#Do I have any evidence for this

[windsweptinred]

You can't change my mind. Any attempt shall be futile.

[yuwuta]

you ask yuuta if he wants a bite of your food and when he says yes you offer your plate to him, but he’s just sat there looking at you with his dumb big bambi boy eyes and his mouth slightly open and he will not look away or blink or close his mouth until you lift your fork to his lips to feed him and then he grins like shit’s sweet and hums about how good the food is like nothing happened like he’s not ridiculously attractive. gonna chew on steel

[hauntingofhouses]

Very interesting to me that a certain subset of the BES fandom's favourite iterations of Mizu and Akemi are seemingly rooted in the facades they have projected towards the world, and are not accurate representations of their true selves.

And I see this is especially the case with Mizu, where fanon likes to paint her as this dominant, hyper-masculine, smirking Cool GuyTM who's going to give you her strap. And this idea of Mizu is often based on the image of her wearing her glasses, and optionally, with her cloak and big, wide-brimmed kasa.

And what's interesting about this, to me, is that fanon is seemingly falling for her deliberate disguise. Because the glasses (with the optional combination of cloak and hat) represent Mizu's suppression of her true self. She is playing a role.

Take this scene of Mizu in the brothel in Episode 4 for example. Here, not only is Mizu wearing her glasses to symbolise the mask she is wearing, but she is purposely acting like some suave and cocky gentleman, intimidating, calm, in control. Her voice is even deeper than usual, like what we hear in her first scene while facing off with Hachiman the Flesh-Trader in Episode 1.

This act that Mizu puts on is an embodiment of masculine showboating, which is highly effective against weak and insecure men like Hachi, but also against women like those who tried to seduce her at the Shindo House.

And that brings me to how Mizu's mask is actually a direct parallel to Akemi's mask in this very same scene.

Here, Akemi is also putting up an act, playing up her naivety and demure girlishness, using her high-pitched lilted voice, complimenting Mizu and trying to make small talk, all so she can seduce and lure Mizu in to drink the drugged cup of sake.

So what I find so interesting and funny about this scene, characters within it, and the subsequent fandom interpretations of both, is that everyone seems to literally be falling for the mask that Mizu and Akemi are putting up to conceal their identities, guard themselves from the world, and get what they want.

It's also a little frustrating because the fanon seems to twist what actually makes Mizu and Akemi's dynamic so interesting by flattening it completely. Because both here and throughout the story, Mizu and Akemi's entire relationship and treatment of each other is solely built off of masks, assumptions, and misconceptions.

Akemi believes Mizu is a selfish, cocky male samurai who destroyed her ex-fiance's career and life, and who abandoned her to let her get dragged away by her father's guards and forcibly married off to a man she didn't know. on the other hand, Mizu believes Akemi is bratty, naive princess who constantly needs saving and who can't make her own decisions.

These misconceptions are even evident in the framing of their first impressions of each other, both of which unfold in these slow-motion POV shots.

Mizu's first impression of Akemi is that of a beautiful, untouchable princess in a cage. Swirling string music in the background.

Akemi's first impression of Mizu is of a mysterious, stoic "demon" samurai who stole her fiance's scarf. Tense music and the sound of ocean waves in the background.

And then, going back to that scene of them together in Episode 4, both Mizu and Akemi continue to fool each other and hold these assumptions of each other, and they both feed into it, as both are purposely acting within the suppressive roles society binds them to in order to achieve their goals within the means they are allowed (Akemi playing the part of a subservient woman; Mizu playing the part of a dominant man).

But then, for once in both their lives, neither of their usual tactics work.

Akemi is trying to use flattery and seduction on Mizu, but Mizu sees right through it, knowing that Akemi is just trying to manipulate and harm her. Rather than give in to Akemi's tactics, Mizu plays with Akemi's emotions by alluding to Taigen's death, before pinning her down, and then when she starts crying, Mizu just rolls her eyes and tells her to shut up.

On the opposite end, when Mizu tries to use brute force and intimidation, Akemi also sees right through it, not falling for it, and instead says this:

"Under your mask, you're not the killer you pretend to be."

Nonetheless, despite the fact that they see a little bit through each other's masks, they both still hold their presumptions of each other until the very end of the season, with Akemi seeing Mizu as an obnoxious samurai swooping in to save the day, and Mizu seeing Akemi as a damsel in distress.

And what I find a bit irksome is that the fandom also resorts to flattening them to these tropes as well.

Because Mizu is not some cool, smooth-talking samurai with a big dick sword as Akemi (and the fandom) might believe. All of that is the facade she puts up and nothing more. In reality, Mizu is an angry, confused and lonely child, and a masterful artist, who is struggling against her own self-hatred. Master Eiji, her father figure who knows her best, knows this.

And Akemi, on the other hand, is not some girly, sweet, vain and spoiled princess as Mizu might believe. Instead she has never cared for frivolous things like fashion, love or looks, instead favouring poetry and strategy games instead, and has always only cared about her own independence. Seki, her father figure who knows her best, knows this.

But neither is she some authoritative dominatrix, though this is part of her new persona that she is trying to project to get what she wants. Because while Akemi is willful, outspoken, intelligent and authoritative, she can still be naive! She is still often unsure and needs to have her hand held through things, as she is still learning and growing into her full potential. Her new parental/guardian figure, Madame Kaji, knows this as well.

So with all that being said, now that we know that Mizu and Akemi are essentially wearing masks and putting up fronts throughout the show, what would a representation of Mizu's and Akemi's true selves actually look like? Easy. It's in their hair.

This shot on the left is the only time we see Mizu with her hair completely down. In this scene, she's being berated by Mama, and her guard is completely down, she has no weapon, and is no longer wearing any mask, as this is after she showed Mikio "all of herself" and tried to take off the mask of a subservient housewife. Thus, here, she is sad, vulnerable, and feeling small (emphasised further by the framing of the scene). This is a perfect encapsulation of what Mizu is on the inside, underneath all the layers of revenge-obsession and the walls she's put around herself.

In contrast, the only time we Akemi with her hair fully down, she is completely alone in the bath, and this scene takes place after being scorned by her father and left weeping at his feet. But despite all that, Akemi is headstrong, determined, taking the reigns of her life as she makes the choice to run away, but even that choice is reflective of her youthful naivety. She even gets scolded by Seki shortly after this in the next scene, because though she wants to be independent, she still hasn't completely learned to be. Not yet. Regardless, her decisiveness and moment of self-empowerment is emphasised by the framing of the scene, where her face takes up the majority of the shot, and she stares seriously into the middle distance.

To conclude, I wish popular fanon would stop mischaracterising these two, and flattening them into tropes and stereotypes (ie. masculine badass swordsman Mizu and feminine alluring queen but also girly swooning damsel Akemi), all of which just seems... reductive. It also irks me when Akemi is merely upheld as a love interest and romantic device for Mizu and nothing more, when she is literally Mizu's narrative foil (takes far more narrative precedence over romantic interest) and the deuteragonist of this show. She is her own person. That is literally the theme of her entire character and arc.

[wolfythewitch]

Hey I wanted to ask, one time you said you disliked the then-current drafts of 'not sorry for loving you' because of the calypso representation in them, so what do you think of the final product?

Hummm I mean tbh, it didn't change much from the drafts so my opinion remains largely the same haha. I think it could be an interesting attempt at manipulation? But my issue is specifically with the line "I love you. But not the way that you want me to." I saw some people say it could be him trying to placate her, but the thing is he leaves Immediately after, which would make trying to placate her not very useful. It's almost like a last word kind of thing? But it's crazy work for your last words to your captor to be I Love You

[dumbasswhatever]

whenever i glance at the aa4 transcript i have to force myself to close the tab quickly or i'll spend forever scrolling on it bc the characters are just too funny. apollo and trucy went in klavier's office and looked at the cocoon replica on a plate and began guessing what it was. "is that... gum, maybe?" "gum?" "yeah, he was chewing it when he got a phone call so he put it on the plate for later consumption" "you'd think a rockstar would be able to afford a fresh piece..." all while klavier is standing there two feet away from them able to hear every word

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Wei Wuxian eats a watermelon. Yep!

[farshootergotme]

Hot take, anyone who thinks Dick Grayson has a persistent case of anger issues just doesn't know what anger issues are.

Does he get angry? Yes (I sure would hope so since he's a human being). Would I call it anger issues? No, not really.

[canisalbus]

I have to ask what drew vasco into falling in love with machete?

His snivelling runt ways were just that irresistable.

[cementcornfield]

https://www.tumblr.com/glitter-vamp/738356449551548416/httpswwwtiktokcomtzt8cxmnsb-not-jamarr

Looks like Joe is about to fight someone and Ja’Marr is probably like bro you have cast on

oh my god anon that's exactly what it looks like. i love it.

[kirby-the-gorb]

[slytherinshua]

slowly realizing more and more that the sm boycott effort is gonna amount to nothing in the end, and this is not the way we should be going about the riize situation.

i loved seunghan when he was in the group, and i am still an ot7 fan. but at a point, i think we need to think of how much of our time and energy we're willing to spend fighting for something that has such a small chance of actually happening. sm is gonna bounce back from any stock lost from the boycott because they are one of the big 3. they have like 4 of the biggest groups in kpop rn: nct, aespa, red velvet, riize. there's just no way either boycotting riize or boycotting all of sm would actually be detrimental enough to get a member who's been terminated from the group back in.

and while i don't agree with the ot6 fans who are being unreasonable, i think some ot7 fans have been just as bad. this fandom is so toxic and rotten, every day it just seems to get worse. and i don't like the narrative that most ot7 fans were spreading about ot6 kfans-- how they were just mad that seunghan was dating pre debut. that isn't why they were mad, they really didn't care about that. it's the fact that he took pictures of him with his possibly/alleged underage girlfriend (it's honestly bad enough with/without her being possible underage, which i don't have confirmation on) at what looks like a hotel and presumably sent it to his friends in a group chat (which was how it got leaked). that's why they wanted him out of the group.

personally, i don't believe that a member should get kicked out of a group or put on hiatus without a proper reason why. and seunghan's hiatus and termination is really messy. but there are valid reasons why kfans weren't too big on him. the problem is there have been many idols kicked out for things they didn't do, and others who have been caught doing really fucked up and nasty things and rightfully kicked out of the group, but it's hard to know which idols are innocent or not when there's no organization. and when we jump on a narrative train and blow something super big out of proportion, the facts and proper investigation of the situation gets lost in the mess of things.

what should have happened was things being properly investigated back in october 2023 before seunghan was ever put on hiatus, and a decision made from there whether to keep him in the group or kick him out based on that.

instead, we have the other 6 members who clearly want seunghan back tired of the state of everything (rightfully so), ot7 and ot6 fans fighting a full blown war every day without logical thinking, and misinformation being spread left and right. there's no organization, there's no firm confirmation on anything, all of this is just such a big mess.

now let me be clear IF it's true that there was anything suspicious going on between seunghan and his girlfriend, then i would obviously no longer support him. as it is, i'm not going to stop supporting him until there's firm evidence. i'm tired of kpop stans making rash decisions based on half truths instead of just being patient and waiting for the facts to come out. staying neutral during unclear situations is a valid stance to take. please let's all stop jumping to conclusions from both sides.

[lavender-phoenix-flames]

"You gotta recognize jc's canon positive traits too"

Hmm, Is he selfless? No. Is he kind? No. Is he a good sect leader? No. Is he a good uncle? No. Is his skills or intelligence exceptional? No. Is he good at regulating his emotions? No. Does he have a likable personality? No. Is he charming/charismatic? No. Do women want to even date him? No.

What good traits exactly? That he is a good swimmer and ranked 5th on the eligible bachelor's list and What else?

A few good things he did:

Distracting the wen guards, telling his mom not to torture wwx that one time, him rescuing wangxian and leading others out from the xuanwu cave, finally letting wwx go at the very end.

BUT these good actions are very few in comparison to the amount of harmful, outright terrible and wrong ones. While he is not evil he isn't exactly a good or admirable person either.

[thebrainrotsreal]

Thinking about de-aged Bruce via magical shenanigans being a bit of a menace. He will bite you if given the chance, and will draw blood. Slippery as an eel to catch. Don't even think you can corner him in his own home, he knows every single secret room and deep tunnel in the manor. Your eyes are scratch-able to him. Try telling he's the future and he's demanding you tell him who killed his parents. Can't tell him? Alright then, you're lying. He would've found out by now if this really the future.

[togglesbloggle]

What to Watch at the End

I've been happy to run in to a couple pieces of media back-to-back over the last week or so- plenty of down time, since I have that bug that's going around. They make pretty interesting companion pieces to one another, actually. With the end of the world so close now, we're starting to get a bit more genuinely thoughtful art about the subject, stuff you really can't say until you have this kind of vantage point.

They are The Power Fantasy (written by Kieron Gillen), an early-days ongoing comic of the 'deconstructing superheroes' type, and Pantheon (created by Craig Silverstein), one of those direct-to-streaming shows that get no marketing and inevitably fade away quickly; this one's an adult cartoon with two eight-episode seasons, adapted from some Ken Liu short stories, with a complete and satisfying ending. I'll put in a cut from here; targeted spoilers won't occur, but I'll be talking about theme and subject matter as well as a few specific plot beats, so you won't be entirely fresh if you read on.

Pantheon is a solid, if wobbly, stab at singularity fiction, with more of a focus on uploaded intelligence than purely synthetic (though both come in to play). It's about two-thirds YA to start, declining to about one-fifth by the end. The Power Fantasy, by contrast, is an examination of superpowers through a geopolitical lens that compares them to nuclear states; I'm not as good a judge of comics over all (particularly unfinished comics), but this one seems very high quality to me.

The intersection of the Venn Diagram of these two shows is the problem of power, and in particular the challenges of a human race handing off the baton to the entities that supersede it. They're both willing to radically change the world in response to the emergence of new forces; none of them even try to 'add up to normal' or preserve the global status quo. Both reckon with megadeath events.

I'm a... fairly specific mix of values and ethical stances, so I'm well used to seeing (and enjoying!) art and media that advance moral conclusions I don't agree with on a deep level. I used to joke that Big Hero Six was the only big-budget movie of its decade that actually captured some of my real values without compromise. (I don't think it's quite that bad, actually, I was being dramatic, but it's pretty close.)

Pantheon was a really interesting watch before I figured out what it was doing, because it felt like it was constantly dancing on the edge of either being one of those rare stories, or of utterly countermanding it with annoying pablum. It wasn't really until the second or third episode that I figured out why- it's a Socratic dialogue, a narrative producing a kind of dialectical Singularity.

The show maintains a complex array of philosophies and points of view, and makes sure that all of them get about as fair a shake as it can. This means, if you're me, then certain characters are going to confidently assert some really annoying pro-death claims and even conspire to kill uploaded loved ones for transparently bad reasons. If you're not me, you'll find someone just as annoying from another direction, I'm sure of it. Everybody has an ally in this show, and everybody has an enemy, and every point of view both causes and solves critical problems for the world.

For example, the thing simply does not decide whether an uploaded person is 'the same as' the original or a copy without the original essence; when one man is uploaded, his daughter continues thinking of him as her dad, and his wife declares herself widowed, and both choices are given gravitas and dignity. He, himself, isn't sure.

This isn't something you see in fiction hardly at all- the last time I can think of was Terra Ignota, though this show lacks that story's gem-cut perfection. It's that beautiful kind of art where almost nobody is evil, and almost everything is broken. And something a little bit magical happens when you do this, even imperfectly, because the resulting narrative doesn't live in any single one of their moral universes; it emerges from all of them, complexly and much weirder than a single simplistic point of view would have it. And they have to commit to the bit, because the importance of dialogue is the core, actual theme and moral center of this show.

The part of rationalism I've always been least comfortable with has been its monomania, the desire to sculpt one perfect system and then subject all of reality to it. This becomes doomerism very quickly; in short order, rationalists notice 'out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made', and then conclude that we're all very definitely going to die, once the singleton infinite-power system takes over, because it too will be flawed. (e.g. this joking-not-joking post by Big Yud.)

And don't get me wrong, I do take that concern seriously. I don't think I can conclusively, definitely convince myself that rationalism is wrong on this point, not to a degree of confidence that lets me ignore that risk. I don't at all begrudge the people devoting their entire professional lives to avoiding that outcome, even though I don't take it as given or even as particularly likely myself.

But it is precisely that monomania that is the central villain of this show, if it even has one. Breakdowns in dialogue, the assertion of unilateral control, conquering the world for its own good. The future, this show says, is multipolar, and we get there together or not at all.

That's a tremendously beautiful message, and a tremendously important one. I do wish it was more convincing.

The Power Fantasy works, quite hard, to build believably compassionate personalities into the fabric of its narrative. It doesn't take easy ways out, it doesn't give destroy-the-world levels of power to madmen or fools. Much like Pantheon, it gives voice to multiple, considered, and profoundly beautiful philosophies of life. Its protagonists have (sometimes quite serious) flaws, but only in the sense that some of the best among us have flaws; one of them is, more or less literally, an angel.

And that's why the slow, grinding story of slow, grinding doom is so effective and so powerful.

In a way that Pantheon does not, TPF reckons with the actual, specific analysis of escalation towards total destruction. Instead of elevating dialogue to the level of the sacred, it explores the actual limits and tendencies of that dialogue. It shows, again and again, how those good-faith negotiations are simply and tragically not quite good enough, with every new development dragging the world just an inch closer to the brink, making peace just a little bit more impossible. Those compassionate, wise superpowers are trapped in a nightmare that's slowly constricting around them, and they're compassionate and wise enough to know exactly what that means while remaining entirely unable to stop it.

It's most directly and obviously telling a story about the cold war, of course, not about artificial intelligence per se. The 'atomics' of TPF are just X-Men with the serial numbers filed off, and are therefore not constructed artifacts the way that uploaded and synthetic minds are; there's some nod to an 'superpowers arms race' in the AI sense of the term, but it's not a core theme. But these are still 'more than human' in important ways, with several of the characters qualifying directly as superintelligences in one way or another.

The story isn't complete (just getting started, really), so I don't want to speak too authoritatively about its theme or conclusions. But it's safe to say that the moral universe it lives in isn't a comfortable one. Echoing rationalists, the comic opens with an arresting line of dialogue: "The ethical thing to do, of course, would be to conquer the world."

In his excellent book Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom discusses multipolarity somewhat, and takes a rather dim view of it. He sees no hope for good outcomes that way, and argues that it will likely be extremely unstable. In other words, it has the ability to cloud the math, for a little while but it's ultimately just a transitional phase before we reach some kind of universal subordination to a single system.

The Power Fantasy describes such a situation, where six well-intentioned individuals are trying to share the world with one another, and shows beat-by-beat how they fail.

Pantheon cheats outrageously to make its optimism work- close relationships between just the right people, shackles on the superintelligences in just the right degree, lucky breaks at just the right time. It also has, I think, a rather more vague understanding of the principles at play (though it's delightfully faithful to the nerd culture in other ways; there's constant nods to Lain and Ghost in the Shell, including some genuinely funny sight gags, and I'm pretty sure one of the hacker characters is literally using the same brand of mouse as me).

TPF doesn't always show its work, lots of the story is told in fragments through flashbacks and nonlinear fragments. But what it shows, it shows precisely and without compromise or vagueness. It does what it can to stake you to the wall with iron spikes, no wiggle room, no flexibility.

But all the same, there's an odd problem, right? We survived the Cold War.

TPF would argue (I suspect) that we survived because the system collapsed to a singleton- the United States emerged as the sole superpower, with the Pax Americana reigning over the world undisputed for much of the last forty years. There were only two rivals, not six, and when one went, the game functionally ended.

In other words, to have a future, we need a Sovereign.

So let me go further back- the conspicuous tendency of biospheres to involve complex ecosystems with no 'dominant' organism. Sure, certain adaptations radiate quickly outward; sometimes killing and displacing much of what came before. But nature simply gives us no prior record of successful singletons emerging from competitive and dynamic environments, ever. Not even humans, not even if you count our collective species as one individual; we're making progress, but Malaria and other such diseases still prey on us, outside our control for now.

TPF would argue, I suspect, that there's a degree of power at which this stops being true- the power to annihilate the world outright, which has not yet been achieved but will be soon.

But that, I think, has not yet been shown to my satisfaction.

Obligate singleton outcomes are a far, far more novel claim than their proponents traditionally accept, and I think the burden of proof must be much higher than simply having a good argument for why it ought to be true. A model isn't enough; models are useful, not true. I'm hungry for evidence, and fictional evidence doesn't count.

It's an interesting problem, even with the consequences looming so profoundly across our collective horizon right now. TPF feels correct-as-in-precise, the way that economists and game theorists are precise. But economics and game theory are not inductive sciences; they are models, theories, arguments, deductions. They're not observations, and not to be trusted as empirical observations are trusted. Pantheon asserts again and again the power of dialogue and communication, trusts the multipolar world. And that's where my moral and analytical instincts lie too, at least to some degree. I concern myself with deep time, and deep time is endlessly, beautifully plural. But Pantheon doesn't have the rigor to back that up- this is hope, not deduction, and quite reckless in its way. Trying to implement dialectical approaches in anything like a formal system has led to colossal tragedy, again and again.

One narrative is ruthlessly rigorous and logically potent, but persistently unable to account for the real world as I've seen it. The other is vague, imprecise, overconfident, and utterly beautiful, and feels in a deep way like a continuation of the reality that I find all around me- but only feels. Both are challenging, in their way.

It's a bit scary, to be this uncertain about something this consequential. This is a question around which so much pivots- the answer to the Drake paradox, the nature of the world-to-come, the permanence of death. But I simply don't know.

[torchickentacos]

i will always shout praises of bi4bi but given recent discourse I feel the need to say that I love bi4het too! I just love bisexuality in general in its many forms, and anyone who only likes it when it's 'queer enough' for them is biphobic. Bisexuals should be able to bring their LaMe CiShEt BoYfRiEnD to pride without being made to feel like spectators and outsiders to their own event.

[namethatghostling]

i know were long past the pitching our own versions of scooby doo tumblr phase but like if i could write/direct just one single piece of scooby doo media i would do an episode (based on the original like 60s/70s run or thereabouts) where the gang is investigating rumors of vampires lurking around a certain abandoned manor or smth on the outskirts of a small superstitious rural town. pretty standard stuff. they hear about the supposed vampire sightings and decide to investigate. its all going pretty normal until they actually spot one, shrouded in shadow at first, and see them turn into a bat and take flight before their very eyes! its a real vampire!

so this huge bat is swooping and screeching at them and everyones flipping out running all helter skelter but then she transforms again and shaggy and scoob suddenly just. stop.

after a sec shaggy starts to laugh. the rest of the gang is like oh god the vampire did something to him or idk maybe he finally got so scared something in his mind just snapped but shaggy is just like lol guys its ok its just sibella.

and sibella is now fully revealed to be a like young teen lookin vampire girl, a little older than she appeared in ghoul school but def still recognizable. and shes super psyched to see her old teachers again and theyre all like catching up (this so called abandoned house is actually her extended familys vacation home (its their first vacation in a century or so and its fallen into a bit of disrepair ok) and shes visiting with them) meanwhile the rest of the gang is like ????

and shaggys like what? i told you guys about that time i took that job as a gym teacher at that creepy boarding school where the kids were all little monsters

and velmas like ............we thought you were being hyperbolic

and daphne and fred are just like EVERYBODY SHUT UP MONSTERS ARE REAL?? FOR REAL??? NOT JUST OLD DUDES IN COSTUMES???

and shaggy says uh yeah did you guys not think monsters were real? like weve been sayin..

and velma says smth like what are you talking about? every time weve investigated some supernatural phenomenon its always been a guy in costume, how could you possibly have deduced from that that monsters are real??

and shaggys just like .......velma my best friend is a whole Talking Dog