#essay submissions

[etherealacademia]

after 5 years of university my best skill as a recent grad is the ability to write a whole 1000 word essay the hour before it's due.

[randomnameless]

A Master’s Thesis for a university no less

-----

Yep, I’ve seen that!

at least that people got some dedication, I nearly died when I wrote mine but it wasn’t for shitposting so maybe that made it even more tedious lol

But I’d say, how can you even write a Thesis about something as empty as Fodlan? I think the writer mentionned how Supreme Leader didn’t attack civilians but... while we don’t see her do it, Ashe mentions they’re starving, Baldo’n’Waldi must come from somewhere (the experiments started in Remire, before the War, but obviously to be used for said war in, basically, Supreme Leader’s maternal territories!) and I guess the religious people fleeing the Empire or not bothering to send letters to their friends who don’t hear about them anymore since the war started must have been busy Zumba’ing with Rhea in the 5 stars Enbarr resort.

As someone from SPE (!) mentionned, the Fodlan games take explicit care not to have anyone seriously challenge her beliefs of criticise her, or give spotlight to her main, self-perceived, nemesis who... well, is either fridged, exists off-screen or gives infodumps before dying.

Which makes any discussion about a “Just War” completely moot - Watsonian wise, especially if you take Fodlan as this entity functionning under the Crust System - same, Doylist wise, with any comparisons with real world Conventions (iirc OP mentionned that one of they juries asked if taking a dragon prisoner could be considered a war crime or something like that lol) because, hey, it’s a video game basically centered around a gameplay mechanic of depleting a red unit’s HP bar by hitting them with a weapon.

This is basically a really good shitpost which shows a lot of dedication - and that’s the kind of stuff fandom thrives for (remember zigludo chan sama senpai’s wiki page?) !

but as a serious/discourse/meta piece...

It’s basically the same redshit 10k words, with a bit more formatting and no word limit.

I mean, I used the search engine for “nabatean” and found nothing, and I think you can’t valably discuss Supreme Leader’s motives, ignoring this 

“You are a child of the goddess. You must not be allowed power over the people!“

part of her reasoning to fight against the Church.

Not wanting to give that chamber pot any credit, but if they sprout heinous arguments to support their fave, imo, it’s basically because even the members of that hellpit noticed Supreme Leader’s, uh, fondness for Nabateans as a species, and since she can’t do anything BaD or be wrong, it means the species are BaD.

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

DAVE: you feel like youd write five paragraph essays on r/aita

ROSE: ...I can neither confirm nor deny.

[dapg-otmebytheballs]

Welcome to philosophy with Dan Howell, today we will discuss such important topics as "Love isn't real" "Democracy is problematic" "A life without dips is no life at all" and "A clone is not meaningfully different in any way from the thing it is a clone of"

[daily-hanamura]

its sweet how when naoto goes "this kinda my fault :( cuz of me you might be in trouble" yosuke immediately goes "nuh uh" so casually

[mikibagels]

Have ya ever drawn any of the other pillarmen? Just curious ^-^

I have drawn Ka-chow and Wam-uwu 👉👈

I still have not drawn Esideez nuts because he's my least favourite pillar man :/ it doesn't spark slay in me idk sorry my opinions change all the time don't take this as a permanent stance

[skrunksthatwunk]

ohhhh this essay was like. definitely plagiarized at least a little bit (<- peer reviewing in the club tonite)

[lesbianboyfriend]

i write one sentence and then go on phone for an hour..

[undertale-fic-librarby]

Featured Fic Friday!

Welcome to Featured Fic Friday! A day where I, or someone who suggests one, tell you about a fanfic that I really enjoy! Spoiler's under the cut! Today's featured fic is...

The Deep End by Yessica (Teen And Up, Complete)

There must have been a mistake. He doesn’t belong here. Life is great. Monsters are free, the surface is wonderful and things couldn’t be better. So the fact that Papyrus still wants to die, isn’t really a problem, is it?

I want this fic to be featured because it explores the affect of Resets on Papyrus (which isn’t something I’ve seen a lot of) and the writing style makes the characters feel like real people.

This fic also explores Papyrus’ character in detail such as seeing how Papyrus always suppressing/ignoring his negative feelings could result him and the people around him.Something that should be explored I think a lot more in this fandom.

It also shows the strain on between both sans and Papyrus as both try to ignore their own issues to keep pretending to be ok.I think it’s best summarised in the authors words(chapter 7 end notes)

“The Papyrus I write isn't always very accurate to Canon!Pap, so I guess I kind of want to see what makes him tic, specifically once reaching the surface. Most people seem to imagine Pap taking to surface life like a fish to water, but I don't see it that way.

For me, Papyrus has been living lies his entire life, only holding out because of the persona he uses and the distance that allows him, the predictability of the timelines and the assuring knowledge nothing is permanent. On the surface, that all changes. Truly the worst ending for him, and it just becomes to much.

I wanted to explore that theory, but also offer a story about recovery, I do quite some awful shit to our favorite skeleton in my stories, and I'm a sucker for bittersweet or even truly bad endings. But in this case, I think he deserves a break. Recovery is possible, but it's a difficult road full of potholes.”

Disclaimer this fic does get a bit dark.

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

TA: hour long viideo e22ay

GA: 👎 

TA: youre ju2t a hater

[carryon-countdown]

❄️COC 2023 Wrap Up🍂

Hello everyone!  

The Carry On Countdown of 2023 has sadly come to an end. We hope that everyone who participated had a wonderful time. The admins sure had a blast feasting on all of the fabulous content from this year's countdown.

We hope everyone will remain inspired to create even more fantastic Carry On related content into the new year.

But before we say goodbye to you all, it’s time to welcome new people onto the Page of Honour!

What you need to do to get your place on the Page of Honour:

You need to have completed all 30 COC 2023 prompts on their set days (If you posted a prompt within a day or so of its set posting date that’s perfectly fine, but, for example, if you posted a prompt for Day 8 on Day 11, that’s a bit too late)

You need to DM @carryonmylovelies ​with an explanation/link of where to find all of the work you posted for this year’s countdown (Can be simply saying what tag everything is under on your blog, or a link to your ao3, etc.)

You’ll also need to let @carryonmylovelies​ know whether you want your blog or another platform where you posted your content (such as ao3 or instagram) linked on the Page of Honour. You can only choose one.

We hope we made this clear, and please remember our ask box is always open for any questions you may have :)

We wish everyone who celebrates a very happy holidays, and we hope everyone will have a terrific 2024.

With lots and lots of love,

The admins of the 2023 Carry On Countdown ❄💘

[hotvintagepoll]

when vincent price is up again in round 2 i have propaganda so u better @ me. or else.

Once round 1 is finished I'll post a list of everyone who made it to the next round. Send me your propaganda then and I might add it to his description!

[hotlosers]

whats been the funniest submissions so far

we don't want to ruin the thrill TOO much but here are a few:

just ken of Barbie (2023)

goro akechi of persona 5 being submitted (checks spreadsheet) (does math) 27 times

squidward (Re: Why should they be crowned king of losers: "clarinet player". Submitter then proceeded to copy paste the entirety of "I'm Not a Loser" from The Spongebob Squarepants Musical)

[svtskneecaps]

friends and fiends if this truly spells the Over for the qsmp i may let the brainworms that have been festering in me for MONTHS--A YEAR, EVEN--win.

i may summarize the goddamn fucking lore.

[casiavium]

Can't sleep again. Thinking about how I don't like knight/prince(ss) as a trope. Besides the fact that it's boring to me. This isn't "discourse" or a call out or anything it's just a personal interpretation and analysis

while yeah there's nothing wrong with that level of power imbalance in fiction, these tropes always act like that's a cute thing which I just find to be. 😬 y'know. Referring to a character as a "pet" for the royal one without understanding that that's. not a great dynamic to have. The "don't call them toxic or problematic!" When the relationship is inherently not equal and can never be without issues, but this can't possibly be discussed because then the person who ships it is a bad person 🙃

and for someee reason still bitching about the "more obvious" power imbalances like enemies, who most of the time end up being MORE equal because they're the same person same situation different fonts

It's fine to me when it's used as an insult (something something loyalty) and then there's discussion of "you know you mean so much more to me than that", or when there's a Very Obviously Fucked Up imbalance that is Very Obviously Not Normal and yet the one that gets the short end of the stick is like "fuck this I don't care that you think you're better than me. Your power only exists because I give you it, so be very careful how you use it" (and when they use it wrong there are consequences that don't get magically forgiven)

If the one with less control isn't very very aware of how much power the other has over them and could exert if they wanted to (but also the fact that the relationship and its genuineness hinges on their agreement) it gets a bit too concerning for me. If there isn't a certain level of meta intertextual analysis and understanding of the way the very much dominant/submissive dynamic works then it's just. Not interesting and often frustrating

Edit: this should have said intra-textual ("in the text itself", which I apparently not a word) not inter-textual (between texts)

[sincerelyandyourstruly]

#boyyuri

on xiaoven & yearning

—

so as we all know, "yuri is when there’s themes and motifs and yaoi is when there’s two blokes who do fuck all. if you reblog this you love trans people." (tumblr user dyggot, 2023.); that "yaoi is about entanglement and yuri is about yearning." (tags by tumblr user thyminesquared, 2023, screenshot and archived on this post.)

as should be clear from these definitions, this essay is not going to concern itself with whether a pairing counts as "yaoi" or "yuri" on the sole basis of the genders of the characters involved. although i understand the deeply gendered connotations of both of these terms, to ME, yuri is about the distance between one’s self and others around them (maybe people, maybe dreams and ideals), and the deeply-rooted desires that grow in that gap as a result.

as a post made to tumblr, put in the xiaoven tag, everyone reading this knows the basic lore surrounding their characters and world: that venti is the anemo archon, god of wind and freedom; that xiao is the last yaksha, who wields the power of anemo in battle to protect his homeland of liyue; that Visions are considered to be representations of a person's dearest wish, crystallized into physical form. but let's run over the basics again real fast, just to keep this piece from having external dependencies to understand, yeah?

venti is a wind sprite from mondstadt who ascended to godhood at the end of a rebellion against the at-the-time god of storms keeping his people in a cage made of windstorm thousands of years ago, and he chose his ideal of freedom to honor the bard who led said rebellion and died at the end of the final battle, but whether the nameless bard even got to see the clear skies he fought so hard to live under is currently up to interpretation. either way, venti took on the nameless bard's appearance so that his nation's people would never forget the true hero who won their freedom, but because thousands of years have passed the people have kind of forgotten by now anyway, and venti probably has a lot of identity issues about it!

also he's a bard who plays music in exchange for wine because singing to pass on the memories of heroes past and then drinking to numb the grief of people's forgetting is how he Copes™.

AND ALSO he will occasionally sleep for hundreds of years at a time.

Meanwhile, xiao is an immortal/"illuminated beast" from liyue whose true form is technically that of a bird, but he goes around in the form of a hot emo boy, ostensibly because he needs hands to don his mask, hold his spear, and do his dance to conquer the remnants of evil gods, the act of which literally taints his soul with their sins— his karmic debts.

anyway he was enslaved by an evil god in his youth because said evil god (probably) knew his True Name and because we're going by fairy rules this means he was forced to commit atrocities (namely eating people's dreams) against his will until the god of contracts geo archon zhongli killed his previous master, gave him a new name, and contractually tasked him with the job of subduing the demonic remnants of other defeated gods, which he has since proceeded to unflinchingly, unwaveringly, and unquestioningly obey for the last few thousand years. however, despite his unfathomable obedience and devotion to his duty, his Vision (his life's greatest desire) is that of anemo (of freedom).

also a few hundred years ago when he was about to succumb to the weight of his karmic debts, xiao's life was saved by the sound of someone (venti) playing the flute in the marsh where he'd been working, and so now his dream, the deepest wish he holds closest to his heart, is to someday "wear the mask and dance — not to conquer demons, but to the tune of that flute amid a sea of flowers." (xiao's character card, genshin impact, 2021)

…can you guys believe that the dihua flute moment was like all we xv shippers had to hold onto for like two years?! that, and xiao's extremely yearnful voiceline abt venti that's just like, "venti? is that what he goes by these days? his tunes are… nevermind." but the point of this recap i hope has become clear by this point: that the relationship btwn xiao and venti seen through these few snippets alone is just rife with potent yuri energy.

like, to elaborate on the opening of thie essay, yuri is specifically about the uncross­able distance between two people who are already sitting right next to each other, so close that only a single thread of wind could even hope to weave its way between them— although, as evidenced by the fact that such a thread of wind could weave its way between them, they are still shy of truly touching— and the painful yearnings of being unable to close that gap… even though you both exist so close to one another, so similar in both place and time, you are the only thing stopping yourself from reaching across that seemingly infinite distance.

as a result, i think that unlike yaoi, yuri— thematically speaking— tends to have a greater mutuality to it: whereas i understand being in a yaoi to be more about acting on one's impulses towards one another and passing along cycles of power, i believe that an important aspect of being in a yuri is the constant fear and anxiety of violating an unspoken boundary because you're afraid that you aren't actually on the same page about those.

deep down inside, you know that you're not supposed to want all the things you've built for yourself in all those private daydreams and self-indulgent fantasies you've created about yourself with the other person, because you know you're not supposed to have drawn your boundaries the way you have, such that the other person would be let in on the most intimate parts of your identity (if they were willing to see all that is ugly sleeping under­neath your skin.)

as mentioned in the paragraph summarizing his lore, xiao's youth was marked by the fact that his very autonomy was continuously violated in service of forcing him to violate others' boundaries, crushing their hopes and devouring their very dreams. his deep cultural ties to liyue as the land of contracts means that he carries within him a keen sense of obligation as inseverable as the need to breathe; thus, saddled with guilt and believing himself to be incapable of gentility, he has come to view himself as nothing more than a weapon for others to use.

in signing his contract with the geo archon, xiao went from a situation where his agency was continuously denied and his boundaries intimately violated to one where he relinquished his agency and had his boundaries delineated for him by his new lord.

he has no desires of his own; immortals aren't so worldly. (if that were true, he wouldn't have a Vision.) he is not an active subject in his own life; anything he does is the effect of someone else's will. (if that were true, he would have stopped protecting liyue the moment that he learned his lord abdicated his rule.) he does not let anyone near him; it is inevitable that his karmic debts will force his hand against them. (if that were true, he wouldn't have been saved by the sound of venti's flute playing nearby.)

don't you see? he places himself in a subservient role to everyone around him, rigidly obeys every ritual of propriety, because he is afraid that by asserting agency over a situation, he will end up violating other people's boundaries again. except that this time, the responsibility for doing so would fall squarely on his own shoulders.

during the main quest arc for liyue, zhongli literally fakes his own death as an archon so that he can finally retire and be free from his own contractual obligation to the nation. this gives us reason to believe that xiao's contract with the geo archon has thus been rendered void, meaning he no longer has any obligation to continue his endless suffering for the sake of liyue— yet he does so anyway.

i think a lot of fans tend to view this as xiao needlessly chaining himself down to his duty, something that's often framed in fanworks as something rather tragic in venti's eyes. however, as the god of freedom, venti feels very strongly about giving other the freedom to make their own decisions, even if he himself may disagree with them or wish they had chosen differently. others' autonomy is deeply important to venti, perhaps even so far as to call it sacred: to order anything from anyone would be a violation for the boundaries venti has set for himself as an archon.

and because we're all familiar with genshin impact lore, what i have to say next should go without saying, we are all so familiar with it: the element of a person's Vision will be directly related to the kind of ideal they strive to meet and uphold, and as such, can generally tell you a lot about a person's desires.

xiao wields an anemo Vision— the only known anemo wielder in liyue until the arrival of xianyun, presumably because that is how deeply ingrained the binding sense of obligation is in its culture— and wears it visibly on his person at all times. it would be ridiculous not to believe that venti knows, and intimately so, just how xiao desires.

and i think that a lot of fans can fail to consider the idea that to xiao, his duty of protection is a choice he made of his own volition when he was first set free, and is, in all likelihood, one he continues to make in canon. yes, this choice comes with a great many obligations restraining him in various ways— but do our choices truly mean anything if they are not bound by obligation? this is something venti would obviously understand and respect as lines drawn in the sand by xiao himself, and he would never dare even suggest they be crossed.

it's clear from the various scraps of in-game lore that xiao craves proximity to and knowledge about his savior in the marsh. yet, he refuses to go out of his way to attain these things and will even deny ownership of these desires altogether because in a sense, they are blasphemy: venti, although not his archon, is still a god.

might seeking venti out over zhongli not be considered a sign of detracting, or perhaps even failing faith in the unwavering sureity of the geo archon? or even if it turns out that's not so— who is xiao to ask anything of venti? the god of freedom must surely be a flighty little thing, following his every capricious whim. to ask him to stay would be akin to tying him down, no?

clearly, there is no need for xiao to call out for him. if venti wants to be with him, he will simply be there.

(and if he doesn't, then he won't.)

((after all, it is the duty of the servant to wait on the master's call.))

it's easy to imagine that these two immortals might end up in a sort of song and dance of propriety for a while, that at fight might be genuine, but eventually just becomes habit and custom. they both want, in some way, for xiao to lay down his duty, to be free of the strict hierarchy of master & servant or god & disciple. but for venti to say it so plainly would feel like he's trying to convert xiao to his ideals— a discomfort that would more than likely only be compounded by how seriously xiao takes the word of god(s), and how expressly venti hates being treated like anything but an equal— and so he would hesitate on his feelings; whereas for xiao to speak of his desires so plainly, it would feel like a betrayal of his duty— that which he chose to shoulder as his first act of free will.

you see it, right? the gap between these two characters, whose lives will otherwise touch and cross over and over through their long, immortal lives, and the mutual desires they can both plainly and painfully read in one another, yet never individually act upon due to their already-established senses of propriety, tradition, and boundaries?

these are the basic yuriisms of xiaoven genshinimpact.