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sometimes I almost forget slut is a derogatory term. it's so friend shaped to me. I love when things are slutty. I love sluts and slutting it up. it's a cute word. make every day sluttier than your last. sluttttt

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the cultural object of the black hole is kind of remarkable. It's almost an anti-God in a sense, a negative infinity. Yeah there's this kind of dead sun that's collapsed into an infinitely dense point, and if you fall past its event horizon you're fucked. Every schoolchild knows this. A black hole can be introduced in a superhero blockbuster without any explanation except for its established look and the name "black hole", and this will be understood as the ultimate natural disaster, which even superman could not hope to defeat. truly S-tier cosmic object

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Noatak loiters behind a curtain and hisses, "Hey. You. Yes, you. You should definitely shave your asshole. And smoke cigarettes. They make you look cool. Stop eating food. Food is for ugly people. Have visible abs at all times. Consume iced caffeinated beverages ONLY. Never sleep. Steal. Steal a police car. You are the chosen one. You are definitely the only person who exists. Have sex with the same guy for years and years and then one day NEVER TALK TO HIM AGAIN because he's not a real person. No jail cell will ever hold you."

Maybe we went downhill as a society when cartoon characters stopped providing important life messages like, 'Don't give strangers your address' and 'don't use level crossings when the lights are flashing you absolute fucking spanner'.

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Now I have to add scenes to my fic where Tarrlok warns any readers that no amount of sex, drugs, or money will ever fill the void (also: you should never shave your asshole, no matter how committed you are to personal hygiene), whereas Jiang just... reads out the BITE model of Authoritarian Control. Unfortunately it's left unclear if Jiang is reading it as a warning or an instruction manual.

Maybe we went downhill as a society when cartoon characters stopped providing important life messages like, 'Don't give strangers your address' and 'don't use level crossings when the lights are flashing you absolute fucking spanner'.

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Maybe we went downhill as a society when cartoon characters stopped providing important life messages like, 'Don't give strangers your address' and 'don't use level crossings when the lights are flashing you absolute fucking spanner'.

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Anyway if a character in a Saturday morning cartoon did turn to the camera and say, 'Hey kids!! The world can be a scary place!! But there are people out there who'll try to make you more scared so they can control you!' then I'd be okay with that. I think it's one of those important messages that everyone should be beaten over the head with, along with stuff like, 'Don't fuck around with fireworks, electricity, or large bodies of water!'

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Strangely I rarely consciously think about racism in the context of AtLA/LoK fic even though AtLA was like, 'heeey kids he's a Saturday morning cartoon with slavery, genocide, and colonisation!'

Then LoK came along and was like, 'yeah a chunk of the population seem concerned about Rampaging Firebenders but these people are probably just like, gullible dickheads or something.' Asami was a character who was pretty well-placed to offer some commentary about how nonbenders might be scared for understandable reasons but the Equalists seemed like a cult of personality that was exploiting vulnerable people, but rassn frassn grumble grumble I am sure I have complained about this before etc.

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Consequences of that post on structural inequality in fiction, in relation to my fic:

I now think of the Lieutenant as John Racist. I think I did cut out a section (for structure-related reasons) where Lieutenant-as-Jiang was chasing Tarrlok, and Jiangtenant angrily yelled a racial epithet at him, and Tarrlok thought, ‘Ah. The eldritch entity that is threatening to kill and/or devour me is also racist.’ Do I write the Lieutenant as being a Proper Racist? I think I write him as someone who'd talk a big game about how the divisions between the Four Nations are bullshit and only there as a form of social control... But then if he got drunk and got into a fight with someone visibly or culturally different from himself, he'd use whatever offensive terminology sprang to mind, and I'm not sure that 'I am using an offensive racial epithet because I want to upset somebody' is really a huge improvement over 'I am using an offensive racial epithet because I hate a certain demographic'. Like, at the end of the day, it's still a case of someone being far too comfortable with expressing contempt in a pretty uhhh... upsetting and nonconstructive way. (Also, using racism for shock value makes you pretty difficult to tell apart from a Proper Actual Racist.)

The prospect of Lieutenant-as-Jiang trying to fix structural problems is a bit like trying to perform a root canal with a chainsaw. If he had his shit together, he might have as much ‘success’ at ‘fixing’ structural problems as the average Metal Gear Solid antagonist, i.e. he’d be a complete nuisance and probably end up monologuing about paradigm shifts before the protagonist punches him in front of a giant robot. It takes a large network of people to change a status quo, and I think it’s difficult for creators to depict the enormity/complexity of change when stories are usually hyper-focused on a limited cast of characters. I think that individual actions do matter but you can’t always predict how they will matter, especially as large change can be brought about by lots of small changes in aggregate. But that’s like just my opinion man. 

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It's always disappointing when a series makes a big deal about societal and structural problems in it's setting, making readers think it has interesting things to say about the subject, only to then resolve the problems by fighting The CEO of Racism, John Racist, so that all of society's problems would then get better because they promoted a new CEO.

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If anyone wants to know what a leopard seal sounds like 🦷🩸

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The fact that the creators referred to the furniture in Mako and Bolin's apartment as "IKEA furniture" means I like to think that they got their furniture from the Avatar equivalent of an IKEA and ofc Asami and Korra helped them and they all got lost in the Avatarverse!IKEA and proceeded to completely fuck up assembling the furniture once they got it back to the apartment

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at dinner people were talking about how much they cried during their weddings and my one cousin said she was SO determined not to cry, made it through the entire ceremony, but then during the reception her husband leaned over and asked 'hey, do you want me to get together a plate of roast beef and hide it in our room so we can have Night Meats?' and she went 'night meats?' and started sobbing because that was so romantic to her

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We out here, stridulating off key

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young man. what is that you have found.

I said young man. you picked it up off the ground.

I said young man. you should put that thing down.

I don't think! that! you! should! eat that!