#it's criticism of the in-universe character

[arcaneconfessions]

People act like gender has nothing to do with it, but it's well-established that female characters fall faster and harder in favor with fandom when they make mistakes, while fans will bend over backwards to excuse men (or just say they love them toxic).

If Caitvi had been two dudes and one of them became an outright dictator, people would be on their knees calling him daddy and praising him in the end, as if him reconciling with his boyfriend and battling Ambessa is all the redemption he needs. If Mel had been a man, people would be obsessed with this hot councilor who had been exiled for being too merciful, who starts from a place of manipulation but lets down his walls and falls for the scientist he's hooking up with.

Sometimes it feels like the most universally beloved female characters in this show are the ones with too few lines for fans to crucify them for the things they say/do. It's also the most femme central characters (Cait, Mel) that get the brunt of the criticism. They're not perfect, but they're certainly treated with more vitriol for their mistakes than men would be (not to mention all the mistakes people extrapolate and IMAGINE they've done with no canonical evidence).

Shippers love to claim that Jayce and Viktor literally don't care about anyone else but each other, that they would doom/destroy the world to be together, that Viktor only turned his followers into a hive mind army cuz he was a heartbroken and confused little blorbo, and somehow that's okay?? That makes them likeable or their story morally superior to Caitvi HOW??? It's cuz they're two good looking men, and when hot men do bad things we just let them off the same leash that we use to hang women in fandom.

.

[wisegirl25]

People talking about “how can you criticize Caitvi for being toxic when timebomb literally tried to kill each other” PISS ME OFF so bad

Jinx and Ekko were on OPPOSITE SIDES OF A WAR

No shit they’re trying to fucking kill each other

Nothing romantic happened until well after a lot of growth for both characters (and even then it was in an ALTERNATE UNIVERSE)

Timebomb had history together—they were childhood best friends

Meanwhile Caitlyn HIT VI even though they’re on the same side (unprompted, they were arguing and not in a physical fight, that’s called abuse), asked her to become an enforcer KNOWING her trauma, and never apologized for a single thing she did

And all of this within at the very most a few months of knowing one another

It’s almost like—and hear me out—Vi fucking trauma bonded to the first person to show her kindness after being beaten and abused in a prison cell for 7 years

The difference between the ships is that for one, they BOTH tried to kill each other, it was even. For the other, it’s just one sided. Caitlyn in no way deserves Vi and I’m tired of acting like it’s such an amazing ship just cause it’s wlw

As a wlw myself, we deserved better representation than this half assed attempt at romance, season 1 caitvi was absolutely amazing, season 2 ruined it

[ilylillies]

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

James Joyce

Photograph of Joyce in profile

Joyce in Zurich c. 1918

Born

2 February 1882

Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland

Died

13 January 1941 (aged 58)

Zurich, Switzerland

Occupation

Novelistpoet

Notable works

Dubliners (1914)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

Ulysses (1922)

Finnegans Wake (1939)

Spouse

Nora Barnacle ​(m. 1931)​

Children

Georgio, Lucia

Joyce was born in Dublin into a middle-class family. He attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, then, briefly, the Christian Brothers–run O'Connell School. Despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's unpredictable finances, he excelled at the Jesuit Belvedere College and graduated from University College Dublin in 1902. In 1904, he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, and they moved to mainland Europe. He briefly worked in Pola and then moved to Trieste in Austria-Hungary, working as an English instructor. Except for an eight-month stay in Rome working as a correspondence clerk and three visits to Dublin, Joyce lived there until 1915. In Trieste, he published his book of poems Chamber Music and his short story collection Dubliners, and began serially publishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the English magazine The Egoist. During most of World War I, Joyce lived in Zurich, Switzerland, and worked on Ulysses. After the war, he briefly returned to Trieste and in 1920 moved to Paris, which was his primary residence until 1940.

Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922, yet its publication in the United Kingdom and the United States was prohibited because of its perceived obscenity. Copies were smuggled into both countries and pirated versions were printed up until the mid-1930s when publication became legal. Joyce started his next major work, Finnegans Wake, in 1923, publishing it sixteen years later in 1939. Between these years, Joyce travelled widely. He and Nora were married in a civil ceremony in London in 1931. He made several trips to Switzerland, frequently seeking treatment for his increasingly severe eye problems and psychological help for his daughter, Lucia. When France was occupied by Germany during World War II, Joyce moved back to Zurich in 1940. He died there in 1941 after surgery for a perforated ulcer at age 58.

Ulysses frequently ranks high in lists of great books, and academic literature analysing his work is extensive and ongoing. Many writers, film-makers, and other artists have been influenced by his stylistic innovations, such as his meticulous attention to detail, use of interior monologue, wordplay, and the radical transformation of traditional plot and character development. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, his fictional universe centres on Dublin and is largely populated by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there. Ulysses is set in the streets and alleyways of the city. Joyce is quoted as saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."[1]

Early life

University years

Post-university years in Dublin

1904–1906: Zurich, Pola and Trieste

1906–1915: Rome, Trieste, and sojourns to Dublin

1915–1920: Zurich and Trieste

1920–1941: Paris and Zurich

Death

Political views

Religious views

Major works

Legacy

Bibliography

Notes

References

Sources

External links

Last edited 20 minutes ago by BeePositive

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Fictional protagonist of James Joyce's novel Ulysses

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1914 short story collection by James Joyce

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[ivyblossom]

Lessons in Story: Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is not an element of story, and yet here we are.

I'm aware that AI is bad for the environment. So's tumblr. That's all true. I'm also aware that AI scrapes copyrighted material like google does. I'm aware of how it steals art for its knowledge base without compensating artists and uses is as a model and replacement for skills. That's bad. I'm not going to address any of that here.

I have been observing how people talk about using AI in various parts of their writing process at the same time as I'm been trying to understand my own process and the obstacles I'm facing, and these two topics have oddly collided.

As I've said previously, my background is in some kind of woo woo where narrative comes out in one whole piece. So the fact that writing is many different and iterative pieces is something I had to figure out in my own bizarre way, but at the moment I now understand the basic process to be in these four general stages:

dreaming/planning (coming up with characters, ideas, goals, worlds, etc.)

outlining (not to say that this isn't many sub-stages, all of these steps are big catagories)

writing (actually putting words into sentences so your story exists)

Editing (revising, restructuring, polishing, etc.)

Are there more steps that I'm not accounting for? Those are the stages as I understand them. You can move back and forth through these stages throughout the process, so it's not necessarily linear, though it could be. For me, the key has been embracing the fact these are all radically different activities that require a completely different headspace, different skills, sometimes different tools, and a different perspective on narrative. That has been freeing revelation, because I was trying to do most of it at the same time.

But here's what else I've learned:

Dreaming/planning: this is a zero consistency space when it comes to how close or how far away you are from your protagonist. Are you feeling what they feel, or are you 30,000 feet up looking at the task they have in front of them and the path they're going to take? Or are you somewhere in between? Kind of all of the above at different points.

Outlining: in my experience, this can and should include emotional through lines, but outlining usually focuses on the 30,000 foot view. I have personally never written an outline that didn't miss critical details because of the 30,000 foot gap between me and the protagonist when I outline.

Writing: this seems like the very closest and most intimate you get with your story and your protagonist, right? This is where you live through it with them in extreme detail. There is no distance between you and them, you have to use a telescope to see 30,000 feet up. I find I have to revise my outline in small ways because I often underestimate or overestimate what something's going to feel like on the ground. This is like a micro-discovery phase: not plot discovery, emotional and intimate detail discovery.

Editing: I'm not an expert at this, but so far I feel like it goes back to being extremely inconsistent. It's either very close in a different way, or 30,000 feet up, or various in-between levels, depending on the type of editing or revision. And sometimes it's none of those, it's completely outside looking at how many times you use the word "feel" or whether your verbs and nouns agree.

Right. So people try to insert AI to do the graft for one or more of these stages.

AI in stage 1: I've seen some folks talk about using AI to get ideas for stories. I don't understand that, ideas are the easiest part of this process, as far as I can tell. Life's a rich pageant, maybe that's not universally true. Now, having AI to help you refine an idea, I can see that. Especially if you ask it to point out tropes and cliches as you go. Is that bad? Is that cheating? I dunno.

AI in stage 2: I've never seen anyone say they do this. If you have an amazing and complete story idea and you want to shaped into a 3 or 5 act structure, or a hero's journey, etc. I'm sure AI could do that, but that's mainly just typing. That's like AI as workbook. Is that cheating? I dunno. Does an AI generated outline help you? Or do you just skip the thinking that would have created the details of your story? Hard to say.

AI in stage 3: The wildest version of using AI in the creation of fiction, and there are whole subreddits for it. This is the people who are constructing novels scene by scene by telling AI to write it for them to their specifications and then "heavily editing" the result. So they are ostensibly doing stage 1, 2, and 4 themselves, and are outsourcing stage 3, the hard graft. Though I'd be very surprised if they aren't also using AI for stage 4, but let's assume they aren't.

Stage 3 is the only part of writing process that is protected by copyright, so it's a weird one to outsource. It's also the stage, in my experience, where you do micro-discovery, the in-the-moment scene details and the actual, living emotional experience of your story that you can't completely capture in outline. So if you just animate your outline without living through the story with your characters, it's always going to feel emotionally 30,000 feet in the air, I think. Right? If you feed AI an outline, that's what you'd get. i think doing this is just avoiding doing the most intimate and immediate discovery process of creating a story, and I don't think that serves the story or the writer (or "writer").

I'm intrigued that people think you can do this and it makes sense. You'd have to believe that the writing process is simply describing the contents of your outline, but I don't think that's true. It's like trying to get from the twelfth floor to the first floor by skipping the stairs, the elevator or the escalator and just leaping into the air assuming you'll land just fine because those intermediary systems are just time-wasters anyway.

I've read some arguments that using AI for stage 3 is something people with disabilities need to get their stories out into the world. As a neurodivergent person, I think that's short-sighted and is a disservice to those stories. I'm pretty sure it's just skipping the work of living through the emotional through line of the story and just not making all the little decisions and constructing the tiny details that go into the telling of a story. That's a heck of a missing staircase. Outlines aren't stories. Skipping the writing part means you're missing 2/3rds of the discovery, and therefore 2/3rds of the richness and depth of the story. How does that serve disabled voices? I don't buy it.

AI in stage 4: the one that looks innocuous but is actually dangerous. Dumping your work into AI and having it fix everything for you. This is a bad idea. Dump your work in there if you want to, but have it tell you what it's finding that needs adjustment so you can make decisions about it yourself. Copying and pasting out of an AI engine means you aren't making decisions about it, you're deferring decisions to a machine. That's the fastest way possible to erase your own voice. I can see getting it to flag things it has questions about, but taking AI advice on your writing is way too trusting.

I think this is especially dangerous for writers who don't have confidence in their own voice. AI's voice may seem like a better chose to them, and that's really sad.

I have more to say about AI, but this is more than enough for now.

[rdng1230]

Random Thoughts about the Ricken book Pt. 1

“I am the youngest son of renowned performance artists Bob and Grace Hale, known collectively as HumpDumpster, though I have sought for decades to distinguish myself from their intellectual shadow.” Starting off strong here with a healthy dose of wtf. But I do think it makes so much more sense why Ricken is the way that he is.

“I am a friend to birds, the earth, the arts, the elderly, the destitute, and the upset.” I can't remember the exact quote but this is phrased exactly the same as one of Ms. Casey's "Your outtie is _____" statements. Which could mean nothing....

“Statistically, your reaction almost certainly fell into one of five categories, and figuring out which one is deeply instructive in determining your You.” It's giving the "Just group off the numbers and put them in the bin" although there are four bins not five.

So we now know the peanuts exist in universe. and not sure if "Caesar Augustus invented democracy" is a serious timeline change or Ricken being stupid.

“my conception and birth took place in a small theatre behind a defunct perfumery in Western Oregon, as part of a nine-month performance art piece originated by my parents titled “Smells Like Afterbirth, F**ker.” woooooboy. Ok so we know that Oregon exists in this timeline, or is Western Oregon the state??? We know that our characters live in a state abbreviated as PE, and the lumon video stated more countries than there are.

“Though I cannot remember my birth performance, the knowledge of it has always brought me great joy. Knowing that a version of me, even one I don’t recall, brought meaning and profundity to so auspicious a coterie of persons, infused into my young life a deep sense of purpose.” Again, it is now very easy to figure out why the innies latched onto this so hard.

“HumpDumpster moved on to new pieces, including 1992’s critically lauded “Cheers, F**kers,” in which they held a Boston bar at actual gunpoint for 36 hours, leading to a quasi-substantive prison term. This and other endeavors led to long stretches where I was alone, and it was in these silent periods that a grim and intrusive resentment — of my parents, my lineage, and even myself — began to take hold.” I wanna know who actually wrote this. Was it a writers room thing? was it a group effort? But yeah again, explaining why Ricken is the way that he is.

It actually frightens me that Koko the signing Gorilla exists in this universe. If Lumon lays one manicured finger on her I will throw hands.

“I put my head very near the wig and noticed that it emitted a dull hum. Perhaps the dear lady had also lost a hearing aid, which had become caught in the wig and was now fritzing in the dew. It was at this moment that I felt my wife place a guiding hand upon my back. “Okay Ricken, honey, that’s a beehive,” she whispered affectionately. Almost sensually.” I audibly cackled holy shit. I can hear this in Devon's voice so clearly, she has suffered more than Jesus. Leave your husband babe, I promise I'll treat you right.

“In my defense, I’d never seen a non-industrial beehive before. I’d interned in a honey plant as a young scholar, but wild bees were as foreign to me as the lush hills of Belgium. I couldn’t help but laugh at the misshapen nest, so divorced from the perfectly constructed factory hives I’d come to know in my youth.” Goddamn, Lumon out here gettin' the bees too.

I delighted in how they darted hither and thither, thoroughly convinced of the dire importance of their work. How like human beings they are, I thought. It was only upon later reflection that I realized this observation was not merely hilarious, but devastatingly profound.” Local man discovers the concept of empathy, more at 11.

Wow, Gemma really was the only person nice to this guy huh? :(

Sister Act also exists....

ok PA exists as well

“I myself ascribe to no defined religion, though certain experiences endow me with a potent sense of the divine: Holding my wife’s hand as we fall asleep.” WHICH IS WHY YOU BETTER TREAT HER RIGHT OR I WILL

And that brings us to the beginning of chapter 4. I need a drink.

[il3x]

(spoilers for reboot s2, but not the endgame!)

thinking about the reboot cloning plot again and you know I love a clone plot, but the fact that This Specific clone plot is presented as a neutral to positive thing kinda rubs me the wrong way. I think there should be more exploration of how fucked up it was.

Like... Seb decides, without consulting most of his teammates, that the best-slash-only way for Pr0 to escape his pursuers is to die. He does not ask Pr0 about this plan, he does not tell Pr0 about this plan. He just straight up Murders Him. That's already a pretty big violation, and it's done to a character whose arc is about escaping control and abuse.

THEN, when Pr0's cloned, Seb just... decides, again, Without Any Input, that what would be best for Pr0 is to have his memories edited to process/heal his trauma. Better than just deleting it entirely, I guess, but it's kinda iffy that 1. in rebootworld there is apparently A Singular Point Of Healing after which trauma doesn't bother you any more and 2. you can get to that point precisely via invasive surgery/genetic reprogramming adn. 3. this is a kind and good thing to do to (to!!! he's not doing it FOR Pr0! pr0's fucking dead! Seb killed him!!) your friend who Has Been Controlled Posessed And Moulded For Most Of His Life. not to mention that Seb, iirc, specifically words it as like. hey can you make him more useful to us. Kinda fucked up innit

also they straight up inject 4 years of simulated military service into pr0's mind and like That's also kinda fucked up eh. What if that also gives him trauma. What if pr0 was anti-war and would never have wanted those memories and the resulting alterations to his personality. He might've been, man, we don't know. because again Sebastian Killed Him.

anyways pr0 is explicitly a new person (without any of those pesky coping mechanisms that annoyed his teammates, yippee!! /sarcastic) now, and again. like. this Could Have Been Good. if it was treated as "yo that was kinda fucked up". but no. Peter/clone-Pr0 is totally chill with it. Even Xiang, who explicitly believes that peter/clone-pr0 is a separate person and original pr0 is dead, is totally chill with it. She's still dating Seb. Y'know. The guy who murdered your friend/apprentice in front of you.

And for some more fun (worrying) context, Seb is, at this point, Actively Preparing his plan for global eugenics to... forcibly sterilise all mean people, I guess?? I don't actually recall the details. But he is all too happy about making unilateral decisions on who deserves to live.

(His global eugenics plan which he would've gone through with if his gf hadn't talked him out of it, to be clear! His gf Xiang who is disabled and presumably Asian, and therefore probably has a vested interest in Not Doing Eugenics, and this still doesn't impact her opinion of Seb very much. Xiang deserved better, I'm sorry. I love everything about her except her taste in men.)

Oh, and for Further Context, the guy who offers to adjust Pr0's mind and actually makes the adjustments (and takes it upon himself to age Pr0 up four years physically) legally owns Pr0. Just in case you're wondering if it's really that fucked up to make non-consensual mind and body modifications to a human trafficking survivor whose previous non consensual body modifications were explicitly done by his captors as a form of abuse. Y'know.

Oh, fuck, and now I'm realising that said previous modifications (cybernetics, experimental drugs, etc - they're mentioned in ep1) were for the purpose of making him a better weapon. And in-universe, the necessity of giving Jazza's character some more combat levels comes through as Seb going "hey, dad, could you make him a better weapon". clears throat. Fucked Up innit.)

AND the only team member Seb consults about killing and rebooting Pr0 in the first place is Incongruent, iirc, who is also the only other main character with a "replace all humans with a better race [robots]" plan. Also worth noting that when Incongruent, a member of an oppressed class directly reacting to his oppression, wants to replace all humans, it's kinda fucked up and part of the dystopia and the other characters don't like it very much and Incongruent changes his mind of his own accord, but when Seb and his mom, members of the ruling class, want to replace humanity, it's hand-waved as an "oh well" dropped plot thread despite that having Even More potential to be a load-bearing piece of worldbuilding w/r/t "this is a fucked up dystopia".

I do get why this happened on a meta level - Jazza needed to reboot (heh) his character build. And in-universe, it kinda works, it has some fun parts. In isolation I really like how chill Peter is about being a clone. Icon behaviour. I also get that Seb is reacting to his own horrific trauma. But just. Y'know. I didn't like Seb in this arc very much, and I wish the narrative had acknowledged that more.

[valnorok]

im really obsessed with dc right now and @sreppub's selkie drawings tingled my brain because seals r just so :3

i also ran with the idea of damian being a polar bear bc i just think its neat. once hes an adult he gonn be a UNIT but hes just a lil baby man rn

inspirations below the cut thank u pinterest

[evilroachindustrial]

I'm sorry but like, the armies of Vasselheim are entirely in the right in immediately trying to stop the Bells Hells from reaching Exandria because from their perspective, these assholes are about to do the one thing this entire military operation was created to prevent: releasing the God-Eater.

The party expressly choosen by all the leaders of the world to save the day and stop Ludinus Da'leth's plan of releasing the God-Eater have instead decided to go entirely off book and release the God-Eater.

Literally every terrified and threatening reaction the party recieves from Vasselheim, Vox Machina, the Air Ashari, the Kryn, all the people they called their allies going into this is entirely justified because the Bells Hells have proven that they cannot be trusted at their word.

[raiiny-bay]

Love, Dhes

Parker,

It's unfair how time with you feels so short. How the last 10 years have felt like no time at all. I like to think there are other versions of us out there, somewhere. Maybe in another timeline, another universe. I like to think we find each other no matter where we are or what we're doing. That we're together and happy and I get to love you in a dozen different lifetimes. That's what I hope, anyway. And I hope when this lifetime ends, we get to start over and do it all again. Because once just isn't enough. Not for me. Not with you.

I hope the next 10 years pass slower.

Love, Dhes

[tshortik]

The traitor duo absolutely nobody has ever asked for | og meme

[soath]

Ashton “if this was a decentralized anarchist godkilling endeavor i might be in favor of it but you guys have an org chart. and i hate the person on top of it. so fuck you” Greymoore-of-the-Hishari, I’d say you’re a gem but everyone already knows that.

[taashyvashedan]

DAV is about trauma, bonds, and the importance of found family. It's not about Rook having a harem.

If you're unable to see adults work through their issues like people with emotional maturity beyond what a teenager would have (don't you even start if you're gonna throw shade at Taash) and have that make sense to you-- get therapy.

That's not an insult. Like, therapy helps you navigate your own emotions. How to support other people's emotions. How to see value in your beliefs even if they don't quite make sense to you. Even if you've been hurt. It's about everyone bringing uniqueness and value to a team through only what THEY can offer.

It's okay to have phobias. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to see a different future than what you thought was set out for you. It's okay to claim a new identity for yourself. To fight for family and subsequently let them go even when you don't want to. To accept familial trauma and move to change it. To let yourself be vulnerable and accept love, even if you're scared of losing it.

Get the fuck over book club and realize that is a throwaway joke to make you laugh at how goofy the companions can be. Jesus.

[macdenlover]

we don’t acknowledge enough how dee used to be a pageant winner when she was a kid and how much damage it did to her. she worked her ass off and got recognition for being pretty and talented at a young age and it was the only source of self esteem she could garner in a family that constantly berated and talked down to her. she sought after that external approval because it was the only way she could prove everyone around her wrong. her dream of being a performer didn’t come from a self-aggrandizing delusion— she genuinely showed a lot of potential when she was younger. but she went through an unflattering puberty and her spinal condition got worse and that natural talent she had as a kid plateaued way too early. the “former gifted kid” dilemma. she slowly lost the thing that promised her that she was good, but she was so desperate to keep holding onto it that she tried anyway. again and again and again no matter how much people made fun of her because it was always about proving them wrong. but after a while she couldn’t jump anymore without anticipating the way it feels when she hits the ground face first. self-sabotage became her way out, choosing to rather live in the fantasy of her own unrealized potential and blaming those around her for her lack of success, than having tried and crashed again. she’d rather buy lottery tickets over and over and never scratch off the numbers than to see that she lost. that self-sabotaging behavior bled into other aspects of her life too, from friendships to relationships to therapy. her own short lived success is what made her grow into embodying the cycle of failure.

[fujii-draws]

“Ohh Bidoof has a Journal!” “Sunflora has a Diary if you go into her room”— WHAT ABOUT PARTNER???

[sparring-spirals]

imogen fumbling shit is just eternally good fodder for memes, alright. and its at least partly BECAUSE of how powerful she is. someone tripping while using a nerf gun? funny. someone dramatically hoisting up an outfit matchin heavy death laser gun and then immediately tripping and landing on their face? phenom. sometimes she goes "GROVEL" and the enemies grovel and we all go "oooooh" and "aaaahhh" and sometimes she just gets fully ignored and gets so huffy and petulant and ineffectually burns a cantrip just to be petty about it. sometimes she smites her enemies into dust with one move and renders a tree in half after threatening and other times she fucking. falls down a flight of stairs and accidentally sets everything on fire. fires a gun at her own team. loses all her hair. turns blue. etc.

Imogen lifts a humongous sand squid into the sky with her mind powers. Imogen is also falling out of a sky ship and landing on the desert sand far below and just. lying there. while her friend plays the flute in the background. epic hot failgirls NEED the HEIGHT to FAIL FROM. u gotta swing and miss sometimes!!! AND you gotta be REAL petty about it when u miss!!!! fucking fantastic.

[itsabouttimex2]

(I think I’m gonna drop this and see how it does cause I’ve been thinking on it for a while, and since I’m not exactly satisfied with my wording I’ll probably delete it, but for a day or two I’m gonna let it settle cause my feelings are split on this perspective and I don’t know if I’m blowing these things out of proportion…)

In general I just don’t really think MK is as good of a hero as the series wants him to be, not in that he’s a “bad person” so much as in that the show is so desperate to gas him up as a “true hero” that it actually warps from reasonable praise that fits in line with his actions to a level of shilling that his actual behavior doesn’t match up with at all.

(In short, if you don’t want to read the whole thing: MK is genuinely a good person, and he’s a functional hero, but when the series outright deprecates Wukong to hype MK up and has his villains remark on what a good hero he is, it really feels shallow on account of MK’s actions rarely going above “we fight people who threaten us”)

And for as much as Lego Monkie Kid does hype up MK (and sometimes his friends but especially MK) as “true heroes”, it’s never really willing to engage with him as being a hero outside of a very shallow “we fight whatever guys are trying to kill us”, -which leads to a very strange situation where his “heroism” usually goes only as far as batting a monster out of the city without any insurance to prevent it from coming back and doing more harm later on, or hell, maybe even just ditching Megapolis and going to attack some other city without a hero to protect.

(It’s especially wild given that MK was ENTIRELY willing to smash (and thereby implicitly reseal) DBK beneath a mountain in his first fight against demon and then entirely gives up on ever being proactive with the preventation of harm ever again because what the fuck kid you were literally on track the very first fight you ever had in your life?? Why’d you go and lose the plot when it made you look so much better???)

MK isn’t the person whose home is getting laser-nuked to ashes by Demon Bull King (there were miles of those in his first attack), and he’s not someone whose been stolen by the Spider Queen to serve as a slave (like Syntax), and he doesn’t get a calamitous fire fused with him after Macaque forces a world-threatening ritual to be performed under threat of his death (Mei), so HE can throw “second chances” out like candy, but that’s only because the narrative is never willing to engage with victims of these villains outside of their impacts on either him or the landscape, the second of which is almost always instantly glossed over or outright played for laughs, even for FLOWER FRUIT MOUNTAIN itself, and if it does have an impact on someone else then it’s only to have them be upset for a few seconds/a minute or two before outright pretending they never had experienced negative interactions begin with.

And giving out “redemptions” to the villains without actually really engaging with their victims (even within the main cast!) really feels less like a hero magnanimously giving someone a second chance and more like watching the hero keep doing what he’s been doing from almost the very start- letting dangerous jerks off the hook, even though they keep coming back to hurt people, but this time, after their fourth mass assault charge, they wander off into the sunset and this time instead of leading another assault they decide to become good people.

(With introspection and actual growth occurring offscreen, of course, because it’s not like the actual ARC of redemption arcs is the fun part/s. On, and all those victims they built up, all the damage they caused, the fear they inspired and the trauma they very likely left innocent souls with?? Never addressed, of course! Only MK’s traumas are important to the story, and they’re so important that most of his key character development involves getting punched with more and more of that angst without ever stopping to address that other characters have been suffering right alongside him, at least never for more than a few seconds/a single minute to explore a brief moment of insecurity or anger before that “flaw” gets packed up to be repurposed, ex: Mei is insecure about her heritage? Solved in an episode! But now she’s at Ao Guang’s place and she’s insecure about her heritage again! Oh, wait- solved in one episode- again!)

It’s especially jarring that the story sets up Azure Lion as a false hero for, essentially, being too proactive in his desire to fight evil and protect the mortal realm that he adores, where MK and his crew are “true heroes” for… waiting for threats to personally inconvenience them before dealing with those threats.

The leonine demon wants to go to the root of what he sees as a tree long rotten and rip it out to supplant it with what he believes is a better core (whether himself or Sun Wukong), while MK and his friends are content to ignore threats and let them fester as long as they aren’t currently fighting or being endangered by said threats. There’s never an actual clash between these perspectives and actions- it’s just “Azure is bad now and can’t control himself, so it’s ethical to beat him around,” which especially is absolutely fucking bonkers when it’s revealed Azure, despite being a soldier of the Jade Emperor, didn’t even know about the whole “this guy is holding the world together with his own power” thing and probably wouldn’t have iced the guy if he had known what would happen.

And on the topic of heroes, I’m also going to come in and say that Azure’s “delusional hero” characterization would be FAR more poignant and fitting if he had learned all that business and still went through with his plan with a “fuck it, I can ball” attitude based on his absolute assurance of his abilities and status as a hero… only to utterly spiral out of control anyways, instead of being hazily warned about dubious consequences by the Jade Emperor and Nezha instead of just being outright told that the world is almost guaranteed to end if he goes forward with this.

Along with Azure’s general character, the ecocide scene centered around knocking himself off of the “hero” pedestal he’s on is really just there to reassure MK (and the audience) about the kid’s status as a hero. It’s a nasty, unforeshadowed cop-out so the series can say “MK, don’t feel bad about fighting him! He’s actually not that good of a guy at all! Don’t feel bad about fighting Azure cause he’s done bad stuff and isn’t really a good guy! MK you’re a perfectly justified moral little boy! Azure doesn’t hold a candle to you!” and dashes his supposed ideals as a shallow veneer instead of having the characters engage with them to support the in-universe viewpoint that MK and his friends are just the very most bestest heroes ever.

(Not to mention that this reveal is literally delivered to the audience by Macaque, who just ass-pulls the knowledge of where to take MK and what to tell him about the big guy to change the kid’s mind in spite of never previously sharing so much as a single word or interaction with Azure to connect the two. Every day I believe a little more in my Macaque Replacement Theory)

So basically, the writers ended up tanking that complexity to give MK an easy moral victory when it could’ve been so cool to do something other than that, like MK acknowledging that hey, Azure is trying to prevent tragedy from occurring in the first place and was outright willing to take part in a siege on the heavens to ostensibly use the Jade Emperor’s powers for good where MK happily sits around until the threatening forces present in the world come to him and his home, and how neither of those paths is inherently “correct”, but any potential complexity is torpedoed with “Actually he’s delusional and needs to go down. Also his plan was inherently flawed and realm-threatening. And he committed ecocide. Also he’s toxic and projects onto the people around him. And his actions personally kill him to keep MK’s hands mostly clean.”

So essentially the narrative says:

“Azure, you should’ve known better than to play god by interfering with cosmic forces of the universe to do what you thought was best for it. This is objectively bad of you given information that existed outside of your knowledge and was inherently flawed and led to tragedy! Why couldn’t you just let things be?!”

While also saying:

“Anyways Season 5!MK, you can play god! You interfering with the cosmic forces of the universe to do what you think is best for it will be portrayed as heroic, dramatic, and sympathetic while also turning out to be the objectively correct and morally right decision! It’s good that you didn’t just let things be!”

And the “consequences” of the difference here are that: while MK and Azure Lion both have the chance to either stand complacently by in the face of what they consider a fixable injustice in the world, and all it takes is denying the cosmic authority that stands above them, and for denying it Azure dies, while MK successfully breaks an unfair and harsh cycle, gives the world cool superpowers, and gets to live on with his friends in a now eternal world.

And this wouldn’t be such a big deal to me if the story was willing to explore what the writers consider “true” heroism outside of… ??? What do they consider “true” heroism? When the good you’ve performed far outweighs the bad? When you… succeed? Is Azure castigated by the narrative for not succeeding? Clearly not, because he’s portrayed negatively in terms of his actions even before the consequences of killing the Jade Emperor set in. Is he only a bad guy for using deceit and subterfuge to get what he wants, because that also happens before he murders the Jade Emperor. I mean, the heroes aren’t above scheming and fucking around themselves-

Like breaking into the Celestial Realm, running roughshod, stealing, and then leaving without returning anything or explaining to anyone about what’s going on afterwards!

Is he a bad guy for wanting to upset the status quo? At some point it feels less like the narrative considers MK a “true hero” because they have a definition for what actually counts as that and more because he’s the protagonist and, well, they want to hype him up.

Basically and for the TLDR, the narrative is custom-built to morally reward MK for essentially all of his heroic actions, even if they fall sharply in line with what the “bad guys” were doing just a season earlier or are outright as shallow as giving attempted mass murderers a dozen second chances to try and kill more innocent people, also without ever truly addressing or applying in-universe consequences for the run-off of his actions such as bringing the trigram furnace to earth and leaving it there, concealing his meeting with the Lady Bone Demon, releasing the Ink Curse by fucking around with the scroll for more than a few seconds or a quick remand before moving past it.

And, can we stop right here and think about a role swap for a moment?

If Sun Wukong had done ANY of that, we all fucking know that the story would’ve stopped sharp to rip him a new asshole and have at least one person would stop to shriek at him about what an irresponsible person he was, about how bad of a mentor he is, about how stupid it was for him not to clean up loose ends. But MK receives a bare minimum throwaway scolding from one of his friends + Ink Curse for releasing it, which doesn’t impact how they or the fandom view him at all.

This is especially egregious for the fact that Wukong is treated like a knuckle-dragging lobotomite by the story (and fandom) whose feats are far surpassed by MK when the Monkey King actually managed to crush his foes in varying ways (destroying their kingdoms, imprisoning them, killing them, etc) that ushered in an era of peace that allowed for rapid technological advancement… but now they’re back and he’s getting beaten over the head for everything, which unintentionally makes it clear that showing mercy in Monkie Kid is just a really, really stupid thing to do unless you’re the super special central protagonist and the writers want to hype you up as the very goodest little boy in the whole wide world over who has full moral authority to allow his city and friends and world to be threatened again and again and again… as long as he’s being “nice” about it.