#but again I am a pacifist

[elbiotipo]

Perhaps it's the pacifist in me but even if I had to kill someone in 100% justified and ambiguous self-defense there was no other choice, I would be haunted forever by it. I would not desire to kill another person in almost any circumstances. Much less about a fucking TV. Yes, I would most probably grab a stick and kick someone's ass if they tried to harm me or steal from me. I wouldn't even CONCIEVE of killing them.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

oop found this in my drafts! might as well post! they become quite close in this au - thats what happens when youve only got each other for a Very Long Stressful Time <3 these are just fragments of scene ideas that came from my single braincell hitting corner perfect <3

[akemiiya]

are you really a flowey fan if you can type u in your browser's search bar and the first thing that shows up isn't undertale.com/alarmclock/flowey

[maul-of-shame]

Quick psa to Acolyte shippers because I'm starting to see some stuff already *heavy sigh*:

If your ship got confirmed/actors talked about it etc, good for you!! That's really cool and I'm happy for you!! WITH THAT SAID- your ship being confirmed, doesn't mean you're like "the chosen one", the "correct one", or the "only one valid". I'm already seeing people coming after other Acolyte ships that haven't been "comfirmed" and like.... There is already so much toxicity in the Star Wars Fandom already, please don't create more.

Don't be that person. Don't bully others because their ships are not "confirmed" and such.

This is about fake people in fake space for God's sake, but people behind screens, creating fanworks (arts, edits, writing etc), they're REAL and coming after them to mock them or bully them, that's not the way to go bestie.

Create the arts, writings, fics, edits, ANYTHING you want for your ship(s).

Use your time for this, not to bully others.

There is already such a huge negative impact (we're talking racism, homophobia and more) created by some """""""fans""""""" of the franchise since the Acolyte has been out, please do NOT create more issues, or bully people because they do not like the same things/ships as you and such.

Some people like sunsets, some prefer christmas lights and some enjoy flowers! Does that mean one is wrong? Fuck no! We're better than this, we've been following the franchise for days, weeks, months, YEARS even, DECADES! It's not hurting anyone to accept some principles of the Jedi:

"Jedi use their powers to defend and protect, never to attack others. Jedi respect all life, in any form."

Let's be respectful towards each other and celebrate the fact that creations and this beautiful franchise brought us together, made us meet so many new people and friends. If you don't like something, scroll or block, but NEVER bully.

[rebornofstars]

nobody fucking touch me rn i went to see tf one in the cinema and im shaking. they actually made a good transformers movie. what the fuck

[boxwinebaddie]

Now Miss Nina...THOSE TAGS

i said what i said!

ALSO: i think he said "I-I Lo--" before he passed out </3

[wakinguponsaturday]

I'm gonna be a hater for a moment and say that I wish they hadn't made it so a "good" PC could recruit Minthara by knocking her out. Having recruited her on my "evil" playthrough, she's one of the best written characters in the game (when her dialogues actually trigger) and her VA's performance is fantastic. I'm not alone in having said the evil route is pretty bare bones relative to the good choices, and Minthara was one of the few things it had going for it. And I do want more people to experience that!

But you can do that by just. Thinking up an evil PC. Dark Urge is already pretty well set up for this if you're not great at conceptualizing original characters. The evil route is again already gutted, and this just makes the gameplay even more unbalanced. Your actions should have consequences - hence why raiding the grove has Karlach and Wyll leave your party. That's great, I love that moral fortitude on their part! And similarly, siding against Minthara locked you out of having her as a companion.

I know fully that this does not matter, and that other people are approaching the game differently. Hell, I'll probably knock Minthara out to recruit her on my next playthrough because I've adored having her around. (Though how I'll manage to gain approval with her as a goody two shoes, I don't know. The worldviews are pretty diametrically opposed.) But I think that it was a reasonable and well thought out decision to keep Minthara locked to that one choice at the onset. It didn't need to change. And playing as a morally grey or evil character, in a game whose moral greyness was already sparse, suffers more for it.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Gonna write a bit of ATLA meta about Uncle Iroh.

Since I saw a post that rubbed me the wrong way, but in the opposite of the way posts about Iroh usually rub me the wrong way, so I'll need a bit of a lead up to explain why both approaches are wrong. Spoilers ahead.

When people look back on a story, they tend to compress it in their minds, as though everything happened all at once. People have a static image of Camelot that includes both Merlin and Lancelot, even though they were never both at Camelot at the same time.

And I think when people look back at Avatar: The Last Airbender, they look at it knowing that Zuko joins the Gaang in the end, and knowing that, they forget how Zuko looks and what Zuko does at the start of the story. Because Zuko is a pretty unambiguous classic cartoon villain at the start of the story.

He's substantially more powerful than the protagonists (look at how easily he bats Sokka out of the way.) His goals are in direct opposition to the protagonists' goals, and if he is successful it will be disastrous to both them and the world. And like most cartoon villains, he's personally a dick: he's constantly angry/impatient, he lashes out, his introduction isn't quite like Azula's where she tells the ship's captain that she expects him to be more afraid of her than the tides, but he does treat the lives of his crew as disposable in an early episode, when there's a storm. (He gets better at the end of the episode, call that foreshadowing.) He's even got a scar on his face, in the long tradition of physically disfigured villains.

And once you've watched the whole show once, sure, it's hard to see him that way. And you can point to some signs that he was going to come around -- he didn't kill anyone (that we know of), when Aang let himself be captured in exchange for Zuko leaving the village alone, he did leave it alone, rather than backing out on his promise once he could. But so what? Plenty of unrepentant villains have a sense of honor and will keep their word, makes for interesting stories.

The point I'm trying to make is: there is only so much one show can do, only so much story they can get in to one story. And in that finite amount of story, they spent a TON of time showing the audience that no matter how much of a villain someone looks to be at first, that villain is still a person.

And they also spend a lot of time showing other people are people. Random Earth Kingdom civilians like Haru. Random Earth Kingdom guerilla fighters like Jet. When we get to the Northern Water Tribe, we find a bunch of people who are just people: old men who are set in their misogynistic ways but maybe can be coaxed into changing, young men who are kind of jerks (but who still don't deserve to die at the hands of an invasive force), young women torn between their own desires and their sense of duty, people people people. And when we get flashbacks to the Air Nomads, they're people: some more serious, some more fun and flighty, just people. And when we get to the Fire Nation, they're just people.

So let's look at the rest of the Fire Nation royal family. Azula's a sympathetic villain: she's scary, she's dangerous, she does appalling things, we see her suffering and the show gives us enough information about her and her family's dynamics, the way their father played them off against each other, to see why she did what she did. Azula ends the story in a situation similar to the one where Zuko is at the start: Zuko starts having lost everything and nearly everyone who ever mattered to him; Azula ends having lost everything and everyone. And we don't see that with Ozai, all we get of a potentially softer side of Ozai is a picture of him as a small child, but it's a short story and there's only so much time and it's not really about Ozai, and surely we can infer that there is something like Azula's story in his, something going on where to him his actions made sense.

Something going on where if you had Ozai's life, his background, his circumstances, his worldview, maybe you would act the same.

What I mean is, Zuko did not become a person because he stopped being a villain. His personhood was there when he was a villain, and was still there when he joined the heroes. And Azula's personhood and her villainhood can coexist. And Ozai's villainhood and personhood, with a little extrapolation, can coexist.

And Iroh. The Dragon of the West, the general of the great siege of Ba Sing Se. He's one person. He doesn't need to be split, either you ignore the harm he did or you decide that the harm he did means he must suffer for it, must be punished for it. He can be a person, and a person who did harm, and a person who did harm for reasons that made sense to him at the time, this is all one thing, it is all there in the story, not all of it is there for Iroh because it is not Iroh's story, but if you look at Zuko's story and Azula's and Chit Sang (guy at the boiling rock they tried to escape with) and Jet and Jeong Jeong and Hama and Yon Rha and Hei Bai, and how things went down with Aang in the Avatar Day episode (ie the town that wanted to punish him for a very old murder that the Avatar did, and they were in the wrong for that even though the Avatar did kill the person they said the Avatar killed) and what happened in The Great Divide (ie that ultimately it didn't matter who was at fault) it's all there in other parts of the story, you can extrapolate.

Iroh doesn't need to be punished, not by anyone else and not by himself in the form of feeling agonized over the harm he caused (much as I love angst in fiction.) Nobody needs to be punished; suffering is bad, causing more suffering does not make other people's suffering less. And he doesn't need to be innocent and pure to not deserve punishment. He's not innocent. He did a lot of harm. We can infer that he caused that harm for reasons that made sense to him at the time, whether they make sense to him in retrospect or not and whether he actually did have better options under the circumstances, which he may well not have. We're all people. We're all people. We're all people.

Like it or not, agree with it or not, ATLA is about forgiveness, about not seeking revenge, about not increasing the amount of suffering in the world by taking an eye for an eye. The story did not punish Zuko for having started on the wrong side, even though he started out as a stereotypical cartoon villain and he would have caused unspeakable devastation to the world if he'd succeeded at his initial goal. And it would not punish Iroh for what he did. And anyone looking for either a way to completely exonerate Iroh -- pretend he has never done anything harmful in his life -- or to criticize the show for not having him punished for his wrongdoing, has completely missed the central theme of the show.

Which is not separate from any imperialism/colonialism is bad messaging you want to draw from it. The show is not claiming colonialism is bad because it sides specifically with the Water Tribe or with everyone-but-the-Fire-Nation. It's against colonialism because...colonialism is bad...for people. Who have inherent value, whose lives have inherent value, whose lives do not stop having inherent value when they harm other people. It's one message.

[hussyknee]

Fuck books. I want a gun.

[itswhattheycallyou]

man i remember when this first came out and it freaked everyone out including us. and then its like. normal. lol

its crazy bc this scene made it so that Kris T ( @kristalpepsi ) have a f'd up backstory that got transferred to me when i split and then when Ch2 came out its like. ok Deltarune is horriffic but not THAT horrific. yet

[orcelito]

ok i am actually so very angry and there's literally nothing i can do to fix it. life keeps going on. she might even be happy. and fuck dude, i'll make sure im happy too, i was a fully developed person before she was in my life and i'll continue to be one without her. but God Damn, the fact that she can just do something so blatantly awful and unfair to me and then run off without any actual repercussions is just so fucking rankling to me.

like perhaps she feels guilty. she said she did when it was all going down. but it was just something she "needed to do". so obviously she didn't feel guilty enough or she wouldnt have done it like that lmaoooo

i really did deserve to have a good solid yell at her. but unfortunately, by the time i did see her in person i just wanted her out of my fucking life. so. no yelling was done, unfortunately.

[kitsunabi]

Ah yes. I call BS.

[iamdeltas]

I apologize for being a huge butthurt SU fan on main today.

It will happen again. Probably whenever another story driven cartoon's finale occurs and people use that to bash SU too.

Honestly the only thing making that a "probably" is that I can't think of any current story driven cartoons right now.

[kingdingsfan]

starting to become crazy on the whiteboard

totally not making fake interactions with other people (myself)

[talkorsomething]

For someone who likes (most of? I dont remember anymore..) ddt and has general questionable taste in music, you would think i would ALSO like lavon volski but somehow i do Not. I found i think like three of his more recent albums that i can listen to but the earlier ones just ... do not gel with me. Which is unfortunate! I want to like All The Music! But i suppose some things just weren't meant to be...

[sl33py-g4m3r]

introspection go brrrrr

Just up kind of late watching youtube and once again something flitters through my mind. "how did I get this way? why am I a pacifist?"

more below the cut as I do ramble and don't want to subject all who don't want to read it to my ramblings about pacifism and how I became (or found out i was) one.

Because I've had that idea in my head for a while that violence in any sense is wrong...

Ever since I was a kid (idk how old I was when it started) mom and dad argued... it was loud, it was terrifying, it led to nothing.... It taught me to run and hide from things like that. That anger and violence solves nothing and just destroys.

I didn't know what a pacifist was or that it was even a thing at all; I just didn't like the loud violence of the domestic kind. that violence of any sort was unjustified....

or perhaps I'm misremembering it's been so long..... my first experience with another pacifist in media was Tikal the Echidna from Sonic Adventure Director's Cut for the GameCube. teenage me became obsessed with Tikal; and as I'd embarrassed myself on here before, in this very manner, wrote down all of her voice lines and read them in school whenever I'd had a spare minute.

don't ask why... I don't know either....

I looked into pacifism and philosophy of it and became intrigued; agreeing with much of it's points. I adopted the ideology soon after. or perhaps was already living it, as I didn't like arguing or violence before that...

My second was Rurouni Kenshin many many years later. but that was after my pacifism had been cemented.

though absolute pacifism might be impossible, I still consider any violence unjust, even in cases of self defense...

my vegetarianism or veganism stems from this view. my "want to save the environment" mindset stems from this view. I don't like to kill ants or bugs if I don't have to.

the less harm done to everything, the better in my opinion.

So.... was it domestic violence in my youth? was it influences from a video game character?

I would assume so. given the fighting continued long into adulthood from my parents, to my younger sibling and mother constantly fighting, with me just in the middle panicking and having anxiety go unchecked for years.

unrelated maybe but it makes me wonder whether there are other games (besides undertale of course) that you can play a pacifist role and still have fun; that aren't puzzle games, visual novels, dancing games, or farming sims.

but maybe in trying to find games that pacifism plays a large part in, perhaps I'm taking it too far? disliking violence even in a fictional context.....

I do have a tendency of doing that.

or perhaps I could also be a pacifist from the way I acted as a teenager. acting in such a way that I deeply regret. breaking a couple things in anger on 2 separate occasions. just like my father had so many times....

I deeply regretted that and swore to myself that I'd never intentionally break anything again, all be it subconsciously perhaps.

Late night post and of course I do indeed ramble on, unfortunately.