#luck discourse

[luckthebard]

I’m not gonna continue to argue with the person on my post because they seem really set on wholeheartedly believing that YouTuber about the CR gods copyright situation. But I have to get this off my chest:

If the copyright issues around the gods names/personalities were such a mess for LoVM and TCSR, to the point of being worried about any small mistake or slip up or accidental use of a proprietary name that it would compel CR as a company to try to write them out of future Exandria stories…

Why on earth wouldn’t that have been done quietly and unobtrusively instead of spending 3 years in a campaign centered on bringing up the gods every 5 minutes and including playing them as PCs

[spaceediasporaa]

I know some people might not like the whole “Sabine training to be a Jedi despite not being super force sensitive” thing but I honestly think it’s really cool. It’s expanding what being a Jedi is, it’s showing they’re more than just space wizards, they’re a religion, a people- being a Jedi isn’t about having powers it’s about your training and how you live your life. I think it’s very cool and I like the idea of nonforce sensitive Jedi

[arcanegifs]

I rarely voice my opinions on stuff like this but I think it’s ridiculous that people fight over a show that hasn’t even aired yet.

[tamarahtalkstv]

Gay Men And People Of The LGBTQ+ Community In General Do Not Have To Be Celibate, “Clean”, And “Pure” Because It Makes You Feel Bad.

I Seriously Doubt That The Person Behind This Video Is Gay, A Man, Or Even Old Enough To Be Watching Helluva Boss If They’re Making A Video Like This.

[bitsbug]

I don't know if this is an exclusively me thing, but I don't think I'll ever get over how just, completely pleasant tumblr is. People leave nice comments on my art & I get to see funny tags in my notifications & I get to make more friends & I'm allowed to gush/infodump as much as I want & there's no pressure to keep up with others ... Even with all the janky design, it's a very calm experience.

[ingravinoveritas]

My last two brain cells on Election Day currently be like...

[the-magpie-collective]

[Part 1/3]: Mizora's Pact is narrative horseshit

I have a lot of issues with the writing that was done for Wyll's story. But there is one that annoys me the most: Mizora's Pact. It is shoddily written, hastily cobbled together, and serves as a poor narrative crutch in lieu of proper storytelling.

Mizora's Pact might merely be a symptom of the greater problems within the writing for Wyll's story, but it is one of my least favorite parts by far.

To begin, let's talk about what I believe the narrative purpose of the pact was supposed to be. This is three-fold:

Illustrate how clever and tricky devils are

Inspire hopelessness in the idea of escaping a pact / outsmarting a devil

Provide restrictions to aid in the narrative flow of Wyll's story

I'll tackle these and explain why I feel Mizora's Pact does none of these and in some ways actually undermines its own intent. We start with the first time the Player is told anything of the pact:

Clause G, Section Nine: 'Targets shall be limited to the infernal, the demonic, the heartless, and the soulless.'

In context, this occurs after Wyll was sent to hunt down Karlach and refused to do so. Wyll, with what he remembers of his pact, rightfully points out that Karlach is not infernal nor demonic. This is when Mizora points out that, how convenient, Karlach is missing a heart. Isn't it just so clever of Mizora to have put such a tricksy clause into the Pact?

Except that makes no sense. Even if we assume that this line is one Wyll specifically bargained for in the naive hope he could limit the damage Mizora would have him do, only for Mizora to twist it, this isn't particularly clever phrasing. In fact, it only seems clever in the context of Mizora using it as a reason to have Wyll hunt down the literally heartless Karlach. Which, unless Mizora is able to see the future, she would have had no way of knowing would happen when she wrote this part of the Pact. I mean really, how often does Mizora run into literally heartless individuals that she felt the need to include this in the pact?

Even if Karlach is already in Zariel's posession. Even if Karlach has presumably already had her heart replaced by an engine. Even if Karlach is just one of dozens of Zariel's new toys. Even if that's why Mizora chooses this particular phrasing it is only half clever at best and that's a lot of really big ifs.

The only way in which this clause make sense is in hindsight. Instead of putting in the work to create narrative world building that sets up logical consequences, the pact is used as a get out of jail free card. If this were the only instance, sure, I'd let it slide. But it's not the only instance.

Part 2

[newwavesylviaplath]

more dumb music opinions!! this is long and ik most of u don't care but whatever this is my platform i will post how i see fit. also im not proofreading this at all its 1:26 in the morning and im literally falling asleep as im writing this so apologies in advance if this isn't the most well written or coherent post ive ever made

okay yall i fell down a rabbit hole of people on tiktok criticizing chappell roan and now im all worked up so here i am giving my opinions no one asked for;

so something i've been noticing a real influx of is people bringing up her hot to go performance at outside lands (a festival) where she says something along the lines of "vip thinks they're way too cool to do this.. you're not fun!" mfs have been getting online to talk about how chappell was being SO RUDE!!! and NOT EVERYONE KNOWS HER MUSIC WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS!!!! but like anyone with common sense who has seen the vid/heard the audio can tell she was being playful?? like come on now. i also saw someone post abt how she was being mean to jimmy fallon?? 😭 first off, while im not sure abt this one in particular late night shows are usually scripted and secondly im starting to believe more and more that these people have just never interacted with a drag queen before. chappell roan is a STAGE PERSONA and the majority of drag queens are characterized by having this larger than life attitude- take for example that one rupaul /jimmy fallon interview (u guys know which one) like idk i feel like it's very obvious that chappell is playing it up for the sake of entertainment, not cuz she genuinely believes she's above everyone else.

the other thing i've seen ppl whining about is how a) she doesn't wanna take a picture with fans, therefore she believes her shit doesn't stink and b) the two tiktoks she posted a day ago where she was voicing her struggles openly without policing her tone. first off, CELEBRITIES DONT OWE U PICTURES. don't get me wrong, taking a picture with a celeb u are a fan of can be a great experience and a fun story- but people are acting as if it is their god given right to get a photo with whoever they want whenever they want. "oh well she brought this on herself it's the price of being famous" are u stupid omfg acting like chappell signed a contract giving up her autonomy in order to get on the billboard charts. she quite literally did not choose this and even if she did that doesn't mean ur automatically entitled to a pic with her as if she's some kind of zoo animal like?? the two vids she posted to tiktok essentially telling ppl to leave her alone was met with backlash because she 'sounded rude' again im going to put this in perspective for everyone. her family is being stalked. she is being harassed both online and in real life. being upset because she comes off a little brash in a video where she is practically begging yall to stop with the harassment should be the least of your concerns. this is a twenty six year old who was virtually unknown six months ago- her meteoric rise to fame was not something she could have been prepped for in anyway possible. i feel like some people just aren't trying to wrap their heads around how insane the reality of this situation really is. the phrase "fifteen minutes of fame" used to be a lot more hyperbolic than it is now. i'm exhausted

[welcometoteyvat]

if youre satisfied with this amount of rep i'll be happy for you and if you want vastly more from hoyo especially concerning skin tone i will completely agree with you but if you're non latam/african/indigenous american/pacific islander, i'm side eyeing so hard if you start making excuses for genshin's colorist ass

[dreamwinged]

didn’t think i had to say this again (+ didn’t realize it wasn’t in my pinned anymore to be completely honest) but if ur proship/comship/darkship/neutral/supportive toward that content in any way then do not interact with me thanks!!!!!!

have noticed an uptick in this and it makes me very uncomfortable so yeah . 😀👍 stay away from me

[witherbee]

apparently people are mad a Chappell Roan for having her aesthetic be heavily influence by drag performers because it’s “capitalizing on queerness” ?!!?!

is lil nas x capitalizing on queerness? is troye sivan? elton john? or is it just the feminine lesbian who uses her aesthetic as an homage (an homage!!!) to drag performers? y’all know anyone can do drag, right? regardless of gender or gender presentation?

[luckthebard]

I think a huge problem I’m seeing in some attempts at meta with C3 is that there is a subset of viewers who do not understand the place, value, and meaning of real world religion. It breeds takes like “well throw the gods out! Who needs them! They caused characters and the world pain! Free Vax from the Raven Queen!”

I throw that last one in there because it is the most ridiculous yet frequent and is really the crux of the issue. Vax’s story is very much about faith and the importance of faith and devotion. If you place no value on that you’ll end up grossly misunderstanding the character and the nature of his tragedy.

I’m going to out myself as an atheist, but I think the issue with a lot of these takes are that they come from internet atheists who are either resentful of and hostile toward religion because of personal experiences or do not know any devout people in their lives who they respect and can empathize with. And while I am not trying to downplay the very real phenomenon of religious trauma, when healing from it it is crucial to realize that all spiritual traditions are not synonymous with the one that harmed you. I would really implore more people to explore why many good people find spiritual traditions and religion to be a source of solace, community, and meaning before writing off the idea wholesale as something only functioning as a means of power and control that people can be educated out of believing. I encourage you to branch out and here are some examples of things I’ve done to challenge my own judgement over the last ten years: read the writings of gay Catholics exploring the queerness of Jesus. Read some beautiful poetry written by a trans man who specializes in Anglican theology. Explore religious observances different from the ones you experienced and attend a Seder. Go if a coworker invites you to a celebration of Ganesh. Learn the significance of solstice celebrations because your coworker is officiating one for a Wiccan event. Break fast at sundown during Ramadan with in solidarity with your roommate.

Deciding that all fictional religion must be an allegory for a specific kind of toxic nationalistic prosperity gospel Christian cult found in America will only limit how you engage with both fiction and the real world. It took me a long time to get to this place about it and I hope I’ve put the spark of curiosity and not judgment into at least one person reading this.

[evilandcrazygirl]

lestat would looooove chappell roan..

[all-seeing-ifer]

at some point in my life i should probablyyyyyy unpack just how badly being on tumblr during peak ace discourse years fucked me up bc i would dearly like to just move on and forget that shit ever happened but unfortunately it's literally Always There. it's the reason i'm Like This on here. and sometimes i'll think to myself "now why do i always feel so uncomfortable and unwelcome and on edge in queer spaces / online spaces / fandom spaces etc etc" and then think about what the answer to that question might Possibly be and go Oh. Yeah. That thing. really this is probably something i should talk about with like a counsellor or something but well how the hell am i even meant to explain any of this to anyone who wasn't a terminally online 16 year old in 2017.

[squishe]

the amount of people who shit on the fact that someone made an unlabeled flag is insane to me holy fuck. people aren't "turning unlabeled into a label" you just need to get your head out of your ass and maybe realize other unlabeled people want some way to represent and recognize themselves. and who does it really hurt for someone else to use a flag you don't like anyways? instead of shitting on people for using the unlabeled flag how about you drink some iced tea and calm the fuck down and remember that the whole world doesn't revolve around you

[batsplat]

On the one hand I definitely agree that Marc’s absence doesn’t take anything away from titles won but on the other I would absolutely understand if Joan and Fabio especially (Pecco less, I think… the bike… they all know about Honda beginning to fail, right? At some point ig you could say even a pre-Jerez Marc Marquez wouldn’t have ridden that to a championship and it is in Pecco’s best interest to put that point into 2022) would forever consider their titles borrowed off “luck” because I also think everyone ASSUMING if Jerez didn’t happen, Marc would have won 2020 and likely also 2021 isn’t exactly wrong. He won 3 whole races in 2021 (however he did that), that’s more than anyone else but Pecco and Fabio who finished second and first… as Max said, if is a stupid concept in sport, but the if in question is not a regular “if”, and the whole grid knows it. Hell, we are all aware that had Jerez been simply milder instead of the horror it became, Marc’s achievements would look different at this time… So that’s definitely very interesting to me, that any winning done in Marc’s continued absence from the top seems asterisked by the riders’ own attitudes. That him being on that Ducati this year helps, even a little, to alleviate a bitterness that seemed settled whenever he missed a race. It’s a true win only if you beat Marquez, because Marquez is the one to beat. I wonder if that’s what 2010 felt like to the then-grid, when Vale broke his leg… that winning didn’t even count properly, bc Valentino was not there to make it real.

yeah, listen, if marc had been uninjured in 2020, he would have won the title. I'm not arguing that bit, I'm saying it doesn't matter. marc's injury wasn't some kind of freak accident... it was unfortunate, but it was also unsurprising, and his comeback going wrong even more so. this is what you have to remember about sports but especially motorcycle racing: you are placing heavy demands on your body, and sometimes the excess demands are directly correlated to your success. in this post, there's some quotes from 2019 about how 'lucky' marc is... because he was crashing so so much outside of races to find the limit of the bike - and yet it didn't hurt his results (obviously he was still injured a lot, yearly off-season surgeries and all that). this was part of his approach and it was obviously a very successful one. and in some ways it is also one that was necessitated by the characteristics of that honda, which at this stage only he could tame... but it is true that if a lot of other riders crashed at that rate, they would've been considerably worse off, and it was a part of the process that allowed him to be so successful. and it did already make a lot of people very uneasy at the time, because it felt like eventually it just... had to go wrong. it's also worth noting that... yes, marc's achievements would look different if the injury hadn't been that bad. but the initial injury wasn't 'that bad' relatively speaking - it was his decision to come back that really fucked him over. I strongly believe he shouldn't have been allowed to race, but it was still his decision, and it was part of a tradition of ridiculously fast injury comebacks that had also helped make him so successful in past years (though fwiw this one immediately felt like a bad idea, zero hindsight needed I promise you). so let's put it like this: if you keep putting your body under incredible strain even by motogp standards to reach the level of success you do, and eventually your luck runs out, eventually you land badly on the wrong side of the risk/reward calculation... then how is it fair to say your competitors should be handed asterisks in your absence?

in 2018-19 everybody (including valentino) expected that marc would surpass valentino's titles. few expected him to last at the top of the sport for as long as valentino did. valentino during his prime crashed far far more rarely than marc did and was battering his body considerably less... for marc, there was always the question of how long this could last. he was punishing his body for his particular brand of brilliance, but this always had to be a trade-off. it wouldn't have been surprising if his career had ended through injury, though of course how 2020 played out still ended up being a shock. but!! at the end of the day, even without marc's particularly risky style of racing, you wouldn't need an asterisk. the comparison to 2010 is an interesting one, because you can tell that jorge was at times extremely eager and determined to stress that he wasn't just benefiting from valentino's absence. in the dorna-produced docu for his title, he emphasises that he was already leading the points when valentino broke his leg at the fourth race of the season... which is true, but a) valentino also wasn't leading the championship in the early stages of the two previous years either, and b) valentino was already managing injury. the eruption of that icelandic volcano meant motegi had to be rescheduled, which gave valentino the opportunity to go and get his shoulder injured in a motocross accident (again, for the question of training risk/reward see the post I linked to above). it was this injury that quite probably caused the next one... and troubled him more in late 2010 and early 2011 than the leg did. it also set off the chain of events that allowed jorge to gain ascendancy internally in yamaha, which is part of the reason why valentino decided to go to ducati and essentially took himself out of title contention for... well, two ducati years, and another year where he still wasn't quite up to speed on the yamaha. stop the volcano from erupting and motogp quite plausibly looks very different for the next few years

the question of whether valentino wins the 2010 title without injury is far more open than whether marc would've won 2020, but at worst you have to call it about 50/50 - and even with the troublesome shoulder valentino was getting the better of their actual wheel-to-wheel fights in late 2010. so that title fight too was severely influenced by one rider's bad luck, one that you can't even trace back to a particularly risky riding style... but on the other hand, eventually everyone's luck runs out, and valentino had been relatively lucky for a long time. he was also getting older, which in itself will affect recovery time. this is how athletes' competitive life cycles go, right - yes, you might lose your physical edge, yes, you might struggle to find the same fire, but you have also demanded a lot from your body for a very long time and eventually you pay the price. eventually, every athlete's era has to end... and unfortunately in grand prix motorcycle racing, a lot of the time that era ends with injury. schwantz and rainey were long-time rivals, with rainey winning three consecutive titles at the start of the nineties. in 1993, they were again locked in a title fight - until rainey crashed and was left in a wheelchair, his career ended and the title handed to schwantz. that was schwantz's only title, but he's still considered one of the greats of the sport. doohan and criville were teammates when doohan was dominant, and it took doohan's career-ending injury during the third race of the 1999 season for crivi to finally win the title. kenny roberts jr won the title in the following season in what was a chaotic year not dissimilar to 2020... from the young star who wasn't quite ready to put together a title charge to the underdogs at suzuki eventually claiming the big prize. this is how it goes... what a champion needs on their side as much as anything else is luck. jorge wasn't crashing as much as marc was in 2013, and yet somehow he ended up with the broken collarbone at assen that severely damaged his title chances - because sometimes, it only takes one crash for it all to go wrong. does that mean marc is an undeserving title winner in 2013? of course it doesn't!

in the case of 2020, when it became increasingly clear marc would not be winning this title, it's not like everyone's minds immediately went to mir. the favourites were dovi, fabio, vinales... the thing is, right, it was an absolute mess of a season (that was also of course seriously impacted by the pandemic), but someone had to be the one to take advantage. the suzuki was a well-settled package and mir after a strong rookie season was the one to put in the consistent results to claim the title. he was already highly rated going into motogp, and he was absolutely seen as a potential star of the future. for his sake and his reputation within the sport, of course it would've been preferable to win a more emphatic title... and in some ways, his 2021 on a lagging suzuki is more impressive than the 2020 title. it's an incredible shame how his career has gone since then, mostly not through his own fault, and you still want to hope he'll have the opportunity to dispel a few more doubts - both from the fans and quite possibly himself. then again, hayden won two races in 2006, kenny roberts jr three in 2000... at the end of the day, the main thing new fans know now is that they were champions, and so it will one day be for mir too. moving on to 2021, it's worth remembering that by then the honda was already a bad bike. yes, marc would undoubtedly have been the title favourite - but two of his three wins that year were at his specialist circuits that also still suited the honda, basically the places where he could win with his eyes closed. at the very least, you have to believe 2021 would have had a proper title fight and wouldn't just have been a stroll in the park for marc - yes, quite probably he would have prevailed anyway, but it's really not so cut and dry

THAT BEING SAID. I do agree with much of this ask! it is interesting that it's asterisked in the riders' minds! but it shouldn't be - that's the devil talking, you need to stand up for yourself and ignore all the doubters and get on with it. jorge had enough self confidence and stubborn belief in his own ability that this discourse in 2010 did nothing but piss him off. in 2007, casey was incredibly sick of people talking down his title because of how good the ducati was that year and the tyre difference between him and valentino. yes, casey was on the better package that year, and valentino did clearly benefit from switching tyres in 2008. does that in any way detract from casey's title? no! it doesn't!! he was right to be annoyed - imbalances are part of the game, and casey was very good that year. he deserved that title! valentino also faced the bike merchant allegations in spades of course, but young champions are particularly vulnerable to this kind of discourse. they're less established in the sport, more likely to attract detractors who are determined to prove they can't live up to the legends of the past... after 2006, everybody more or less agreed that it was a bit of a lucky title, but hayden was so popular and people were so pleased for him that it was just treated as a feel-good story - which it wasn't in the same way with surly young casey. no matter! who cares what people think! if your opponent has a bad day, you need to take the opportunity presented to you and press home the advantage. if your opponent has a bad year, even better. no sitting around worrying whether history is going to take your accomplishments seriously... it's like hayden said at assen 2006 when valentino broke his right hand and left ankle. from the oxley reference book: '[valentino] finished the race in eighth, which put him 46 points behind hayden. "when that rossi guy is down, you gotta jump on him!" he grinned'. brutal, but that's the game

also, I'll say it: I reckon both joan and fabio have probably had their fair share of bad luck to compensate by now. enough