#it was just a way to differentiate ‘things that are explicitly in the text’ and ‘things that you have to use your imagination for’

[fatalism-and-villainy]

This is a bigger problem in the fanfic realm as well, because I have recently frequently been running into the problem of being drawn in by shippy fanfics that involve things like captivity, enslavement, and other scenarios that inherently constitute reduced autonomy and thus dubious (at best) consent, but actively refuse to engage with those implications.

And it's frustrating, because these are scenarios that I find compelling, and that have the potential for very rich emotional work. I like the juxtaposition of physical pleasure or emotional fulfillment with feelings of fear and violation, and the shame and self-blame that those feelings bring about. And I like digging into an experience of love and desire that is frighteningly selfish in its negligence towards the personhood of its object.

But I see so many of these fics that are explicitly framed as seeking to avoid these story elements - they'll have an author's note or something at the beginning with something like "I know this is problematic, but I've tried to mitigate the dubcon elements as much as I can!" And I find this... deeply frustrating! Because it's seeking to ameliorate the very dynamics that make this sort of story interesting to me!

And by the refusal to engage with the inherently nonconsensual aspects of these premises, I'm not necessarily referring to fantasy romance plot scenarios in which the characters overcome the violence of their initial dynamic to live happily ever after in a more egalitarian relationship. I can understand that these plots are living inside a sort of non-diegetic BDSM fantasy bubble, and they are still engaging with and deriving their initial eroticism and intimacy from violence implicit in their premises, while using the fantasy aspect to mitigate the actual "realistic" consequences of that violence. (I read some danmei novels that did this in ways I found really enjoyable; I think Hannigram also arguably fits into this mold in certain ways, especially considering that it is a fantasy about the parts of abuse that can feel intensely thrilling and that can make you feel recognized and known in ways no one else can.) What I'm referring to is, well, a refusal to engage at all with that violence and violation; an implementation of these premises that feels like just another pretext for introducing the characters and getting them into a relationship, without attentiveness to the implications of the specific pretext in play.

And there's something worth probing at with these kinds of authors' notes in the sense that... there's a lot of concern in fandom nowadays about "romanticizing" rape and abuse, and the seeming necessity of portraying perfect negotiation and consent in fanfic. And yet these sorts of paratextual framings seem to me to be dangerously mistaken about what consent even is - to be conceiving of it as a magic script with no interpersonal or situational antecedents, one that intrinsically smooths over systemic power differentials or lack of personal trust.

I wonder also if that's actually related to the simplistic approach to textual criticism that I sometimes call "checklist criticism" - the idea that a text can be deemed harmful or not, problematic or not, -ist or not, simply by going through a list of "is x present? check yes or no" bullet points, rather than taking a more holistic approach to the relationship between textual production and broader systems of power, being attentive to the specific premises and genre/stylistic aims of a text, etc. Possibly that's too much of a reach for what is ultimately a complaint about the difficulty of finding really juicy darkfic, but it's worth considering.

[eugeniedanglars]

some of you need to learn to be less personally offended by writers saying “canon is just the things that explicitly happen in the show/book/movie”

[jamsofdeath0]

Thr thing about re:zero is its an explicitly feminist text thats perpusfully situated itself within a misogynistic genre. This means it has a weird audience. Especially since it doesn't immediately differentiate itself from its comparables. Subaru has a habit of dehumanizing woman. Even if he doesnt think them lesser than men. The Roswaal house looks like a harem on the surface. It gives visual noval vibes. Subaru himself likens finding Betty's library to "flag catching". Subaru's rbd makes the whole world sorta game like. BUT his time travel doesnt "get him the girl(s)" If anything it often makes his relationships worse. Bc the girls hes talking to are real people like him and will not always react as expected. Or the same way as before. And conversations cant be forced to follow the same path. On the suface it has all the halmarks of a normal harem isekai. But then it just isnt. And not just in the horror aspects. more importantly in the character aspects.

[tgcf-fanon-exposed]

hii!

this blog is the tgcf counterpart to @svsss-fanon-exposed and @mdzs-fanon-exposed :3. both those blogs are the inspiration for this one. this blog, like the others, is made to differentiate tgcf fanon from canon. i haven't seen as many fanon things being accepted as canon in the tgcf fandom, but we might as well make the counterpart!

i will post once or twice a week, and i will be citing the seven-seas translations as my source, but i may reference the donghua/manhua at points. a list of topics i have covered is under the cut :3

i am a professionally obsessed with tgcf -- i have read the novels/watched the donghua multiple times -- so send me asks! it can be anything, as long as its related to tgcf. maybe its something you've seen come up a lot but you aren't sure if its canon, or you just want to see how canon your headcanon is.

i speak minimal chinese, so i sadly cannot reference the original novels very often. i cannot talk about chinese culture as well, as i am unfamiliar with it.

please keep in mind that this is for fun! ill try an answer as many asks as possible, however it probably wont be consistent. i will also try my best to keep a neutral standpoint on everything i talk about as well. just because something isn't canon doesn't mean you can't like it!

Edit: Please note that while I try to differentiate canon from fanon, there is no denying I can be wrong! I would be more surprised if I was always right! And I haven't seen it happen with this blog, but please don't think that every single thing from here is correct. I try my best, but do not take what I say as purely correct. Any work of literature is going to have some level of nuance and many different interpretations will exist. Plus, the EN versions are translated, so some meaning will be lost. And I try not to let my biases get in the way, but they are still there. It is nearly impossible to be completely neutral.

The rating system! I'm using the same one as @svsss-fanon-exposed

CANON: this is supported by the text, and most likely explicitly stated. if you're trying to be as canon-compliant as possible, this rating is for you.

FANON – SUPPORTED: not directly stated in canon, but it's a very likely interpretation! most likely was hinted at or a reasonable conclusion to come to from the novel.

FANON – NEUTRAL: who knows if this is canon or not. most likely wasn't covered in the text, or there isn't enough evidence to swing one way or the other.

FANON – UNSUPPORTED: not directly stated in canon, but it's a very unlikely interpretation. most likely was a reasonable conclusion to come to from the novel.

FANON – CONFLICTING: this idea directly contradicts something stated in the text. if you want to stay as canon-compliant as possible, this rating is not for you.

and lastly, please add onto my posts with more evidence! i'll try to find as much as possible but there is always a chance i missed something.

stuff i've talked about:

CANON

TBA

FANON - SUPPORTED

Qi Rong Has Green Eyes

FANON - NEUTRAL

Mu Qing is a Medic

FANON - UNSUPPORTED

Xie Lian Doesn't Know His Food is Bad

Quan Yizhen Has Tassel Earrings

FANON - CONFLICTING

TBA

CANON EXAMINED

Hua Cheng's String, Eyepatch, Braid + Xie Lian's String

What are the Four Different Ghost Ranks?

[starcanwrecked-confessions]

Content warning for discussions about transphobia.

I'm here almost two weeks later because I still think about how defensive and dismissive the response was to that anon expressing frustration about Sherman Young. And while I agree that him being played by a woman isn't the butt of the joke the way Umbridge being played by a man was, I don't think the anon's discomfort is unwarranted like the reactions to that confession did. Sherman irks me too. And I think the issues with this character go way deeper than the cross-dressing (the coding of autistic traits as creepy is way worse imo), but I'll limit this ask to discussing the original point raised. Yes, cross-dressing is part of theatre practice, but it's not always a value-neutral act, even unintentionally.

Starkid have cross-cast a lot of roles, but importantly have dropped the practice in the Hatchetfield shows (unless it was for the one child actor they had). Except for Sherman. Him being acted in drag was a deliberate choice, because Jaime Lyn was cast over several guys who auditioned for the part. In BF, Sherman is written with no redeeming qualities. He is sexual in a way meant to be uncomfortable, he gets called a sicko and a pervert in the text, he assaults a young woman. He's the only named character that gets explicitly queered when he calls Wiggly his boyfriend in that one throwaway gag line. His jacket is striped blue, white and pink. That's how they present the one character that's played in drag, and it was really noticeable to me, especially in contrast to how aggressively cishet the rest of the show is.

And I don't think there was any transphobic intent at all, but looking at something like this in context matters. These choices about the character do add up to say something about gender in these shows, because Sherman doesn't exist in a vacuum. He is surrounded by other characters, and I think it's important to critically think about what traits and actions are used to differentiate and villainize him and how these traits and actions take on an additional layer if you decide to have him be a man played by a woman. And again, I don't think it was malicious, just a slightly tone-deaf decision that can strike the wrong chords if one looks at the broader context of how Hatchetfield is usually cast and Starkid's less than stellar history of depicting genderqueerness or rather their lack thereof on stage.

I've refrained from ending this with a joke about how people should think about the implications, but sometimes that is the thing to do, unironically. Just because a character isn't an overtly transphobic joke like Umbridge doesn't mean they can't carry unintended harmful connotations, and it doesn't help being dismissive of people trying to point those out.

~~~

[qrtchlvr]

A Common Mischaracterization of Miles Quaritch & Why it's Wrong

The idea that he hates/dislikes his Na'vi body and what it means; identity crisis.

- This is not necessarily wrong in every facet, but it still holds a great deal of mischaracterization due to the idea's inability to nuance where the identity crisis actually is. Most opinions I've seen regarding Quaritch's stance on his new specie-transition have been that he dislikes/hates the fact that he's "Na'vi" now. This is an incorrect conclusion, albeit understandable why a person might think that way. I only say this with confidence because there is canon content within the "Avatar: A Visual Guide" book that explicitly states Quaritch's positive stance on his recombinant state. The text itself reads, "Unlike humans and machines, Recoms are not detected by Eywa as a threat due to their Na'vi DNA. This means that Recoms can walk freely through Pandora without triggering Eywa's immune response of dispatching animals to defend the moon. Going undetected by Eywa gives Quaritch the tactical advantage he's always wanted in the forest: using Na'vi-like stealth, he is able to establish his own hunting ground." I personally believe where the lines blur for people is how they remember human Quaritch. It's an astoundingly fair assumption that Quaritch as a person hates the Na'vi, and you'd be correct in that regard, considering his derogatory language toward them (Natives, Blue monkeys, etc.) But, that's where it's important to differentiate between the physicality of the Na'vi versus their culture. Quaritch is a naturally advantageous person, which is perfectly exemplified in the text above where it says, "Going undetected by Eywa gives Quaritch The tactical advantage he's always wanted in the forest: using Na'vi-like stealth, he is able to establish his own hunting ground." This shows that while he doesn't like what the Na'vi do, and their culture, he is completely and utterly willing to even the odds by physically adapting to Pandora. Even if some of the advantages were unknown at the time when proj. Pheonix (Recom program) came to be (Eywa being unable to determine the recombinants from natives, etc.), there were still a great deal of advantages on the table, all to do with having the hyper-adapted Na'vi physiology. Since we know Quaritch is highly persevering individual, it's genuinely no shock that he wouldn't have a problem with being blue and 9 ft. tall if it gave him the edge he needed to complete his mission. Part of this can be contributed to the fact that he is evidently not a vain person. Hell, one of the first scenes we see of him is him telling Jake that he could have rotated back to Earth and had his facial scars fixed nicely, but he chose not to. His reasoning has a little less to do with the point here, but for the sake of the record, he chalks it up to wanting to remind himself what lies in Pandora's "dangerous' forests every day. I may be regurgitating a little bit here, but it really does prove that above all else, his looks are definitely NOT the highest thing on his list of concerns. Each and every time, it's been his duty above all else.

- Miles Quaritch CONSENTED to the recombinant program. I feel like that part goes over people's heads a bit, because it wasn't explicitly stated. But, to clarify on behalf of the seeable cinema and dialogue, Quaritch absolutely had the choice to not go through with the program. His exact words, "In two hours, I fly a mission against the Na'vi's stronghold. The powers that be, thought it prudent that I do this backup just in case," appear to indicate that there was no force behind the matter. "The powers that be" is most definitely in reference to corporate, and "thought it prudent" gives the idea that they proposed the idea rather than enforced it. We all know Quaritch isn't a complacent person by any means, so it's hard to imagine they really forced him to do anything without an iota of retaliation from his behalf.

- That being said, it brings another interesting point. Parker Selfridge says, "So see this? This is all your memories and your personality. We're gonna send this back to Earth...where you're growing in a lab as we speak." Growing in a lab. As we speak. At the very precise moment of the explanation, Quaritch had essentially an Avatar already growing. Whether he died or not. The soul crystal was the backup, not the Avatar! Not to be dramatic, but that's a huge, HUGE indicator that Quaritch doesn't give a shit about being blue. Otherwise, what other option is there? Quaritch was also already confident that he wasn't going to die based on the fact that he says, "What you won't remember is my death because it hasn't happened yet, and it ain't gonna," so the only other reasonable assumption was that that man was gonna be blue (consensually) whether he died at the Battle of the Tree of Souls or not. (A little unimportant tangent note, but that notion also makes me wonder if eventually Quaritch would've made a permanent mental transition to his Na'vi once his human body got to be a too old, just because he was 51 when he died, and would've been 57/58 when his avatar arrived to Pandora for use. But, anyway.)

- His identity crisis provably lies within the Soul Drive, not his new body. But first, I implore you to think about how finely crafted this movie is made before I really get into anything. Scenes (especially ones containing Spider AKA basically any Quaritch scene) are meticulously crafted through a rigorous cycle of refilming, capturing, post-editing, and digital effects. James, as the director, personally shot the scenes himself as well. Anything put into the narrative of Avatar: The Way of Water was intentional. There is not even a possibility for even a "stormtrooper hitting his head" moment. With all of this being said, I want to say that we see absolutely ZERO scenes with Quaritch expressing an iota of contempt for himself for be genetically Na'vi. The only thing that comes slightly close is when he touches his tooth after waking up, and says "Well, ain't this a bitch," but the most logical explanation for his reaction isn't that he hates that he came back as Na'vi (again he literally SAID YES TO THE IDEA), but rather the realization that he died (and lost the battle.) Basically a "...godamnit" moment. Digressing to the main point, any scene with a supposed body identity crisis moment is more about him being a hater more than anything, like when he crushes his old skull. He's maaaaaad Jake Sully/Neytiri fuckin' got his ass after all that went down, and he probably feels like a failure. The contempt on his face for his failed actions is palpable in that scene. That being said, I would like to add another example of it, but there just isn't any. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in some way, but there isn't a single other scene of his where he explicitly acknowledges his physical differences. It just doesn't seem... Important. It's certainly not as important to him than killing Jake. His body is a means to an end at this point.

- He expresses more conflict about who he was and who he currently considers himself to be. When he speaks to Spider about himself, he refers to his former life in the third person, and acts as an entity seperate of Spider's "father." Saying things like "I'm not that man," and "But, I have enough of his memories to know that he wasn't always the best father." Now, I COULD potentially be tweakin', because Quaritch never says stuff like that again, and certainly doesn't act like he actually feels that way (Saying Jake personally betrayed him, not former Quaritch, etc.) He could have been manipulating Spider into taking his side by 1) disconnecting himself from the man his kid so clearly despises and 2) Portending as though he's different. Regardless, it still adds a layer of ambiguity about his true feelings that will definitely be roved over and explored in the upcoming films.

~

To conclude my yapping session, I want to express that I'm not attacking Headcanons. If this is something you want to personally believe because it's canon in your head, I'm not going to complain. I just wanted to yap because I've seen some people suggest before in the past that he probably hates his na'vi body, and I simply disagree. Thank yew for reading.

[heartgold]

Just curious how do you interpret Sayo’s hair color? I can never make up my mind on whether I think her hair is naturally dark or light. I’ve looked into this question before and I’ve seen some say that the different hair colors are all probably part of the fiction and that in reality everyone’s hair is likely black unless they are described otherwise in the text (Beatrice, Erika and Bernkastel) . I think this is a fair interpretation but some use this to dismiss the hair colors entirely as just a way for the character designs to be differentiated and stand out more. Again its all fair interpretation but it is a little boring to me to think that way because I still think there is analysis that can be made. It’s not like its all completely random. Ange and Battler’s hair shows their relationship. The parallels between Battler and Kinzo especially looking at the young Kinzo and Tohya sprites. etc.

yea it's understandable that there's much confusion about her hair color... considering how sayo explicitly makes beatrice blonde to match battler's stated preferences in women (this was before the beatrice portrait was put up and she incorporated it into beatrice's final design later) and implies that she doesn't match his description herself i think it makes the most sense for her hair to NOT be blonde. brown like shannon's makes the most sense to me. afaik kanon's hair was confirmed to be a wig, and sayo-as-beatrice is directly shown to be wearing a wig too.

(the console release kind of fucked this up by giving like, Fukcing Everyone blue eyes when colored eyes were supposed to be a witch/magic thing in the original... and one of the things she gives beatrice that she's implied not to have is blue eyes. but at least shannon and kanon's eyes being more of a grey-blue than straight up blue Still works with their ambiguous human/furniture, real/fictional status. and their thing with the color of the sea lol. i like the idea of sayo having dark brown eyes better, though)

speaking of symbolic hair color, that's something I only really apply to lion since it feels actually relevant in this case. I personally see lion's appearance as we see them in ep7 to be a representation of them being the anti-beatrice, since what we get to see of their fragment is explicitly stated to be "edited" and mashed together with other fragments, on top of the point of obfuscating the culprit's identity. i think if you were to look into lion's original fragment without narrative obfuscations they would probably look more like sayo (a fun thing about this is that they can pass for natsuhi and krauss's biological child with either hair color LOL)

the same goes for how young sayo is portrayed in the ep7 manga. the way she looks helps to differentiate her from shannon (who is shown as a separate character from her perspective). the ep7 stageplay is how sayo as clair narrativizes her path towards becoming a witch (whereas confessions is a vent work about her trauma and lacks most of the embellishment), so it tracks that she looks different in both. in the original we never see sayo since she's the pov and lens of the story. so when the manga had to adapt it to make it more visual, it makes sense that they came up with a symbolic appearance for her that both visually distinguishes from the shannon persona (it'd be odd to see big shannon and small shannon interacting...) and presents sayo herself as the child who became a witch (her appearance here looks like a young lion and a young beatrice at the same time, in the sense that she could have potentially become either possibility). later in the stageplay the blonde young sayo decides to become a witch, "erases herself from the world" and is shown as a director of a play sitting on a couch in an ambiguous space, crafting shannon's world and only showing up in her dreams as beatrice. this is a representation of sayo the human taking the backseat as she started to engage with the world Through her personas like a witch moving pieces that i REALLY like... this was when she started hiding her heart and changed shannon's role from a supporting character in her life to the protagonist to play her role. i love all the symbolism here and how much she uses theater imagery and the lens of storycrafting to make sense of her experiences... but yea i rambled a bit but the point is, it makes sense that ep7 manga sayo looks the way she does for symbolic reasons, and the same goes for lion, all without contradicting sayo having natural brown hair.

[cripplecharacters]

Hello!

I've been working on doing research for some of my physically disabled characters, and with regard to that, wondering what I should be focusing on so that I can maximize my efforts. Like I want to do my own research, but I'm not sure where to focus most of that energy. Do you have any lists of "questions you should have enough knowledge to answer if you're writing a character with x disability?" Like examples I can think of would be "what restrictions does x disability pose when real people with that disability are traversing the environment your character lives in, and how do they usually accomodate it?" or "what are several problematic tropes that real people with x disability don't appreciate, and why?"

Thank you so much!

Hello, thanks for your question!

It already sounds like you're on the right track with regards to your research, but off the top of my head here are some things I'd want an author to feel comfortable answering before writing a disabled character:

The character's disability/ies. Get as specific as possible–even if you don't explicitly identify it in the text, you as the author should know what your character's condition is or would be in the real world. You need to know what the disability is to understand how it affects the character's life. "Nebulous heart problem" doesn't really cut it when it comes to good representation. This is also important in order to know which particular tropes to avoid. If the character is multiply disabled, look into how those comorbidities might affect them in unique ways.

The character's medical treatment(s). Does the character have access to the right doctors and specialists to treat their condition? Do they take medication, and does it have side effects? Have they undergone surgeries and/or physical therapy? Have their experiences with the medical system (or equivalent, based on the setting) been positive or negative? When writing a modern setting, take particular care to consider how other axes of oppression, such as race and class, affect access to and experiences with medical care.

How long the character has been disabled. Is their disability congenital, or did it occur later in life? Was it the result of an injury or trauma? What kinds of memories and feelings does your character associate with the disability and/or the event that may have caused it? A newly disabled character is very different from a character who's been disabled for a long time/their entire life.

If the disability was acquired later in life, what did they gain and what did they lose when they became disabled? The chances of nothing changing in the character's life if they acquired their disability–especially as an established adult–are slim.

The symptoms of their disability. This sounds like an obvious one, but surprisingly often I see authors make assumptions about what a character would experience that are quite inconsistent with the experiences of people who actually have that disability. For example, not every traumatic brain injury will cause memory loss, but people often make that assumption. Not every time of chronic pain feels the same. You should be able to differentiate between popular myths about the disability you're portraying and the actual facts about said disability.

How the disability is affected by the character's environment and social context. You should have a pretty good idea of which factors the character will need to accommodate in the setting. This can include anything from which mobility aids they might use and in which situations, how their home or workspace has been modified to accommodate their disability, how they handle the climate or weather, how people react to seeing them on the street, etc.

How prevalent the disability is in the setting. Just like in real life, different visible disabilities will get different reactions from people, and this will vary a lot from place to place. Consider if this is a disability that is widely known and accommodated in the setting and which supports would be available for it.

The character's support system. This is both a social and practical question. If the character requires a caretaker, who is it and what is their relationship? If they don't, who do they go to when they need help with something related to their disability? Do they know anyone else who shares their disability, or have any connections to a disabled community?

I hope these offer a decent starting point in terms of directing research. There are likely some points I've missed, so I'll leave this post open for replies and comments from other disabled people who would like to offer suggestions.

Best of luck writing!

-Mod Faelan

[slugtranslation-hypmic]

Not entirely Hypmic related, but I did get curious after thinking about it for the Buster Bros. I know that Japanese people tend to refer to each other on a last-name first basis if they're not particularly close, but when speaking to siblings, how would this work? Like "Yamada-kun" for example, could apply to all 3 brothers.

Yeah, you could call them all Yamada-san. I feel like it wouldn't be super confusing in practice because it's difficult to think of a situation where you'd be at "Yamada-san" level with all three of them.

See, name honorifics are one of a number of ways the speaker indicates what they feel about the listener--emotional closeness/distance, respect/admiration, paternalistic warmth--but everyone around the globe adjusts their speech to indicate this too. Japanese explicitly codifies it into language, but even if you speak nothing but English, you can find those same concepts in your ordinary life.

Let's pretend you're 17 and one of Jirou's classmates. How would you refer to Jirou? Well, how do you (or did you, if you--the person reading this--are no longer a teen) talk to your classmates compared to teenage strangers? You probably feel more comfortable with them, so your conversation takes on a more relaxed, casual tone than with a total stranger. Maybe you share inside jokes, use slang, use more contractions. In Japanese, you can do all of those things and also say "Jirou-kun" or "Yamada-kun" to show that emotional closeness. Ichirou, then, is your clasmmate's older brother. You probably don't know him very well. People, especially young people, tend to look up to or admire those who are older than them. If you've ever had a cool older friend, friend's older sibling, or friend of a sibling, maybe you wanted them to think you were cool too. You wouldn't use the same inside jokes as you would with a classmate, and you'd probably (at least subconsciously) be a bit more deferential. So, one of the ways you would express that in Japanese is through "Yamada-san" or "Ichirou-san." Saburou, on the other hand, is your classmate's little sibling. Kids and teens don't tend to respect little siblings or younger kids all that much. Not like there's anything wrong with them--they're just young! They lack the same experience you do. They say stupid things because they are yet to be 17 and, consequently, paragons of maturity and knowledge. Duh. Your language choice reflects these subconscious judgements. You might start speaking in a slightly higher pitch or be otherwise a little more patronizing (like, "Oh, you're on the chess club at school? And the science bowl? Wow, that's so cool! Good for you!" *exchanges a Knowing Look w/ Jirou over Saburou's head*). In Japanese, you might also say "Saburou-kun." Let's try another scenario. Let's say you're an unrelated adult facing all three of the Buster Bros. Maybe you're with the orphanage? Either way, you're an adult facing three kids you don't know very well. You can respect them as individuals, but you're still likely to treat them a little differently than you would treat adults. You might use simpler language, or you might be a little jokey or friendly to try to put them at ease. In Japanese, you could also express that like "Ichirou-kun," "Jirou-kun," and "Saburou-kun." (If this is present day Ichirou and you think of him as an adult, he'd probably be "Yamada-san.") Worst comes to worst and you truly are in a situation where all three take "Yamada-san," I feel like it'd be fine to use "oniisan" and "otouto-san" (big and little brother) to differentiate. Or simply use their full names. "Yamada Ichirou-san," "Yamada Jirou-san," etc. I could see that being appropriate for very formal contexts. Sorry for the wall of text, but I feel like there's an aura of mystique around Japanese, especially when it comes to respectful language and honorifics, and I consider it important to not feed into that or the idea that there's something unique or endemic about the mindsets of people who use Japanese. We're all just people! And while it's insulting to erase differences in cultures and personal circumstances, it's likewise dehumanizing to pretend that our communication methods lock us in or out of basic human feelings and experiences. Languages provide lenses to approach the world, and some languages cast a focus on or obscure different elements than others. Still, that doesn't change who we fundamentally are inside, and I consider it crucial to keep this in mind whenever translating or discussing language across spacial and cultural borders. That's why I like to break concepts down to the underlying ideas instead of locking them in one language or another. Hopefully this helps! :)

[bayesic-bitch]

Honestly the thing I find kind of frightening about the recent wave of large language models is the degree to which they developed capabilities that we did not explicitly give them. Like more and more it seems like transformers are a truly universal architecture that can do almost any task you can give them.

Like okay, they can do a little bit of math and solve some simple logic puzzles. The thing that I find so so startling is that they get this and also the common sense reasoning necessary to solve them without there being specialized architectures for those things. There's been a ton of work on trying to plug machine learning algorithms into formal reasoning models and trying to learn them together. Neural Turing machines, differentiable neural computers, Markov logic networks, fuzzy logic, neurosymbolic languages like Scallop and Neuralogic. This is decades of work from half a dozen different angles. Turns out you don't need it. Just make the model bigger and it can do math.

What about vision? It's a field with a long history. hand engineered features like wavelets gave way to convolutional networks, but those are also being replaced by guess what? that's right transformers! You dont even really need to think about the structure of the problem, just feed it to a transformer and also feed it text, and the fact that it's jointly trained with language improves its performance.

What about planning in robotics? Again, field with 50+ years of research. Turns out GPT actually just solves this too with no robot- or planning-focused training at all. All you have to do is ask it to write a plan and it'll give you one, a lot more easily than we could with the existing frameworks we've spent 50 years developing.

This is why it's driving me nuts seeing all these posts dumping on alignment concerns by saying "oh but intelligence isn't just one thing, just because GPT is good at text generation doesn't mean it'll be good at all the other things we call intelligence". This is completely missing the point. Whether or not it's necessarily true, what we're rapidly finding is that the current generation of language models very much are able to solve a wide variety of tasks, even for things it wasn't specially trained for. I cannot emphasize enough that what's concerning about this is 1) nobody was trying to make a model that could specifically do math or reasoning or planning. There's no specialized math or planning part of the model. It just figured out how to do them. 2) The transformer architecture seems to be a fully general, or nearly fully general, tool for learning from almost any kind of data. The paper that introduced the model was called Attention is All You Need, and that's only proven to be more and more true over time. For many tasks, attention really is all you need. It really feels like we're getting a lot closer to truly general artificial intelligence.

Now, I do actually think there are some things separating our current knowledge from building something really generally intelligent, and several more that separate us from making super-human level intelligence (most notably, while you can probably get human level intelligence from imitating humans, I don't think you can get superhuman intelligence this way -- you need some way of reasoning about exploration and how to gather new out-of-distribution data). But by far the longest standing open problem in AI has not been "how to do reasoning" or "how to do math", but "how to encode common-sense reasoning into an AI". It's an old enough problem that philosophers have built careers talking about why it's so hard. And I cannot stress enough that this problem, long considered to be the holy grail of the field, is now very close to being solved, if it isn't solved already. GPT-3 gets 65% on Winograd schemas, and GPT-4 gets nearly 95%. Is anybody really betting against the idea that GPT-5 will get 99.8% or higher? It would not at all surprise me if a lot of the other problems after this, like enabling long chains of correct reasoning, ended up being easier than this one.

[fiveht]

I am once again going through Disarm and every time I find new little details I missed of characterizations like when Remus says his hand his bigger and, in rereading, we know he knows and Sirius never stops to wonder thinks it's just part of the game or doesn't think.

It is just ridiculously well done and subtle and the way Remus doesn't respond until after he knows it's Sirius and has got him saying 'Remus' and explicitly stated he sees Sirius as an equal. Just. Ugh.

And anyways I am just super normal about this and wanted you to know.

Yeah, there are a few hints dropped by Remus that Sirius doesn't pick up on, that one in particular just felt like part of the little roles they were playing. He's baby boy, he's small; Remus is daddy, he's big. It never would have occurred to him that Remus had actual knowledge of the relative sizes of their hands. Remus keeps those hints subtle, though, because he's not actually trying to tell Sirius he knows.

The thing is, Remus is acutely aware of the power differential inherent in their relationship, right from the start. Even when he's not sure of Sirius' intentions and has no real idea of where they're going, he knows he has to tread carefully. Because, as it's been established, Sirius is the personification of Remus' type, so there's some pretty significant attraction there, even before Sirius starts texting him, because Sirius is flirty and brazen and fucking beautiful. Remus just never would have done anything about it if Sirius hadn't made the first hundred or so moves.

So Remus knows this is a delicate situation, to say the least, and it's important to him that Sirius recognises that he has agency here. It's why Remus wouldn't pull the trigger on the reveal, he wanted Sirius to do it. He wanted Sirius to feel safe and comfortable enough to do it.

(That was a other hint -- Daddy: I want you to be comfortable enough to tell me who you are, because I don't think I should make that decision for you -- Remus always could have made that decision, he just didn't want to take the control away from Sirius.)

All of this is magnified by how possessive Remus feels over Sirius, because that part seriously blindsided him. He's never felt like this -- most of his relationships in the past have been casual, open arrangements, because he's never felt any particular desire to keep a partner all to himself. And as much as Sirius obviously likes it, Remus still harbours some guilt about the sheer overwhelming force of his desire to never let Sirius out of his sight ever again. So he's extra careful to make sure Sirius knows he has an equal say in everything they do. Explicit and very enthusiastic consent, that's Remus' kink.

I'm honestly a little mindblown that people are actually rereading my fic (and like, thinking about it?!), so thank you for that, and for another opportunity to ramble about them. I did this instead of going to the gym this afternoon 👌

[woodswolf]

anyway im going to make some minor changes to existing chapters of DLD. im going to make a point to differentiate between the Hocotate and Hokotate pronunciations in-text since that's actually kinda really important and informs a lot about where olimar and various characters come from.

i don't think ive said this before anywhere (at least outside of DMs with my partner/ideas ducky), but the TL;DR is that both the "american" and japanese pronunciations of Hocotate/Hokotate are kind of an important background detail that inform how i see the pikmin universe Working in DLD. Hocotate ("american" pronunciation, "hawk-a-tate", rhymes with Freight) is the "standard" pronunciation across the galaxy while Hokotate (japanese pronunciation, "hoh-koh-tah-tay") is how Hokotate natives would refer to it. and this like, really really informs a lot of characterizations.

the ship for instance always pronounces it as Hocotate because it literally wouldn't know any better and nobody's ever said otherwise because it works well enough for an interplanetary business setting.

olimar also pronounces it as Hocotate unless he's specifically in a situation where everyone involved would Know to pronounce it Hokotate. however, he Thinks of it as Hokotate except in the context of Hocotate Freight.

the president is obviously from Hokotate but intentionally always pronounces it Hocotate and obviously named his company Hocotate Freight.

lamella would always pronounce it Hokotate which might make some characters (i.e. basically anyone who isn't from Hokotate) kinda 🤨 at her.

etc. like these are 4 very different outlooks that imply a lot of very different things about each of the characters.

also to be clear, Hocotatian is the "standard galactic" name for people from Hocotate. if asked by anyone Familiar With The Hokotate Distinction, though, they'd call themselves Hokotateno. but some people (such as olimar, aka Mister Nuance) would naturally have a conditional answer depending on who was asking and why.

in case anyone can't tell from the tone of this post, a lot of the reasons for this relate to some of the background lore of this universe that ive alluded to both in-text and in comment replies. i don't think it's ever going to come up explicitly in-text (so far it's mostly just been alluded to in things such as Hokotate's socioeconomics as olimar ranted about in chapter 2), but in DLD Hokotate has a history of Being Colonized and exploited for resources which can pretty clearly reframe a lot of those attitudes mentioned above if you didn't get the vibe already. it just hugely informs characterization so i think it's a change that's important to make sooner than later (even if it's mostly going to be relevant in much later entries once we start getting people Not From Hokotate involved in a major way, e.g. the Koppaites).

also blah blah blah everyone is technically speaking different languages but something something universal translators are standard features or something. i can have my really nuanced worldbuilding AND handwave things. if you're going to get mad at me about handwaving stuff though id like to introduce you to a cool game called Pikmin 4 which definitely does not handwave 90% of its plot and is 100% internally consistent all the time.

anyway ill probably make these changes tomorrow night or something. all im really gonna do is change 13 instances of spelling (the other 9 are going to remain unchanged as either part of "Hocotate Freight" or one instance in dialogue) but i can't be bothered tonight lol. i also might rewrite this post to actually use sentence case etc. since it'll be an important reference post to link in the chapter 1 author's note after making this change but i just expanded this from a discord message lmao

[teddywesworl]

While you're being all DA on main, please let me share the info that I found so interesting and that I just know will not be examined ever.

Given what we now know is the source of lyrium, isn't it reasonable to suppose all magic is inherently blood magic now? Or, if we differentiate between a mage's natural mana pool, then the use of lyrium potion to replenish is arguably blood magic adjacent at the very least.

These questions have compelled me for years, but given the gutting of the DA writing staff at BioWare, I do not expect to ever get even a meaningful lore/codex entry.

I can answer this now!!! Sorry, I was waiting for a friend to finish all the DAI dlc before I started posting opinions with crazy spoilers

I don't think ALL magic is blood magic, because 1. the source of most magic in Thedas is the Fade, which seems to interact with lyrium in ways we don't fully understand (but which probably prompted the original conflict between the Evanuris and the Titans? Maybe???? all the references to "it started with a war" and the statues of Mythal in the lyrium mine the Qunari were digging up etc. etc. got me thinkin) and 2. Solas actually specifically claims that performing blood magic weakens the caster's connection to the Fade, which is why he personally does not do it. So blood magic (as in all the things explicitly called blood magic in-universe, involving the sacrifice of blood for power) is a third thing, distinct from the magic inherent to the Fade and the magic in lyrium.

Or I guess it's possible that the logic of using lyrium functions the same as using blood to power a spell? But I'll let the text provide those answers as it will, because I have a lot more faith that the games will explore their own lore questions than that they will do Perfect Character Development or deep analysis of structural power.

HOWEVER,

I think it's super fuckin funny that two fundamental tools employed by the Templar Order--lyrium, of course, but also fucking PHYLACTERIES--are two distinct forms of magic relying on two distinct forms of blood. I'm bullying every Templar about it in my mind as we speak.

[jumpscaregoose]

lyserg diethel in hell is neat basically

lyserg's always had my favourite arc out of the main five guys and I wanna talk about it but mostly the culmination of that arc when he goes to hell. because it is neat and I get to sound ridiculous

lyserg is different from the other main characters in that instead of following a more linear character progression he hits absolute rock bottom and winds up only a few steps ahead of his introduction by the end of the manga. this fucking slaps and I love it.

the crux of his character is similar to the concept of aristotelian hamartia, or a downfall based on a morally neutral fatal flaw (the most pretentious series of words I've ever written). lyserg's parents are killed by hao, he wants revenge, he winds up in the echo chamber of the x laws for a while and spirals. the way lyserg differentiates from a class tragedy is in that he doesn't crash and burn but instead quietly returns to around where he started (but not exactly. like 4 steps ahead).

unlike the other main guys, lyserg doesn't get a big bombastic culmination of his arc (well he does, but considering the rest of them all went to hell at the same time I don't think it counts). his is a lot more understated. and I like that because I'm a loser who likes going over this manga with a fine toothed comb.

for a bit of context as to where lyserg is as a character before this scene we're busting out these scans I have again

^ this scene is about as fucked up as he gets. for most of the second half of the manga the angst is more subdued ^

at his lowest point, lyserg's #1 priority was his revenge on hao. he was willing to do a significant amount of murder and other fucked up shit for this goal. the niles match is this mentality crystallized.

when he's not being put in situations where he can kill people to further his revenge, lyserg is more... quietly depressed. just sitting in the corner all 😔. he is There

and then we get the mastema hell scene (what do you even call it). the character's individual hells are clearly meant to demonstrate traumas/important stuff in relation to the character (the tao mansion, a flooded forest, mount osorezan, and a dante's inferno reference I think?). lyserg's is in london. the area around big ben specifcally. the last moments of happiness he had before his parents' deaths

and actually the big ben thing was a lie. he spawns in next to this building

I'm assuming it's meant to be a church but given how busted it is it could be something else. church is my first guess based on the christian imagery of the x laws as a group. if we take this building as a church meant to represent the x laws, it's also of note that it's broken, like the current state of the group with almost all its members dead

out of all five hells, we only see two significant demons. the first is oh-oni in yoh's, clearly calling back to the osorezan arc. the second is mastema in lyserg's. the demon being named mastema is significant because, at least according to my googling, the name mastema means hatred in hebrew. it's also explicitly stated as a symbol of hatred in the text

my absolute favourite part of this scene is this part though

(my absolute favourite part got bodied by my phone scan rip)

ALSO if this RANDOM BRITTANIA FACTOID is true MISSED OPPORTUNITY FROM TAKEI

six wings for fire and you give the fire guy four. ok. kind of hope this isn't true so we didn't lose anything in the divorce

back to the actual scene, I think the angel form is meant to represent the justice of the x laws as a crutch for actual personal growth. it isn't possible for lyserg to defeat his hatred with the holier-than-thou ideology he's been living with, so he nearly gets crushed

the rest of the scene is significantly less interesting but the cliffsnotes version is that Cool Character Development is implied but happens mostly offscreen in a Takei Moment. read it for yourself if you want the details there because I don't wanna write about them

this next pages makes me feral though

mastema dolkeem. flames of hatred. love it so much. roses are red violets are blue mastema dolkeem has nothing to do with you. yeeessss my boy work on overcoming your need for revenge and grow as a person yesssss

obnoxiously long lyserg rant over thanks for coming

[maladaptedreader-writes]

Mal's ramblings/sources for TGOE Ch 1

The quote at the top from (Pseudo-)Apollodorus 3.7.1, translated by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A. can be found on the Tufts website, which is where I find most all my Greek/Roman texts. The website explicitly says Apollodorus, which is why I labeled it as such.

The Theoi Project has a lovely rundown on our titular Eleos, which is where I found the quote in the first place. (The Tufts translation had less parenthesis. Ironic that I put that in parenthesis?)

A supplicants branch sounds kind of obvious, but, like, what kinda branch? Well, I found this fancy PDF from something called "The Nature of the Act of Supplication" that specifies it's an olive branch, and now I feel a little silly for not coming to that obvious conclusion on my own.

Mycenaean Greek vs. Achaean Doric Greek I got from Wikipedia. Technically Achaean Greek is shorthand for Mycenaean Greek, but that seems really easy to mix up. And if I use "Mycenaean" if emphasizes the regional players in a way that Achaean doesn't (at least to me).

Can't remember where I read the thing about ancient Greek writers being able to muddle their way through a newspaper, but I've seen similar sentiments on other sites, so I'm just going to assume it's a thing people seem to think in academia in general.

We know thermopolium were a thing around 79 CE, and kapeleion in 400 BCE, but what about, like, 2700-1500 BCE? Were eateries a thing in bronze age Greece? While this lovely paper talks about food and its relation to class (to put it simply). Here's a quote from early in the paper: "...rural population of Greece used scarce ingredients and culinary elaboration to differentiate between daily meals within the household and commensality on ‘special’ occasions involving hospitality to ‘outsiders.’" The paper has nothing to do with eateries. But I'm looking at this quote and thinking a lot about Xenia and the stories and just how they're told and what they do and don't say. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But, for now, we're gonna go with "eateries weren't a thing in bronze age Greece."

Oral stories are not generally considered fictional stories. Maybe they're cultural lessons, but it's important to remember that they're histories first and foremost. With Greek stories (among many others I'm sure), they were retold in ways that would relate to the listener. No one expected Jimmy down the block actually fought in that battle multiple city-states over, but it's more fun to hear about Jimmy than some rando. (Seriously, this paper talks about oral myths as memes, and it's super fascinating.) I'm personally on the side of (some) oral stories being like Klingon stories. Exaggeration is just part of the game.

I can't remember where I found the thing I did about possessives and Greek names, so I now refer to this debate about it on Stack Exchange as evidence of "rules? what rules?"

Oh wait! I found it. It has to do with syllables. Now, if I don't go back and fix all the things, I'll annoy me. (Note to self: Make offerings to the god of Ctrl+H)

I think it was FlaviaFulvia who pointed out that only Achilles and Helen use "I" in the Iliad. I want to read more discourse on that.

[watchfuldeer]

I was so happy when I read your tomgreg queerbaiting post. So many people say it's 'queerbaiting' every time their ship doesn't become canon and it drives me crazy. Just because something isn't explicitly shown on screen doesn't mean it's queerbaiting; actual queerbaiting is way more layered.

tbh queerbaiting as a term is very nebulous, to the point of being meaningless. almost nothing meets the proposed definition of queerbaiting, and even the few examples that kind of do if you squint can usually be explained better by other factors (e.g. it's legitimate coding and subtext, or it's censorship, queerphobia, artistic differences, poor storytelling and so on). fandom culture at large seems to have difficulty in differentiating between all of those things and so uses one word as a catchall for when anything happens they didn't like or expect.

approaching popular media that contains queer themes like there are only ever two outcomes - Representation or Queerbait - means you're always in a state of bargaining about something you can't possibly control the outcome of. as funkadelic once said, free your mind and your ass will follow.

with tom and greg in particular, i would just say have some confidence in your own interpretation of succession as a text, yknow? it's a pretty difficult show to predict in terms of actual plot, but it has such strong thematic cohesion that i don't think there's even an outside chance that they won't be a central concern next season.