#instead of the reality that people were hyping him up for no reason and he just wasn’t that good

[dyna-myght]

Girlfriend sent me some of the cosplay contest drama from NYCC and I’m still like laughing that people really thought that one guy was gonna win or even place when like it doesn’t even take that long to look at it and be like. That’s just foam glued together 😭😭😭.

[oddyseye]

Let's talk about Polites in EPIC: The Musical...and Eurylochus.

I do not get the hype for Polites. Yes, he’s supposed to be this sweet, trusting, “open arms” guy who exists to show Odysseus the value of kindness, but he’s an actual walking disaster. He’s a hypocrite through and through. This man fought in the Trojan War — there’s no way his hands are clean — so his sudden push for peace and “let’s all trust each other” feels completely illogical. You don’t get to be a warrior and then act shocked when the world bites back. Here’s what gets me: Polites doesn’t even suffer the consequences of his own idiocy. He dies immediately, leaving the rest of the crew (especially Odysseus) to clean up the mess. His naive, sunshine-and-rainbows approach literally causes everything to fall apart. It’s because of his influence that Odysseus shows mercy to the Cyclops. Look, Polyphemus wasn’t just some big guy with sheep; he was a monster who ate people alive. Odysseus could have stuck to what he does best — being clever, ruthless, and surviving — but instead, Polites’ “let’s be kind and reasonable” act softened him. What did that get them? Poseidon’s rage, storms that killed dozens of men, and an endless chain of suffering. I don’t even feel bad for him because he’s the one who got them into that situation. He got bludgeoned to death, and Odysseus was left holding the guilt and the trauma. Polites did more harm to Odysseus than any monster, god, or storm combined. His naive “open arms” nonsense shattered everything Odysseus built.

His “open arms” philosophy doesn’t even fit the world they live in. This isn’t some cozy, peaceful land — it’s a brutal, war-torn reality where gods toy with humans for sport and monsters eat you for dinner. Odysseus knows this. He’s been through ten years of war, and his leadership is built on cleverness, caution, and yes, ruthlessness when necessary. Polites telling Odysseus to just trust people is like handing a lamb to a lion and acting shocked when it gets eaten. It’s ridiculous. And for all the praise he gets for his ideals, what do they actually accomplish? Nothing. They just put everyone in danger. I care about the impact he had on Odysseus, of course, but not him as a person — because his ideals were dangerous, and his death came way too soon for it to feel meaningful. He was a plot device, not a hero. Meanwhile, Eurylochus gets called selfish, but at least he wasn’t stupid enough to greet the Cyclops or a pretty witch with open arms (and legs).

And keep in mind that, in the original epic, Polites is barely even a footnote — a guy who gets name-dropped once or twice and that’s it. He wasn’t Odysseus’ best friend, he wasn’t some great philosopher of peace, and he definitely didn’t have this huge impact on Odysseus�� leadership. He was just another member of the crew. Yet, for some reason, Jorge decided to pluck him out of obscurity, slap on some manufactured “kind soul” personality, and act like he’s this beacon of morality who changes everything. And for what? Polites’ entire presence in Epic feels like a forced excuse to make Odysseus feel bad about everything. Polites wasn’t important in The Odyssey, so why does Epic act like losing him broke Odysseus? If the story wanted to explore Odysseus’ guilt, fine — but why pin it all on some guy who didn’t even matter in the original myth? At least Eurylochus had a real role in the Odyssey. He was Odysseus’ second-in-command, brother-in-law, and actually did stuff. Speaking of Eurylochus, my man deserves some credit for being an actual human character. Eurylochus makes bad decisions, but at least his choices feel human. Polites, on the other hand, is just...there. A one-note plot device designed to give Odysseus trauma.

I call Polites a hypocrite, while everyone slaps that title onto Eurylochus. But honestly, if anything, Eurylochus is the only crew member who shows consistent growth throughout the story. Eurylochus doesn’t just blindly follow Odysseus or cling to pretty ideals like Polites. Instead, he’s pragmatic, deeply flawed, and painfully human — exactly the kind of person you’d expect to survive years of war and suffering. And honestly? He’s the only one who sees through Odysseus’ contradictions and calls him out when it matters most. Let’s start with the wind bag incident. People love to blame Eurylochus for this, but let’s look at what really happened. Odysseus did tell the crew what was in the bag — he made it clear: “This bag has the storm inside, we cannot let the treasure rumor fly!”

But by that point, the crew was exhausted, starving, and suspicious of their leader. It didn’t help that the Winions planted the idea that the bag contained treasure. That’s what drove the crew to act — greed and distrust, born out of their suffering. And despite the fact Eurylochus didn’t act alone, he often gets singled out as the scapegoat. But reminder that Odysseus refused to let anyone carry the bag, didn’t share its burden, and still kept himself separate from the crew. The men were barely hanging on, and their captain’s secrecy — however well-intentioned — made it easy for paranoia to fester. Was opening the bag a mistake? Absolutely. But it wasn’t just Eurylochus’ fault. It was the natural result of a crew pushed to their breaking point, fueled by mistrust. And when everything blew up — literally — who carried the blame? Eurylochus. Because that’s the role he always ends up in: the fall guy for everyone else’s failures. Then there’s Circe’s island — another moment where Eurylochus’ actions get unfairly criticized. When the men are turned into pigs, Eurylochus does something incredibly human: he panics. He doesn’t want to rush back into danger, and his instinct is to survive. And thus, he suggests abandoning the men and sailing away with Odysseus, which is a harsh and selfish choice. But when he suggests leaving the men, it’s because the situation with Circe is impossible, and the men are trapped. He doesn’t want to abandon them out of cruelty. And let’s not forget that Odysseus’ response is pivotal here. He tells Eurylochus this:

“There’s no length I wouldn’t go if it was you I had to save. I can only hope you’d do the same.” This line changes everything. It plants a seed in Eurylochus that will shape his future actions and, more importantly, his expectations of Odysseus. From that moment on, Eurylochus believes in the idea of loyalty — of never leaving a man behind. He takes Odysseus’ words to heart and learns from him. That’s why what happens later, at Scylla, feels like such a betrayal. When Odysseus sacrifices six men to Scylla to save the rest of the crew, Eurylochus is furious, and rightfully so. From Eurylochus’ perspective, this is hypocrisy of the highest order. Odysseus, who taught him to value every life, now coldly sacrifices six of their men without even warning them. He plans their deaths. “If you want all the power, you must carry all the blame!” This line hits hard, because it exposes the truth about Odysseus’ leadership. Odysseus demands loyalty, respect, and obedience, but he doesn’t want to share the weight of his failures. Eurylochus’ anger isn’t hypocrisy — it’s justified. He held Odysseus to the same standard Odysseus set for him on Circe’s island, and when Odysseus fell short, Eurylochus refused to stay silent. This moment is a turning point: Eurylochus transforms from the scared, self-serving man on Circe’s island to someone who believes in loyalty and accountability. He learned from Odysseus, only to realize that Odysseus doesn’t always live up to his own ideals (hmmmm who does that sound like, oh I wonder).

And to make matters worse — because of course Polites' chaos wasn't enough — we have the cattle situation, which is basically Eurylochus and Odysseus reaching their absolute breaking points. Let’s get one thing clear: what happens with the cattle of Helios? That’s not Eurylochus being weak or selfish — it’s Eurylochus being human. By the time they get to the island, the crew is starving, hopeless, and barely hanging on. Odysseus’ guilt, Poseidon’s fury, everything else, it broke everyone, including Eurylochus. So when he sees those cattle, he cracks. It’s not just about hunger. It’s about everything that’s led them there: the death, the constant danger, the years of being dragged across the seas because of Odysseus’ mistakes and gods playing games. This is where the lyrics hit like a gut punch. Look at the difference in lyrics: “I need to get home!” “How much longer must I go about my life like this, when people die like this?” And that right there? That’s the heart of it.

Odysseus is fixated on his goal, on getting home, because that’s what keeps him going. But Eurylochus? He’s stuck in the present. He’s surrounded by death and misery every single day. Polites��� naive optimism is long gone, and what’s left is the harsh reality of survival. Eurylochus isn’t wrong for saying “enough is enough.” They’ve been starved, cursed, and hunted; the gods have abandoned them. Why wouldn’t he break? And Odysseus loses it. “You’ve doomed us all, Eurylochus!” And yeah, it’s easy to say that when you’re the one in charge (since Odysseus did not kill the cattle, he holds none of the blame). But Eurylochus was broken by everything that’s happened. The way Odysseus says “I need to get home” feels so disconnected from everything Eurylochus has been going through. Odysseus still sees home as the end goal, while Eurylochus has already seen how much it costs to get there. And when Eurylochus calls him “Captain” instead of “Ody” at the end, it shows that everything between them has changed. There’s no more camaraderie. There’s no more brotherhood. He knows what he’s done, but he also knows that Odysseus will never be the same after this. That shift in how he addresses Odysseus shows how much their relationship has deteriorated — and how much Eurylochus has lost. And let us not forget, Odysseus was doomed from the start.

Polites set the curse in motion. Poseidon was already out for blood. The gods were never going to let them off easy, no matter what Eurylochus did. So let’s stop blaming him for one moment of desperation when he was already broken. People always point out Eurylochus’ flaws, but they forget one key thing: he’s the only one who really gets it. He’s the one who challenges Odysseus when he sees his leader making reckless choices. He’s the one who has the courage to question Odysseus, even when everyone else is too afraid to speak up. If you ask me, Polites represents the idealistic lie — this idea that kindness and trust will save you in a world ruled by cruelty and chaos. Eurylochus, on the other hand, represents the harsh truth of what it means to survive. He’s messy, flawed, and emotional, but he’s real. And unlike Polites, who dies early and leaves everyone else to clean up his mess, Eurylochus stays until the bitter end. He bears the burden of Odysseus’ choices, and when he breaks, he does so in a way that makes you feel for him, not judge him.

Eurylochus never gets the credit he deserves because everyone’s too busy crying over Polites. Polites, who gets to die early and leave Odysseus saddled with guilt. Polites, who delivers one cheesy song about “kindness” and then gets bludgeoned in a cave. I’m supposed to feel bad for him? Sure, his death is sad, but the impact he left on Odysseus and the crew? Utter chaos. He’s the reason Odysseus showed mercy to Polyphemus, which kicked off Poseidon’s revenge. Without that storm, they could’ve sailed back home after the cyclops incident. No Circe, no gravity killing Elpenor, no Scylla, no Zeus obliterating the last of them with his thunderbolt. Polites may as well have killed the 599 men himself. Eurylochus deserved his place in the story. He earned it, and he deserves more credit than anyone is willing to give him. Polites was just a naive dreamer who died too early, leaving everyone to deal with the mess he made.

[inchidentally]

hiii inch!

as the resident landoscar scholar/essayist in the community, i'm curious about your take on their debriefs! ps. i love them both equally so i'm not trying to favor one over the other, just genuinely curious about your thoughts on it :)

it definitely could just be them having different styles of communicating and/or explaining things but i've noticed that whenever lando wins, he always shares his gratitude/appreciation for the team and oscar (even when oscar didn't directly 'help' him) and oscar will give lando credit for winning but then just talk about how bad he did in the race

yet whenever oscar wins, not only does lando hype him up, but he doesn't talk about himself in the debrief & oscar (at least not to my knowledge) has yet to thank/acknowledge lando for contributing to his win (& strangely enough has always thanked sponsors instead??)

so yeah, i hope this isn't too ramble-y & i hope you have a great day! <33

your timing is insane anon bc while scholar and essayist are wayyyy too nice ways to describe me being overly consumed w a hyperfixation, I was actually noticing things similar to your ask in comments sections and had written something that I wasn't sure about posting ! but I think it's worth it simply bc there is such a huge misfire with interpreting Oscar going on - totally not saying you are, anon and you were very clear in what you've said and I rly appreciate you wanting to know my take <3

- first thing to dispel is “Lando thanked Oscar for his first win/for helping make his first win happen” - he didn't! he thanked him for showing what the car was capable of with overtakes. I know I know! reality isn’t as bromancey but the sweetness of it was Lando giving Oscar’s drive a little shout out, but it was not him thanking Oscar for helping with his win. that's why they all chuckled when he stated the reason. and the sweetness remains <3<3 gotta clear that up bc there is no lingering double standard going on there. it’s the same as Oscar praising Lando’s drives. (also, apropos of this ask and ppl seeing Oscar as deficient - contrast that with how Oscar did very deliberately thank Lando for welcoming him to the team!)

- the other thing to dispel is the recency bias of thinking Lando praises and mentions Oscar this much on a regular basis/Oscar doesn’t mention Lando at all (anon, I know you’re not saying that btw). now! reality is that Lando's POV =/= his stans' POV. so from his perspective, as of recently he feels a need to assert himself to the media as a team player and to acknowledge Oscar more and make it known that he acknowledges Oscar helping him in similar ways. I’m not even going to dip a little toe into the reasons why, all that matters is that this is what Lando sees as something he needs to do and say right now especially. plenty of team orders instances and races have gone by where Lando doesn’t mention or acknowledge Oscar or Oscar’s help and plenty of times where Oscar has been the one to bring up and praise Lando where Lando hasn’t etc etc.

to the point where !! last season we had people concerned that Oscar was so Lando-centric and mentioned him so much and was such a great team player with team orders and being happy and supportive for Lando’s successes even when his own race was misery or the result was gutting or he just lost out on a podium - but that Lando wasn’t bringing Oscar up at all or acknowledging Oscar’s races. the turntables etc! literally had the flip situation! (even extending to this season in Melbourne where Lando got so wrapped up in his Quadrant filming and podium he kind of forgot it was Oscar’s literal hometown race salfsafjlah in the post race press conf a journalist brought it up and he was like ‘oh’ - like, Oscar was not upset about that he just wanted a podium!)

and guess what - in both cases it was never a problem for either Lando or Oscar!

seriously, I cannot emphasize enough how much what teammates like Lando and Oscar say to the media and fans is for the media and fans and NOT how they actually communicate to each other as people. Charles and Carlos openly admit they’ll bite chunks out of each other at times in media but then they see each other in person, immediately hug and are totally fine. PR is PR. it’s either not reality or at best it’s a publicly-framed version of it. which leads to…

- Lando and Oscar don’t do the PR or the bromance thing. instead they giggle and side-eye their way through having to do scripted stuff and media interviews, and thankfully their occasional shared-brain thing and contrasting personalities are fun enough for most fans to enjoy. and literally the fact that they beam into each other’s faces Like That and it’s incredibly endearing. which is exactly how they handle these post race videos - trust me, they are not sitting there in media talking the same way they do in their little closed off world of just their drivers rooms and no one else. or even when cameras are off and they’re just around the team or other drivers. equally, they aren’t viewing how they talk about each other to media and fans as relevant. it’s solely how they talk to each other.

- Oscar is an acts of service guy; Lando is a words of affirmation guy. as Lando fandom has so much discussion around mental health*, it is very worth reminding that mental health inclusivity means learning the different ways that different personalities express affection and friendship! there is not just one way! clearly, Lando is very happy with having a teammate who may not talk much but his fondness of Lando makes up multiple compilation videos and posts about being absolutely whipped when it comes to … almost anything Lando wants or prefers (“nope, I’m gonna keep you happy”). and paying such close attention to Lando talking that he helps fill in the blanks when Lando’s brain struggles in public. and watching closely when Lando looked like he might trip over his own race suit. 

- it’s worth mentioning here that Oscar inspires genuine affection in people who gain absolutely nothing from openly liking him. he maintains friendships from his early karting days, still has a group chat from the boys in his boarding house at school, and has been with Lily for 4 or 5 years now - but all of those people either have private social media or have remained so thoroughly normal that they’re undetectable. Tom Stallard, his race engineer, and Andrea Stella have taken to Oscar like a nephew/son despite Oscar not being a demonstratively emotional person (and how for himself he views extreme emotions on par with negative emotions which is innnnteresting!). bear in mind that Andrea and Tom remain very fond of Carlos and count him as a friend still, so their judgment is very much to be trusted <3 if you look up Oscar’s mum Nicole’s episode on The Red Flags Pod she confirms that he���s truly Just Like That and his family adore him. there’s also this tiny but very telling moment of Oscar sending a journalist gifts for their new baby and the fact that The Fast and the Curious Pod (wholesome nerds HQ) view Oscar as their child. and that Abbi Pulling thinks he’s “too nice to be a racing driver”. it’s healthy to learn how to receive love and affection from people based on how they are naturally and comfortably rather than expecting them to behave in ways that are more socially the norm/seen as "acceptable"! 

*and side note it’s extremely gross and anti-mental health the way certain F1 fans have genuinely decided to interpret Oscar’s personality type as evil or cold or unfeeling. that is so profoundly backward and bigoted boomery thinking. yes it’s fine to joke a bit that Oscar’s a baby-face killer or robotic IF you make it clear it’s not true. but when I get sent links to adult women on tiktok claiming that Oscar’s mother and sister are part of some grand PR scheme orchestrated by McLaren to manipulate and maximize Oscar’s image then we’ve officially left the whole ‘I support mental health’ thing and entered ‘I persecute and suspect people who don’t fit a socially acceptable norm’. because of all the drivers who quite literally do orchestrate and manipulate PR for growing their careers or their impact (which is fine btw!!) sorry, Nicole’s sporadic social media presence is not remotely skillful PR and Oscar’s little sister is a college girl using tiktok to talk about her own interests. and if Oscar was trying to PR his way into whatever gain people imagine an introvert who dislikes being on camera could possibly gain then he’s doing an abominable job! his sponsors are still the ones he’s had since before F1 (including his dad’s company), his social media is as standard and bland with highly irregular sprinklings of personality, and he isn’t branching out into anything outside his racing career. like, sorry to destroy anyone’s insane projections of some grand plan onto a guy who truly is just happy to have his job and hang out with his friends and his girlfriend lasfgljsagfjlagfslagfsaj

so anyway, when Lando and McLaren team and staff members love on Oscar, it’s because it’s real and they clearly feel reciprocation from Oscar despite it not being traditionally emotional or verbal. plenty of teams and teammates can be neutral to fully disinterested in a driver and it's fine for it to be like that. if nobody actually liked Oscar or found him cold or unfeeling, they would make little to no effort to seem like they love him or like him. F1 isn't team sports, the whole public face of it aspect just doesn't exist outside of backmarker teams who need social media engagement to keep sponsors happy.

- Oscar is famously Not ! a public speaking/on camera/PR/media person and you can see in their early 2023 stuff how much Lando helps him (this video esp is painfully cute bc Lando encourages and praises him and Oscar’s so pleased he does a song and dance). ask any longtime Oscar fan and they’ll tell you he’s leaned on the energy of extroverts and PR skilled people his whole racing career. and no, he really does not try to be a meme that's just what happens to awkward introverted ppl who have to be on camera a lot ;__;

- Lando used to be just as uncomfortable as Oscar with this stuff! and he’s said many times he has learned and adapted to be better at public speaking and media work, just as Oscar is learning! Carlos basically socialized and raised Lando from shy, twitchy mumbly little introvert to the person he became around 2021/2022. and we all observed how Lando basically copied Carlos and Daniel’s sense of humor to develop the bromance content we all know and love. and he does the same with Max F on streams as well. I wish I could find it but he said in one of the early winter break 2023 streams how he ‘usually lets other people do most of the talking and he interjects occasionally’.

-re the “thanking the sponsors” thing: to help Oscar get by on camera, especially with spontaneous speaking, Oscar uses little ‘scripts’ he’s worked out and approved of ahead of time so that he doesn’t have to deal with the white noise that hits him when having to speak spontaneously (the famous little ahhhh’s and uhhhhm’s and long delays he has before answering). which is why things like thanking the sponsors has been in rotation lately since it’s something Andrea said (remember him being teased for saying 'we're in Austria' x 50? and repeating the bit about his wisdom teeth? and the refrain of ‘my girlfriend says…’) because he’s just trying to get out something he knows is acceptable and palatable. compare the stiffness of his post race videos with when he’s one on one with an interviewer (the Laura Winter one is great) or filming non-scripted stuff w Lando and you can see the difference between him feeling under pressure vs how he expresses himself when he’s relaxed. 

- it’s genuinely weird and adorable how Oscar doesn’t use gushy language or do PDA with Lily or Lando, but in exactly the same way with both he loves bringing up their little quirks or what they disagree with him about or things they like that he doesn’t etc ??? idk if they’re secretly very similar or what but for some reason Oscar shows his affection for them only occasionally in plain terms, but mostly by bringing them up seemingly for no reason and in extremely mundane ways ?? idk it’s just a very very cute observation I wanted to point out and he doesn’t do that with any other people aslfgsljagfafgl

so yes, those are the Things To Know about Oscar and his relationship with other people and with Lando to explain why he isn’t like Lando, Carlos, or Daniel. and that whether or not Lando or Oscar bring each other up or acknowledge each other in media duties is not something to get stuck on because that’s not something they personally pay attention to in their relationship. we got used to a specific almost identical type of teammate relationship with Lando’s previous two - and even other teammates who are less close all follow a similar pattern of humor and media friendly behavior. but Oscar is weird, Lando is weird and just adapts better, and they’re both very weird together. they can mindread when not under pressure and they obsess over details about each other’s food and choices etc and go off on bizarre tangents about naps and music and they don’t like posting content about their downtime together/purely social hanging out. oh and they openly complain that they want to spend more non-racing time together as if they couldn’t just… do it more ?? yea they’re just like that.

somehow I have more to say but it’s mostly observations so under a cut it goes (but the stuff above is basically the main points I wanted to make!)

a lot of misconceptions have happened both because Lando's grown and changed so much since the start of 2023 and because Oscar's real personality is so slow to be revealed... and tbh it's def yet to be understood fully by a lot of people…

Lando very openly kicked against the idea of being the older/more experienced big brother role widely expected of him when Oscar was announced for Mclaren (to this day he jokingly but semi seriously says he envies Oscar’s “youth”). Lando had spent the previous four years as little brother and gotten very comfortable in that role. around Austin 2023, he realized Oscar was happy to look after himself and didn't need serious help with anything except media/PR/public speaking. this is where Lando found his big brother role and ran with it happily. it’s where the Finish the Lyrics video happened and we saw a major shift in the landoscar dynamic.

take Lando’s initial insecurity trying to figure out the dynamic with a quiet, low energy rookie and contrast that with how someone five years behind in experience to their teammate is NOT as secure of his position** and has much more to prove. yes Oscar has a contract but he knows better than anyone !! that those are not set in stone or immutable. he frequently has said - and his mom has said - Lando's place in F1 is already established as a front-runner. therefore Oscar's job is to push himself and prove himself to that level.

all of which is why you can’t look at Lando and Oscar in media - or even on track - and mistake their closeness in age for being able to judge them similarly. 

**the refrain of 'why can't he be a support driver until Lando gets a WDC' is easy to answer: for one thing absolutely NO driver wants that and for another, he very understandably does not assume he has the space or stability to just not try his hardest unless specifically asked by the team. 

without opening a can of worms on my personal opinions, I’ve consulted my family/friends of family who have been F1 obsessed since I was born - and the reality of guys who are seen or who actually are ‘support driver’ (not rly an official term but we all know what it is) is NOT the same as a number 2 driver, and neither of those are even options for Oscar. 

a number 2 is a driver seen as having become relatively disposable compared to the number 1 and who just wants to keep a seat in F1 despite the insult. they will at least tacitly accept that their role is to follow team orders and suck it up while number 1 chases the glory (whether that’s points or podiums). a number 2 has a limited life span either because his skill drops off and he becomes a liability or because he can’t stand it after a while.

a support driver is someone who either brings money/sponsorships/a unique regional fanbase and can occasionally or at least theoretically compete with their teammate. and who for whatever reason is judged as the guy who has to suck it up when the other guy has a better shot at the glory. but if the other guy falls behind or suffers a DNF, the support driver is automatically the number one. and if the support driver has a shitty season or the gap in ability widens between him and his teammate, he retains his seat anyway because of the money/sponsorships/unique regional fanbase he brings. so basically, he’s pretty damn safe.

Oscar does not bring money, sponsorships or a unique regional fanbase. Australia doesn’t need convincing to be invested in F1, Oscar’s sponsorships are peanuts compared to what sponsor-grabber Zak Brown already has and Oscar’s funding ran out before F1 and his career only continued because of Mark Webber taking an interest in him (for more on that, see K’s excellent primer - you can scroll down to the screencap of a sheet with a lot of numbers on it for that particular part). and despite insane conspiracy theories about him, Oscar’s PR and image not only don’t have anywhere near the numbers of many other drivers, he also had to recover from the immensely bad PR following Alpinegate. he had most fans of McLaren, Alpine, Danny Ric and Lando (as the prospective teammate) all hating his guts before he’d even stepped into his first papaya race suit. all he’s had getting him past all of that was his promise from F2 and F3 and then his improvement as a driver.

so that’s being support driver out of the question.

and also referencing Mark Webber, without leaning too cornily into the obvious like… no, Oscar’s not going to be the one F1 driver to be okay with the idea of being a number 2. his own mother said how he viewed potentially having Lando as a teammate as advantageous for a rookie because he wouldn’t be expected to match up immediately. the flipside of that is what he’s had to achieve and become immediately after his rookie year in order to be seen as around Lando’s level. his job is to prove to McLaren and to his race team that he's going to try and bring them the best result on every outing. if mathematically that means team orders in favor of Lando then fine, which he's more than proven he'll do. but without said orders, Oscar's job remains to try and get at the very front - just like it is Lando's. there isn't an option or a reason for Oscar to just... intentionally fail or ease off that responsibility (again, unless ordered to).

so that's a no go for being a number 2 driver.

and some more about Oscar and mental health for those who think it only applies to drivers who talk about it frequently: Oscar has talked about how, when his dad came with him to the UK, initially Oscar felt he had "too much time to think". and about his difficulties in moving all alone to boarding school (“sacrificing” being with his family) on the other side of the world at fourteen. I cannot for the life of me find the post again but he even hired a sports psychologist to help him. he’s always been called mature and competent for his age and he and Lily seemed to just go right into domestic almost-married codependency after about two years together. there’s a whole school of thought about children who leave home early and parentification and boarding school syndrome etc but that’s getting way too speculative for even me to go into. but basically, Oscar leapt into a lot of unknowns without a lot of the usual safety nets drivers have/have had. he's had to be self-reliant in a way that's not common among the extreme privilege of the average F1 driver and for those who have it similar to him, they have a similar outlook and approach***. so to mistake his confidence and determination for cockiness or coldness is as wildly off as people misinterpreting Lando’s genuine honesty for him being a cocky asshole. overall, Oscar’s self-assurance and maturity are why he’s continued and succeeded in such a volatile sport and pipedream career because compared to a lot of other drivers on the grid, he has not had a smooth or assured journey.

***obv in reality, apart from Ocon and Hamilton, we're always talking about very relative disadvantages. but Oscar is absolutely in the class of drivers who have to live far away from a family support system and who financially were not guaranteed career progression.

by contrast, Lando was a totally unique phenom and had big, welcoming hands grab him as a teenager and bring him into the McLaren and F1 fold. pundits and cameras and fans all saw him bringing drinks to Alonso and toddling around being helpful in the garage before his time with the team had even come. by the time he drove his first F1 race he was already everyone's beloved baby and Carlos basically got a crash course in parenting as he took full responsibility for socializing Lando and even having to cope with his teenage mood swings. Lando also had a comparatively gentle learning curve by dint of being so immensely talented and exceeding expectation for his age - but also always having older, more experienced teammates as his nearest competition. I will say he made sure to state he didn't want people to give him bias simply because his teammates had such an advantage of experience - and that he personally judged himself equally against them (to his detriment of confidence sometimes!). but it's only logical that people would factor in the age gaps anyway. by the time he'd entered his third year in F1 he was firmly established, had one of the largest fanbases and McLaren couldn't have made it clearer how badly they wanted to keep him from the clutches of other teams.

again - very much NOT saying that Lando doesn't feel the need or pressure to keep proving himself because he absolutely does, but it's still a VERY unique and unusual first few years in F1 !! 

Oscar had a very different experience of not knowing if he could progress after winning F2, having to hang around in reserve and then show up at McLaren without much fanfare (except the unanimous walls of hate from Danny Ric fans, Alpine fans and McLaren fans) and work from the backmarkers up with the team to prove himself - all while those months before the upgrades were spent with fans united in wanting him to fail and celebrating his difficulties.

so yea, all even more worth bearing in mind when it comes to how Lando takes the approach of speaking about Oscar and the team from a proprietary sense of pride - versus Oscar still focusing on his own races because it’s normal for young drivers early in their careers to be more focused on proving themselves and asserting themselves in order to become established in the way Lando is now. they seem so similar in so many ways but when it comes to their positions in the team and in the sport, it’s well worth remembering that big gap exists and why it makes them different sometimes - but that crucially, they end those post race videos united either in misery or in happiness and pride <3

I AM SO SORRY TO EVERYONE WHO READ THIS FAR GOD I WON’T SHUT UPPPP

[leenodeeno]

The Fall of the JJK Empire, as written by a Gojo lover

so one of my friends said i should post this here, and, at their persistence, i have finally made a sideblog to share with the world. here's my dissertation on why the jjk ending was bad. MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

The JJK manga has literally changed the anime and manga scene forever. It's revolutionary. It offers consumers the chance to open their minds to concepts and ideas that are hard to portray successfully in art. There are so many different ways to analyze it and explore the human condition in the different aspects of this story. It's a shame that the way the story played out has caused so much anger and disappointment that will probably lead a mass of people to avoid the story entirely.

Gojo's the reason a good portion of the cast are still alive at the end and their executions were postponed, so the whole giving a multiple chapters long backstory (a whole story arc) on the man just to kill him with no closure is a disservice not only to the story, but also to the fanbase. Gojo deserves closure. And I'm not saying that just because of the fact that I adore Gojo, but more in the fact that, as a major character, he pushes the story forward and makes people think and feel things about not only the JJK universe itself, but about real life and how things work in reality. Gojo was a progressive radical. He believed that change starts with educating the youth. He believed that in order to see the change you want to see, you need to be the one to step up and take the actions needed to set the change in motion. He didn't care about being there to see this change, but that doesn't matter. He just wanted the change to happen so his children (yes, the students were his children) could live in a better world.

His letter to Megumi was disrespectful, but lackluster at best if you're trying to be nice about it. Gojo was his father figure. He was the one that stepped up and raised him to be who he is today. The letter basically just being “by the way I killed your dad LMAO” is insane. Yes, it kind of fits what their relationship was like, but there was also so much love between them that the audience got to see glimpses of throughout the story. That love should have shined through in the final letter to Megumi. The way it played out, Megumi was abandoned by two fathers in his life, gaining no closure for either one.

There were so many points in the story that could and should have been expanded upon, but, instead, we're left with barely fleshed out characters that are supposed to be so important, but we barely have anything left to have faith in them. Megumi's character was brutally massacred by Gege. Megumi had so much potential to be a powerful sorcerer, especially one that made a huge difference in Yuuji's life. And he did, to a point. Megumi ended up with very little character growth, to include his growth as a sorcerer. His whole schtick being his sister gave him nothing other than a failed dream to follow. A sister that has no impact on the story other than being the vessel for Sukuna's lover and dying in the span of about two chapters. His abilities did not grow as much as his hype in the story paved the path for — even leading to his domain never being completed. The audience is also left with many questions regarding his technique that are never answered. Can he gain new shikigami to replace the ones lost? Who knows. If he can't, does that end up with him essentially being useless as a sorcerer since his whole technique revolves around those shikigami? Another question never answered.

I am very happy with Sukuna's ending; I am not happy at all with Gojo's ending. What was the purpose of us having to skip past the time period of Gojo being unsealed and training for the final fight? Training scenes are key to character and story growth in shonen. Key scenes that the audience did not get, in part because of poor writing and in part because of the pressure from Jump to finish the series in order to give the spot to a different serial. There was so much potential for closing off the loose ends during the final training arc, and the story was done a disservice by skipping that whole period of time.

I will forever be thankful for this manga and its invitation for me to analyze the human condition in ways I never thought I'd be able to. You don't even have to enjoy Gojo's character, but the amount of hate I've seen that completely disregards his growth is crazy. I'll be honest, I didn't even really like Gojo when I first joined the fandom, but, over time, Gojo's story and experiences grew on me, and I now have so much love for him. It's baffling how people can not even acknowledge his strengths as a character and the lessons his story can teach to the world.

Gojo's impact on the real world alone knows no bounds, and that impact, which is also stated several times in the story, is completely disregarded by the characters that he should have been most important to. He did not even receive a sentence of the other characters grieving his loss. I would have been okay with even just a panel of incense burning for Gojo, or even just a quick acknowledgement of his death and the effect on the world of the story. It all basically panned out to the characters saying, “Wow, he sacrificed himself for all of us. That's pretty shitty.” Like give us anything.

Yes. I'm upset about Gojo's death and the ending as a whole. But not in the delusional “Gojo's the best, he never should've died blah blah blah” way that a lot of the shallow fans of the story are saying why they're upset.  I think it's very poetic, and it's a tragic story. There are things to be learned from this. This is art, and it's meant to make people feel things.

I do disagree with the people that say Gojo didn't accept his death. It's very clear in his fight and his final conversation with Yuuji that he accepted it. No, he didn't want to die, but he did accept it in the end as something that needed to happen in order to see the change he's been pushing for since he was sixteen years old.

If this ending pushed by Gege and Jump is supposed to be seen as Jujutsu society being completely fixed, then the whole narrative of Gojo's beliefs and his reasons for not killing the higher ups (that just ended up being killed offscreen by the man in the end anyway) because he didn't want to be like them is completely pointless.

And if the whole point was to play Sukuna and Gojo as two sides of the same coin, it was executed very poorly. The audience got to see Sukuna's closure and his choice to seek nirvana in the end. It's very vague whether Gojo decided to seek nirvana or to spin the wheel again and try to go for a better life than he had. Essentially saying “We had the same struggle, and we're going to play that out,” but then the conclusion for both of them isn't clearly shown?

Why should fans have to accept the offscreen death of their favorite character just to spare the author's feelings about being critiqued for his clearly rushed, piss-poor ending? Killing essential characters offscreen is lazy, and it causes people to subconsciously think that they aren't dead because they didn't actually see them die. It's basic human behavior. Not to include the fact that Gege used similar tactics with Nobara, and she ended up being alive in the end. He played into the fact that it was up in the air whether Gojo was alive or not, and it was not executed in a way that made the audience understand the choice. It was done in a way that was on the verge of being cruel because Gege himself has shared his own disdain for Gojo.

Gege hated how much Gojo was loved, and it caused poor writing and a feeling that he was killed just as a way to say fuck you to everyone that loved Gojo. Yeah, he has said many times that he hates Gojo, but Gojo is part of the reason the popularity skyrocketed (and that's probably what added to his hatred for the character). Maybe the plan was for Gojo to die all along, and that's okay, but the way it played out was cruel. Either way it could have happened, Gege's choices led to a major character death that is universally hated, and his fan base and the anime/manga community as a whole will remember it if and when he puts out future works. His legacy as one of the greatest mangakas has been tainted because of this death and the way the story was clearly rushed and filled with plot holes at the end. However, I will say I absolutely cannot get behind the people that are threatening Gege because that's just vile behavior.

Gojo is designed to be attractive and play into that character role, but there's so much more that the shallower Gojo fans just didn't or couldn't grasp, and I think that also plays a big part in the range of reactions going on in response to his death. “Gojo the type to hit and quit.” Yes, but would you care to analyze why he does that? There is depth to his character that the fans that don't care to look deeper don't see. They are the reason a lot of JJK fans are disregarded.

But, I also had to come to terms with the fact that for a lot of people in this fandom, they're very young, and this is one of the first major events they've had to interact with in regards to the ending and everything else. A lot of us have already experienced situations like this many times because we've been around long enough to experience the emotions and actions that go along with loving a major piece of pop culture as it's currently being released. A lot of these young fans are experiencing it for the first time, so I think everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt with what people are saying about the ending. And yes, the current generation of people joining fandom spaces are not mature enough for it, but that's a whole other thing that I don't want to get into right now. The parasocial relationship thing is going to always happen in fandom, but it's going to happen a lot with JJK because, again, a lot of these younger fans it's their first time experiencing a fandom like this.

There are always going to be takes and theories that are shallow, but I'm here for the ones that start with those, but then they continue to analyze and explore why they're thinking that way. I think that's why I'm partially excited that JJK has ended so that these younger fans can either dive deeper and explore the themes and ideologies and morals given to them, or they can decide they don't want to or they just can't. But, I'm excited to see what this piece of art (yes, this manga was art) can do to help develop people in their abilities to explore and discover new ideas and grow as people. This manga has so much potential to make change, and I'm hoping it does that even a little bit.

I just think that, yes, as people that have grown and learned and have more experiences inside and outside of fandom, we have to allow for these younger fans to have this experience. We have to allow them the chance to grow. We can gripe on and on about how they're annoying and everything else, but I'm sure we (at least myself) were once in their shoes. They need to be given that time and space to grow. Not all of them will, but that's okay too. I don't think it's conducive to constantly shoot people down (depending on the idea or whatever it is, obviously) and expect people to want to grow, if all they're being met with is constant negativity and beratement. There has to be that opportunity for growth.

In the end, the conclusion of the story was poorly written — caused by the author's growing resentment of the story he created, insurmountable timelines pushed by money hungry companies, and a fanbase where a majority of the members weren’t quite mature enough to embrace the story as it should have been.

[gatorbites-imagines]

do you think you can do a yandere Jason todd x male reader x Yandere Dick Grayson if you want to that is your a great writer :)

Yandere Jason Todd x male reader x Yandere Dick Grayson

Headcanons

(i couldnt find a gif of just Jason and Dick, so have this one)

So, Jason and Dick are both yandere for the same person here, who’s got powers, cuz duh, I always make the reader a hero or meta. Readers related to Reverse flash, cuz hes one of my crazy meow meows.

I kinda went a little all over the place in the story with this, but I love the idea of speedster powers.

 -          You were called Mach 10, or that was your alter egos name anyways. In the beginning they had called you reverse kid flash since you were to Thawne what Wally was to Barry, except your relationship with Thawne was a lot more confusing.

-          You weren’t sure where you even started, what year you were from, or what reality for that matter, and neither was Thawne. But he saw you had his exact powers, looked like him, at least a little, so he took you under his wing and brought you with him.

-          Thawne is in no way a good person, whatsoever, but he didn’t force you to follow his path. You didn’t have a reason for what you did like Thawne, but part of you liked the feeling of your powers and how strong you were, so you also did crime, though not to the same scale as your father figure.

-          This didn’t mean you were all evil though. You saw yourself as greyer or rather a darker grey. You helped when people were in mortal danger, sometimes, and you always helped if the world was in danger or similar.

-          You could even be convinced to work alongside the flashes, though they were wary of you in the beginning, until you all actually got closer, and you became allies with the likes of Wally or Bart, though they weren’t the biggest fans of your villainy, they knew they couldn’t stop you for the most part.

-          And as long as you weren’t actually hurting people, or you only were hurting actually evil people, they could look past it in a similar way to the league looking past the outlaws and their behavior. Of course, you’d killed innocent people too, you weren’t without flaws, but they didn’t have to know that.

 -          The first time you used your powers to your full potential and jumped through and altered time, or jumped to different dimensions, Thawne was so proud and the two of you went out for ice cream to celebrate.

-          This new world was very similar to your own, and the league of this world must have felt the ripple in the speedforce or reality itself, as the ice cream shop you and Thawne were sitting in soon had a couple of heroes outside.

-          Your father figure rolled his eyes so hard you couldn’t help but giggle, and you two kept on eating your treat as this dimensions Flash cautiously made his way inside, seemingly recognizing Thawne at the very least, though you gave you some wary looks.

-          As the two men talked you ended up speeding outside to get some air, and since you grew extremely bored listening to them discuss why you were here, what you wanted, etc. etc. You flashed past the other heroes outside and decided to check out the different cities this dimension had to offer.

-          As the heroes panicked, Thawne just waved his hand and told them you were fine since you didn’t have a bloodlust like he did, and you were more like a dog hyped up on the speedforce checking out a new patch of grass.

-          Of course none of them trusted Thawne, but its not like anyone but Barry could really keep up with you, and as Thawne left saying you’d leave when you were done, they decided to keep an eye on you instead.

 -          One thing led to another, and you ended up in Gotham, sitting on the edge of a rooftop watching the gloomy city go about their life. Every now and then you’d catch some people glancing up at you, as your bright yellow suit stood out very brightly across the dark city.

-          Your suit was very similar to Thawnes, though you had added your own quirks to it, and the suit had more black mixed with some red patterns, though it was clear your inspiration was from Reverse Flash and not Flash.

-          It was when you were debating on ransacking a store for all their snacks that you noticed this dimensions Red Hood fighting a large number of enemies. He was limping and was struggling to keep up, so you could under assume he had been at this for a while.

-          Shrugging you decided to help, since Red Hood was the only bat you got along with in your universe. With a crackle of black and red lightning, you flashed on over and took out the enemies with ease.

-          You had to hold back from not killing them since you knew the bat wouldn’t be very happy about that, and you remembered Red Hood from your universe didn’t kill as much anymore.

-          Turning around you watched as Red Hood collapsed to his knee with a pained groan, blood vividly pouring down his torso and onto the rooftop.

 -          Jason had no idea who you were or where you came from, but he was too messed up from his fight to do much as you walked over and picked him up like he weighed nothing. Then you sped somewhere else, one of his safehouses that seemed to be the same as the one in your original dimension, and you patched him out.

-          He passed out from blood loss, but when he woke up again you were still there, sitting on his couch watching tv like you owned the place. Seeing as he was awake you went and checked up on him, making sure he wasn’t dying or anything.

-          That’s when Jason finally demanded to know who the hell you were, or how you knew about his safehouse. You just laugh and reach up to push you cowl off, introducing yourself as Mach 10, and saying you were just a visitor from a different dimension.

-          Jason would never admit it but the moment he saw your face the seeds of obsession were sown, and as you stuck around for the rest of the day you two started talking and found out you had a lot in common.

-          And when you didn’t judge him for his violent ways and he learned you resorted to violence and murder as well, he felt some kind of kinship with you, only deepening the already brewing obsession and love.

-          You end up figuring out the Red Hood of this world never stopped using real bullets, he just kills less than before, but still puts and end to the lives of the worse kinds of people.

 -          After that, much to Batman’s annoyance, you stuck around Gotham, though you mainly stuck around Crime Alley. You started to become Red Hoods terrifying yellow shadow. There were rumors you were some kind of opposite to Signal, but they people saw your use of speed, and it became obvious you weren’t a bat.

-          You had never been one much for boundaries, so when Jasons obsession grew over time and he started to touch you like grabbing you, holding your hand or carrying you around you just let him, knowing you could snap him in half if you needed too.

-          You weren’t the best influence as your own moral compass wasn’t the best, but Crime Alley had never been more safe for the innocent, and you started to actually gather admirers amongst the civilian population.

-          Jason never spoke of how jealous or sick it made him feel to see people cheer for you or take your hand to thank you for saving them. But people never got too far in their hero worship, as you always did something the normal population found terrifying, placing you right back in the untouchable category.

-          But seeing you use the speedforce to rip apart someones atoms or watch you vibrate at a frequency that allowed you to control people, it made people back away and only admire and fear you from a distance.

-          But for Jason it only made you more attractive, and watching you vibrate or as sparks of lightning shot off your body, it only made Jason feel hot under the collar. His obsession with you grew to the point where he would neglect his duties as the Red Hood if you weren’t going out as well, so he could spend more time with you.

 -          Before you arrived Jason had kept up some kind of contact with the batfam since he was lonely or might need support at times, but now that you were there he pretty much stopped all contact as you were all he needed.

-          This worried the bats, but not enough for most of them to do anything about it, except for Dick who decided he needed to get to the bottom of this. So he went to Crime Alley to check on Jason and you.

-          When Dick first met you he couldn’t help but notice how bright and carefree you were, like the weight of the world meant absolutely nothing to you, and looking at you and your powers that might be the truth.

-          But he also couldn’t help but notice how Jason seemed to tense up as he shook your hand, or how his younger brothers hand seemed to be twitching for his gun whenever Dick got a little too close to you.

-          Dick hadn’t ever really been the most mentally stable person, especially in this new dimension he seemed even more unstable in a sense, as he grew interested in you and seemed to ignore the obvious danger that Jason was to him.

-          In the beginning it was just a curious interest for Dick, but like Jason the moment he saw your face the first time without your cowl, his heart stuttered, and his face went red, and he felt like he had to have you.

 -          Like with Jason you did very little to disapprove of his behavior, letting Dick hug you whenever he wanted, or leaving the trackers you knew they both placed on you, knowing your lightning would break them at some point.

-          Dick went out of his way to learn all your interests, and buying you more gifts than you knew what to do with, he might even use his connection to the league to get you speedster based gear that you could use.

-          Jasons jealousy became worse as he clung to you, his eyes pretty much always a constant bright green as pit rage burned in his chest as he watched Dick try to charm you and steal you from him.

-          Up until they point Jason hadn’t made a move on you romantically, but when he saw Dick bring you a brand new herosuit, one that when you put it on hugged your body even more than the last one, he decided enough was enough.

-          It was especially the way Dick seemed to look all over your body in your new suit, or how Dicks hands wandered over your body to ���check out that the suit fit” and how he knew Dick kept pictures and recordings of you.

-          Jason hoped Dicks interest would disappear when he watched you mind control someone to kill their entire family and then themselves, as multiple members of the family were innocent or children.

-          But to Jasons extreme annoyance, Dick only seemed to get more interested or feel more drawn to you. Jason was happy you didn’t pay much attention to other people, or else you might have noticed how Dick was aching for you like a cat in heat as he watched you rip out someone’s lungs using the speedforce.

 -          They both knew they couldn’t keep you locked up, they couldn’t even threaten you as you were so much more powerful than them, and you weren’t dumb enough to manipulate.

-          No matter how many plans Jason cooked up, he couldn’t figure out a way to keep you as his and his alone, until one night it just became too much.

-          A woman you had just saved from a criminal pressed up against you, hands rubbing your chest as she told you she could thank you in the best way, but before you could laugh in her face, Jason had shot her.

-          As you turned to look at him in confusion Jason crowded close to you, ripping of his helmet to grab your face and force his lips onto yours. You could easily have broken both his arms, but you didn’t find Jason annoying to be around, so you kissed him back.

-          Jason was over the moon as you kissed him back, his legs growing weak as he started moaning and whimpering against your lips, his knees completely giving out as your tongues clashed, resulting in you having to hold him up.

-          What you both didn’t realize was that Dick had been following you, and had seen the kiss which was enough to snap what little bit of sanity he had left as possessiveness burned so brightly in his chest.

-          He followed you both back to Jasons place where he confronted you two as you got inside, and you were just confused as the two bats started fighting both physically and with words. But when their fighting got a little too extreme you pulled them apart.

-          Dick ended up grabbing you and pulling you close so he could kiss you too, forcing his tongue between your lips as you could taste blood from where Jason must have busted his lip. Jason yelled in rage and tried to fling himself at Dick again, but you just grabbed him and held him against your side.

 -          Where Jason had grown weak in his knees and almost soft at the kisses, Dick seemed to grow controlling, the grip he had on you growing tight to the point it would have hurt a normal person.

-          When the kiss started to feel like you were being devoured by some animal you forced Dick to step back, wiping your mouth with the back of your hand as you told him to control the slobbering.

-          Both Dick and Jason still fought a lot for you, but they also knew they’d have to kill one another to get the other to leave, but you liked them both as a person, so they put up with each other’s presence.

-          They even started sharing the pictures or videos they had, or their collection of stolen items they had taken from you, where dicks most prized possession was your last suit, and Jasons was the original clothes you had been wearing underneath the suit when you first arrived.

-          Dick grew more violent during his patrols as he became almost illusioned by his possessive obsession to you, that he couldn’t let these criminals walk around as they’d want to take you from him or would taint you. This resulted in Dick also cutting most contact with the batfam and the league, as he and Jason were too busy worshipping your very existence.

-          They were both extremely clingy, both inside and outside of suits, and they loved to buy you things or to always be touching you. And though they hated your powers at times since they could never get the upper hand, they both loved how strong you were, or how cruel you were to criminals or just anybody that got in your way.

 -          But one day came that you were growing bored of this dimension, and though you did care for Jason and Dick, you wanted to be on your way and even return to your original dimension.

-          You weren’t a good person, and since you’d never officially put a name on what you were with the two bats, you just packed up what few things you needed on a rare day neither of them were there, put on your suit, left a note, and left using the speedforce.

-          When Dick and Jason realize you left, they both in their delusional minds think there must have been some reason you left, that maybe Thawne forced you or something happened in your original universe.

-          You were the only thing keeping them a little stable, so with you gone they both pretty much lose it and hurt and kill anybody in their way to get you back, which ends up with them finding some gear or machine that uses the speedforce.

-          They somehow had something of yours that is connected to you or your presence in the speedforce that means they can zero the machine in on you, and take them to you. So with the league in shambles around them, they abandon their original Dimension and step into your original dimension, on their search for you so they can stand by you once more.

[lifesteal-headcanons]

I'm gonna put the glitch in glitch duo right now and rant about them and how their glitches work because I am so normal about them (lie)

Okay, so I barely got into Lifesteal like. Late last year because of Squiddo joining and I lowkey got really hyped for it and seeing Ash and Squiddo together I was like.. Woah.. New fav duo alert.. And then found that there was no fancontent and had to make it myself so.

Anywho! Ashswag, as we already know, has that lil.. Thing over his left eye (?) That a lot of us (me) has interpreted as like. Glitching. So to start us off, I believe that glitching can stem from messing with your own player code/others player code/server codes/using mods with like. Virus' or something idk im not that smart. And from the Ashswag videos I've watched we can kind of tell where Ash fits in there by like. Fucking with how servers work and therefore fucking up his own code.

Squiddo's code is glitched because.. Have you watched Squiddo's videos? Naw but fr, she's constantly putting the most cancer inducing mods on her game, playing mods that can definitely fry their pc, playing minecraft on a USB DRIVE?? Which would DELETE chunks to MAKE MORE OF ITSELF so like. You can see where I'm going with this. So obviously, their code gets fucked up and the more they do these mods and plug ins and - whatever the hell, the more their code because intangible and unable to be fixed.

So, with that, I'm gonna go ahead and explain how I think their glitching works and how it affects their body/like.. Everything else.

Ashswag's glitches, as we can see, are more visible to the eye. Literally over his damn eye. I'm gonna go ahead and assume that gives him some partial blindness in his left eye. Also, from some fics that ive read ive seen people give him like, back problems and chronic pain that he probably had before but the glitches DEFINITELY don't help at all and instead make the pain way worse than it already is so. Yay!

While Ash's are more physical, I feel like Squiddo's are more like. Mental? If you catch my drift? While Ash is stumbling down into a heap of pain on the floor because his back is killing him, Squiddo is standing in the hallway staring at him wondering why the guy from the one house smp is crumbling on the floor in front of them on a server they swore they were not on a few weeks ago.

So yeah. Memory loss Squiddo. Also inspired from a fic that I do know! I'll link the fics I got inspired from at the end because they are genuinely such good reads and great ideas.

But I decided that memory loss best fit Squiddo, because tbh they are pretty forgetful. And I take their goofy hijinks and shenanigans as just. Squiddo having to recollection of anything and just trying to do something (which she's probably done before) to job their memory but oh well. I feel as if the memory loss is more of a living in the farlands thing rather than glitched out fucked-up code inducing thing, but whatever. The only time we see glitched out Squiddo is on thumbnails! So I feel like whenever Squiddo joins a server or world that's previously glitched or like. They're already pretty glitched, it really takes its toll and fucks up the whole thing and makes it a memory loss disaster for Squiddo.

And because of Squiddo's horrible memory, they can never recollect and find out what the hell happened to the world to make it this glitched out when in reality she's the reason the world is so glitched.

Except when joining servers! Surprisingly, they don't experience those things when joining servers while when joining worlds the world would become discombobulated and delete itself just after a few hours. Funsies! Which they realize when they join the one house smp just to explore it and then they find ASHSWAG!! And then realizes that HE'S GLITCHED TOO!! YAYY!!! And then they absolutely BOMBARDDDD him with questioned like "why do my worlds always delete themselves?", "what causes someone to have a glitched code?" And "how are servers able to not glitch out?" Etc etc which Ashswag answers and then BOOM! FRIENDSHIP!!!

Basically the only reason servers are able to work for them is because theres like.. This other thing cody whatever that prevents it to idk im not smart. This is not compliant with my past fics written about this stuff but oh wellsies.

Another thing I have made up is 'glitch fever' where basically they just get sick because of their fucked up code and glitches. Yeah. Also based off a fic I read where being around Ashswag too much can make you sick and stuff. I feel like their are certain people who are immune to it like Reddoons (purely because of Swagdoons and nothing else) and Squiddo (because they also glitch tf out and Swagsquid/silly).

Another thing I've like. Headcanoned (because this is all just me reading too much into things and making too many headcanons about) is that their glitches also like.. Made their body tempature irregular. This is so random but it was just something I thought of and then I wrote a fic about it. Like, Ash is constantly fucking cold and on a hot ass texas summer day he'll feel a little warm. Same for Squiddo just vice versa. I love them. The sillies. I want to put them in a terrarium and study them.

That's.. All I have I'm pretty sure. Hello I am Swagsquid the #1 Glitch Duo Writer/Enthusiast and the #1 Swagsquid Shipper (the ONLY Swagsquid shipper..) and thank you for listening to my ted talk.

Fics I took inspiration from:

"Dear Diary: Today, I killed someone" by Fey_wilde on Ao3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works/52170592)

"I Feel Too Weak to Stand" by Eternal_Era on Ao3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works/48067240)

"fault lines" by garlic_sauc3 on Ao3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works/41924196)

Fics I've written based on this idea:

"Glitch fever" by (ME!!) Swagsquid on Ao3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works/53400835)

"The warmth of another's embrace" by Swagsquid on Ao3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works/53449573/chapters/135284551)

"Forgotten hot chocolate" by Swagsquid on Ao3 (https://archiveofourown.org/works/54350146)

(Please read the tags and ratings before reading some of the fics!)

.

[edsanon]

I don’t feel like drawing, so have some platonic Lumi and Alastor headcanons :

They met via Rosie. They had seen each other before, Lumi accidentally helping Alastor taking down on an Overlord, but they officially met via Rosie.

Lumi is terrible at social cues, but they are good at picking up patterns, which is how they can read people, Alastor was no match for that.

Alastor is thankful for that, since Lumi can pick up on people, and Alastor can use that to his advantage to strike deals.

Lumi died in 1917 at 18, while Alastor died in 1933 at 35(ish). They often joke that they could’ve met each other had they lived in the same country, and how they could’ve been around the same age had they died at the same time.

Lumi and Alastor don’t exactly show vulnerability, if at all, so for one of them to show vulnerability, the other will have to show that first. It’s truly a mess.

During the time where Alastor disappeared, Lumi genuinely thought that he had died. They grieved and continued on with their life- until they saw the commercial for the hotel and they recognized him.

Lumi has their little family down in hell : twin sister, younger brother, youngest sister and mother. They do not get along with their mother. Their younger sister and father are in heaven.

Alastor doesn’t really like the twin sister, can barely handle the younger brother. But the youngest sister ? Who is a cannibal ? He adores her ! He doesn’t like children, but Yu is an exception, he secretly spoils her to no end.

Speaking about baby Yu, she resides in cannibal town with Rosie, Lumi visits often.

Alastor believes in discipline that involves hitting children (it’s canon), but he knows better than to hit any of Lumi’s siblings.

Being friends with Lumi made of Alastor a cat person. He hates dogs already, so a friend who is a cat and purrs and smells like happiness and all the best things ever ? Count him in.

Husk dislikes Lumi for this very reason.

Speaking of Husk and Niffty, Lumi likes them, they don’t understand how Husk hates being a cat, they’re apex predators after all, and they like Niffty, and Niffty adores them so much.

Lumi showed her a katana they use when they train with their students, ever since then they became one of Niffty’s favorite person.

Alastor has witnessed how they train their students, they were a samurai after all and he was curious. Let’s just say that watching them gave him new torture ideas with how rough and hard that training looked (He quite felt bad for that one student who had to start over 500 swings because their body wasn’t correctly placed in Lumi’s standards.)

Lumi reads Alastor better than a lot of people, so they know that he loves and craves attention 24/7 among other things. So when the attention is striped away from him (like in episode 5 where Mimzy turned her attention to Lucifer) Lumi is here to give him some attention (“So you used to dance ? Maybe I should accompany you to one of your outings then, I’d like to see that for myself.”)

Which Alastor appreciates immensely.

Lumi has a set of rules they follow to stay on Alastor’s good side.

Alastor was very sour when he learned that Lumi had a partner when they were human. They are the one to always give them the attention he wants and needs, to always praise him in some way, who can understand him like nobody else, he doesn’t want their attention away from him.

In reality when the partner comes along eventually, Alastor has now 2 people hyping him up and giving him attention when he needs it.

And this is Lumi’s partner we’re talking about, when Alastor latches out and tries to make the partner jealous (“I’ve stayed with them for the last 80 years”) instead of being met with anger and jealousy, he is met with patience, gratefulness and understanding. (“I see. Thank you for taking care of them, I am glad they found a friend who cares for them the way you do.”)

Alastor taught Lumi how to cook, and cooks for them sometimes.

And Lumi taught Alastor French. He had a good start, but it could’ve been better.

Lumi speaks 9 languages, and they are native Japanese.

Alastor had to teach himself how to hold chopsticks, and Lumi had to teach themselves how to use a fork.

Whenever Alastor notices that Lumi isn’t doing great (aka they start to melt because when their emotions are too much they become magma and they start to melt), he takes them on a walk in the Bayou side of his room.

Alastor and Lumi fought Adam together, they got severely hurt together and left to lick their wounds together.

Lumi has tagged along on a few radio broadcasts of Alastor, it’s just them sitting next to him, listening and purring quietly.

Alastor loves the sound of their purrs, he wants Husk to make the same sound.

Lumi started to use pet names such as “honey” or “baby” after hanging around Alastor and Rosie as much as they do.

Alastor often calls them “Lumi dear”, and occasionally “Darling” (he found out that the nickname snaps them out when they are panicking or experiencing a flashback of some sort)

Lumi nicknames Alastor “A-kun”

[pterobat]

Sinsmas Review

This was delayed as I got stuck trying to articulate my thoughts on the demon birds without seeming like I couldn’t understand basic emotional cues. Finally I said, “screw it”.

**A lot of Stolitz fun and cuteness, with enough conflict to satisfy. “Opposites attract” doesn’t float my boat by itself but these are fun characters to observe.

**It's also really funny, to my convoluted ND mind, that as viewers complain about the Hellaverse demons (both sinners and Hellborn) not acting demonic enough, the Hellaverse up and gives the hellborn a holiday with all the trappings of our allegedly secular Christmas.

**But adding some xenofictional specifics also makes for something charming to go with the hilarity. I'm glad they're sticking with Moxxie being Wrath-identified even after they nerfed it, and him and Millie fighting like rabid chipmunk versions of Mr. and Mrs. Smith is great.

**(I take small issue with Greed being equated to working on a holiday when personal greed isn’t usually the reason people work on holidays but enh.)

**All right, I'm eating crow: Stolas IS feeling the lack of privilege as well as the loss of Via, rather than suffering saintily. Good on the crew.

**Speaking of, does Stolas really have an issue with eating hell-eggs? Ozzie doesn't and he's a Big Cock, and these aren’t even owl eggs so I thought it was Blitz's cooking but...

**At least we get more acknowledgement that Stolas eats like a real owl, that’s always fun.

**Always thought the fan theory of Stolas working at IMP sounded goofy and his abortive attempt didn't do much to change that.

**Ehn, the decision to turn away from a hit doesn’t quite land. It’s too obvious a beat and kind of redundant.

**So, I understand Via being mad at Stolas, mostly understand being mad enough to walk back inside, but nothing, not a single word or expression towards Stella and Andrealphus delivered in any tone?

**Or, uh…it’s starting to get frustrating, the way the series to series barely shows anything of Octavia outside of the sadness/anger at feared or perceived abandonment by Stolas. Thankfully the series doesn't dismiss her grievances with him, but it feels so thin when that's the only focus she gets.

**And it’s so especially dire because it seems like the series is actively avoiding having any direct interaction, or explicit avoidance of such, between Octavia and her jailers. It’s easy to say, “Oh, they all hate/are indifferent to each other”, but there’s just no personality or weight to this mutual disinterest.

**Stella offered false compassion to Octavia last episode, and it got me hyped for more interaction, but then there was no fallout, no greater interest in exploring how this played into their usual interactions—-because we still don’t know what those were.

**Now, Octavia witnesses Stella's goofy brand of evil and has no reaction but a scowl at her phone being snatched, and we don’t know to what degree that expression is directed at her mother for doing it, her uncle for setting this in motion, or Dad for leaving her with these twits, because the story only flaps its hand in a vague direction.

**Stella obviously doesn't love anyone, but the particular form indifference takes could speak volumes if someone lets it. I know the crew loves Bojack Horseman, but that series did a way better job with communicating the abuse by Beatrice and Butterscotch in a solid way while still being cartoony—hell, The Owl House did a better job with Odalia.

**We thus don’t know why Octavia would say, “You don’t love Mother (…)” —is she sticking up for Stella? Why? Or is Via just pointing out the obvious?

As it is, the fandom’s seething hatred of Stella and the determination to take her every action with the utmost sincerity when this is the caliber of material is what we get, is confusing.

**Thinking further, the disconnect is probably that I’m a huge Doylist and I view art as something made, instead of this window into another reality where there’s no theme, tone, subversions, expectations, execution, or style, because life doesn’t have those, and so everything we witness has equal weight, and seeing a character being terrible is enough to hate them.

**Doylism is hardly a mechanical way of looking at storytelling, but it means that HB often feels to me like a series of fractured events, wanting for some slower pacing and more connective tissue to make it really shine.

Though I did enjoy the scrap with Andy. Loved the ice hydra, but wish Andrealphus could have turned into that hydra instead of conjuring it---finally debuting a demon form as good as Stolas' full-throttle one.

**Whoa, Loona went into Hispo form! (That's for the WTA crew)

**One of the most Hellish/xenofictional things here might be the free and easy public distribution of drugs--I'm hoping Stolas's “candy” pills would be hard substances in the human realm, and it's not all some anti-SSRI twaddle about "medicating away your feelings".

**So of course if an adult woman character throws up, she's pregnant, right? I shouldn't be disappointed but here I am.

**It doesn’t seem like the right time for Millie emotionally or situationally, but much as I love HB, it feels like it’d be married to “Screenwriting 101” cliches that emptily dictate that a pregnancy/birth/baby is the strongest narrative course regardless of characterization

**So, I guess we'll find out if imps lay eggs or not. I'm guessing not since the Hellaverse aims for things being as humanlike as possible unless anthro demons are involved, which makes me wonder if imps are born with fairy fingers--and do NOT Google that unless your stomach is strong. It's basically a biological "cap" on the hooves of infant ungulates to prevent them injuring the mother. I assume their horns grow in later.

**I guess one of Millie's brothers from the character sheet (the one with the bob cut and big gloves) has been removed from the series proper because he's not there at Sinsmas and a quick check shows he wasn't in the family portrait in "Harvest Moon".

**I assumed the biggest brother was the married brother visiting back in "Harvest Moon” but if so, his spouse isn't visible now.

[pink-strawberry-kissess]

I actually think Leon was extremely lucky to have met Ada that night in Raccoon City. Leon was going to figure out sooner or later about the harsh realities that result from terrible people in power. Even if hypothetically there was no virus outbreak he would have still been working under sleazy Chief Irons. If he had instead run into someone like Hunk that night, he likely would have just killed Leon or leave him to die if Leon tired to stop him.

I feel like Leon, coming in fresh and naive, too viewed himself in a very idealistic way. But after his experience with Ada, he realized his own morals aren’t black and white either, there are some things/people he is willing to look past for his own selfish reasons despite it going against what is ethically and morally right. Honestly watching that bridge scene, I feel like he was definitely angry on a personal level that she may not have had actual feelings for him and used him than he was about her faking it as an FBI to get the sample “to sell”. The moment she decides not to shoot him, choosing him over her own duty, he was relieved and his concern from there was all about saving her. With the direction the VAs were given it’s basically Leon feeling like “just tell me you love me and then we can just forget this all happened and move on” lol

Speaking of Hunk, he is the prime example of how misogyny is in play when it comes to Ada hate (or they hate that she prevent Leon from being the “perfect” protagonist). He’s actually a mercenary himself, went to retrieve the G-virus for Umbrella, and we also don’t know much about him at all. Yet so many RE fans love him, say he needs a DLC in RE4R, needs his own game etc. He literally gets hyped up for all the reasons Ada gets hated on for.

leon simps and ada haters realize that leon would be dead without ada challenge: impossible

leon is incredibly naive at the beginning of re2, and it's okay to assume that. no, 21 year old is that mature.

leon has always been depicted at the beginning of re2 to be young, naive, bright eyed, and extremely faithful to authority figures (whether or not they were morally good or not, chief irons for example)

(With the direction the VAs were given it’s basically Leon feeling like “just tell me you love me and then we can just forget this all happened and move on” lol) this was more so to draw out emotion for the scene. that they had an emotional connection and that leon was genuinely hurt by ada's betrayal. "Look, I'm just doing my job." Was her clarifying that what she did and why she did it wasn't personal.

people also act like carlos isn't a mercenary. but he also gets so much praise and love. luis literally created a bio weapon that KILLED HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE. but that's fine cause he's so scrunkly. so many male characters do the same shit or WORSE than ada but get so praised. it absolutely is the misogyny.

[verishii]

I would very much like to hear about ur hunger games au

Oh Hell Yeah!

I've always been a fan of Hunger Games AUs that focus on people post games, where they have to try and find themselves and live with what they did on top of navigating the snakes nest of the Capitol.

I'll put this under a read more as to not clog up the dash.

General AU Stuff:

Most Hunger Games canon stays the same, however Hermitcraft canon gets mixed and mingled in there. Same way Mumbo was the youngest ever Hermit member to join at 17, in this he was the youngest victor to win at 12/13.

Their ages are the same as they are irl, since years have passed since they competed. No Children Here

Personally i am really fond of the idea of Evil Xisuma taking on the role of president snow - his legal name is Xisuma, but since Xisuma Void won everyone just calls him Evil Xisuma and victor Xisuma got to keep his name LMAO

Why Yes they overthrow the Capitol again. Frankly, with these people i don't think any other ending is possible.

With more character specific stuff though, i only have some that i have real concrete ideas for. I don't watch everyone so if people who do watch the ones i miss/have not much on have ideas i'd love to hear them!!

Bdubs:

From district 10, he was the one who lowkey revolutionized the games by winning using expert camouflage - a technique that was more finesse focused and less strength, something that what was not expected.

That gave a hell of a lot of hope to other tributes though in following games, and made the career districts hate him because it was 'cowardly'.

During his games he would always sleep at night, and due to the aforementioned skill was able to usually get a solid 8 hours. People poked fun at this during the post game interviews, and it became a running joke associated with him to the public.

Reality is though, that Bdubs knew that people fuck up the most when they're sleep deprived. District 10 has 19 thousand people and one million livestock. He Has Seen The Consequences Of Not Good Enough Sleep. Being better rested then everyone else on top of knowing how to go without food, keep hidden and let the others tear each other apart was how he won.

Cubfan:

From district 6 and dreams of using the vast amount of technology at their hands to actually venture out into space instead of like. working on fucking trains

Capitol often has him working in district 3 because he's "wasted" in district 6, which has Cub internally seethe.

Docm77:

From district 3 and frankly, he should not have survived his games. Literally won because his opponent bled to death faster than him.

His eye and arm were destroyed during that final fight, and his stylist thought it would be "fun" to make his prosthetics reminiscent of his district, without actually asking for his input on the matter.

As one of the older victors he had to deal with the Capitol back when there was less victors, and the Capitol was more than willing to subjugate the ones they had to their whims.

Yeah sorry your son got experimented on. yeah sorry they decided his games weren't memorable enough for a gimmick and decided his post games looks worked better. yeah sorry about that.

He and Cub hang out together :)

Ethos:

Realistically he should be from district 3 or 5, but since he's Canadian i want to put him in district 7 so bad.

ICONIC Hunger games. Literally in the top 10 for reviewability according to people from the Capitol :) meanwhile that hunger games has Ethos running around both in a completely delirious freaked out state and also like. completely detached? A hell mess of dissociation and too much being in the moment

He deployed a ton of traps that would kill without him actually having to be there, and contraptions that would get him resources. Dude was constantly on the move, and was like a busy bee. The way he kept spectators on their feet at home, and generated massive amount of hype for what he did next, was the only reason the game makers let him do this shit.

His eye was injured but not wholly ripped out like Doc, so when his got repaired his stylist decided dying his iris red would be a fun reminder of his 'deadly gaze' :)

False:

From district 2, False volunteered for the games as she was the most eligible girl in her years. Career district go brrr

Still the Queen of Hearts and Bodyparts, except she got that title when she accidentally disemboweled someone right on top of her trying to kill her. yeah she had to smile at the post games interview when they played that and try not to remember how warm the blood was, how it got into her mouth, how she could feel organs and see spine.

Unlike the others who try to distance themselves from the game, False usually tries to mentor. False knows she's capable and able - knows her district produces girls who fight exactly like her, so she's the best to tell them how to direct it.

Each one that comes home is a triumph, but for the ones that don't she remembers. Tries to learn from their deaths to provide better, but carries it with her and it's starting to make her bitter.

okay wow this is getting long, i can do a part 2 if you'd like for Scar, Grian, Gem, Etc !!

[waterparksdrama]

ok now do Greatest Hits

took me a while, sorry anon but i needed to be in a certain mood for it and i'm more willing to listen to this in full even if it's long.

greatest hits - as far as intro songs go i think this is a good one. i like the vocal effects and the way it builds into this stormy atmosphere before going quiet again. 8/10

fuzzy - FUCK YEAH FUZZY WOOOOOOO!!!!! this song is so chewy i don't know how to explain it. the song is about awsten's sleepless nights/sleep paralysis/nightmares but in a really fun way and there's no annoying lyrics here i literally cannot complain about this song the bassline is godly. 10/10

lowkey as hell - and from that hype we are brought back down. i was kinda meh about this song when this came out and i'm still like kinda meh about it lol. it's very much a waterparks song (big rock chorus, lyrics complaining about something stupid that no one else would really) but nothing that really makes it stands out. i think the lyrical sentiment of trying to be there for someone whether it be fans or friends despite your own problems is sweet though i will admit. 6/10

numb - when this first came out i was like "this just sounds like a fandom b side" and what do you know i was close enough. good song to hype up to live i will admit it's a lot better like that than studio recorded. another fucking song complaining how fans only like him when he's sad and more lyrics that were tweets he put in a song for some reason. which. eye roll. c'mon man. 6/10

violet! - i like the transition from numb to this it's fun. a more pop oriented song with it's 80s pop like guitars in the beginning before evolving into this sparkly chorus. lyrically it's about a supposed stalker fan awsten had and with some of these exaggerated lyrics it's hard to tell how real that is, but his own mindset on the situation is clearer than that. i like it. it's fun and tells a story regardless. 7/10

snow globe - when this came out i was listening to a lot of classical piano so i really dug the intro because it reminded me of this piece called la campanella. i like the cold atmosphere it builds with the heavy autotune and desolate synths. lyrically, this follows awsten's self doubts and experience living as a public figure, how he simultaneously experiences loneliness while thousands people know him (loose term) from his music to his online posts. one time i used one of those online mashup sites to create a mashup between this and frou frou foxes in midsummer fires by cocateau twins and it was godly. 7/10 but the remix i got for it gets 8/10 bc shoegaze.

just kidding - cmon man. a song about feeling like shit, what else is there to say. the song chronicles awsten's mental struggles of feeling hated with a touch of implications of using someone as a distraction from this while being passive aggressive to them at the same time. sonically, it rides a sort of chill emo rap wave you might hear as background music to a lofi anime beats youtube if awsten wasn't singing specifically during the chorus where this annoying vocal effect sort of sounds like it's mocking his own words (which i guess is the point? but still). the song is more annoying than sympathetic for me and i don't understand why de'wayne and travis rallied for this song so hard. 4/10

the secret life of me - okay we're back to decent songs again. the sparkly guitars and drums remind me of a classic sonic game soundtrack. the song follows awsten's disassociation after just kidding, where instead of being caught in throes of reality, he gets caught in a maladaptive daydream of better things. i do that too so i can't really bitch here. 8/10

american graffiti - titled after a george lucas movie that was made to "appeal to the mainstream", it's a song about becoming a spectacle of fan interest and dealing with those expectation (believe me you don't have to tell me the irony of me reviewing any of this rn). awsten said this song was supposed to be a "pop punk but make it good" sort of thing so essentially they just made a neck deep song. the song reprises and seems to twist the lyrics from lowkey as hell ("if you need me, i'm here now") showing how that while it is good he can be so accessible, he's so accessible to the point that it's kind of meaningless to the general public. 8/10

you'd be paranoid too (if everyone you knew was out to get you) - wow another self reference. who would've thought. it's another fucking song about anxiety and living as a public figure and at this point in the album when it's so long and repeated so much it's kinda just like "do you have other things to complain about or..." sonically it feels kinda basic with it's rock anthem feel. there's a weird dichotomy between the suicidal lyrics and the ones that try to be lighthearted and it's just. well it's a song. 5/10

fruit roll ups - i like the transition. not much i can say about other parts of this song. was the autotune always this grating. anyways this song follows awsten trying to use random shit he bought as an excuse for someone to try seeing him. instrumentally, it's a lot better but oh my god these vocals and lyrics. i'm not even that convinced he even likes this person that much. also i've had band nerds tell me the song is actually in 6/8 time which makes awsten's statement at the beginning a lie. 4/10

LIKE IT - you guys know how much i love horrible music (i help run a waterparks blog after all) so when i heard this i was like "oh my god this is like modern the blue poptarts, my favorite terrible band." everything down to the rapping feels like a refined version of "it ain't easy being gangsta". again, it's another complaining song, but i think it works better than the other ones because it's not as tonally jarring and gets away with being bitchy by being so ridiculous instrumentally. i feel like he's like one line away from saying that old "cruisin down the street in my tight jeans" line (i learned that was an eazy e interpolation a couple years back isn't that weird). 8/10

gladiator (interlude) - i like the instrumental i don't like josh madden because he's another shill in the madden family and also one time someone said he looked like a thumb so now when i hear this i just think of that. either way his rambling about gladiators as an allegory for working in entertainment becomes very relevant to the next song 6/10

magnetic - the genius page may have rejected my annotations to this song but just remember i am always right. linked to gladiator, this song deals with awsten's internal battle between his public persona and his personal life, which bleed into each other and gets him lost in everything and nothing with things he hates. i love this song i can't lie. not only is this a pretty good lyrically, the electronic tinged guitars are so addictive and crunchy in all the right ways. god and the ending??? god it's so good. 9/10

crying over it all - a love song to someone that doesn't exist lol. a sweet song to someone that's supposed to stay behind once the band is gone and awsten exists outside of that. i really like zeph's backing vocals in this it really adds to this dreamy fantasy the song tries to build. 7/10

ice bath - the sister interlude to the intro title track. a song using the intro vocals and "wakes up" back into reality and awsten gets caught back into his materialism to cope with his mental struggles. 6/10

see you in the future - a song that essentially a chaotic ramble of awsten's life at that point that for the most part settles on focusing on the future (for better or for worse). a lot of these lyrics are probably just tweets awsten never sent amongst the random shit and attempts at insight in his life. it's. certainly a song but i can't lie the drums at the end are so primal and larger than life i remember screaming so hard when otto was doing that live. 6/10

in conclusion, a lot of this album is complaining about the same thing (i mean what waterparks album isn't that at it's core really), but it makes up for its (usually lyrical) faults in some songs with its out of this world, chaotic production. it is still a solid 3/5 stars in my book and this relisten made me realize it's been so long since i overplayed magnetic that i can enjoy it again so thanks for that sort of anon. greatest hits more like greatest shits *ba dum tss*

-iz

[yourlocalpurplekinnie]

Honestly her reputation in my mind really tanked seeing how she handled the whole “velgerians are disappearing” thing.

She so clearly could care less about it as she was putting her own selfish desires to confess to Yuga instead of helping. I wouldn’t mind it too much if she was trying to just find him because he would help and then after everything was all good again then she would confess.

But she viewed her issues as more “important” than the disappearance of a whole species.

Look, Im not opposed to selfish characters (as I deeply enjoyed Luke’s character and he can be pretty selfish y’know?) but its more of how they are left off. For example, I loved Luke from the start but my opinion of him did alter slightly over some episodes for the worst but ultimately it did end up extremely positive due to his last moments. But Yuna’s last moments were focused on THAT. I felt bad for her sure but I didn’t feel as bad as I would have if I saw her in a more positive light in that moment.

I also know for a fact that if she did end up seeing Yuga she would use that as a chance to confess and I don’t think I would have enjoyed that. I think its VERY unlikely but what if Yuga actually had feelings for her back? What if that aided in another reason for him to stay?

Ultimately I don’t think people should be pushing this idea of staying in this timeline onto him even if they would be distraught to see him go. After all, doesn’t his friends and his family deserve to see him once more? People should be pushing him to go back to his timeline.

Yuna also has the problem of serving others while serving herself at the same time (let me explain it’ll make sense).

She “serves” Rovian when we first see her being a part of the Rovian bandits and hyping up her space poems and everything. We see how ever since she was little she thought that Rovian was cool. She decided to stay with her because she liked Rovian, she was so utterly attached to her that she would want to praise her at any moment and would always stick by her side and make sure others treat her in a similar way she does.

Though as soon as her interests go else where (Yuga) she ends up leaving Rovian searching for her “own road”, when in reality it isn’t her own road. Shes just constantly in the cycle of following someone and putting them on a pedestal and viewing being with them as her own road when it isn’t. Being with someone is not all she should want. Sure its a nice side goal but she cant keep just focusing on that aspect while ignoring any careers she can do, or expanding the company shes literally the president of.

She keeps telling herself that shes carving her own future while shes letting her infatuation with Rovian and later Yuga shape that.

We can also see how hurt Rovian is by Yuna leaving and then her only coming back when she needs something from her. Like I enjoyed them talking and everything but Rovian needed her to be her friend like she was before (she didn’t need to be in the Rovian bandits to continue hanging around her) but she wasn’t and Yuna was the only person who could truly understand what her space poems were talking about and now she doesn’t have that, leaving Rovian utterly alone.

To carve your own path you don’t necessarily need to completely move on from the people you made bonds with before.

I also just wanna circle back to how people handled the velgerains disappearing.

Asaka (someone who was also show to have a crush on Yuga) didn't bother to seek him out even though she probably would have wanted to see him probably as much as Yuna did but she knew that confessing her love for someone who she would not be with forever as they as 13 at that point in the story and people typically aren't with people they dated at that age after all people change and grow as they get older so it'll be natural for them to grow apart.

Also it would be likely for him to go back to his timeline (regardless if he said he wasn't planning on it) so there's no guarantee for a future with him and Asaka saw that.

Yuna, however, did not.

she put a crush she was having on a boy from a future who she probably hardly knew anything about above the lives of many and thats a quick way to make a character fall out of the good view of fans.

Though, I don’t hate her. I don’t think i could make myself hate her tbh even though she does shit like that. Shes a love struck 13 year old who is so utterly bad at what to prioritise and she also never got to say goodbye, while people who weren’t as close to Yuga as she was got to. They got to send him off while she sat alone.

I don’t think i would have wanted her to send him off. I feel like this has the sort of mellow, sad tone that was intended as she watched the TV. She must have been thinking of what she could have done, said, how she could have BEEN there.

Ultimately, I want to see more of her and I haven’t finished the arc with the Dark Meister and Darkmen yet but Im assuming she wont be apart of that right?

Anyways, I want to see her change from that. I want her to realise that she wasnt right in her priorities and to rekindle her friendship with Asaka because they have been very strained with their relationship seems (as well as Yuna’s and Rovian’s).

I don’t think that her story should end here. She deserves to have something more.

(I’m so sorry this is so long lmaooo. Im genuinely so interested in her character and I’m probably gonna rewatch it eventually after I finish so I’ll take proper notes then :3)

the most tragic part for goha yuna for this is that the people she got mad at this arc Manabu and Asaka got to see yuga but not her . That line she claim to Manabu she will speak to yuga did not happen. yuga did not trust yuna enough to tell her what was going on and went to zwijo instead. Her friendship with asaka is heavily damaged if not destroyed

[sharkdream3421]

They try out VR headcanons (Izuku Midoriya, Fumikage Tokoyami, Gang Orca, Selkie, Mezo Shoji, Ramattra)

My birthday is coming up, and I'm receiving a VR headset! I wanted to do something special for you guys due to all of your support. Thank you so much! Enjoy some headcanons!

Izuku Midoriya:

You gave Izuku the VR Headset and he was confused by what it was.

“What is this Y/N?” Izuku asked.

“It’s a VR headset! It’s virtual reality, and it’s basically where you can immerse yourself in what the headset is showing you.”

Izuku was amazed and quickly put on the headset.

”Wow! This is amazing!” Izuku said in amazement.

Izuku refused to take off the headset for some time until you told him that you would take him out to his favorite restaurant.

Izuku was so hyped to eat his favorite food at his favorite restaurant.

After the restaurant, he went right back to virtual reality.

His favorite game is VRChat. He likes being social with others and talking about quirks.

Fumikage Tokoyami:

Tokoyami noticed that you were wearing a strange, shaped-box on your head.

”Y/N? What is that on your head?” Tokoyami asked.

You took off the headset in excitement, “It’s called virtual reality. You should try it out!”

Tokoyami quietly refused, but after some convincing he attempted it.

He tried to put it on his head, but it didn’t really work as it didn’t fit.

There are no VR headsets for birds yet.

Instead you showed a video of someone playing VR.

Tokoyami was intrigued, but politely declined on Virtual Reality.

You shrugged. I guess VR isn’t for everyone. Gang Orca (Kugo Sakamata):

Kugo was confused about what you wanted him to try on.

You told him that it was virtual reality.

Kugo took the headset out of your grasp in curiosity.

It seemed like it couldn't fit his head though.

Kugo still wanted to try VR out.

While Kugo was out on hero business. You took it to yourself to make a custom VR headset just for your boyfriend.

Kugo was astonished by your hard work and gladly didn't want your hard work to go to waste.

When Kugo put on the headset, he was amazed at the world that he was seeing.

Kugo was amused with VR and thought it would be valuable for modern day technology and the uses of it were infinite.

VR would be fun for children.

VR could be used as simulators for the military.

And much more uses of VR.

Overall, Kugo enjoyed VR and is interested to see further developments of it.

He also gave you a kiss for making that custom headset for him.

Selkie:

Selkie is confused about what virtual reality is.

His job is to defend the ocean, and much more to what a hero does.

He doesn't really have time for technology and isn't well acquainted with it.

Selkie is willing to try it out though.

Selkie thought it was interesting for small children, but couldn't understand why VR is so popular.

Selkie thinks that people should focus on reality more than being in some fictional, fake, unrealistic world.

He respects people's passion for VR though.

If anything, Selkie has brought a new perspective about technology, and how you should spend your time doing things besides VR in the future.

Mezo Shoji:

Mezo is a little perplexed by the headset that you are giving to him.

You tell him how to put it on and so he does.

His hair is a little bit of a problem since it's so long, but he works his way around it.

Mezo looks kind of werid with a VR headset on.

Mezo never has been one for technology so he needs some time to adjust.

After about an hour in VR, Mezo took it off and said it was okay.

Although, virtual reality wasn't quite to his tastes and declines putting it on ever again.

He wants to stay in reality for the reason of being in a relationship with you and how the real-world could never replicate VR.

Words of wisdom, and Mezo is known for that to you.

Ramattra:

Ramattra isn't well acquainted with VR.

He asks what it's function is.

Uhh? It's used for immersion, and a multitude of things you explain to him.

Ramattra politely asks if he can try the headset on, and of course you let him.

You are a human, but since you have nothing against Ramattra and have been rumored by Omnics that you help them out. He and his kind accept you in their community.

The headset easily fits on his head.

I'm not sure if VR works for omnics, but let's just say it does?

Ramattra is pleased by virtual reality and requests to get more of these interesting pieces of technology.

Ramattra thinks that his army could use VR as battle simulators.

He's not wrong?

Ramattra and his army attack a store to steel a bunch of VR headsets!

What have I done? You think to yourself.

You still love him regardless of what he steels, and he loves you very much even though you're a human.

You treat his kind as you are equals, so he has no quarrel with you.

Masterlist

[macgregorhoughton]

So now with a new Disney film coming out with a "first gay" character, those lists are doing the rounds again and it makes me so irritated seeing McGregor on there. Like yeah, in Beauty & the Beast or Cruella or Onward they were not fleahed out, throw away gay characters, but MacGregor is a Main Character! Who is fleshed out and fully part of the story and he and his relationship with Lily drives it in many parts, and his being gay is actually part of his character rather than just hinted at and argh! People keep writing him off as "ooh, another 1st gay!" But he actually was! And you bet its mostly people whove never seen the film just reacting to the bad faith takes some people put online

A large reason I ended up making this blog (aside from I was hype for the movie even just based on the trailer) is because I knew this would happen and I wanted to create a space where people who actually saw themselves in the character could express how the character and movie as a whole make them happy and they could find positive posts and not be constantly reminded of all the bad faith takes. I don't talk about these bad faith takes a lot for this reason (I have some posts tagged #representation compilation where I discuss all of this) but I whole-heartedly agree with you anon.

a lot of people, me included, were really touched by MacGregor's coming out, saw themselves in his struggles, appreciated what a well-rounded character he is, and I suspect many more people would feel the same if they gave the movie a chance. But unfortunately "disney's 200th first gay character" jokes get more likes so they overshadowed any good feeling anyone might have been having. and I got messages from people who were absolutely crushed by this too. it feels like people are mocking them for seeing themselves in it, shaming them for liking a gay character that was arbitrarily deemed bad by people who never even saw the movie. (there is also a larger conversation to be had about the sense of moral superiority derived from deeming certain portrayals of a minority "bad" and shaming others for enjoying them in an attempt to appear more enlightened when in reality none of this really matters and personal enjoyment of media is not indicative of someone's morality or ability to treat people well and respectfully irl, whereas publicly shaming and mocking people constantly is kinda indicative of a failure on both accounts)

the opinions "we shouldn't have to beg for representation from huge media companies that only care about us when they can profit off us and instead support struggling queer artists' work more" and "a gay character from a huge media company can be someone queer people see themselves in and like watching" can coexist. feeling the second doesn't automatically make someone a bootlicker and thinking the first doesn't mean enjoying an enjoyable thing once in a while makes you a hypocrite.

[amazingphanisnotonfire-imagines]

Cheryl//she is my everything

Request: Hey can you do where the reader is a serpent and is dating Cheryl and Cheryl's friends likes the reader she brings Cheryl in since they're having a serpents Toni tells the reader what is Cheryl doing here so swangs and jughead makes jokes about Cheryl and she's tells them that she's dating her and they're not happy Toni makes her choose is it her or us she chooses Cheryl so she and Cheryl leaves but jughead tells If you walk out of the door your kicked out of the serpents she walks back she takes off her jacket she tells them "you guys were my family" but she's my everything. And leaves the serpents In shock thank you so much

hey! trigger warning: toxic/mean friends. it pained me to write my babies so mean, but it was kind of fun to do. apart from that, enjoy! 

Cheryl squeezes your hand gently, her cold fingers jolting you into motion as you realize you haven’t moved from your position beside your bike. 

She offers you a nervous smile and you mirror it, the two of you having a silent conversation in the dark parking lot of the Wyrm. The neon sign flickers unevenly, almost as if it’s trying to warn you, but you shake it off. Instead replacing your anxious smile with an excited one in an attempt to ignore the doubts creeping into your head. 

Cheryl seems to pick up on your sudden excitement and you watch her visibly relax. Her faux fur covered shoulders fall and a giggle that sets your heart on fire passes her lips. 

“They’re gonna love you!” You capture them in a sweet kiss, the taste of cherry leaving it’s mark on you and you cup her cheek in order to deepen it. “I know it.” You add once you pull away, but her eyes remain closed and her lips stay parted for a few seconds longer, still lost in the feeling of your slightly chapped lips against her painted ones. 

In the low light, she looks like an angel, and you feel lucky to just be in her presence. 

“You’re staring.” She says, slightly embarrassed and you blink at her. 

“Sor-Sorry.” You stutter and look at the dusty ground in order to give you a few moments to recover. When you look at her again, she’s the one that’s staring and the two of you look at each other shyly when she tucks a piece of hair behind your ear. “Ready?” 

She looks between you and the Wyrm, before taking a deep breath and nodding slowly. 

The door opens with a creak and you poke your head around it before opening it fully. You smile at the warm atmosphere, the smell of beer and leather welcoming you home despite it making the air a little stale. 

You say hi to a few of the older serpents and Cheryl follows your lead, putting on her politest smile and awkwardest wave. At most, you get a grunt in reply, but it’s more than you usually get so Toni must have given them half price drinks as long as they promise leave the bar clear so she can have her friends with her while she’s working. 

Okay, deep breath. The first part is over, you’ve both made it through the door in one piece, maybe this won’t be as bad as you feared. 

Ever since Cheryl officially introduced you to her friends, well what she calls the sad breakfast club, but in reality they are actually her friends, you’ve been waiting to introduce her to your own. 

However, you soon realised that it may not be as easy as ‘hi, this is cheryl! you’ve probably seen her around. oh you have! great! she’s my girlfriend, now what are we doing?’ 

As much as you wished it would be. 

Cheryl and the rest of the serpents have had a...complicated relationship, that you’re all still feeling the effects from. But you’ve been hyping Cheryl up to them for the past few months and they are your best friends after-all, so if you’re happy, they should be happy. Right?

Wrong. 

“Hi!” You greet your friends, maybe a little too enthusiastically, however the only person that seems to notice is Toni, who stops drying the glass in her hand to make you your usual. 

However the amused smile on her face is quickly replaced with a snarl once she sees the red head sat on the stool beside you, smiling anxiously back at her. 

“What’s she doing here?” She asks through gritted teeth and slams the glass down. 

Your eyes widen at her and Cheryl jumps a little in fear. The sudden loud noise causes Sweet Pea, Fangs and Jughead to stop their conversation and the three of them turn to look at Toni and then you, their eyebrows furrow in confusion until they notice Cheryl making their expressions harden. 

“Oh God.” Fangs groans and downs the rest of his drink. Toni grabs him another and he mumbles a small thank you, but nobody looks away from Cheryl. Instead the four of them eye her suspiciously causing you to roll your eyes at them. 

“She’s probably here to accuse us of being criminals, drunks or addicts.” Jughead mumbles and your eyes narrow at the dark haired boy. 

“Maybe she should look a little closer to home then.” Sweet Pea adds and Cheryl shrinks in her seat. 

“What the fu-” Your chest feels tight as their words rattle around in your head, and you can’t even begin to imagine how Cheryl is feeling. 

“Come on, facist barbie, what do you want?” Toni cuts you off and they all look at her expectantly. 

Her lips part and you notice the bottom one wobble as she fights to keep her composure. She knew this would be hard, the things she’s said and done have been cruel and she knows how lucky she is that you saw through all of that, forgave her and now make her feel more loved that she imagined was possible. 

Your heart aches and anger bubbles in your chest. You knew your friends could be mean, but you never thought they could be cruel. 

“We’re dating.” You deadpan, trying to keep your expression as unfazed as possible. They don’t deserve your hurt, and stupidly, part of you thinks that they’ll apologize and welcome her with open arms and a free drink for the inconvenience. 

Now they look offended, betrayed even.

Sweet Pea scoffs and spins around so he’s staring straight at the bar. Fangs copies his movements and the two of them take a long sip from their drinks before shaking their heads. 

Jughead’s eyebrows furrow as he looks between the two of you, but before he can say anything, Toni jumps in, her words laced with venom that sting as soon as they leave her lips. 

“Really Y/n? After everything she did to us? She tormented us, accused us of all sorts and was just plain evil and you still decide to date her? Out of all the northsiders you could have had and you choose her?” She spits. 

Cheryl stands, the wooden stool squeaking against the floor and causing all of you to look at her. She wipes her tears and grabs her bag, quickly mumbling a few apologies before walking away. 

She catches the shoulder of an older serpent and adds another apology to her long list before stopping at the door and staring at you with pleading eyes. It’s only now that you feel the eyes of every serpent, young and old burning into your skin, but you’re not bothered by them. 

You stand, just as quick as Cheryl had moments ago, but a hand gripping your arms stops you from moving and a small gasp leaves your lips when they squeeze, forcing you to look at the person attached to it. 

“Choose. Us or her?” Toni says lowly and your eyes widen. 

“You can’t be serious.” You scoff and pull your arm free, making your way towards Cheryl who offers you a watery smile. 

“If you leave, you’re out for good.” Jughead says and your shoulders sag while you shake your head in disappointment 

Cheryl squeezes your hand and shakes her head quickly. She knows how much the serpents mean to you, and she doesn’t want to be the reason you have to leave. She’d never want you to choose between her or them, but you’ve already made your decision. You did a long time ago. 

You look at her with a reassuring smile before turning around and walking to where Jughead is stood, now surrounded by the rest of the people you once called friends. 

You shrug your jacket off, the leather feeling heavier than usual and shove it into his chest. 

“You guys may have been my family, but she is my everything.” You say, your voice low and full of anger before letting go and spinning on your heel. 

Jughead scrambles to catch it while the rest of the serpents stare at you in shock as you leave hand in hand with Cheryl. 

“You didn’t have to do that you know.” She says, worried that you’re going to regret it. But how could you ever regret anything to do with her? 

“I know.” You reply. “I wanted to...because I want you.” 

support my writing! if you want! 

✨taglist ✨

@amberritonicole

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Facebook thrives on criticism of "disinformation"

The mainstream critique of Facebook is surprisingly compatible with Facebook’s own narrative about its products. FB critics say that the company’s machine learning and data-gathering slides disinformation past users’ critical faculties, poisoning their minds.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself tells advertisers that it can use data and machine learning to slide past users’ critical faculties, convincing them to buy stuff.

In other words, the mainline of Facebook critics start from the presumption that FB is a really good product and that advertisers are definitely getting their money’s worth when they shower billions on the company.

Which is weird, because these same critics (rightfully) point out that Facebook lies all the time, about everything. It would be bizarre if the only time FB was telling the truth was when it was boasting about how valuable its ad-tech is.

Facebook has a conflicted relationship with this critique. I’m sure they’d rather not be characterized as a brainwashing system that turns good people into monsters, but not when the choice is between “brainwashers” and “con-artists selling garbage to credulous ad execs.”

As FB investor and board member Peter Thiel puts it: “I’d rather be seen as evil than incompetent.” In other words, the important word in “evil genius” is “genius,” not “evil.”

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1440312271511568393

The accord of tech critics and techbros gives rise to a curious hybrid, aptly named by Maria Farrell: the Prodigal Techbro.

A prodigal techbro is a self-styled wizard of machine-learning/surveillance mind control who has see the error of his ways.

https://crookedtimber.org/2020/09/23/story-ate-the-world-im-biting-back/

This high-tech sorcerer doesn’t disclaim his magical powers — rather, he pledges to use them for good, to fight the evil sorcerers who invented a mind-control ray to sell your nephew a fidget-spinner, then let Robert Mercer hijack it to turn your uncle into a Qanon racist.

There’s a great name for this critique, criticism that takes its subjects’ claims to genius at face value: criti-hype, coined by Lee Vinsel, describing a discourse that turns critics into “the professional concern trolls of technoculture.”

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

The thing is, Facebook really is terrible — but not because it uses machine learning to brainwash boomers into iodine-guzzling Qnuts. And likewise, there really is a problem with conspiratorial, racist, science-denying, epistemologically chaotic conspiratorialism.

Addressing that problem requires that we understand the direction of the causal arrow — that we understand whether Facebook is the cause or the effect of the crisis, and what role it plays.

“Facebook wizards turned boomers into orcs” is a comforting tale, in that it implies that we need merely to fix Facebook and the orcs will turn back into our cuddly grandparents and get their shots. The reality is a lot gnarlier and, sadly, less comforting.

There’s been a lot written about Facebook’s sell-job to advertisers, but less about the concern over “disinformation.” In a new, excellent longread for Harpers, Joe Bernstein makes the connection between the two:

https://harpers.org/archive/2021/09/bad-news-selling-the-story-of-disinformation/

Fundamentally: if we question whether Facebook ads work, we should also question whether the disinformation campaigns that run amok on the platform are any more effective.

Bernstein starts by reminding us of the ad industry’s one indisputable claim to persuasive powers: ad salespeople are really good at convincing ad buyers that ads work.

Think of department store magnate John Wanamaker’s lament that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Whoever convinced him that he was only wasting half his ad spend was a true virtuoso of the con.

As Tim Hwang documents brilliantly in his 2020 pamphlet “Subprime Attention Crisis,” ad-tech is even griftier than the traditional ad industry. Ad-tech companies charge advertisers for ads that are never served, or never rendered, or never seen.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

They rig ad auctions, fake their reach numbers, fake their conversions (they also lie to publishers about how much they’ve taken in for serving ads on their pages and short change them by millions).

Bernstein cites Hwang’s work, and says, essentially, shouldn’t this apply to “disinformation?”

If ads don’t work well, then maybe political ads don’t work well. And if regular ads are a swamp of fraudulently inflated reach numbers, wouldn’t that be true of political ads?

Bernstein talks about the history of ads as a political tool, starting with Eisenhower’s 1952 “Answers America” campaign, designed and executed at great expense by Madison Ave giants Ted Bates.

Hannah Arendt, whom no one can accuse of being soft on the consequences of propaganda, was skeptical of this kind of enterprise: “The psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.”

The ad industry ran an ambitious campaign to give scientific credibility to its products. As Jacques Ellul wrote in 1962, propagandists were engaged in “the increasing attempt to control its use, measure its results, define its effects.”

Appropriating the jargon of behavioral scientists let ad execs “assert audiences, like workers in a Taylorized workplace, need not be persuaded through reason, but could be trained through repetition to adopt the new consumption habits desired by the sellers.” -Zoe Sherman

These “scientific ads” had their own criti-hype attackers, like Vance “Hidden Persuaders” Packard, who admitted that “researchers were sometimes prone to oversell themselves — or in a sense to exploit the exploiters.”

Packard cites Yale’s John Dollard, a scientific ad consultant, who accused his colleagues of promising advertisers “a mild form of omnipotence,” which was “well received.”

Today’s scientific persuaders aren’t in a much better place than Dollard or Packard. Despite all the talk of political disinformation’s reach, a 2017 study found “sharing articles from fake news domains was a rare activity” affecting <10% of users.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586

So, how harmful is this? One study estimates “if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point.”

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211

Now, all that said, American politics certainly feel and act differently today than in years previous. The key question: “is social media creating new types of people, or simply revealing long-obscured types of people to a segment of the public unaccustomed to seeing them?”

After all, American politics has always had its “paranoid style,” and the American right has always had a sizable tendency towards unhinged conspiratorialism, from the John Birch Society to Goldwater Republicans.

Social media may not be making more of these yahoos, but rather, making them visible to the wider world, and to each other, allowing them to make common cause and mobilize their adherents (say, to carry tiki torches through Charlottesville in Nazi cosplay).

If that’s true, then elite calls to “fight disinformation” are unlikely to do much, except possibly inflaming things. If “disinformation” is really people finding each other (not infecting each other) labelling their posts as “disinformation” won’t change their minds.

Worse, plans like the Biden admin’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism lump 1/6 insurrectionists in with anti-pipeline activists, racial justice campaigners, and animal rights groups.

Whatever new powers we hand over to fight disinformation will be felt most by people without deep-pocketed backers who’ll foot the bill for crack lawyers.

Here’s the key to Bernstein’s argument: “One reason to grant Silicon Valley’s assumptions about our mechanistic persuadability is that it prevents us from thinking too hard about the role we play in taking up and believing the things we want to believe. It turns a huge question about the nature of democracy in the digital age — what if the people believe crazy things, and now everyone knows it? — into a technocratic negotiation between tech companies, media companies, think tanks, and universities.”

I want to “Yes, and” that.

My 2020 book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism doesn’t dismiss the idea that conspiratorialism is on the rise, nor that tech companies are playing a key role in that rise — but without engaging in criti-hype.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

In my book, I propose that conspiratorialism isn’t a crisis of what people believe so much as how they arrive at their beliefs — it’s an “epistemological crisis.”

We live in a complex society plagued by high-stakes questions none of us can answer on our own.

Do vaccines work? Is oxycontin addictive? Should I wear a mask? Can we fight covid by sanitizing surfaces? Will distance ed make my kind an ignoramus? Should I fly in a 737 Max?

Even if you have the background to answer one of these questions, no one can answer all of them.

Instead, we have a process: neutral expert agencies use truth-seeking procedures to sort of competing claims, showing their work and recusing themselves when they have conflicts, and revising their conclusions in light of new evidence.

It’s pretty clear that this process is breaking down. As companies (led by the tech industry) merge with one another to form monopolies, they hijack their regulators and turn truth-seeking into an auction, where shareholder preferences trump evidence.

This perversion of truth has consequences — take the FDA’s willingness to accept the expensively manufactured evidence of Oxycontin’s safety, a corrupt act that kickstarted the opioid epidemic, which has killed 800,000 Americans to date.

If the best argument for vaccine safety and efficacy is “We used the same process and experts as pronounced judgement on Oxy” then it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical — especially if you’re still coping with the trauma of lost loved ones.

As Anna Merlan writes in her excellent Republic of Lies, conspiratorialism feeds on distrust and trauma, and we’ve got plenty of legitimate reasons to experience both.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

Tech was an early adopter of monopolistic tactics — the Apple ][+ went on sale the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail, and the industry’s growth tracked perfectly with the dismantling of antitrust enforcement over the past 40 years.

What’s more, while tech may not persuade people, it is indisputably good at finding them. If you’re an advertiser looking for people who recently looked at fridge reviews, tech finds them for you. If you’re a boomer looking for your old high school chums, it’ll do that too.

Seen in that light, “online radicalization” stops looking like the result of mind control, instead showing itself to be a kind of homecoming — finding the people who share your interests, a common online experience we can all relate to.

I found out about Bernstein’s article from the Techdirt podcast, where he had a fascinating discussion with host Mike Masnick.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210928/12593747652/techdirt-podcast-episode-299-misinformation-about-disinformation.shtml

Towards the end of that discussion, they talked about FB’s Project Amplify, in which the company tweaked its news algorithm to uprank positive stories about Facebook, including stories its own PR department wrote.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/22/kropotkin-graeber/#zuckerveganism

Project Amplify is part of a larger, aggressive image-control effort by the company, which has included shuttering internal transparency portals, providing bad data to researchers, and suing independent auditors who tracked its promises.

I’d always assumed that this truth-suppression and wanton fraud was about hiding how bad the platform’s disinformation problem was.

But listening to Masnick and Bernstein, I suddenly realized there was another explanation.

Maybe Facebook’s aggressive suppression of accurate assessments of disinformation on its platform are driven by a desire to hide how expensive (and profitable) political advertising it depends on is pretty useless.

Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_(41793470192).jpg

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en