#idk more me rambling than anything else

[norman-ratri-truther]

svtfoe finale was absolutely MESSY as hell but like. so much of the criticism i see just feels wrong..

putting it under a cut bcz this post ended up being longer than i expected, spoilers obv / svtfoe critical stuff still even if i am defending it

like "star merged two worlds causing total chaos just so she could see her boyfriend of like 3 hours" is something ive seen and that just isnt. really how it happened??

like, no.. star didnt know the two worlds would merge, like ive seen a lot of criticism of her and the finale being "star merged the worlds" but put it as if she Knowingly merged them. She didn't.

Also I've seen the "boyfriend for like one day" comment used to explain why her actions were so rash but it completely overlooks the previous relationship they had??? like they were best friends for 2 years, they spent every single day together for months at a time. They just started dating, yeah, but using that as a reason to why she shouldn't have tried to stay with him is stupid because it makes it sound like she just met him.

also, if anything them just dating could make it make More sense depending on how you interpret it. She's been crushing on this guy for 2 years and the second they get together she has to never see him again? she has to be stuck on a world she JUST wanted to get away from for a bit? a world she wanted to stop needing to hold together, a world that is going to be even more in shambles now? with a mother who just betrayed her???? ofc shes gonna wanna go to earth

like yeah, destroying the magic was an incredibly irrational decision but sometimes it feels overblown, like blaming her for things that just were not in her control. Like I dont get why people make Star sound worse than she is because like, she did some pretty shitty things already??? why do you have to make up stuff to be mad at the character for bro theres enough that actually happened..

i wish this finale was better written, i do genuinely think it had the potential to be a great and solid story. especially the destroying the magic stuff!! i think if the show built up to the concept of the multiverse being better without magic then that could have been great! instead they have the toffee storyline which was incredible for seasons 1-2-the beginning of s3 and it just ... gets dropped?? like they barely brought him up in season 4?

i want this show to get a reboot someday where the writers actually consider the overarching story better, i really think theres some great stuff that could be done with the destroying the magic plotline if it was built up and executed better.

[lesgay-loser]

Sorry for all the ventposting it's just that I'm fucking miserable and no one really loves me enough to stay

[arsenicflame]

hey does anyone wanna bounce bellhands/they all went to pirate school together ideas with me? im trying to figure out the missing pieces of my personal set up and it might be easier with someone else!

[sonic-adventure-3]

dude i phrased that sonic v shadow post so wrong. in my head “more skilled” meant shadow relies on more specific skills like gunplay and chaos energy manipulation, and more theoretical knowledge, not that he’s generally more proficient. “raw power” is wholly undescriptive and invokes an image of brute force, which isn’t what i meant. sonic has significantly more actual experience and more honed movement. sonic is a very quick learner, and has dexterity and stamina off the charts. he’s most certainly not unskilled, not in general nor compared to shadow, so i supremely failed if i implied that.

in my head at least, shadow would’ve learned to fight in a controlled environment, if he had physical training at all. i imagine he’d be book smart, had a formal education and shit. either he learned and trained on the ark, or when gerald messed with his memories he implanted fighting knowledge too, baymax style, or something i guess. sonic learned to fight through actual experience, so sonic would be the one with far better battle sense and instincts, it’s like second nature to him rather than a studious pursuit. dude’s graceful as hell, makes everything look easy; no way in hell is he unskilled or less skilled than shadow. shadow’s skill is like, classical, whereas sonic’s is pure schmovement. but idk i’m just thinking aloud.

[lunanoc]

this is probably definitely an unpopular and potentially controversial opinion, but i saw a take recently on npss and the female characters of dmbj that to be fair pops up often that i feel it’s a pretty prevalent one, so i just. decided to give my two cents on it that once again no one asked for

more under the cut because this got a little long

just to be clear, this a topic that has quite a bit of nuance and multiple layers to it, and perception entirely depends on both personal interpretation and your medium of choice. i’m also not saying that npss is some pioneer in terms of writing female characters because he’s not. but i also feel that saying he’s a blatant misogynist and that he can’t write female characters properly at all is a gross exaggeration and doing the ladies of dmbj a disservice

i’m also going to be talking about the books specifically here, since the books and the dramas/movies treat female characters differently not only because of plotline reasons, but because of the differences in the nature of their narratives. the dramas have quite a bit more of the accusations people tend to like throwing at dmbj like reducing female characters to flat, one-dimensional archetypes or fridging the dramas do have su nan though, but contrary to what a large part of the fandom seems to push forward, the dramas don’t and can’t represent dmbj in its entirety, and if you’re going to try and do that, you can’t leave out the books and vice-versa, but seeing how different both versions of the story can get at times i just tend to separate them entirely

as it stands, the only female characters who die in the books zhang haixing not counting because we technically don’t know what happens to her are a ning and yuncai, and i guess you can add huo xiangu to that, but she's part of the lao jiumen and chen pi ah si dies similarly so not sure that counts here really. and while you can argue for a ning at least that her death for narrative purposes was fridging, npss also used panzi’s death later on for similar narrative purposes, so at least in that respect he doesn’t discriminate

don’t get me wrong, the books aren’t perfect either, and you do get misogynistic comments from the male characters from time to time that make me squint, which is why i’m not trying to pretend dmbj is peak feminism, but they’re also not egregious or frequent enough comments, and in my opinion the main difference with the dramas is that the male gaze in the books is at least somewhat more justified, because where the dramas are necessarily presented from a third person pov, the books are wu xie’s first person pov for the most part. dmbj is essentially written as and treated as wu xie’s memoirs, and so everything and everyone is seen and filtered through the lense of his perception. and wu xie is a man, so that comes with its own set of ramifications. and even then ironically, wu xie is far from the only or the worst culprit when it comes to casual misogyny. pangzi has his fair share of takes, as do a number of other characters

but for all that the female characters are sometimes placed into archetype boxes by virtue of not only the narrative being from wu xie’s pov, but also the fact that the tomb robbing business is shown to be a male dominated one, and also just because npss himself is a man, that doesn’t mean those female characters aren’t complex and fleshed out characters in their own right to the same extent as their male counterparts of similar narrative relevance

i’m thinking of huo xiuxiu for example, who’s arguably the most prominent and recurring female character in dmbj, who from the get-go is very quickly made out to be not a pretty girl (or rather not just a pretty girl) but quick-witted the likes of which wu xie resonates with as a kindred spirit and draws a number of parallels with himself because he finds they share similar ways of thinking and problem solving. she’s capable, skilled, and sees herself as an equal to the iron triangle and the men around her, and yet none of this detracts from either her femininity or her vulnerability as the youngest lao jiumen member, and later as the one left behind to pick up the broken pieces of her own family. she’s a leader in her own right, and she gains support from xiao hua and wu xie in the years leading up to sand sea just as much as she lends them her support in later canon. all of this without ever being presented as a potential love interest and reduced to only that wu xie’s lack of interest in women in a practical sense as romantic/sexual partners is a topic for another post but it’s also a thing that contributes to not relegating most of the female characters to just that too

i’m not about to say npss is being particularly progressive, but it’s also interesting and nice to note that even in recent canon, just like the iron triangle and xiao hua, huo xiuxiu is well into her 30s and unmarried without it ever either being mentioned really or being an issue, which considering the cultural significance of marriage in china, even more so seeing as xiuxiu is the heiress and head to a powerful family, it’s worth noting she’s not treated any differently from the male characters who make the same equally culturally problematic choices. she’s too busy going with the iron triangle, xiao hua, and hei xiazi down into dangerous tombs (which is why she’s often featured in official merch as a main cast member alongside the iron triangle and heihua)

i’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty about every single female character otherwise this would get way too long but i could, but even someone like liang wan, who is absolutely portrayed as vain and sometimes unrealistically obsessed with her appearance and chasing after men, i personally find still has more depth given to her in the book in some respects, because as zhang rishan isn’t in sand sea the book, she has no romance plotline, and so not only does she get pov chapters, she gets pov chapters that flesh out her involvement with wu xie’s plan and the wangs by extension, and her goals, though never followed through on because npss didn’t tie up that loose end, i find are far more driven by something deeply personal. zhang haixing in tibetan sea flower is arrogant and condescending, manipulative as much as she is competent, and while pangzi especially responds to her behavior with borderline misogynistic provocations, it’s very clear that her character isn’t so much the fruit of putting her in the femme fatale archetype box as it is a consequence of her being a zhang. because both zhang haike and zhang hailou (aka ‘little brother zhang’) who are both men, are very much also like this. special mention also to the girls from the side novel a thousand faces because yes npss wrote a book that’s entirely about two women who may or may not be girlfriends

i could also talk about chen wenjin whose entire story runs very much parallel to wu sanxing’s and they both end up with similar endgame situations and are both tragic characters but this post is already long enough. there are more minor female characters who get their share of both “screentime” and development on par with their male counterparts, and for the sake of argument, some of these female characters have as much presence and/or depth given to them as a character like liu sang, who while being a fandom darling, is also very much a minor character. so what i’m saying is that while yes most of the characters in dmbj are men, and the main cast even more so (excluding xiuxiu), at equal level of importance, there’s about as much depth to a character like liu sang as there is to a character like liang wan, or a ning, and so at some point it begs the question of how much of the fandom’s perception of depth in minor female characters is colored by personal preferences rather than objective fact. are there female characters who are basically reduced to being a romantic interest and serve no real purpose other than to be the source of a man’s pain? yes looking at yuncai whose death is both sudden (while it does have some minor foreshadowing) and happens so far towards the end of the book that it almost seems pointless, and in the end only serves as the catalyst for pangzi’s own suffering and justifies his almost ten-year on-and-off retreat to banai

because again, npss isn’t out here making dmbj a feminist manifesto, and there’s room for criticism and pointing out a number of things if you wanted to. but he also doesn’t write bad female characters. they’re as much people as the men are for better or worse, and saying npss can’t write women properly is doing them a disservice. not to mention the fact the dmbj never leans into romance and that actually almost every single ‘canon’ romance is doomed in some capacity means women are rarely relegated to solely being potential love interests, which in a narrative dominated by the male gaze is actually nice?

[obsidiannebula]

Husband apparently found some posts of people complaining about trying to play Divinity: Original Sin 2 after enjoying BG3. And to that I say, just be glad you weren't playing with my husband, whose favorite battle strategies were "Laser Ray everything and I mean EVERYTHING in his path" and "use Internal Combustion on allies to turn them into walking time bombs if that maximizes the number of enemies hit, and also out of combat just for fun"

[sskk-manifesto]

:)

[joshuaalbert]

another thing I do wish had at least come up in ds9 while talking about the bajoran faith is the idea of just like. secular bajorans. I think the way they’re written that’s kind of ‘everyone just believes in the religion and that’s it’ is honestly a little flat? but I think there would be people who have a very complicated relationship with the prophets, who maybe didn’t believe in them before the events of the show and now maybe they have to but they think of them more as the wormhole aliens rather than gods, or just don’t believe (anymore, if they once did) that they should be worshipped because they allowed the events of the occupation to happen. but that wouldn’t mean entirely disengaging from the practices of religion as a community thing, or as comfort in times of need bc sometimes that sense of ritual can be a good one, who still wear the earring not so much as a sign of faith but just as a sign of being bajoran and being connected to their people.

idk not to sound like I’m overexplaining secular approaches to an ethnoreligion when that’s a lot of people’s lived experience but I’m just kind of thinking about what it would look like in this context, and I don’t know that it ever would have been a whole plotline but I think a mention could have been interesting. maybe something as small as rearranging duty schedules and it’s something that would interfere with religious services, but a couple specific bajorans are willing to take that because they’re not religious, and it’s a one line mention (which is the kind of thing ds9 often did well so it would feel natural), but it makes them a little less homogenous as a species.

[elysianymph]

"although walburga hated her mother and swore she would never become her, she ended up walking in her shoes, wearing her dresses and using her punishments." SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

[smuggsy]

can ppl stop going into museums and throwing shit at historically-relevant material. thank you

[nailgunstigmata]

listen we all know about praise kink mac but i also think praise kink dennis. and i also think that if mac told him hes doing well in a completely sweet and earnest and painfully loving way dens brain would make the window emergency shutdown noise and smoke would start coming out of his ears

[butnotbubblegum]

Thinking a lot recently about the fact that within a wider group of friends there will be people you don’t like. And this is fine and normal and you just get on with them because that’s what you do. But when it happens in a smaller group which is tighter knit, what do you do then? If you try and do the same it comes across weirdly. Because the level of closeness with the rest of the group is on average higher than in a big group.

[kerizaret]

good luck with your writing keri, i hope you'll figure everything out soon! and don't worry about the quality of it, i'm sure it's still good even if you haven't touched it in a while 🫶 your abilities don't just go away!

(and i really need to read your fics finally)

My fics are only for genshin tho 😭😭 it's just kaeya / ragbros HDHAHSH old hyperfixation hit hard. But if it's smth u like then have fun reading hahdhs ^^

Any sekai "fics" so far are only wips..for the same reason as stated earlier hxjsjdh. But thank you still, maybe sometime I'll figure it out And stop holding back bc of those doubts and all 🤍😔🫶🫡

[chaoticgouda]

[theclosetedskeleton]

me staring at my DAD when he said "if i see you have any f's during these 10 days.. things are gonna be bad. and by that i mean youre gonna get your tv taken. And youre gonna get no privacy. Meaning im going to take your door away" when i just wanted to go downstairs and get a fucking granola bar and NOT remember that if i fuck up once at school my privacy vanishes