#both socially and economically

[mollysunder]

I have a problem with the idea of a Jinx redemption arc. It's not that I have any issue with the fact that Jinx will be viewed as a hero to the people of Zaun. It's pretty obvious Jinx would be admired, she did a thing the people of Zaun wanted en masse for a long time. The thing about Jinx being the savior of Zaun is that it isn't really a redemption arc, because that's still just Jinx being militantly opposed to Piltover, a thing she always has been.

My problem is that the insistence that Jinx NEEDS to have a redemption arc takes away from the larger complexity of Arcane's worldbuilding. What does Jinx have to apologize for in order to be redeemed? Why is there so much emphasis on Jinx's character specifically to rectify her wrongs? And the way the fandom often defines Jinx's wrongdoings centers around a vague discomfort in her acts of violence and general instability.

What does it look like for Jinx to be "good", when the actions of many well-intentioned characters that the audience has an easier time being morally-aligned with either generates very little benefit or actual harm? No one in the cast sans Jinx and Silco have taken the material steps (as controversial as they may be) to deal with the problem that is Piltover, and Piltover has always been THE problem for Zaun.

The concept of a redemption arc for Jinx is so backwards because it asks Jinx as an individual to do "better" when it should be demanded of Piltover instead. How do you live to a standard that makes you morally good when the environment around you necessitates violence as it's own form of capital?

Sidenote: This all leads to the one real worry I have about Jinx and Ekko's inevitable partnership. Ekko is the character the showrunners treat as a guiding light in Zaun, which unfortunately makes Ekko an agent of the showrunners' biases. Case in point, Ekko's friendship with Heimerdinger, the architect of Zaun's despair.

If Jinx and Ekko team up, there's a chance she'd up end up working with Heimerdinger too. And it's like, "C'mon, really????"

[mzminola]

DC Bat comics have a lot of classism issues (among other problems) but thanks to the weird-ass way that wealth scales, any analysis that assumes Tim’s original family is closer to the Waynes than they are to the Browns is going to be full of holes. Or if you assume Stephanie’s family is closer to the Todds than to the Drakes.

Like, the Drakes when Jack still has the company are definitely in a different tax bracket than Crystal Brown the nurse & Arthur Brown the ex gameshow host turned costumed villain, but the Drakes & Browns are still closer to each other than they are to the old money Bruce Wayne whose company bankrolls the Justice League.

Plus the time when DI went under and the Drakes were relying on Dana’s income from working as a physical therapist moved them to probably about the same bracket until Jack picked up a job too.

Acting like Stephanie Brown, who grows up in the suburbs in a house her mom owns outright, can easily put herself up in a hotel room for a week or two when fighting with her mom, only needs a job in college to avoid student loans instead of to supplement them... is close to pre-adoption Jason?

Even pre-his-parents-dying Jason?

No.

Tim & Steph have enough of a gap to have different experiences and sometimes talk past each other, but they’re still both much closer to each other than either of them is to the Waynes or the Todds.

Tim & Steph are both economically well off kids with abusive dads who decide to sneak out and fight crime. Stephanie’s mom is uninvolved in her life because of a prescription pill addiction (though she works past that to become more involved), while Tim’s mom is straight up dead, and the stepmom he gets later is nice but takes a hands-off approach to parenting (and then dies too).

This makes sense with Stephanie’s role in earlier comics being a foil to Tim (though she grows into a more independent character over time). They need enough similarities in circumstance that their different philosophies and crime fighting styles come down to personal choice, and they can argue with each other without mutually devolving into “You just don’t understand!”

TL;DR: economics and social class are fucking weird, Tim & Steph are foils, exaggerating the differences in their backgrounds messes up your analysis.

Bonus: You don’t need to make Steph even more of an underdog to appreciate her character.

[putridpride]

happy (not that stoked) Labor Day to all the mfs that work today. especially if y'all aren't getting time & a half or double time. Thank you for working because it's what u have to do to survive. Labor Day is only a blue collar worker/office job kinda holiday, so bless you all that are working like it's any other day, I promise we see ya and appreciate y'all <3

[punkshitposts]

something I think is actually hilarious is that if you go left enough you start having more stances in common with (individual) conservatives, and if you go right enough you start agreeing with (individual) leftists. like i have a pretty close friend who's self described as "just far enough right that I hate politicians" , whom I hard disagree with his overarching political stances. but the finer details of it... yeah we agree with each other. gun control/gun rights opinions taxation opinions pro-small government opinions slight separatist opinions anti two party opinions anti-corporation opinion ect ect ect.

we stand on opposite sides of a standard political compass but I genuinely think if I were to count stats, I'd agree with as many of his stances as I would a liberals/democrats stances. my hs gov teacher described the difference in right vs left to us as "everyone's goal here is the betterment of mankind, they just think the best ways to do it are different" and that's literally the best way, to me, to describe what the difference in right vs left is regarding anarchism specifically. we got ESSENTIALLY the same opinion but the ways we think are the best ways to go about enacting said opinion are what makes us different. and something abt that is really painfully funny to me. envisioning a world where an-something is the major world thing, not capitalism.... and there's STILL right vs left... but The Anarchist Versions. christ.

sorry for the book i wrote in the tags. ignore typos I am NOT retyping any of that to fix them xoxo

[hershelwidget]

did i mention i like bob’s burgers

i have shown y’all a louise once i think(?) but that was it. and janice came absolutely out of nowhere for y’all

uhm anyways!! the family animated sitcom show ever <3

[yyoaticas]

Sorry people are being awful :(

You're right and I think you should run for president tbqh

i feel like running for president of tumblr is like running for president of argentina. no one deserves the job except for those stupid enough to want it

[grinchwrapsupreme]

Was having a debate yesterday with my boss about the validity of nfts and their impact on what we consider art and about 10 minutes in i mentioned the bored ape and he didnt know what it was and i had to get him to google it and it was at that point i realized i was arguing on the business of war with a man who has never been in the trenches

[doomstonee]

Smash Hit as the Warner siblings’ strange uncle that accidentally confesses his crimes to

[practically-an-x-man]

ugh. my brain.

[haunted-maids]

watching teen wolf and constantly thinking to myself “peter parker did it better”

[zorrxchicle]

i haven't read nearly enough to call myself a marxist with any kind of confidence but my god, trying to discuss any topic in depth from a purely liberal perspective is so.

[weirdsociology]

[bendgineer]

I think one of the reasons the Harris / Walz ticket has so much momentum is because the campaign is genuinely trying to put out this vibe of fun. Like that's all the "brat" thing is, the coconut jokes, just being kind of silly and fun.

And I think it's working, because let's be real, we are all exhausted. It's been all about preserving democracy, defeating fascism, the past eight years. The message has been "vote for us because the country is literally on the line". The vibes are not good when we are stuck back at that fight, and not even discussing trying to make progress on things like housing, healthcare, education, etc. And the fight to just stop fascism? All still true. Project 2025 is real and is extremely scary. We can't let that man back into office.

But the vibe was "vote for us otherwise we're all fucked :(" and now has shifted to "get in, we're making popcorn and then bullying fascists." Like a lot of the issues conservatives bring up, the Harris / Walz is just not engaging them in good faith, as they shouldn't. Republicans bring up abortion, and the Dems are just like, "you want 14 year old to give birth? Weirdo" and just leave it at that. Like YES, that's what you should do. Because it SHOULDNT be a debate. And it's working. This is how you defeat the identify politics thing Republicans have been trying to push for a while. Just mocking them for the stupidity of it all. "Like seriously? You think a book can make someone gay??? Hahaha." None of the Republicans are reacting well. They can't stand it. Vance even complained about bullying!!! Like do you KNOW who picked you as vp??? It's actually laughable, because they have no room to stand on when it comes to bullying.

And a huge part of the mocking and dismissing of Republicans is that the message is clear - were done debating all this stupid stuff. We've won the last two elections' popular vote - most Americans do NOT want christo-facism. It's time to move on. And that's what gives me hope, and the feeling of hope I think a lot of people have picked up on. It's time to address all the issues we've all wished we've been addressing the past decade. It's important we move onto that, and that's the message I'm getting from this campaign (We're not going back). I think it will resonate with a lot of people, because plainly, we're all just sick of this same old news cycle and fake rage bait over things like "should women have rights?", "Should gay people be allowed to exist?" The general populace have answered YES to both these multiple times, and it is time to move on. Maybe I'm being naive, but I am genuinely excited at the idea of putting to bed these debates (it's exhausting trying to fend your very existence) and moving on to actual economic and social policies that could fix a lot of deterioration over the last 2 decades.

[thetruearchmagos]

I'll be honest, I usually have a deep seated dislike of damn near all Sci Fi Setting 'mercenary / pirate' groups, and the more of them I see the worse it gets

[imsobadatnicknames2]

i've really been struggling to articulate this lol but

There's a very specific kind of privileged worldview that has become apparent to me in the recent wave of (usually European) non-US bloggers making posts like "my US followers and friends, don't forget that American politics influence the politics of the rest of the world too, you have a responsibility to all of us" where it becomes clear that their idea of how "American politics influencing the rest of the world" works is like "if republicans win in the US other countries follow their example and become more right wing by like osmosis or something" and not "the US government engages in a longstanding bipartisan policy of sabotaging social and labor reforms in other countries for the material economic gain of US businesses, which universally involves propping up and supporting far-right governments through a variety of means both direct and indirect"

[sentimental-darkness]

Anything that's "theoretical and perfect" is yet to be tested in the real world, and there always remains a question whether that's even truly feasible when push comes to shove.

I'm talking about high end (very expensive) cell phones that people pay for in installments and yes, they usually are/were affordable/fair because overall interests rates were low. I've also never bought anything expensive like house or car etc, even though I could have, but it doesn't mean it wasn't happening. Plenty of examples in my environment and people still do that even now, hurrying up to the bank to take out a loan for life. Plus, the situation between countries differs so I don't mean to say it's going to be exact same in every place, countries of Eastern Europe will have it rougher. In my place you can already notice the effects of increased wages on overall society but prices rise all the time anyway, so there is hardly any difference to be felt. But how it manifests in society is kind of loss of ambition and resignation, also bankruptcies of small/decent businesses, who aren't able to actually pay their workers (...with required harsh tax on top). People feel resignation if a store cashier earns the same wage as entry/medium level office worker with higher credentials or physical worker with experience and skill, and companies stay at minimum for as long as they can of course... so there is that (some because they can't afford it, some because you want to maximize profits, which isn't unexpected at all). Whether raising the minimum wage helps or not is highly controversial and complex, and any studies that it doesn't negatively effect inflation might have been influenced by some of the prevailing political sentiments (and even then they were not studies about long-term consequences, most likely). It's clear it might have positive psychological effect on some people and even help with productivity, however not all places are the same and long-term effects are hard to study.

But even historically since the beginning of time, in the wider picture, overall long-term economic principles and consequences are the same. If you think magical money printed out of nothing to help economy and/or artificially set wages - so you won't feel any change even though there is inflation - are going to magically fix everything... well, then I don't know what I can say to change your perspective because yours is clearly short-sighted and we're more like at the end of the road rather than the beginning of it, like in 1970, which was almost immediate fallout from the erasure of gold standard, so the current situation is different too. The principles of printing free money and injecting it into economy all the time, with interest rates staying so low for many years, are exactly why we're in this mess in the first place, and artificial regulations/faking it has never really turned out that well in long-term. More of the same = the eventual fallout will be only steeper, I would assume.

I have made a meme to explain how Millennials aren’t destroying industries, the industries are destroying us:

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.