#i'm sure you're a wonderful person

[glassedplanets]

a few months ago giffy was like "haha hear me out, what if tattoo au" and then we blacked out and talked about nothing else for like three weeks

[wizardemotions]

i had to get the slytherins out of my head. also the dynamic i personally imagine for eighth year drarry

[discordiansamba]

rotating an AU idea that I like to call "zuko and toph and do terrorism while rookie avatar aang feels like he's getting in over his head already" in which the hundred year war never happened because roku chose not to spare sozin, only to die shortly thereafter. the air nomads continue to thrive, but the air avatar dies of an illness in their childhood.

avatar korra guides the four nations into a time of prosperity, fueled by technological revolutions from the fire nation, agricultural innovations from the earth kingdom, seafaring knowledge from the water tribes, and diplomacy from the air nomads. she dies under mysterious circumstances, followed shortly thereafter by the loss of the earth kingdom and fire nation avatars- so the white lotus has a vested interest in the survival of the young air nomad avatar, Aang.

he grows up with his mentor, monk gyatso- but is also taught the four elements much earlier than previous avatars. he befriends the children of the southern water tribe's chieftain, the daughter of which is taught waterbending alongside him by his masters hama and pakku (who never see eye to eye). when he is fifteen, gyatso decides it would be a good chance for aang to see the world with his friends-

-starting with the newly formed republic city.

(or: it's an era swap without being a true era swap.)

aang is hopeful that his time as the avatar will be as peaceful as korra's was (you know. aside from the 'died under mysterious circumstances' thing). this may be wishful thinking given the recent unrest in the fire nation- mysterious assailants invaded the palace in the dead of night, resulting in the death of fire lord iroh and his heir, prince lu ten, and the disappearance of the young prince zuko.

the case was never closed.

iroh's brother, ozai, ascended to the throne in his place. his reign has been plagued by trouble ever since- in the form of a pair of masked terrorists known collectively as The Blue Spirit. as the Avatar, it's Aang's duty to stop the pair- which is a lot harder than it should be, given that nobody knows who they are.

at least he has the peaceful refuge of the Jasmine Dragon, run by old man Mushi and his nephew, Lee. the heiress of the Beifong family, Toph Beifong, and the princess of the Northern Water Tribe, Yue, are almost always there as well during their breaks from the Republic City Academy for Fine Young Ladies. even the bodyguard the White Lotus sent to Republic City with him opens up and just acts like a normal person while they're at the Jasmine Dragon.

(her name is Suki. she's a Kyoshi Warrior. Aang and Katara are pretty sure Sokka's in love with both her and Yue.)

...now if he could only figure out how The Blue Spirit always manages to have a leg up on them.

[shannonsketches]

The way I will simply never recover from this page:

Vegeta's Panic and then IMMEDIATE affection for his new baby

Vegeta being excited to have a daughter

Goku assuming his wife Magic'd their children out of herself

Supreme Kai being embarrassed for Goku

Beerus getting wasted

Bulma saying she will raw dog her husband frequently and expeditiously with her whole chest, in front of god and everybody

Whis being like 'i gotchu babe 💅 but i gotta borrow ur man first or there'll be no more boning for anybody lol'

[haveyoureadthisfanfic]

Oh, so there's a person out there who eats their hard boiled eggs with peanut butter, but people still have the audacity to call me weird when I eat them with olives

we should all just save a screenshot of the peanut butter egg anon on our phones so we can show it to people who call us weird and say "at least I'm not this person"

[kyouka-supremacy]

--

[hacked-by-jake]

I have spent so much time, thoughts, work and tears trying desperately to be someone special/popular/known that there was no room left for the thought of how much more beautiful it would be, instead of becoming someone else, to work on learning to love and accept myself exactly the way I am right now. While this isn’t easy either, it’s still so much easier than becoming someone I’m not.

I want to stop romanticizing that life can only be beautiful if you’re popular and known by many people. But I want to start romanticizing how nice it would be to love yourself. How nice it would be to look at myself and to think "You’re worth it, you’re worth working on accepting and loving yourself."

[servuscallidus]

.

[kinard-buckley]

a truly terrible idea has latched hold of my gremlin brain which is, buck and tommy do break up so that buck can pursue eddie because either tommy thinks buck is in love with eddie or buck feels like he should be with eddie because everyone else keeps suggesting there's something more there BUT buck/eddie getting together changes their dynamic so much that neither of them are enjoying themselves (and they're worrying about losing what made their friendship so special because of all the changes to the dynamic) AND buck and tommy keep hooking up [air quotes] platonically (with tommy stumbling into inconvenient feelings and pining pathetically for buck while fucking him) while buck struggles to sort out intense feelings toward eddie (which obviously have to be romantic of course) vs. his calm, more settled feelings toward tommy (they're not as intense as his feelings about eddie so they can't possibly be romantic) blah blah long story slightly less long but buck realizes he's been in love with tommy the whole time and was having trouble separating strong but platonic feelings for eddie from his romantic feelings toward tommy and then tommy's like "newsflash asshole i've been in love with you the whole goddamn time"

i'll never write it because it's irredeemably stupid and i value my peace but it IS sitting in my hindbrain tormenting me right now

[scarecrow-in-a-hatake]

[chaifighter]

Ok but what if I really want to hear your Orson Scott Card rant?

...You asked for this.

This is definitely harder to deliver in text format than verbally, but I'll do my best.

Ender's Game is a seminal science fiction novel from the mid 80's about a space war between Earth and an insectoid alien species referred to as "buggers" (they have an actual name I think but I don't remember it). The war has been raging for years, Earth has effectively united to fight it, and particularly intelligent children are taken by the military to train at an orbital boot camp to be the next generation of soldiers. Our protagonist Ender Wiggin, a genius to end all geniuses, is taken to this space station to begin this training. (Ender is a usually-illegal third child who the government gave his parents special permission to produce, since their first two children were both unaccountably brilliant but too violent (Peter) or too gentle (Valentine) to be good child soldiers, which is uhhhh pretty eugenicist BUT THAT'S NOT THE SUBJECT OF THIS PARTICULAR TED TALK-)

The main body of the book covers Ender's time at battle school and is pretty solidly entertaining, with some genuinely interesting thought experiments on zero-g battles and psychological management and manipulation of a young fighting force (though it's, yanno, undercut by the full-page out of nowhere antisemitic raving. I'm not fucking kidding, there's slurs and everything, it's. Fucking wild.) but the really important stuff comes at the end of the book, when Ender and his trusted group of friends are put through a grueling series of simulations designed as a graduation test. Through this series of simulations, Ender, gifted and cursed with an incredible depth of empathy, begins to understand the buggers in a way that no one has before, and by understanding them, knows how to end them. To quote directly:

"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves."

Through this understanding, he realizes that the buggers are a hive mind, and that by destroying the center of that hive mind, he can win. So he does, and the simulation ends. And then they tell him he just won the war. He has given real orders to real soldiers, and he has exterminated the buggers. He has loved his enemy, and he has destroyed them.

Compassion is the key theme of Ender's Game. It is what makes Ender and what breaks him when it is exploited. Empathy and understanding for someone deeply, incomprehensibly different from you.

So then we come to Orson Scott Card, great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, a virulent homophobe, a racist (called Obama "a black man who talks like a white man" as an explanation of his success in politics) and antisemite (looking at that FUCKING page again). He wrote this entire book that hinges on empathy, but either refuses or abjectly fails to apply that notion to his own life. It is genuinely remarkable to me that someone can craft a narrative so explicitly about the one trait they seem to lack entirely and not allow it to open some window of understanding into their own shortcomings.

But we're not quite done yet. Let's talk about Xenocide.

Xenocide is the first of 3 sequels to Ender's Game, set some hundreds/thousands (can't remember, it's a long fuckin time) of years after the events of the first book. Humanity has spread across the universe and settled other planets. The book tells the story of a small human community on a planet predominantly inhabited by the pequeninos, a race of piglike sentients with whom human contact is limited to two specific researchers. The researchers' interactions with the pequeninos are going well -- until one day the body of one of the humans is found vivisected by the pequeninos. Later in the book, it happens to the other researcher as well. All this, very understandably, threatens to spark a war.

Then the discovery is made -- the late life cycle stage of a pequenino is to transition from one of the piglike creatures into a tree, which is the form that is actually capable of reproduction. This transition, bestowed upon members of the species who have done something significant or remarkable, is done by vivisection, after which the body sprouts. The pequeninos believed they were bestowing an honor upon the researchers they killed, and were confused when they did not proceed into the next stage of life. When they learn that they in fact killed them, they mourn.

I am so genuinely fascinated by this story as a work of science fiction. I read this book pretty young, but this is all from memory, it stuck with me that vividly. When two species so utterly alien to each other begin to interact, a simple assumption of similarity can end in tragedy, even during acts of respect or good will. It's juicy! It's thought-provoking! The pequeninos are convincingly alien and the scenario makes sense. And the key thing is that they are people, they cared, they wanted to show their respect for the humans they admired. Empathy, speaking with them and understanding their view of the situation, was the only way to move forward in a constructive way, to avoid war and prevent further tragedy.

Another fascinating thing in this book: the concept of a Speaker for the Dead. Through the time-distorting effects of intergalactic travel, Ender is in his mid-30's in Xenocide, having spent the intervening centuries as a Speaker for the Dead, a position named after the role he assumed in writing his own book about the buggers as a species, laying out their story postmortem. The job of a Speaker is to tell the story of a life as the person viewed themselves -- returning once again to empathy, this time as an almost ritualized practice, as a Speaker arrives to a place where they have been requested and has to piece together the life of the deceased in order to tell the tale. (A friend of mine once promised to be my Speaker if I died first, if I'd promise the same. I think that promise still holds, though I somehow doubt both our capabilities toward the task as writ.)

Orson Scott Card loves empathy. It's one of his main themes. He keeps coming back to it, keeps emphasizing it in new and varied ways. And then he turns around and is a fucking asshole in real life. And you can't help but wonder - does he think he's succeeded? Does he think that he's managed to interact with the world in a kind and empathetic way? Does he somehow believe that he truly understands all these groups he seems to actively disdain, to campaign against, to view as alien? Does he think he loves them the way they love themselves?

After 71 spiteful little years on this planet, I somehow don't think change is in the cards for this man before he shuffles off the mortal coil. And yet I can't help thinking... he could stand to read his own books sometime. He might learn something.

[sheliesshattered]

10 minutes left before I turn a year older and what did I do?

I ordered myself a lightsaber. ah yiss

[watery-melon-baller]

does anyone know a better way to try and reformat a research question for a survey because I am SUFFERING

[melonthesprigatito]

These images popped up on r/pokeplush once to the great dismay and distress of everyone who commented, and I gotta say, I was feeling it too

The plush collector in me is going "Wow, what an asshole!" If you don't know, both of these particular plushies are incredibly rare and pretty expensive if you order them brand new. They also get subjected to scalpers a lot, so this is basically the plushie equivalent of those YouTube videos where someone buys a PS5 or whatever the newest iPhone is and smashes it with a sledgehammer for clout.

The part of me that feels really guilty if I accidentally drop a plushie on the floor and spent weeks trying to decide what plushies I want to bring with me on holiday because whatever one I picked, I'd feel bad about leaving the others behind, is watching that poor Palkia and Dragonite getting slowly and surgically sliced apart with a steak knife and is going

[crownedinmarigolds]

So many talented artists on this website and so lil pocket money.... !!

[bugmistake]

makes me a little sad when people are like "this is just some guy you could find at any gas station" because it's like. yeah! isn't that so wonderful? that there are so many beautiful people in the world? isn't it so wonderful that you could go to the gas station to buy a bag of chips and see someone beautiful in line?