#like the moral is literally

[tennyo-elf]

What I learned about revenge from Love Like the Galaxy:

If you’re going to get revenge make sure you take your favorite vindictive blorbo with you. Otherwise if you take revenge alone, your blorbo might get really fucking pissed and not speak to you for 5 years.

[nogodsnomorales]

This took me 2 hours to make i almost passed outn2 tikmes I’m so tirfed

edit: do not repost my art to a different site/platform/app. if sharing on discord/etc, just directly linkback to the post. thank u! oc redraws are fine, just credit me!! and tag me in those id like to see lol

[lucabyte]

siffrin starts the game with oddly empty pockets for a rogue who has a habit of stashing away every little trinket that isn't nailed down

and a hardy pocketwatch is an indispensable tool for oceanic navigation

[keferon]

I don’t know if I got their designs quite right. It’s my first time drawing them :)

Monster hunter au lambo twins ehehe

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[opens-up-4-nobody]

Something something Merlin is Arthur's bane.

[milimeters-morales]

PROWLER MILES USED TO SMILE EXACTLY LIKE THIS. THIS WAS HIM. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE IM LOSING IT

[jasminebythebay]

what could have been

-

i was making myself sad by watching a clip of peter parker dying when the implications of insomniac peter parker being in atsv hit me. insomniac's Spiderman is one of the few times Peter actually lives to see Miles becomes Spiderman, so you can imagine how seeing a version of himself actually get a chance to know the peter parker of his world might shake up some Feelings™ (read: guilt, jealousy, awe)

don't get me wrong, Miles has clearly stepped into his role as Spiderman fantastically and loves having Peter B Parker as a mentor, but i wouldn't be surprised if he was a little jealous of insomniac miles getting peter's constant presence and support instead of just a week's worth

[idolomantises]

i'll be real, i always hated it whenever media tries to "critique" Christianity while portraying all Christians as bigoted, misogynistic and irredeemable. its why it matters a lot to me that my own angels have some nuances to them.

Sera is very puritanical and obsessed with showing her devotion to God, but she's still a caring and well-meaning angel.

[moonagedaydreamsofrhiannon]

MARAUDERS FANS LET JAMES POTTER BE A LITTLE BIT OF A CUNT PLEASE

[virginiathegray]

Watching creators across the internet yap themselves into hating this game for no reason is actually so sad

[8igiron]

No cuz you don’t fucking understand

Look at his fucking suit bro.

DO YOU SEE THAT?????!

DO YOU FUCKING SEE THAT???!

MILES FUCKING COPIED THE “fly ambiance down the side” FROM AARON’S SUIT. DO YOU FUCKING GET IT???! DO YOU UNDERSTAND.

AND THEN EVERYONE FUCKING MADE FUN OF IT.

“It looks like your bleeding from your armpits.” Count your fucking days Peter.

[vancalox]

i genuinely love love love the iconoclast path in rogue trader SO MUCH. its one of the things that ultimately enamors me to the warhammer franchise as a whole despite empathy being so antithetical to its world and genre. its not just because iconoclast is the Nice Person route or because it subverts the foundational principle that In The Grim Dark Universe There Is Only War............ but mostly i love it because its the best way to actually engage w the morality system presented in 40k and explore it the way it deserves to be explored. its so unique parsing through the choices of the game and navigating how one might actually ACHIEVE goodness through - or more accurately without - the lens of liberal modern morality. because adhering to what we presently would call morality is arguably crueler than some of the dogmatic choices - or at least the game wants you to reflect on that and decide if that kind of morality still has value or not. and i like that they give you the opportunity to do that. youre rarely rewarded for kindness in this game and in fact your oftentimes actively punished for it (void shadows was a TRIAL for my iconoclast rt) which presents another question: are you being good because of a reward you believe you'lll be entitled to, or are you being good for the sake of goodness itself??? in saying that i do LOVE how there IS payoff in the iconoclast route eventually - when youve bleed and suffered for it enough. but theres a quality to it thats so..... so BITTERSWEET, because yippee you Empathed your way to the top - but also what IS the top?? congratulations, you are the kindest autocrat in the most bloodthirsty fascist regime in human history, sitting on your throne on a voidship run by all your slaves and serfs who die by the hundreds every time you make a warpjump for some dumbass sidequest. what the fuck. can you actually call that goodness ????? is whatever goodness-adjacent thing youve achieved worth it even if you cant change the system in the ways that matter ??? lastly - the iconoclast ending is both so wildly universe-altering to the point of feeling like a heretical ending - but also kind of. not mattering really lol. because even though its hopeful, the "good" ending still feels soooo tentative with the likelihood that its very likely not going to last. but that in itself is my favorite take away from playing this game as The Last Good Guy in the Galaxy: because the love DIDNT change anything. and it DOESNT save anyone. but ohhhhhhhhh my fucking god does it absolutely matter that it was there.

[sokkas-therapist]

Breaking my silence: I think Zuko’s “I’m angry at myself” explosion in The Beach episode was queer coded

*runs away before I can be booed off the stage*

[strangestcase]

Let it be known that it’s perfectly possible to be pro-choice re:abortion AND against eugenics. Abortion shouldn’t be about getting the perfect child, it HAS to be about preserving the health of both the pregnant person and their child, and that includes choosing to abort simply because you don’t want to be pregnant. It doesn’t include aborting a perfectly viable child because they just happen to have a disability.

[growling]

the way this website treats disabled people is actually horrendous