to be fdb reading the letter to dfs & guests of the wedding spectators of the duel)

the boat lxy/llh jumped on is not the same as the one he was writing the letter on - the boatman is also not on it despite the conversation at the beginning, but lxy/llh's dressing and hairpin are the same as the ones before he jumped. (the boatman delivered the letter so he's real though.)

also as @wonderfulnonsense happened to have just pointed out in the tags left in my other post: it's in fact the same boat he took to go fight dfs at donghai 10 years ago. (edit: or maybe it isn't? as pointed out by anon.)

if we viewed whatever we perceived in this scene as imaginary (not what actually happened), then the reading of it being a metaphor for lxy/llh being on his way to enlightenment just makes sense. (the boat being a carrier on his spiritual transformations.) especially when you consider that 彼岸 the other shore is another concept in buddhism to represent enlightenment, alongside the motif of lotuses. (credits to @markiafc for the buddhism reading - edit: mark's meta here) and then, consider the beach ending... yeah.

[quirkle2]

i liked the part when he

[koshercosplay]

one of the (many) things that resonated with me after reading the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers (if you haven't read them yet, GO READ THEM) is Ouloo's opinion on the exhaustion of political activism vs taking the easy way out and letting others do the work for you.

she wants to live a quiet life, and she wants people to stop killing each other. that's the extent of her politics. she doesn't know the complexities of the political landscape of the galactic commons in which she lives, nor is she obligated to become an expert in it: fundamentally, she wants people to get along, and she wants to serve them cake, and she does her best to live her life in exactly those terms. when she's confronted with her own biases, she works doubly hard on herself to overcome them, because her existence is dominated by that one, very very simple thing: be kind to others. some of the other characters look down at her for it, saying it's naive, that the world can't be made better with cake, that if she really cared she'd do something more tangible about it.

but I think there's something really valuable in that mindset. I want to be kind to others, and I want others to get along. I don't have the answers to all of the political questions in our society. but also, I don't have to. not everyone is capable of being loud and angry. I go through so much anxiety and stress, worrying that I'm not doing enough, I'm not loud enough, I'm not doing my part to change the world we live in, what if I'm just being lazy?

sometimes living your own life gently and with kindness and interacting with others from a place of love is enough. we need both kinds of people in the world. and sometimes gentle people get loud, and sometimes loud people need gentleness.

not having all the answers all the time is okay. worrying is not activism. anxiety is not activism. you are allowed to take care of your body and mind.

[anistarrose]

what I mean when I say I'm tired of people making found families into nuclear families:

among other things, it's kind of annoying when people act like the romantic couple are automatically the "most obvious" candidates to adopt a kid; or act like a pair of people in a romantic relationship can't happily co-parent a kid with people outside of that romance

what I don't mean when I say I'm tired of people making found families into nuclear families:

people using "siblings" or "parent and child" as a shorthand (or even non-shorthand) for characters' relationships sometimes

[lupins-hehim-pussy]

I wanna know ur Fontaine msq criticisms 👁️👁️👂I’m all ears

I'm not sure if you wanted me to talk about this secretly or publicly but! Here I go!

The TLDR: Fontaine MSQ aestheticised prison, poverty, child abuse, the justice system/court and didn't properly address any of it.

More:

Focalors/Furina has way too much of a sympathetic angle for a dictator who's lets people drown with her inaction.

Neuvillette feels Bad for sentencing some people to death/prison, but that's it. He's one of the most powerful people in Fontaine. If he felt like there are systemic injustices, I.E sending an abused Child to prison, he should be the first person to DO something about it, not just cry and be sad so the audience can be like aw, that's complex character writing isn't it? No it's not! And guilt doesn't absolve you!!!!!!! (These are stuff we deal with in OTCOJ read my fic now /j)

Meropide has children in it, both Sentenced there (Wriothesley) and BORN THERE (Lanoire), and this is just a quirk of the place. Not only that, Meropide accepts prisoners of all genders and crimes. There are abusers and abuse victims in one place. Do you know how bad that is? How much potential for crimes to happen in a place like that— oh wait, Meropide isn't under Fontaine's jurisdiction. If you are assaulted as an inmate it literally means nothing to the court.

Wriothesley had no qualifications when he took over. Depending on how long he lived on the streets, how old he was when he killed his parents, how old he was when he was first taken in by the orphanage, etc, the man might never have more than 4–5 years of formal education. Sigewinne probably had to teach him how to write reports. And do Meropide's spreadsheets. Edit because I forgot to elaborate on this one: This isn't a point brought up anywhere, which is bad, because when poverty and incarceration robs you of a proper education (and the rights to vote in many places too, too, by the way), it reduces your prospects for jobs, reduces many people's ability to get a home etc etc. Wriothesley was just, narratively, Given his position.

Meropide is an industrialized prison, and they portray this as a good thing. Prisoners are paid in coupons for their labour, and this is also portrayed as a good thing.

The One-Meal-A-Day reform was something Paimon gushed about being so great of a perk, that people might want to go to jail for food (could be interesting and reflective of systemic poverty if MHY had brains, but they don't, so I was just Pissed because essentially all Paimon wanted to say was "Prison isn't so bad, but still don't go to prison guys! Prison labour is really hard!"). By the way, in most real-world prisons they are obligated to feed you three meals a day. Because that's how much food a human needs. MHY went with one meal just so they can say "if you want to eat more, you have to work." And then the welfare meal is a goddamn gacha. So imagine you're a starving child who's too weak to work in the fucking robot assembly line, and you wander up for your first meal in 24 hours, only to luck in with a shit one. I'd kill myself.

They wrote Wriothesley, who's a victim of the system, into a guy who's say shit like "I'm the Duke I can do whatever I want" for a cool moment where he choke-slams an inmate (I know he was a bad guy. But also, in copaganda when cops are violent/disregarding protocols, they are always only portrayed to do that against bad guys, so what does our critical thinking tells us about this one?) They wrote Wriothesley, who was an inmate of a prison so bad, so notorious that it is the literal boogeyman of Fontaine, that has a legal (???) fighting pit, with an administrator who abuses his position to be unreasonable, to willingly stay in the place and become an Administrator who would choke-slam an inmate while saying a cool line about how he has the power to do whatever he wants. They wrote him, the guy who had to be fed on the streets by melusines, to think one-meal-a-day was a good enough reform (while he spends god-knows how much on his boat). This wasn't a victim-turns-into-abuser narrative either, they want all this to be seen as positive character growth.

And then, the final kicker is, they gloss over his entire abuse. You can only read about these shit in his profile, which most people don't because they don't Have Him or doesn't care to unlock it/read it online, and they jammed his entire backstory into a flaccid info-dump at the end of his character story quest. This man isn't Allowed to feel abused and neglected and show any reaction to it within the narrative of Fontaine itself, because if they actually Gave Weight to what happened to him, they'd have to confront THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM they had NO PLANS on criticising. I don't think they ever explicitly said the fucking Crime-Theatre nonsense was Bad either.

I could go on, but this is already so long. But yeah, I hope this gave you an idea.

[cerus]

so was anybody going to tell me how beautiful gyala delve is?

[dragon-spaghetti]

BOOM. M&M FANCHILD BE UPON YE

Started chatting w @/meandtheyeehaws and we made ourselves Soft I had to scribble out a design

[toytulini]

me, stupidly and weirdly resistant to listening to audio books vs reading a physical book for no real reason: man i wish there was a way to like, read a book while i crochet like i do with tv shows and movies and podcasts

[mittensmorgul]

There’s another post going around about this, but tumblr won’t let me reblog it but...

When I read a story written by a human being, I’m not just reading it because I want to read a coffee shop AU with a specific plot description. I’m reading it because it’s making a connection to another human storyteller and seeing a piece of them carved into the words. Storytelling is a human act of sharing joy, angst, tension, resolution, satisfaction. It’s an act of love.

Writing and reading a story isn’t just an act of creation and consumption. I hate that commercialism and AI are reducing it to that sort of transaction. Like oh, you need words on this subject and that’s the end of it. Like what we really needed was just a vending machine we can push buttons on to get a fix, as if the human creating the story wasn’t a factor. That the author’s life experience and views and feelings haven’t infused the words with their own unique touches.

I’ve read hundreds of coffee shop AU’s over the years (and thousands of fics in general). I’ve seen many similar tropes reused across stories, and just like an AI would, I’ve learned things about writing them that I will always carry with me. But unlike an AI, a human author is not just the sum total of coffee shop AU’s we’ve consumed. Even if we used the same prompt, the same sets of tropes, the same characters. I will always choose the human-crafted story over the computer generated one.

Because again, I’m not just looking for a very specific fix via a series of words. I’m looking for a human connection through story.

Unlike an AI, I have BEEN to a coffee shop. I’ve had experiences in coffee shops. I’ve had funny little meet-cutes with people. I’ve accidentally spilled coffee on myself and knocked heads with someone as we both rushed to wipe it up. I know what it FEELS like. The machine doesn’t.

I’ve also read millions of things that aren’t fanfic, or coffee shop AU’s. I’ve experienced things OTHER than going to coffee shops and having meet-cutes. And I know what all those things feel like when processed through my personal human lens of experience, which is different from every other personal human lens of experience.

All the machine can do is spit out what it THINKS a human experience is, and I honestly don’t care about that at all. Fic is not a “product” to be “generated.” It’s an art form that connects us to other people who share the same love of a thing that we do.

People who, even when all writing the same characters in the same setting to the exact same prompt, will all add something or have a viewpoint about something or bring a completely different personality and life experience to the story that no one else on the planet could. That’s what I’m actually reading.

[gibbearish]

btw its interesting the way james tries to imply that like. well the videos that have plagiarism are the ones our dumb stupid annoying patrons requested about bad topics that didnt deserve to have the effort put in to covering them well so basically its fine. like obv thats interesting on its own but moreso the fact that he doesnt actually /say/ it, or like. give a list of the videos hes referring to, just says "those videos are very clear on which ones they were" i think as a nod meaning like "yknow the ones everyones talking about". unless what hes meaning is that like they put a note in certain videos saying "this video was requested by a patron, we here at james somertom incorporated do not espouse these views" which seems unlikely to me. idk methinks maybe it's because there is indeed a lot more than people think and with all the buzz he's not sure which ones have been discovered yet or not, so putting down a solid list that missed some would look like he was still hiding things whereas putting down a fully sourced list would be admitting to wayyyy more than anyone's found yet