#i like the alien being really weird and different. therefore i do not like when people try to make the alien as human as possible

[moinsbienquekaworu]

One thing I did not know I was looking for in terms of Venom fanfic is the really weird alien sex. Not the tentacles, I like those too but I knew there would be tentacles, I mean sex that does not adhere to human notions of what sex should be like, either in terms of actions or reactions. A fair amount of fics will have Venom not really Getting human sex but liking it/being neutral towards it for Eddie - which imo is how it should be, why would the goo "parasite" aliens have the same kind of sex as humans? On their own they're GOO! It would be more fun and I feel more logical for their reproduction to be either some kind of asexual dedoubling... or just really really weird goo shenanigans that don't look like anything to us, which is what I've found a few times. I just love it when the aliens are genuinely aliens!! It's one of the things I'm sad about in Star Wars, the prevalence of humanoid aliens that work similarly to humans. I understand that it's easier to make live-action movies with humans painted in blue instead of sentient goo, but that's just for live-action movie/series! Anyway yeah I found a fic where Eddie isn't even sure they're really having sex when they do it Venom's way because it's so weird (and the author made it so it turns out the chemicals they need to switch into sex mode are just what's into yeast, which is a fun addition) and another one where the closest equivalent to sex for Venom is like, being kneaded/rolled/put through a pasta machine. Absolutely incredible, no notes.

[enuui]

long thoughts abt watcher

its so weird to me that people are being like ‘you aren’t entitled to free content’ about the watcher situation bc that’s not the actual problem here. artists deserve to be fairly paid, but the watcher situation reveals a truly bizarre level of business incompetence and a lack of market research.

they actively cultivated a relatively young audience, actively claimed to be ‘eat the rich’ style liberals, then turned over and told that audience that they need to pay $6/month. which again, fine! dropout did it and survived, but dropout had so much more backing it up, went about the transition slowly, and on top of that, their audience was older and therefore had more spending money available.

watcher has none of that. it would be one thing if they had started marketing to an older audience months ago, or changed the style of their content to match the heavy production costs. but as it stands, they built their career off of relatively simple videos with a lower budget, gained a specific type of audience from those videos, then expected that audience to pivot with them when watcher realized they wanted to make a different type of (more expensive, more produced) content.

it can’t work that way. the audience is not acting entitled right now for feeling a shock, bc the audience became loyal to watcher due to a desire for a certain kind of content (specifically the dynamic between shane and ryan).

and if watcher wants to make different content and be paid for it on a more regular basis, that is also okay! but they severely miscalculated their existing audience, and definitely misunderstood how much their current audience wants to watch the style of videos they want to make.

also, imo, ryan and shane have admitted that they dislike the admin side of running a business. i think they truly thrived as regular content creators and not as business managers, and so they struggled to figure out how to run their company and ultimately handed over the reins to steven to wash their hands of it all and go back to making the content they want. and thats also fine, some people are not built for business and work better as individual contributors.

but ryan and shane and steven also seem to have a view that their simple content is almost… beneath them? they talk a lot abt challenging themselves to put out well produced content that their cultivated audience clearly doesn’t really care about. its a mismatch between watcher’s desires for the future and the audience they built in the past that ultimately led to this mess.

they had two options: easier option to make the type of low-budget content their audience has been proven to enjoy, or put in the work to build up an expanded audience so that they could fund the content they wanted to make, put in the work to do a longer, more well thought out transition, put in the work to make connections and figure out how to manage their revenue streams.

and instead they decided to take a shortcut and brute force their existing audience to fund their dreams, and in the process shooting themselves in the foot by alienating their audience. i just can’t comprehend how they reached this conclusion at all.

[natequarter]

if other doctors did human nature:

one is badly cosplaying as a teacher at coal hill. susan, not having regenerative abilities, is watching over him. barbara and ian have never met the doctor as the doctor; as far as they know, he's just their crotchety coworker doctor foreman, who STILL won't share his first name. the doctor was on the run from gallifrey when he stumbled upon the family... now he's just on the run from the family of blood. regrettably, barbara got a bit too nosy in the doctor's office at one point, and took his fob watch. can susan recover the fob watch from ian and barbara before it's too late?

two lands jamie and zoe in jamie's era. look it's all very well and good that you know how to navigate eighteenth-century scotland, jamie, but i'm a bit out of my depth here!

if three did this, literally nothing would change, except that now the brigadier is being harassed by two human scientists who are smarter than him rather than one. the master lands on earth and tries to sell the doctor out to the family, only for it to backfire; the brigadier's men try and fail to shoot the family; liz insists the master pay for her therapy. the doctor barely notices the difference when he becomes a time lord again

there are two different ways i'd want to play four as a human. the first is this: harry and sarah have to put up with him. stationed at a naval base, harry and sarah must ward off the family whilst also warding off the doctor's insanity. sarah is disguised as the doctor's estranged younger brother (don't question the crossdressing) and harry is disguised as harry. inevitably things go wrong.

alternatively: rather than staying in e-space, romana returns to the main universe with the doctor. unfortunately, they manage to attract the family along the way; adric must badly pretend to be human whilst corralling two fob watched time lords who have chosen a really bad time to plan their wedding

tegan and turlough have plenty of experience with hiding from aliens, being on earth, and putting up with the doctor, but boy is he annoying as a human

the doctor gives peri exactly zero instructions and then lands them in the 1300s as an amnesiac human in the midst of the black death. peri is at her FUCKING LIMIT

much like three, very little changes for eight. this is the only one i'd still be tempted to set in 1913 à la the vna/nuwho episodes. charley gets to explore the recent past (to her, anyway) whilst acting as the severely amnesiac john smith's caretaker

honestly, rose and jack would be a remarkably competent team to be saddled with the doctor as a human... and he's falling in love with both of them, of course

amy vs the family: amy has won. rory gets possessed by the family but don't worry, it gets unwritten from time. the doctor is never doing that again, ever, yuck, he ate pears, YUCK

i don't think clara could be trusted with the doctor as a human, and if this was bill and nardole, i don't think the doctor would change much as a human. missy is not fob watched because she is in the vault and therefore simply inaccessible. bill continues to get set weird essays. the family are so focused on trying to get to missy (who they KNOW is there) that they fail to realise the doctor is there and simply perish within their three-month lifespans

[thelongestway]

hey no shade but you know dungeon meshi isn't actually based off dnd right? there are definitely some overlapping concepts and it can be fun to analyze it through a dnd lens but really it's its own homebrew fantasy setting. just checking bc i nearly got in an argument w someone over dungeon meshi lore the other day only to realize it was because they were trying to apply dnd lore to it ahahaa

Oh yeah, absolutely, it's its own thing. You don't even have to go far to show how it's its own thing: for one, the whole set-up with the dungeons being what they are isn't found anywhere else in D&D-inspired material that I know. You could maybe reflavor Halaster's Undermountain to something like the Dungeon Meshi dungeons, but that would be another layer of homebrew. That said, I do have the feeling that Ryoko Kui grew up on the same kind of D&D material that I did - stuff like Elminster's Ecologies, or old school Greyhawk materials. Her story genuinely feels like an AD&D game run by an old-school DM, maybe even earlier in the editions (hi, Chilchuck and "I'm a rogue, I'm not gonna fight"!). I don't mean that she follows D&D canon in any meaningful sense--her stuff isn't set in Greyhawk, nor on Abeir-Toril, nor on Krynn, etc. But I do think she's someone who's inspired by old school stuff, even as she makes her work thoroughly her own.

An acquaintance of mine once wrote that long tabletop games gain a quality that she called "being well-trod". This is when the players and DM are so familiar with the world they live in that it becomes, well, lived-in. They don't need to look up rules anymore to extrapolate: they understand the logic of the setting, and they get the same kind of intuitive feel for the world that we do when living in our own world, in real life. A feeling of where the boundaries lie, and how things work.

This is how I feel about Dungeon Meshi and D&D. It feels like a work written by someone who walked the same paths that I did, and whose work is therefore both new and startlingly familiar. That's it in a nutshell, but then I also wrote a bunch of examples, which got very long, so cut for length and spoilers!

I wrote somewhere in the tags on my Dungeon Meshi posts that it's incredibly surreal reading a story that seems to be informed by the exact materials that you base your own homebrew games on. Kui takes her work in a wholly different direction than I did - but the disparate elements of the story would fit in like a glove, because they're based on similar logic. I could quite literally take any of the ecologies elements of Dungeon Meshi and put them into a given module I'm running, and it would need less adaptation than 5e material. And most of the cultural/racial elements of Dungeon Meshi? That, too. Where it's not a one for one match, it would so easily be explainable by "different continent".

Let's take the example you're probably here from: the Canaries and elves in general, and let's take elves in general first. In D&D, there's been a switch in models of elven aging throughout the years: from "they are literal babies up until 60-ish, and then have 40 years of actual adolescence" to "yeah they grow to full adult size at about the same speed as the other races, and are then just culturally considered too young to make their own decisions". I am decidedly not a fan of the second model - I think it takes away from the cool biologies early D&D thrived on. BG3's treatment of Astarion's age of death, for instance, keeps throwing me. Yeah, I get it: it fits in with the edition they're working off, but I hate it. That's not how things work on our Faerun! But then we get to Marcille's backstory, and we see that she has the problems old school half-elves did, and you're like "oh, well of course someone invested in weird cool biology as an author would interpret elves like that." Her treatment of age makes sense to me. She makes the races as alien as possible, and hits that vibe of "D&D-style fantasy is its own thing, with its own set of rules" that I love. In contrast, and unlike any prototypes I know, Kui takes her half-foots in a different direction! They don't live longer than tall-men, they live shorter lives, closer to goblinoids. And I think it's for the same reason: because it's that much cooler to have different experiences of life in humanoid races. This is decidedly Not D&D, but it would absolutely fit into that vein.

With smaller details, I keep joking around here that the Canaries are grey elves, and of course they're not. But then Kui keeps putting in these tiny little details - which can be either nods to existing material, or the same extrapolations that other authors drawing upon high fantasy tropes have made. The white ships that have travelled all the way from Tolkien's Valinor to Evermeet and now to Shima. The fact that the Canaries have basically the right color scheme for grey elves threw me completely: I was not expecting that! Elves being that specific brand of destructive that they are - jeez, the Canaries would be right at home in Myth Drannor, or during the Crown Wars. So I joke around about these specific dolts a lot, and I am having an inordinate amount of fun seeing if my predictions that come from running a Myth Drannor game for a good long while now come true. And it goes on. Marcille doesn't prepare spells, and the magic here is obviously not Vancian. But Mithrun's teleport shenanigans are literally stuff I've done in games. The differences between races in D&D aren't because of wishes made by mortals; they're built in by gods for their own purposes. But the towns that spring up around anomalous spots and that have to deal with the weirdness have the same vibe. Kui draws on a more extensive tradition than just D&D, of course, but she transforms the tradition in a very similar way to old D&D. Of course the elves' magic in Kui's work does weird and creepy stuff with soulbinding and immortality; that's been their dark side since Tolkien and Celebrimbor's work with Annatar, and then it turned into stuff like elves regularly sacrificing their lives in high magic rituals in Faerun. Of course Senshi's backstory is about the dwarves that have dug too deep - but they are, of course, distinct from gnomes, and the gnomes are a peculiar and interesting breed of arcana specialists. Of course Chilchuck is a Burglar - but he works on dungeon delving unions, of all things! It's a familiar transformation, so the world makes sense to me, and I love it. So yeah. Tl;dr: not D&D ofc, but the vibe is there, and I am having fun with it.

Also - can you tell me about the argument? I am super curious, and I wonder if the person you were arguing with was working from 5e material.

[onlycosmere]

Ironeyes: So, uh, we know that the charcoal creatures are afraid of coins.

Brandon Sanderson: Yes.

Ironeyes: So are the white chalk creatures, which I think are called Shadowblazes…

Brandon Sanderson: Yes.

Ironeyes: Are they also afraid of coins?

Brandon Sanderson Are they also afraid of coins? To a much lesser extent. I can give you guys some backstory on this.

What’s going on here is that the place these things come from linear structure and things like this are frightening to them, like they come from a non-linear location. Time does not move linearly where they come from. When they come into this world, structure and linear time progression, is bizarre to them.

And there are some who have embraced it, and been like, “This is cool and different!” and there are others that are still terrified of it, as a representation of what is so alien from the world they came from.

So that’s why we’ve got this whole clocks, and even structure, as a metaphor for something that is terrifying to them.

Rithmatist started in the Cosmere. The magic shares a lot of its roots, then, in Cosmere magic worldbuilding. I split if off because I wrote the whole first book with it being in the Cosmere. I split it off, saying “No, I don’t want Earth to be in the Cosmere.”

Even an alternate version of Earth. It just raises too many questions about the nature of Earth being involved in this. I want the Cosmere to be its own dwarf galaxy of which not even a dimension of Earth is involved.

And when I made that decision, I broke Rithmatist off. That’s the only one I had written that didn’t belong, but it still has, so, it means that the magic is going to feel very familiar to you, uh, it’s going to feel like the magic of the Cosmere. And Cosmere magic is based around, usually, human beings making a symbiotic bond with an entity made out of the magic.

This is, kind of, one of the origins of Cosmere magic, and Rithmatist has, therefore, its roots in that. I’ve done some things since I’ve split it off in the outlines to distinguish it, but it’s going to have the same roots. So you’ll notice some things like that, that are similar.

Questioner: Before you split The Rithmatist from the Cosmere, did the Shadowblazes come from the Cognitive realm?

Brandon Sanderson: Yeah. Yeah, the Shadowblazes were in the Cognitive realm, they’re--you know, well, they’re more Spiritual Realm. They were Spiritual Realm, sorry. They were Spiritual realm entities that got pulled into the Physical realm.

And the Spiritual realm has no time, it exists independent of time and location, all times and all places are one, and so, when something that’s from the Spiritual Realm got pulled into the Physical realm, it was like, “This is so weird!” And there are very few things in the Cosmere that exist only on the Spiritual Realm, which was a really fun thing I could do with this book, was show that. Cause most things exist on all three Realms. Um, so, yeah.

So, yeah, I mean if you’ve got, if you’re a Cosmere theologian--not theologian, magic, what do you call it? They call that, I have a word for it in-world. But anyway, if you’re a realmatic theorist, you can kind of pick out how the Spiritual Realm beings were related, originally, to the Realmatic theory.

[the-fallen-blue]

Ok so of all the things about Baldur’s Gate that everyone keeps saying are amazing, let me put this one out there, because this is a thing I’ve been yelling about for easily a decade:

The voice actors know what they’re saying.

Like, here’s the usual flow for a voice actor in a major, triple-A rpg like, say, Mass Effect. The team pulls and prints a list of every line in the game for a specific character, and only those lines, and that “script” is handed to a voice actor. If there are weird alien words, someone might have thought to add a pronunciation guide. And that’s it. That’s all they get.

So you end up with a game where three different characters pronounce the same name in three different ways. You end up with a game where a character says “A bottle of [space drink] for whoever bags the most bad guys!” and another one says “that’s a sucker bet, you drank the last of the [space drink] last night (emphasis on space drink, like, you consumed a space buff so you’ll obviously win)” instead of “you drank the last of the [space drink] last night! (emphasis on the fact that it’s gone, and therefore there’s nothing to win).” You end up with a game where a character says “no one has thanked me” as though no thanks are being given to anyone, when the line should have been “no one has thanked me” because the entire point of that line is that everyone else except that character has just been thanked, and pointing that imbalance out is core to the scene. When a voice actor puts the wrong emphasis on a sentence, it changes the whole meaning, and when a voice actor has no context, it is inevitable that they will sometimes pick the wrong emphasis!

And I don’t know what Larian is doing backstage, but in however many thousand lines of dialog, I have not found even one of those yet.

In fact, very early in the game, there is a moment where the narrator is called upon to say a single word. One word. No surrounding sentence. No contextual dialog whatsoever. That word is “perfect.”

You read that as “PER-fect,” didn’t you? The adjective? Of course you did. That’s the natural reading. Literally any native English speaker, seeing that word in isolation, would automatically assume it was the adjective. 99% of the time, that’s what those letters mean.

The word was actually “perFECT,” the verb. “To improve a thing to its best form.”

And she gets it right.

Because someone told her what the fuck she was supposed to be saying.

Whatever else nonsense the industry does and does not take from this game’s production, I really hope “giving your poor VAs some godforsaken context improves the game” manages to sink into the brain of even one single other producer, somewhere.

[halogenwarrior]

Well I finally finished reading all of the Animorphs books (getting into them now as an adult) and I found them really interesting in terms of themes that they used the sci-fi premises to explore. Everyone talks about how they explore the trauma of war, but I thought something else very fascinating that they do (and which is connected to said exploration of war and the morality thereof) is how they use both the existence of aliens of different types and the ability of morph to interrogate the assumptions humans typically make to justify the lives of non-human animals being morally less significant than those of humans. In total, this series can be seen as an exploration of how to find moral understanding and purpose in life in a world where humans are not the only part of one’s vision of the world, but a wide variety of species with different experiences, all shaped by natural selection. 

Note: the Animorphs series has an annoying habit of not using the term “sentient” as what it correctly means, it’s supposed to mean any being with a conscious, lived experience, with sapience being the term used for being capable of things like language, complex rational thought, etc. and generally being seen as “people”. So I will be using the terms in that way throughout this post.

In general, there are three arguments or assumptions that usually play into the belief in humans’ greater importance:

Superiority of lived experience

This is the often unspoken assumption that there is more inherent value, however one defines it, in the very experience of living for a human than any non-human animal, perhaps in the richness of emotion, ability to conceptualize values, the complex social life of humans, however you might put it, and therefore a human living is a greater gain and dying is a greater loss than for any other being.  Throughout the books, the Animorphs transform into various animals and, due to how morphing works, get a sense of the instincts and natural conscious perspective of said animals. And some seem far preferable to others – while the dolphin and dog morphs give the main characters access to a kind of joy different from and stronger than what is experienced as a human, others like shrews (with constant fear) or especially ants (due to the loss of human conception of self, as well as the constant danger and brutal fighting) are so horrifying the Animorphs are reluctant to ever morph that creature again, even if it would give them an advantage, and even traumatized by the experience. This raises the question of how life could just generically be seen to have value and be sacred (as Cassie tends to think) when some lives’ innate experience, as just the condition of being that species rather than their particular circumstances, seem so much more worthwhile than others. But it’s worth noting that some animals’ lives do seem preferable to humans – it’s not humans who are the largest “utility monster” whose lives seem the most valuable of all, as is the typical human assumption.

The relative value of different species’ lived experience is a theme most directly confronted by Tobias, who, after the first book, is trapped in the form of a red-tailed hawk and now has to live life in the wild as a hawk rather than a human. Tobias’ attitude leaving up to this shows how many humans’ assumption that their life is the most preferable to live comes from disgust of alien experiences and the “wisdom of repugnance” rather than an objective valuation. Due to his open-mindedness and dissatisfaction with his human life, Tobias is able to avoid the default belief that being a human is “best” because being anything else is “weird”, finding much of the hawk’s experience like flying far preferable to his human life and not having an automatic aversion, at least in book #1, to other aspects like eating roadkill (an attitude that astonishes and disgusts the other children). When he is trapped, it's shown that even if he did not fully intentionally do so, he was attracted enough to the life of a hawk that he at least did not make as much of an effort as he could have to avoid it and semi-consciously seemed to want it to happen. 

By book #3, Tobias finds himself having mixed feelings about his new life -in a “the grass is greener on the other side” sense, he misses various parts of the human experience when deprived of them, and feels horror at the idea of killing animals to survive in a way that seems less of a moral point (given he has no problem at this point with eating human-produced meat) and more of disgust, to the point of suicidal behavior upon realizing he cannot control his hawk instincts and is losing his humanity. But nonetheless, the feelings are still mixed, he finds much value in his life and much preferable to the life of a human, and is uncomfortable with his friends’ assumptions of him as solely an object of pity who tragically sacrificed any joy his life could ever have to live some kind of horrifying fate worse than death, as shown in the scene where they nearly get stuck as wolves and Tobias is deeply uncomfortable with how horrified they are at the idea of ending up like him. The others’ reactions lead to his self-consciousness, as shown by how he is embarrassed in #23 specifically about having the other Animorphs see him eat roadkill, when in #1 he notably did not have an inhibition about the idea of eating it. These early parts of Tobias’ arc explore whether our assumptions of human life being preferable, and thus of more value, are based only on the favoring of familiarity, while still portraying the ambiguity of his experience.

But the picture is further complicated by showing ways in which a hawk’s, and by extension most animals’ (at least wild animals’) experience might truly be horrible, not just assumed to be so. It’s also noted that one large way the experience of a hawk differs from that of a human is that hawks have to spend all of their focus on survival – they are at constant risk of starvation and attack by other raptors, and have no hobbies or diversions in life. And this isn’t just a coincidence or rotten luck; the nature of predator/prey relationships in ecosystems is such that, from the predator’s perspective, starvation conditions are inevitable in regular cycles as the prey populations fluctuate. To some extent Tobias copes with this by romanticizing survival, finding peace in the push and pull of creatures every day living and struggling, giving a monologue to this effect in Megamorphs #2. And it helps that he already wants to “toughen up” and not be the child who was bullied for being sensitive anymore, and being a predator and survivor is helpful to his self-image. But his actions bely his words. At the end of the same book, Megamorphs #2, with the group transported back in time to the end of the Cretaceous Period, Tobias is the one to make the decision to not divert the comet that will cause the extinction at the end of this period, killing perhaps three fourths of species of animals on the planet in a horrific, drawn-out apocalypse because he knows that is the only way humans will come to exist in the future. The very character who claims he is at least partially happy and proud in the life of a hawk also believes that the existence of humanity is so important, and the value of the lives of animals like him so depreciating by them having pain and the struggle to survive to look forward to and little else complexity in their experience to alleviate this, that the animals’ actual deaths are preferable to humans just never having existed in the first place. Note there is also a small group of sapient aliens he is killing in this case, but while condemning them to death can be explained in a “trolley problem” sense by their number being much, much smaller than all the humans that did, now do, and will exist, I think his decision leading to the massacre of most of the animals on the planet is much more thematically relevant. 

Book #23 further explores how thin Tobias’ justifications that his life is worthwhile are becoming. In this book, he is increasingly struggling to find food to the point of starvation, when a relative of his suddenly offers to adopt him – but becoming human to be adopted would mean losing his ability to morph forever. Others like Rachel have already wondered why he is so resistant to going back to being a human, and now with the prospect of family, Tobias isn’t sure himself, he feels little joy or purpose in his life anymore. But I think the reason why he hesitates is revealed by his reaction to finding out said relative is actually his enemy Visser Three in morph. It’s clear in this scene and others (like his flashbacks to earlier childhood in #33 or his alternate self joining the Sharing in Megamorphs #4) that Tobias is a dreamer, always hoping for and willing to imagine an escape from his life, and yet due to these qualities being attacked and belittled by other people he hates himself for daring to hope and being proven wrong. Remember that wanting to be a hawk, just like thinking he might have a family, was also a form of dream of escape, something he to some extent let happen. And to some extent, his friends belittled him for it, believing that his idea of an escape would actually be a miserable and disgraceful life and sometimes reacting to him as such. His reluctance to live as a human is largely a fear, or growing realization, that what everyone told him might be right – that the life he half-chose for himself might be a horrible one, the discomfort they had that he once saw as misguided and a sign of being close-minded could be right all along. And that would mean facing his worst fear of being a dupe, a naïve idiot who has dumb, self-destructive ideas for how his life could be better and he could escape when really the world doesn’t work that way. He has to remain a hawk because, even if he doesn’t want it, it’s a fair punishment in his mind for putting himself foolishly into a trap, for being his open-minded self, and even if he doesn’t enjoy it at least living as a predator fighting for survival is the perfect symbol of the tough cynic who can’t be bullied that he wants to become. At this point he seems to not think the life and experience of a hawk is worth anything for himself or, as shown in Megamorphs #2, for other animals. 

It's not just Tobias’ arc that explores the question of whether a life can be worse than another or even not worth living due to the inherent experiences that come with being that kind of life form. There’s also the Taxxons, with their constant hunger that makes them desperate to do anything to escape it. When Arbron is trapped as one he tries to kill himself, but ultimately settles on living out of a belief that there can be hope in any life, and fighting for the Taxxon resistance. Even so, his life is still miserable in many ways, perhaps lived more for the opportunity to do good in the world than any personal happiness, and it’s surmised he might have been relieved when he finally died.  And the Yeerks, who are motivated to enslave others as brain parasites because it’s their condition as Yeerks to have a depreciated experience of life without infesting someone. They have no sight and hearing, but perhaps most importantly for the comparison to humans viewing their lives as more rich and thus more worthy, have no ability to experience the diverse range of life that comes with a sapient species’ society. A Yeerk alone just floats in a pool and nothing else, when infesting another being they can have the wide range of activities and complexity of intellectual experience that a human would have. Again the question is asked – are any beings’ condition of living bad enough that death would be preferable? Are there any bad enough that hurting another to have an experience of life more comparable with the readers’ human reference point would be an understandable action? 

The Animorphs books are also clear, though, that even with the main characters’ ability to live as other species and experience their instincts, and thus some slice of their lived experience, they don’t have nearly enough information to answer this question. As Rachel notes in #23 when trying to figure out why he doesn’t want to become human now that he has a family, Tobias is not fundamentally a hawk, but both a hawk and a human. He isn’t really making the decision whether the life of a human is preferable to that of a hawk, even the sad human life he lived before. He is making the decision of whether a human, coming from a human perspective, would be happier in his original form or as a hawk. For instance, his loneliness and need of a family isn’t a true “downside” of being a hawk from an actual hawk’s perspective, just from the mind of a social animal transplanted into one. Starvation and pain are things real hawks face, but they might conceptualize it completely differently than a human does. Note how studies have shown the pain people feel from injuries can vary depending on the story they mentally tell themselves, like soldiers believing their pain is for a cause feeling less than civilians who are injured by accident, and of course nonhuman animals don’t have language and thus likely don’t have a concept of a “story” behind their pain at all. This is explored in #33, when Tobias is being tortured and finds completely giving in to the instinctual experience a hawk would have helps him endure it – an acceptance of pain as a given, that “life is pain”, though this comes at the cost of not being able to appreciate pleasure from things like eating food like a human would as well. I’m not that convinced that this is how a hawk would experience things (I’d imagine due to natural selection promoting those feelings, a hawk would be likely to feel both pain and the pleasure of eating food intensely, if not in the same way as a person, and one could definitely argue not having a story and explanation for pain could make it feel worse), but obviously a human author can’t know and there’s a tough line to walk between anthropomorphism and complete denial of animals’ experiences paralleling humans in any way. And, although Yeerks like Aftran find being without a host a horrible fate, we see in Esplin’s perspective in the Hork-Bajir chronicles that Yeerks who have never had a host feel content enough in their pools, it’s only the comparison to a different experience that makes at least some feel lacking. Any attempt to use the experience in morph to judge how rich and happy the real animal’s experience is has this problem. The Animorphs’ much-despised ant morph is in part hated because of the constant violence, but also because of the loss of a human’s conception of self, something that would likely be only horrific if you started out as a human and not to a real ant. 

One can make a comparison here to disability activism and the criticism of people’s assumption that, because someone with a disability has a certain experience or is missing a certain experience, their lives are miserable or even not worth living. This is often predicated on an assumption that the abled human being is a happy default – so while being deaf is stereotyped as being miserable because of the lack of hearing, not being able to see ultraviolet light or sense magnetic fields like some animals can do is never seen as a tragic loss, showing it’s less about some objective valuation of experiences and more about devaluing disabled people in particular. What is interesting about this series is how it explores this theme in a context where the abled human is not the default, instead there is a huge range of different species’ experiences that can be shared and exchanged through morphing or Yeerk parasitism. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes play the ableist tropes straight, unfortunately, such as Loren in #49 preferring to die than demorph a hawk and become blind again, only relenting when she finds her blindness will be cured. But there is definitely a parallel to the experiences of people with disabilities in how book #3 Tobias finds he can’t express the complexities, both good and bad, of his experience without it being whittled down by the other Animorphs into pity and assumption there is just misery. 

Intelligence

Another perspective people often have is that humans’ intelligence grants them more moral relevance than that of non-human animals. This idea is explored in the Hork-Bajir Chronicles, which uses an interesting premise to explore this; a species that is less intelligent than the other sapient species in the series, but contains rare individuals who have intelligence comparable to those other species and thus capable of reflecting on how moral value is assigned, from whose perspective we can analyze and criticize this assumption. Through Dak Hamee’s perspective, we see how the Andalites around him, despite how they are supposed to be the Hork-Bajir’s allies and protectors against a common threat, are condescending to them and think them of little moral importance due to their lack of intelligence, to the point of being willing to sacrifice them all for a strategic gain. Dak Hamee reflects on how foolish it is to think intelligence as the be-all end-all of a being’s value, especially when it’s the Hork-Bajir who have lived in peace throughout their history and other species who are enthusiastic about war. 

The thematic exploration really gets interesting when Dak Hamee and Aldrea encounter the Arn, the species that turns out to have created the Hork-Bajir through genetic engineering. Their motive for doing so is a very understandable one – in order to salvage their destroyed environment and allow their species, and life on their planet, to survive, they needed to create an ecosystem that allowed circulation of oxygen. One role required for such an ecosystem was a caretaker of the trees, so they created the Hork-Bajir to do so. So let’s talk about what exactly the Arn are doing here, and why Dak Hamee is so horrified by it. They are not exactly enslaving or forcing the Hork-Bajir to do anything; they haven’t even met any of the Hork-Bajir. What they are doing is forcing the Hork-Bajir into exactly the condition of a non-sapient animal within an ecosystem, and by showing the horror an individual who became aware of such a role, this book is posing the question of theodicy of sorts – how could a loving creator use the mechanisms of an ecosystem as a tool for their creations, even if such a scheme was successful in preventing apocalyptic destruction? As the Arn note, they did not make the Hork-Bajir very intelligent because, like animals in Earth’s ecosystems, they do not need intelligence to do their role. And the Arn did not bother to explain to them the nature of the world and their role in it and have them consent towards avoiding doing the things that would destroy that world. Instead they used brute force, the threat of predators in the deep, to keep them in their assigned roles. And the occasional death by predator is comparatively gentle compared to most wild animals’ lives on Earth, who, unable to understand like humans the threat of overuse of resources and peacefully manage their behavior, are kept in check, and the world kept functioning, by constant cycles of predation or starvation that decimate populations rather than just picking off a few occasionally (look at a predator and prey population chart with the cyclic dips for both). By having an individual from such a species which is kept in its world-preserving “duty” not by intelligence and awareness but by suffering and death who is uncommonly intelligent and able to reflect on their condition, the morality of a creator using such a system is questioned.

All of this theodicy discussion ultimately connects back to the series’ resident “good” godlike being, the Ellimist. The Ellimist takes as his goal spreading altruism and allowing life to flourish, though his discussion with the Animorphs in #26 makes it clear his end goal and exactly why he wants these things. As he says “We watched the rise of other species throughout the galaxy. Helped at times, when we could. We wanted companions. We wanted to learn, We imagined a galaxy filled with millions of sentient species, each with its own science and art, its own beauty”. Using the word sentient while meaning sapient aside, what we can see here is that the Ellimist is motivated less by a utilitarian idea of allowing all life to flourish and be happy but specifically by a desire to increase the amount of sapient species, species that would be able to provide intellectual enhancement and new perspectives for him. Though the Ellimist chronicles, from his own perspective does show he cares about the happiness and survival of other species for their own sake rather than their intelligence in a way this quote somewhat downplays, he still limits this moral focus to sapient species, with his general principle of propagating life being more directed towards how it will give rise to sapience one day than that life existing for itself. And here we see a parallel to the Arn, by which the Ellimist’s morality can be questioned; can a godlike being justify a system where most of the beings in it are fodder, their suffering and deaths used only to eventually give rise to sapient beings which are considered the only morally important ones? Now admittedly, one can question whether the Ellimist has meaningful power to do otherwise; he is shown in his book to initially have notable limits to his power and knowledge of how interventions will affect things, and gaining much more power after his fight with Crayak happens at the same time as he is newly constrained by the rules of their “game”. But nonetheless, a being with such amazing power taking no consideration of non-sapient beings for their own sake in his moral system, apparently due to a lack of intelligence to provide interesting creations of their own, would still likely lead to him neglecting moral paths he could otherwise take within his considerable power. Which leads into the third reason people have for especially valuing sapient life, a view which one of the Animorphs holds herself…

Moral and Technological Understanding

Cassie outlines this view in Megamorphs #2 when she is arguing against killing a dinosaur. Sapient life is important from her perspective, not because their life experience or intelligence makes their lives inherently more valuable, but because they alone are capable of moral reflection and making choices that are influenced by something deeper than one’s own survival and that of one’s genetic relatives. “Yeah, we’re just animals ourselves. But we’re the animals who can think. We’re the animals who can imagine something better than kill or be killed. I don’t think predators are immoral. I’m not an idiot, whatever you may think. But I’m a human, okay? And I have to think and care, and I have to feel things”. 

Interestingly, this is a perspective she doesn’t quite start out the series with. #9 shows how Cassie starts out with a naïve belief (it it can count as a belief, it’s more of an unspoken assumption she doesn’t think about or define enough to call a belief) of a sort of moral continuity among living things, that there’s something inherent and baked into the universe about how valuable and sacred life is. Her experience in this book with the termites makes her realize just how amoral the natural world is, of the utter loneliness of her convictions and ability to make sense of the world when the rule everywhere else is survival. This realization forms the core of her character and motivations throughout the rest of the series. Her worst fear is to make the decisions and follow the logic that an animal would according to the impetus of natural selection. Even if the decision seems the best from a utilitarian perspective, if it is a decision one could come to from just survival of oneself and one’s own without deeper reflection, than making it would prove the world is senseless and there would be no point to the survival it earns. This perspective is one that makes her feel isolated not only within the natural world that she loves but among the other Animorphs, who think in terms of the war they are fighting with its rules of us vs. them. 

Whether you call it thinking more deeply and more wisely, or a stubbornness that values one’s own feelings of sanctity and security in the world over the suffering of others, Cassie’s perspective after #9 is fundamentally not naivete. Although she is still young and making the decisions she makes in an environment of war where flawed compromises and hypocrisy are inevitable - she’s not some kind of perfectly wise moral machine - she is presented as not out of touch but someone who is literally and metaphorically used to the earthy grittiness of life, and makes the decisions she makes with full knowledge of their implications. And for her, this means standing firm on the principle that every life is valuable, while making little distinction based on the particular abilities or subjective qualities of that life. Not no distinction (she calls the others out for stereotyping her when they think she wouldn’t be willing to kill a seal for their immediate survival, for example), but still a conviction that life has more or less the same value regardless of the contents of it. Even if the life is that of someone enslaved and trapped in their own brain, or doomed to endless, life-ruining hunger, as long as they are alive there can be hope of something different. 

This is the dilemma she faces; to value lives differently based on their experiences can lead to bias and, though one might pretend at detached reasons in doing so, is very likely to lead to valuing human life most of all due to the disguised reasoning of preserving one’s genes, exactly what she wants to avoid. It’s also only a step back from the humans who have killed those of her own that they felt were inferior, like the Nazis, who Cassie often reflects on. But to insist all life is of equal value regardless of context can lead to a fanaticism that ignores reality, an ability to do anything to someone as long as they are still alive, since as long as they are alive their life is still equally valuable so you didn’t do anything bad to them at all. This is shown when she comes up with the plan to trap David as a rat, justifying herself with how she is not killing him, only for David in #48 to make it clear he would have just preferred to die. Still, Cassie is willing to listen to other beings, like Aftran, when they express their greatest fear being not to die but to live a life depreciated in experience and value, and willing to “put her money where her mouth is” by willingly sentencing herself to such a life to prove she does not demand of others what she would not demand of herself. And ultimately, for most of those she spares the life of like Yeerks and Taxxons, her determination to see other possibilities beyond those given by evolution and animal instincts leads to them getting the possibility to morph, which does in fact give them hope in lives that would have otherwise not been ideal, at least without harming another for one’s own sake in the Yeerks’ case. In doing so, despite her flaws she proves the strongest and most principled prophet of this third argument in the series.

After all, it is not just the ability to think morally that sapience grants, but the ability to create technology that can transcend the compromises and suffering that would otherwise seem like an inevitable biological condition of a given species. In doing so, the series presents somewhat of a transhumanist message (if not applied to actual humans). The morphing technology gives the Yeerks and Taxxons a chance to not be bound by their biological condition, as does the Iskoorts’ symbiosis. The latter is implied to be supported by the Ellimist, with him perhaps subtly hinting to the Animorphs that this could be a solution to allowing both the Yeerks and the species they parasitize to coexist. However, how the Ellimist’s ethics centering around promoting the diversity of sapient life would coexist with these ideas in other scenarios remains unclear. 

To try to investigate this, it’s worth looking into the Ellimist’s own backstory. Growing up on his home planet, a big issue for the Ketrans was whether to use technology to transcend their condition of having to spend half their lives “docking” to keep the crystals they lived on afloat. To do so would undoubtably make their lives freer and better, but inertia and tradition made some reluctant to do so. One can draw the comparison (not a perfect comparison since some humans were hunter-gatherers before and during the rise of subsistence farming, rather than it appearing to be an inevitable condition of the species) to modern technology freeing the majority of the human population from spending much of their lives subsistence farming. When most of their species were killed, the Ellimist and Menno, a strong advocate for using such technology, were left on a spaceship together trying to find a home to restart their species, only to find that no other planet seemed to have crystals like the ones on their home planet. Menno suggested genetically altering the Ketrans to be able to survive on the surface, since there would be no hope of reproducing their old living conditions (which, as mentioned, had led to astronomical constraints on their lives) while the Ellimist argued otherwise on the grounds that doing so would make the species not what it once was. It would mean a piece of the diversity of experience (and particularly, from his perspective, sapient experience) would be lost, and he would argue there is great value for sapient species with their unique characteristics existing and being able to share their unique perspective with the rest of the universe. 

His stand ultimately turned out to be for nothing when all of them but he himself were killed, but given his views expressed in #26 I think the idea of keeping diversity alive is very important in his moral calculus, deriving from the grieving memory of his own lost species. The Iskoort issue is one thing, as it preserves the other species who would otherwise be threatened by them while preserving the Iskoort themselves, but the morphing of Taxxons or Yeerks that Cassie thinks up would be ensuring that none of the offspring of such morphs will be Taxxons or Yeerks at all. It would mean the freeing of the Taxxons from their suffering and the Yeerks from the horrible choice they had to make, but the essential extinction of the species itself. And I think Cassie and the Ellimist, despite being allies of convenience for having more or less the same goals, would fundamentally differ on whether they think that would be justified – in addition to, as mentioned, whether they think non-sapient life has inherent moral value. And I just think it’s fascinating how this series explores questions like this and the different perspectives involved.

[cat-in-a-mech-suit]

Re: https://www.tumblr.com/cat-in-a-mech-suit/760173505957576704/can-we-make-a-genderless-and-non-exclusive-but?source=share

(Impunkster-syndrome is a sideblog oof)

I've sort of come to a similar conclusion with a catch-all term I've had rolling around in my head for a while for anyone who is feminine but is not welcome to hegemonic femininity- trollfem (reclaiming it from the NFT project and niche radfem use as a derogatory term for transfems). My whole thing was related to homestuck and how troll femininity is still femininity but not human and therefore seen as alien by the reader. Still typing a whole post on it and it's got me in a weird place since I'm literally a Vriska and Porrim fictive in a system (I hate the term fictive when used for me but used for simplicity due to my identity situation being more complex). It would be inclusive of anyone who experiences a feminine identity and gatekept from it due to systems of oppression that consider us a threat to the "ideal feminine."

I do think there should be an equivalent term for mascs, neutrals, and androgynes- anyone who may benefit from it. Trollmasc is on the table and would sound awesome, but I do have a Homestuck Problem and I know not everyone would want to self-identify with that. There's definitely a need for wide terms like this for solidarity-building on common experiences and oppression being experienced in different ways by different groups.

If I misread the post, oops.

I love this response! Thank you for this explanation, I think the term trollfem in this context is very interesting and cool! I will admit I don’t understand the fandom references but as a fellow system with many fictivelike alters who experiences gender differently based on that I really appreciate hearing your experiences nonetheless. I honestly could identify with the term trollfem as an autistic person - even trying to pass as a cis woman before coming out as trans, I ran into some issues because my femininity wasn’t “right.” Trollmasc is a good term too, and could work as a placeholder, but I’m not sure if the metaphor holds the same way as it does with feminine trolls.. and I might want to use a broader term. I welcome as many terms to be created as anyone would like though.

[tiredmamaissy]

Writing smut about Neteyam is just wrong. Even if he is aged up, doing that so you can write it is still weird. Stick to Jake Sully and adults, but this isn’t right. Don’t ignore this.

Aging Up of Characters

All characters in my literature are adults, in terran and human years. Meaning, when I'm writing them I see them as adults. Therefore, I will portray them as such - mentally, physically, culturally, etc. Although my blog is an nsfw blog, I include their character development outside of smut. Moreover, age isn't really counted on pandora. Na'vi age quicker than humans do and experience a plateau until their senior years (which they can live for well over a hundred years). What really matters to the na'vi is passing their iknimaya - that's what makes them an adult (ready for a mate, etc).

Anyways, this isn't necessarily my main point, but it's something to keep in mind going forward.

Now, I know James Cameron did such an amazing job at portraying these aliens in a light that us humans can really relate to them, didn't he? To the point where perhaps we could start applying our own laws to them. I guess that's why it's so hard for people to really differentiate the two species sometimes :) but, you know, the na'vi are humanoid aliens, after all. aliens that have their own way of life and biology? that live on another planet? that doesn't exist? are we forgetting that these are fictional characters or something?

Most importantly, their actors are of age, yes? Yes. So I don't personally see the issue here. I can distinguish that characters and actors are not synonymous, but my point is, if their actors were underage that would be a different story. Yes, I am also aware of their age when avatar was filmed. But, they grew up - much like their fictional characters will in the next movie. Everyone was once a child - everyone grows up.

I do my upmost best to tag my fictions properly and thoroughly. If there are any fictions that you feel I may not have tagged correctly, feel free to let me know. I have no issue with being corrected, I would honestly love to be corrected. My intention is never to cause harm to anyone. If you don't like this type of content - which is totally fine and your right - I strongly recommend you avoid consuming it. Especially if it's triggering. You'll have my respect if I have yours.

Anyways, I do hear you, though. I understand it, even. You're entitled to your opinion, as am I. I mean no harm to anyone, and thankfully because the characters I'm writing about are fictional - fake, it won't harm them either. No pressure to look at my (extremely nsfw) blog or to read my (heavily warned) content - you definitely have a choice here.

But here's my (also unsolicited) advice:

Remind yourself that these are fictional characters. They don't exist :) Meaning no one here is being hurt or harmed in anyway. Take a deep breath and find comfort in that. Please also remember, that there are much bigger, and better things to worry and advocate about. To be clear - yes, pedophilia is a serious issue. But, throwing around such a word when regarding aged up fake characters from a movie really dilutes it and is disrespectful to the real life victims of pedophilia as well as other victims of sexual abuse, child porn, human trafficking, slavery.. unfortunately the list goes on. These are the people that need to be advocated for. So, I would strongly encourage you to channel your passion to advocate for real life matters - not blue, fictional aliens. Because truthfully, me and my blue alien fictions should not have this magnitude of an effect on you for you to seek me out and take time out of your day to message me about it.

To conclude, I will not be engaging in any further discussions relating to this topic. This is my perspective. If you don’t share a similar one, that’s fine. Do not engage with my explicit content, especially if you are under 18. I feel very strongly about this. My content is intended for adult consumption only as it contains explicit adult themes pertaining but not limited to - pregnancy, birth, sex, dub-con/dark themes, heats/ruts, etc. If you are a minor messaging me about these things you should not be here in the first place. All further comments & messages will be disregarded and blocked.

'nuff love,

issy.

--

[bnxxshthealien]

The Legend of Ruby Sunday happens in 2027

this is far more complicated than it sounds.

so. nuwho starts in 2005. 10th doctor goes back to meet rose for the first time on january 1st (a week after baby ruby was left at a church). When 9 first meets rose, it must therefore be at least 2005.

in aliens of london, a year is skipped, so it is now 2006.

the christmas invasion must happen after this (harriet jones is prime minister), so, christmas 2006, despite the episode being aired in 2005.

series 2 must then happen in 2007. So in 2007, there was that big cyberman invasion thing

The runaway bride takes place at a different christmas to the christmas invasion. We know it is after the christmas invasion because events of s2 are mentioned, so the earliest it could be is 2007.

The Atraxi invasion (eleventh hour) happens 2 years before june 2010, so about mid-2008. It should be near the beginning of Turn Left but I guess Donna missed it

Turn Left shows that the 2007 christmas special (voyage of the damned) is one year after runaway bride, so christmas 2008.

Turn Left also shows that the Adipose stuff happens afterwards, so series 4 (2008) takes place in 2009. So the stolen Earth event happens that year.

The doctor then has no companions for the 2009 specials, so it is possible that they do not take place alongside earth time, which places the End of Time at christmas 2009 / new year’s day 2010 at the earliest. Donna does not yet have a baby so Rose must have been born in late 2010 at the earliest.

At some point, all of these events are erased by the crack in time but then they’re put back in 2010 so I guess that’s not important

From july 2011-2012 (an entire year) there are little black alien cubes everywhere. not really relevant but i just felt like saying that it’s weird nobody has mentioned that since

2013, people get murdered by wifi

2014, another thing that’s not relevant but I want to point out: dead people turn into cybermen in a way that really resembles what happened in 2007 and nobody thinks that maybe they’re dangerous. also the entire planet was an overgrown forest for a day

2015-2020: the zygon thing, a superhero in america, an alien monk invasion that everyone actually forgot about, some big tech guy (vore was a wild name to go with) tried to kill all humans, the prime minister use daleks as police

2021: half the universe got destroyed and sontarans occupied the entire planet for a while. i suppose donna noble missed that too

2022: another global cyberman + dalek invasion

ok that brings us up to speed

Then, in the Legend of Ruby Sunday, it is stated that Rose is 17. If she was born in 2010, this episode must therefore take place in 2027.

Unless, um, hear me out:

The Giggle must happen before 2024 (we know it’s chronologically before church on ruby road) so Rose was 13. (sounds unlikely but imma go with it for now.) But, perhaps she travels with the fourteenth doctor a lot which causes her to experience more time than what actually happens and ages four years. She would then be 17 in 2024, and LoRS can happen at a reasonable date!

There we go i fixed the timeline it only took far too long and only works with the assumption that an adult woman’s character is actually 13

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

i do feel sad sometimes that i didn't have any access to english folk trads when i was growing up. i got into irish folk stuff as a tween in part because that was the only sort of folk i really knew about; i didn't have many local musicians to learn from so i got it from youtube and clannad CDs. as an adult most of the folk that's available to me is actually scottish, even though i'm a very long way from scotland, just due to the vibes of where i live. when i play sessions in donegal i don't have the same tunes as people there but i don't have english ones either, i've mostly got scottish ones and there's nothing wrong with that but it's also not grounded in any of the communities i'm actually a member of. there's something about having to borrow it from elsewhere because your own communities have become disconnected that DOES feel alienating

my parents are classically trained (though not musicians by profession) so i grew up with a lot of music but none of it was trad – i played in youth orchestras and wind bands and pit orchs for musicals. they didn't have any interest in folk music even though i know my paternal grandad did play it because i have his "fiddler's tunebook" from 1953 (i never met my paternal grandad though, he died before i was born). it would have made a difference if they did, i think, but our area didn't really have any folk going on, so maybe not that much difference unless they were keen enough to travel for it. they always thought of it as faintly embarrassing, though. when i got into irish music my family referred to it as "diddly diddly music", but in general it would be a lot more socially acceptable to say you do irish dance than to confess to being a clog dancer

but i think a huge part of it is also a class thing. the middle class classical musicians vs the peasant folk musicians, the highly trained dancers in studios vs the everyman in the pub in his boots... there's been a lot of social mobility in my family history and a couple of generations back they were a lot poorer so maybe that's why the folk got left behind as a remnant of those years

and i wonder if that's maybe at the root of a lot of english weirdness about folk traditions. like modern competitive irish dancing as we know it is basically the invention of the gaelic league and a lot of its distinctive features, such as the upright upper body, were specifically constructed to distinguish it from the more relaxed "peasant" styles and to make it a socially acceptable and sophisticated form of national heritage etc etc (catherine foley has an interesting book on the history of it if you want more on that). and this was obviously largely a response to colonisation. the same didn't really happen to the music tho. and the english, as the colonisers, had nothing to defend their heritage against, so that's part of why so much of it got lost, but also never elevated it from being the tradition of working people and peasants and whatever. and the english are SO weird about class (as something quite distinct from income/wealth) so of course folk music and dance would often get pushed aside in favour of ballet and classical music as the acceptably middle class arts, and therefore the folk trads get relegated to an embarrassing footnote that you don't admit to participating in in polite company (read: middle class company)

dunno. some sociologists and ethnomusicologists have probably written about this in more depth and with actual data and better wording. i'm just musing on my own experiences and observations

[sugudoe]

1, 6, 7, 9, 14, 18, 21, 24, 30, 32, 40

emy, love, i got too excited and started babbling .ᐟ ִֶָ𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🪷་༘

what are 3 things you’d say shaped you into who you are?

morbid as it is, i believe my depression and anxiety are the two major factors, specially this last few months, it’s getting difficult as of late, but fortunately i have the third thing, which is love. i might have problems with loving my own life, but i love others and it makes worth living. there are greater things expecting me, so i keep being this optimistic, gentle and try hard person.

what’s the best and worst part of being online/a creator?

the best thing, without a doubt, it’s this whole community of strangers that follow me, likes my stuff and interact with it. any time i see a comment it turns into fuel for my writing, and therefore i keep making more and more non stopping. the worst part for me, would be my strong desire to keep getting better than what i was yesterday, so i burn my brains and my eyes with editing a new theme every night, writing until my fingers and arms go numb and the feeling of believing no one likes it. i had a talk with another creator this week, about this fear of never growing or making people hate what i do, it’s silly, but it has been plaguing me for a few weeks now.

what scares you the most and why?

be stuck. i have many goals, had always been a wanderer in my own mind, creating the life of my dreams, and it petrifies me the idea to never conquer them. to see myself in the future living something i did not plan or created, to be unhappy and grey, makes me very very scared.

tell a story about your childhood.

i don’t remember much of it, so i’ll tell you this one from before my birth. my mother was on her way to clip her tubes, and found out she was pregnant with not only me, but a boy as well, her biggest dream. she then decided to trick my older sibling, saying if the baby is a girl, my sibling can pick the name, if is a boy then she will. i guess whatever divine creature in the sky didn’t enjoyed her lying to a six years old, and then i ended up “eating” my twin. any opportunity, my mom tells this story and she says “you ate my boy!!”. sukuna aah story.

what’s something you’ve always wanted to do but maybe been to scared to do?

to live by myself, actually. not in a house setting way, i actually mean i fear doing things by myself, i avoid wasting my money with me or going out alone. i thrive on having company, that’s why i like to interact with people.

do you believe in ghosts and/or aliens?

yes for both! all the woman in my family could be considered mediums, specially my mom. we have always been followed by weird things. we have lived in three houses, the first one had a weird atmosphere to it, in the dark. the second one was were i grow up, constant nightmares, one person died and showed up demonically to two people, it scares me to be anywhere there, to look somewhere for too long and know you will see something. my current house, though, it’s fucking creepy as well and unfortunately i’m the most affected one. i’ve seen a girl on my siblings bed, something white jumping towards me, a black shadow following me, sounds of chains, screaming, footsteps and yet, the second one scares me the most. for aliens i believe in them, astronomy is my favorite thing in the world, my dad and i use our telescopes to see the astros and keep saying “you see that? that’s an ovni, for sure.”

are you a spiritual person?

i don’t know, my parents have never imposed religion on me, so i learned for myself. have always believed in the universe, i studied lots of religion and when i found all those similarities i started to believe that there is something that is behind all of this, and it presents itself for others with different names and faces.

what’s one thing you’re proud of yourself for?

i’m proud of mini me, she was really pure and really smart. i learned english by myself when i was seven years old, i learned of astronomy, arrows and bows, of the history of the world, to write and to read and to talk freely of what i think. gosh, she was amazing.

what’s one thing that never fails to make you happy/happier?

as of later, you guys. anytime i see an ask, a comment, a follower, serotonin is released. and also music, to sing and dance when the emotions are too much. my favorite song is a nova vida, by carter burwell.

how many tabs do you have open right now?

110 on safari and if asking about apps, it’s 6.

any bad habits?

bed rotting, and i used to smke, but it’s been a long time, yay!

[ilovesmosh55]

This is a certified fire emblem headcanon info dump post . Bullet points copied and pasted from my notes app for the most part so sorry everyone if the formatting or grammar or something is weird

Exactly how the Nabateans work isn’t ever fully explained in game so this is. My take on it based on hints from the game and the characters’ relationships with each other and with Sothis:

-Sothis is an otherworldly alien being who DID come from far beyond the stars. Her lifespan is unfathomably long compared to an average human’s (if not just infinite/indefinite. I imagine as long as her home star shines she could live forever) and her godly power is basically like. An average human’s ability to wield magic times one bajillion. Naturally just has More Magic.

-She left the rest of her kind behind to visit earth and settle there but she doesn’t talk very much about her life before earth to anyone even her closest family. She greatly prefers life on earth and forming human connections to… whatever was going on back on the blue sea star.

-She created her children not by giving birth but like the games said . With her blood. She can just sculpt a human form from Anything, press together a crest stone, and blood-let on it a little bit, and badda bing badda boom new Nabatean. A Nabatean’s abilities, dragon form, and personality can be influenced by what she created their vessels out of. The first ones were created from the clay and mud of the earth she landed on hence the name Nabatean meaning earth dragon lol.

-Sothis DID love and want to watch over humanity, despite not being omnipotent and all-powerful like the Church claims. Creating her children and living among them and humans side by side was sort of her way of expressing that love.

-Despite not claiming to be omnipotent and all-powerful, Sothis’s strange appearance and abilities lead the people of Fodlan to begin calling her a goddess and worshipping her, which she happily accepted and encouraged. The idea that she watches over all life from above and is the arbiter of every soul came along with the church after she died (and is not really true). During her lifetime, she was just worshipped and was the queen of Zanado

-Sothis can create and bring life to a Nabatean at any age/stage of life. Rhea is one of the few she created as a baby rather than a fully grown adult, and she raised her as her own as a result.

-Seteth and his brothers are one of many “batches” of Nabateans made as adults and as a result they aren’t nearly as close to Sothis as Rhea is/was.

-Specifically, Macuil seems to even resent Sothis as he mentions byleth “stinking” of her during his battle. I imagine he’s the eldest brother and resents her for seemingly “abandoning” him to watch his brothers alone when others like Rhea got centuries of her time, love, and attention.

-Nabateans are all created by Sothis and most of them view her as a mother or at least a distant family member/matriarch figure but unless specifically made by Sothis to be siblings (as Seteth and his brothers were. Made as a matching set.) Nabateans aren’t actually related to each other. Sothis travelled all over Fodlan and probably other parts of the world too and created countless sets of Nabateans based on all different types of people. She would often make a few sets/unrelated individuals at once so that her creations/children could have like-minded company.

-Flayn’s mom/Seteth’s wife was also a Nabatean but from another “clan” and therefore yknow not his sister. Rhea Seteth and Flayn only really see each other as family in 3h because they are the last of their kind and feel the need to bond together for safety.

-Seteth and his brothers were based on whatever the Fodlan equivalent of Celtic people is. Rhea was made as a baby for Sothis to raise herself and is made more closely in her image than most of the others.

-Nabateans DO age, but very veeerryyy slowly. Rhea was pretty young, about the equivalent of 19 when Sothis was killed and the war of heroes started. By the time 3H canon begins, she’s about the equivalent of 38-41-ish. Seteth is about 40 in human years too, though he’s actually much younger than Rhea because he was created after her but was created as a young adult. Flayn is the equivalent of 15. Was only like 12 when she was injured and fell asleep back in the day.

-Sothis’s body, like when she was alive properly, will never die/rot so long as the blue star shines. However, the other Nabatean’s bodies DO rot but again. Veeerrryyy slowly. It would take centuries before they’d start to smell off.

-Other Nabateans, especially ones created later who weren’t raised and taught how to use their power by Sothis herself are not nearly as powerful as she was. Rhea is one of the strongest and was raised by Sothis personally but even she can’t control herself and goes crazy if she overuses her dragon form too much.

-Rhea was able to create Sitri/the other failed mom vessels because she was taught how to by Sothis. Probably watched her create many other Nabateans. However, since she is not nearly as powerful as her mother (and was just reusing the crest stone of a dead woman), Rhea’s vessels are far more fragile/sickly and humanlike. Most of them died very shortly after being created from their bodies basically being unable to sustain themselves. Sitri was pretty sickly and feeble but she was actually the healthiest and longest living one

-If not properly utilized and honed, Nabatean’s magic also fades over time, hence how Seteth’s brothers are now basically stuck as dragons. They didn’t transform for so long that they got rusty and probably can’t anymore.

[callmecyangreen]

sci-fi world building tip: the earth is weird

It’s your story, you can do whatever you want, but realistically most habitable planets aren’t gonna be like earth. There are a few exceptions, though, that might encourage either evolution or space travel to certain planets.

Most planets don’t have a tilt and therefor don’t have seasons. Far north and south it’s always winter and the equator is always summer

Most planets don’t get tides. Our moon is weird because we only have one and it’s a certain distance away that it affects how our oceans work. Other planets with water might have more or less moons that are closer or further making the tides work funky

Kinda similar to 2: MOONS. We have the moon, and that’s it. And our moon and sun are the right size and the right distance that sometimes they perfectly line up and block each other. That’s weird. Most planets don’t have total eclipses, but if they have more moons (or stars) they’ll have partial eclipses a lot more often.

this one isn’t Earth being, it’s all planets being different, but the size of a planet affects a lot. You might me like, no shit it affects gravity, but gravity also affects the atmosphere, how large it is, how dense it is, and what’s it’s made out of. That can affect a lot of things including, but not limited to: weapons/explosions, fire, size of organisms, wind and weather, ect. Figure out how your planet is and how EVERYTHING is affected by that. And also what elements are in the atmosphere.

Life as we know it is weird! Humans are weird! Every single animal on this planet is weird! Most planets will probably only have single called organisms, but I know that’s boring for a story so the aliens that do exist will be funky compared to earth. their emotions will be funky too. Maybe they reproduce with 3? Maybe they don’t feel empathy? Maybe violence is normal?

EXCEPTIONS (ish):

There a few things like all planets with life will probably have, like being made of rock instead of gas, being in the Goldilocks zone so water can be a liquid and, you know having water in the first place, but you can still break these rules. Maybe this alien species doesn’t life off of liquid water? Maybe a different species moved to this gas giant but like in big floating ships. I dunno, go crazy. Have fun

Life can exist on any planet, but certain conditions really encourage evolution, like tectonic activity. If your planet is one where a species actually evolved, do some research and try and make your planet suited to evolution.

#5 said that humans are weird, and they are, but other intelligent and long lasting species might share some traits. They’re probably going to have similar senses to us, but probably not the same ones. And, in order for us to find them, they might competitive like humans are. Just make sure these aliens are different, but still possible and able to actually survive.

Intelligent species are more likely to move to different planets if they have a reason. Maybe there’s resources or elements not on their home planet? Maybe one planet is easier to get to? Maybe their old planet is overcrowded? Then, maybe they might be searching for one similar to their orgianl planet. People (humans, at least) are sentimental and will look for similarities.

that’s it for now, but I might do more world building tips because that seems to be the only thing I’m good at when it comes to writing

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/17/2024: COMMUNION (1989)

I promise I'm going somewhere with this, but:

I wrote this thing recently about I KNOW WHO KILLED ME, a movie I really love but that I have certainly told people is astoundingly bad. I mean I have evangelized for it heavily and it has brought me a lot of pleasure, but I also wasn't thinking about it very flexibly. I often give the general public a hard time about imposing literalist rules on movies that have ambitions that differ from, like, an essentially hygienic and rule-abiding Hollywood release, but I'm guilty of this too now and again. So when I sat down to write this thing for CBR, I began to realize that I really didn't want to say anything snarky about I KNOW WHO KILLED ME, and then by the final draft my whole attitude about it had shifted--in part because of interviews I read with the director and the writer (one is linked in there) about what they really intended. It's a mistake to watch that movie and think that nobody knew they were doing something campy, surreal, even magic-realist at times, even funny-on-purpose occasionally. You can argue about whether it is completely successful, but it does seem like viewers at large (ahem) said, "We decided that you were trying to make a regular old erotic thriller, and this is much too weird and ridiculous and abstract for that, so therefore you suck." Which is not only unfair, but it limits what you, the viewer, get to think about and experience.

If you've seen Philippe Mora's COMMUNION, then you may have guessed where I'm going with this. This incomparably bonkers adaptation of Whitley Strieber's credible and complex abductee memoir was pretty much panned and forgotten about, except by people who are happy to tell you how zany it is--and those people are not wrong, but I think there's more to it, perhaps especially in its zaniest moment. Christopher Walken plays Whitley, who struggles to acknowledge and accepted that he is being routinely kidnapped and experimented on by aliens; sometimes his suppressed memories have the quality of a dream whose abstraction mutes the trauma of what really happened--say, when he sees himself from the outside, and his body has been replaced by a large toy. But at the same time, his direct, conscious experiences become stranger and stranger, perhaps in proportion to his efforts to consciously control them.

For the climactic abduction, Whitley dresses in a sharp suit and fedora--clothes that confer confidence, that he must think will help him dominate the situation--and greets the aliens with a conciliatory handshake and other honorific gestures...and they just make fun of him. Then comes the notorious dance sequence, where bossa nova starts playing and they all party (I think, I don't have a good grasp of latin subgenres, don't hit me), and Whitley hangs loose, going with the flow, still clinging to the idea that he can handle the abduction with grace and dignity. The aliens respond by scaring him in a bizarre new way. They're not going to let him play along.

Whitley is confronted with his doppelganger, a sinister figure masquerading as a magician who mockingly repeats everything Whitley has said during the abductions: his pleas for mercy, his angry threats, his attempts at distancing humor. He then confronts Whitley with something we also see in FIRE IN THE SKY--that the stereotypical smooth, impassive alien face is actually a mask that hides an unthinkable horror--but Whitley doesn't flinch. He finally starts to grasp that this is all an illusion: "It's like a Chinese box...you're not going to let me see it, are you?" The alien magician confirms as much; that for whatever reason, humanity will never be allowed to see this phenomenon for what it is.

Whitley Strieber wrote the screenplay for COMMUNION, and while these scenes don't transpire in his book, they do reflect the essentially irrational, incomprehensible nature of the abduction experience. Every time you try to give it a name, it turns into something else, mocking your petty attempts at rationalizing. In the book, Whitley entertains a huge number of possible explanations, giving the lowest priority to literal animals driving literal space vehicles. He relates his experiences to ancient folklore, religious epiphanies, and neurological phenomena (he doesn't have the vocabulary in 1987, but the DMT machine elf phenomena would fit what he's getting it). Here is my favorite passage:

"If mine is a real experience of visitors, it is among the deepest and most extensive as yet recorded, and I hope it will be of value if they emerge. If it is an experience of something else, then I warn you: this 'something else' is a power within us, maybe some central power of the soul, and we had best try to understand it before it overcomes objective efforts to control it."

This has been my very elaborate way of saying that people deprive themselves of greater possibilities when they see a really weird movie and assume that it is simply failing at the aims of an ordinary movie. Too often, people assume that such high weirdness could only be the result of a big mistake made by idiots or lunatics--that it couldn't possibly have its own unique goals. A lot of people have a peculiar resistance to the idea that something that is genuinely weird could be deliberately weird, and by extension they can't accept that something that is deliberately weird can simultaneously be deliberately funny. And if they can't get that far, they definitely won't get that humor has different purposes and effects; it's not always about laffs, sometimes it's critical, sometimes it's harmful, sometimes it interferes with your sense of reality and insults the accepted rules. There's a purpose to all that. And if you still don't believe me, here are some amusing facts about director Philippe Mora that may shed a helpful light on why COMMUNION is the way it is.

"Experiment on a rat presumed," synthetic polymer paint on composition board. Philippe Mora, 1970.

[lookatmysillies]

OMG WHEN I SAW YOUR REPLY TO THE DAILY OC QUESTION OF WHO YOUR ALNST OC IS MOST LIKE IN THE ALNST CAST I JUST HAS AN IDEA

cas and kyo are like mizisua. azure is like luka. kyo died in a round with cas. kyo and azure have the same voice. azure will try and resemble kyo if he and cas were in a round so that he could win. it's basically ruler of my heart mv reenactment.

DO YOU SEE THE VISION? idk if you have any plans but i just wanted to know what you'd think

OH MY GOD I SEE THE VISION MY HEAD IS EXPLODING

I have plans in the OC ALNST going on soon to put Cas up against Onyx since most of Cas’s arc takes place before the 39th Alien Stage and therefore Cas vs Onyx is a conclusion to that arc, but you mentioned in a recent post how you’re going to consider the ALNST we’re doing alternate to your canon, so the way I think, I’m seeing it as like… half-canon? Three-quarters canon? Like certain aspects (like Cas v Onyx) I consider part of my characters’ canon and other aspects moving forward I might consider alternate canon, so even if there’s not an official Cas v Azure round I STILL GOTTA HAVE IT IN MY HEAD’S CANON BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY LAYERS TO THIS MATCHUP

Castor and Azure being the perfect hot and cold symbolism. Cas is visually warm (red hair, orange-gold eyes, always smiling) while Azure is visually cold (dark hair, ice blue eyes, steely expression). Red star and blue star symbolism—and isn’t it interesting that red is the coolest star while blue is the hottest? Kyo fits in here being known as a hothead, another contrast to Azure. Their voices are similar but they express them differently. Kyo dies to maintain his individuality and sense of autonomy while Azure has already lost his. THE PARALLELS BETWEEN THESE THREE, I COULD GO ON. I can’t stop picturing a Ruler of My Heart-like performance with those three because IMAGINEEEEE the weird sort of tension between Luka and Mizi but with Azure and Castor and then Cas keeps seeing Kyo as if he’s there too so they have a weird tension going on and the whole thing is *wild gesturing*

SO YEAH. Basically the three canon rounds I have in my head now for Castor are Kyo, Azure, and Onyx, Onyx being his last. Funny enough, I don’t even think he would win the round with Azure because he would be so thrown (and rising star vs falling star symbolism BLUE STAR RED STAR PSPSPSPSPS) but I could see something unconventional happening in such a round like with Ruler of My Heart, or I could see the audience getting angry because their two favorites are being pitted up against one another so early so whoever loses doesn’t REALLY lose and the whole thing gets swept under the rug to appease the crowd since they didn’t like this brand of drama so early on—not because it’s cruel, but because it’s anticlimactic. The audience wants a higher stakes battle with them and then Cas goes “aw hell naw I’m not doin that shit again” and fucking dies against Onyx I’m—