#no idea if there’s an audience for this but bes is away so i have no one to ramble to!!! so now you are all part of my captive audience

[pocket-solas]

I love your blog and I hope this doesn’t come across rude but I feel like you and a lot of people are overlooking the glaring issues this game has. The writing is abysmal and they are clearly trying to pander the series towards a new audience. Whatever lore they had built up has not been addressed or has been trickled down into crumbs. That ending with Solas and the inquisitor was ridiculously bad and I don’t think we should praise them for giving us fans crumbs when they had built up this idea of a solavellan reunion and us getting a satisfying resolution. Ghil Dirthalen, a massive creator has openly been shitting on people in a recent tweet because we are ‘upset’ and put it down to people getting too invested into their headcanons. No, it is because we have been waiting for SO long, (some people who have been OG fans since Origins) and their beloved series gets turned into this? I’m tired of seeing empty praise and people not calling out Bioware’s shortcomings. This is the worst dragon age game we have ever gotten and at this point, I hope the IP dies.

Hey, normally I wouldn't post this to my blog cause I'm trying to stay positive but I do agree with everything you've said!

I don't think anything I've seen was "well-written," and I do think people have a right to be disappointed.

But hear me out now, if you will. I am simply thrilled we got a Solavellan resolution. A happy one. One where they don't both die, because honestly fam, that's what I was expecting.

To be frank, I don't care about the game as a whole. It will probably be quite a while before I play it, if I even do. I was solely invested in what happens to Solas and Lavellan.

Bestie, we got a kiss. A kiss. I can't even complain because a year ago I never thought there'd be anything ever again aside from fanwork for those two, my OTP since I was 18.

Am I peeved about some things I've seen, like the lore being messed up, etc, yes. But again, my expectations were rock bottom, so maybe I'm feeling it a bit less.

I'm sorry so many people are so upset, and I'm trying to spread positivity where I can for those who felt let down ❤️🫂

I know how much these stories have meant to people for literal decades. I know how much Solavellan means to so many people. And now, because of the ending we were given, it opens up a whole world where we can explore what happens next for those two.

And as an aside, I know there are people who are LOVING the game and are thrilled with the Solavellan ending (myself included) and the last thing I want to do is take that joy away from them.

[sickness-stricken]

Uh… the cost is FASCISM, Lily.

For someone who wants to be a bread tuber so fucking badly I would hope you know that.

Media literacy is the thing that makes you able to think for yourself in the face of propaganda. That’s why it’s so damaging that “maybe the curtains are just blue” has sent back English classes for generations to come. That’s why not being able to work out subtext in the media you consume in your off time is so alarming, because when faced with actual news and politics you have to apply those same skills. And if you can’t do that, well… you’ll just be fed whatever looks the most appealing to you in that moment. It’s why the alt-right Youtube pipeline targeting teen boys is scary, because they don’t know better yet and are just believing whatever the person they deem a likeable authority figure says. Sound familiar?

Not to parrot Ethel but I think she had the right idea when she said that Lily was trying to teach her audience not to adopt Queer as a label, but it applies heavier here. If Lily’s dwindling fanbase is taught that media literacy is just a dumb buzzword that people use to feel smart, they’ll be less inclined to think for themselves and dissect her media takes as factually incorrect, which in turn keeps them away from digging into her past.

Scary shit happening in the studio today.

[linkspooky]

What in particular inspired you to write Burn This City, Burn This City Down? It's a very unique fic.

Oh man I hope you're ready to take my hand and go on a journey with me because this is going to be long ride.

The first version of this fic came from 1) the ending of the Search where Azula runs off into the woods and we were just left on that cliffhanger for years. The first story that ever gave me the inspiration though was Katanagatari by Nisioisin, especially after I read the translated light novel for the first time.

Katanagatari is a story of a former princess who wants revenge teaming up with a human who was raised as a weapon known as Yasuri Shichika who comes from an entire family of martial artists living on an island. She takes Shichika out to the world and they gather twelve magical swords for the shogunate government. Basically, it's easy to see how you could put Azula into this scenario. Except instead of swords it was just going to be Azula wanting to resolve different political issues or, my earliest idea was killing members of the red lotus in the colonies far from Zuko's jurisdiction.

Lio came from this initial idea and he was one, a person in the forest that Azula met, and two a very strong martial artist who is unhealthily devoted to her. Basically it's what Azula thinks she wants in a relationship, a perfect solider who follows her every order and is unconditionally loyal. That relationship eventualyl breaks apart though as Azula eventually has to go back to her real friends, because Lio mirrors like all her bad flaws at her.

I had serious trouble coming up with an overarching plot though, because Katanagatari's plot is just "go to the place, fight the guy, get the sword" and it was just hard to come up with 12 seperate guys for Azula to fight. Also it wasn't feasible because she'd basically spend all her time away from canon characters. I tried to throw Jet in too so it wouldn't just be Azula and this OC, but it never really got past the planning stages.

There were a few manga I read that were also Azula adjacent that helped further my ideas along. I've referenced Akatsuki no Yona before, and TGCF too, but those were a little bit too much like Katanagari. I liked the idea of like Azula roaming the country side with a partner character improving things by herself for awhile like Yona does with Akatsuki no Yona but I ran into the same problem again it would be 90% Azula and this oc with no canon interaction. I did like making Hua Cheng really weird though, and that became Lio like, developing entitled, posessive and borderline stalkery behaviors.

I'm sure you've noticed the fic hasn't become incredibly surreal and weird yet. So the actual tone and the way the fic portrays mental illness comes from three works in praticular. Tokyo Ghoul, which is kind of where I got my start on this blog, Kara no Kyoukai, and Tsukihime. The idea to make Lio a disassoicative disorder personality so Azula would have someone to sympathize with her and understand she's hallucinating came from a character named Shiki Ryougi who is also a character who has a system.

The prose style that is lowkey horror comes from my best attempts to write in a Nasu style in Tsukihime. Basically part of the reason the fanfic is so surreal is because I want to use elements of horror to add to the surrealism in order to make the audience viscerally fear the feel that characters like Azula do when they lose control over the reality in front of them.

When going in the forest for the Search I wanted to lean heavily on the Suicide Forest or the Forgetful Valley being an actually terrifying or unnerving setting to be in. I also thought the Mother of Faces was a cool idea for a spirit that the comics completely blew. So one of the improvements was making Mother of Faces a genuinely terrifying inhuman entity where the entire forest is basically her playground and humans are her puppets. It's a continued trend I want to do in this fic to make spirits like genuinely terrifying, and at the most indifferent to humans and at the worst extremely hostile.

The second was making the forest an actually scary and confusing place to be in. The forest is the head, and Azula is the head, and she's dreaming the forest. The forest is a metaphor for how Azula is lost inside her own head and trapped because no one in the world empathizes with her or tries to understand her, and like, Zuko sees her run into that huge forest twice and just watches her go even though she could end up dead in a ditch.

There's two big inspirations I took for describing the forest itself. The first was the book roadisde picnic and the movie STALKER which are about a zone in Russia which is fundamentally altered by aliens where nothing in that zone follows the laws of physics and instead follows their own abusrd laws. The second was from the book and movie annihilation. In annihilation the strange zone where strange things happen is nature actively like, retaking the earth, and changing the humans who enter that territory into something else.

As for Azula's narration itself and the way her mental health is depicted, I basically got her narration style down especially in her trippy points by reading Girl, Interrupted roughly one hundred times. My general rule of thumb is that Azula's narration is incredibly dry and mechanical and straight to the point, and her prose is very minimialist until it's not. Azula is very high functionning until she is not. Then the self-loathing, and the paranoia, and the voices begin to creep in. Yet on the surface Azula will do absolutely everything to pretend she is not loosing her grip of things until she has, full on meltdowns. This pattern continues ad infinituum, Azula just gets better at hiding her sympatoms and appearing more functional. Girl, interrupted though with the very detached kind of narration, the anachronistic order I employ a lot in this fic.

So the fic rewrite existed for awhile, like there were ten different drafts of the first chapter where Azula just finds a masked man in the woods after running away from Zuko.

So, okay I lied there is one more inspiration for the way I write Azula which is Zaregoto by Nisioisin and specifically the way he writes the main character IIchan and this very detached narrator voice who like, clearly suffers from some type of schizo-type and will have the most surreal moments of narration. That is primarily a mystery series so that's what gave me the plot in it's final form. It's basically like a mystery series that's led by two unreliable narrators Azula and Lio, and Zuko who let's be honest another unreliable narrator, and then Katara and Aang who are the most reliable narrators but they're also kind of like, they're not as aware of the dark side of the world and are more naive. I basically told myself like, I'll write it like a mystery novel. Instead of solving murders though it'll be political intrigue, where we have to follow two unreliable narrators. Two unreliable narrators who we don't know everything about bevcause the narration skips along their history in anancronistic order, and that'll be a metaphor for the weird way that Azula and Lio both experience reality because of how disordered their thinking is now.

The surraelist stuff started to finalize into like a solid plot when I read another fic. I don't know if I should like, mention this fic. I'm going to complain about it so I probably shouldn't mention it by name. Okay I'm just going to be vague about it. There was a Zuko / Sokka fanfic where Azula has been fully redeemed by her brother and they get along great and she is basically, playing political games in the court for her brother's sake. Sokka however doesn't know this and becomes suspicious of her and becomes embroiled in the politics too. In this version Azula is kind of just Zuko's attack dog which was very funny.

It's a fic where I did like Azula and Sokka's characterization, and like revitalized my desire to write avatar fic but I also had just as many faults in it. Basically my biggest nitpick in any Zuko and Azula fanfic is where they protray Zuko as a compassionate brother who helped Azula in her rehabilitation because like, that's just not what happened. So Zuko kind of just felt like a non character because there's no acknowledgment that Zuko can really be just as bad to Azula as Azula is to him and like... I need that drama in my life.

It also like timeskipped past her entire recovery and like I don't want sane Azula, I want barely functional Azula wearing a mask of sanity and convinced she peaked at fourteen and just trying to feel like the way she did when she was fourteen. I need her to be like "oh yes, I'm fixed now" and then have her start to break down again because she never actually learned to deal with stress.

The other was that the ocs in the fic were absolutely boring, like the villains were one note. It was this grand spiraling political plot but the villains behind the plot had no human motivations and Azula killed them in like five minutes. I was like no, no I can make my own ocs. I will have this new fic have actual compelling antagonists who feel like they are characters in the story and actually move the plot and challenge the main characters.

So to Summarize this long ramble, basically my idea for this fic came from the collective works of Nasu and Nisioisin. It started out as like, a journey through the colonies and help people fic to like, taking place entirely in Caldera City. That's where the current idea of Azula dealing with factions who are trying to take her brother's thrown from her, and also she's trying to play the political game that everyone else is playing comes from. Azula is playing political games but like, also, the people she's playing against aren't one note bad guys they're actually interesting characters.

I also want to basically adapt a kind of like, mystery novel character following the mystery through all the political intrigue and finding the answer. I guess you'd call that "Noir". Like the confusing surrealism stuff in the search part of the story shows how lost Azula is in the forest. The confusing surrealism stuff in Caldera City will now be about how Caldera city is a city of liars, where everyone has their own hidden motivation and Azula has to navigate all of that again.

Okay, I hope that answered your qusetion. I can cite some more sources on scenes that inspired me. That scene where Lio saw Azula and the first thing he thought about was how he wanted to stab her a whole bunch is a reference to Tsukihime where Shiki meets Arcueid for the first time.

The story for Azula, Interupted of someone else framing Azula for killing cats and turtleducks comes from a really brief flashback in Tokyo Ghoul where Mutsuki remembers killing cats as a child and gets made fun of for it. Then she remembers running all the way to where she buried all the cat's tongues, and picks the jar up and cries and begs for the cats to forgive her. I know that's kind of a weird scene, but basically that whole chapter came from my idea of Azula remembering getting slapped by her mom for killing the turtleducks and begging someone to believe her and then it suddenly flashes forward to the future and Azula is still crying about it.

That's all I can remember referencing or getting inspired by for now.

[pweepsiee]

Thank you but goodbye

This won’t get any traction because only pictures of tits get pushed or interacted with but that’s okay. I’ll add tags so you guys see this anyway.

It’s hard to know where to start. I spent a long time on here, putting pieces of myself out into the void, hoping for connection, validation, maybe even some kind of understanding. But it’s been a journey that taught me more than I ever anticipated—about others, about myself, and about the darker sides of online spaces and human nature.

I’ve been through more than I ever thought I’d face here. I’ve had people send me things no one should have to see—gore, graphic threats of rape and murder. Strangers who decided they had the right to punish me with violence for simply existing and sharing my body on my own terms. I’ve been slut-shamed, insulted, torn apart, told I’m not “enough” in a thousand different ways. Too fat, too ugly, too bitchy, too much of a people pleaser. For some, my body was never enough to satisfy whatever expectation they’d dreamed up for me. And when I expressed my pain, I was told to just “try harder” to please. Every insult, every attack—it was relentless.

At first, there was a thrill in it. The idea that people were paying attention. But over time, it became less about freedom and self-expression, and more like a trap. I started needing the notifications, addicted to the fleeting rush of being “seen,” even if it came with all the ugliness. I posted things that made me feel raw, exposed, and ashamed—but still, I kept them up. It wasn’t even about me anymore; it was about performing for a faceless audience, one that only wanted to consume and never connect. I kept hoping that if I posted more, someone might notice that I was struggling, that I was hurting. But the moments I tried to be vulnerable were met with derision, mockery, or worse, cruelty.

On October 6th, I tried to end my life. It wasn’t a whim or a flippant decision—it was the culmination of feeling completely worthless, invisible beyond what I could offer visually, and unheard. I had tried to signal that I was in pain, and the responses I got were gut-wrenching. People told me to “try again,” mocking my failure to die. Others brushed it aside entirely, demanding I get back to posting my body as if I had no value beyond that. It was like looking into a mirror that only showed one version of myself—a version people felt entitled to consume and degrade.

There’s a sickness in spaces like these, a perverse lack of empathy and human decency. There’s a void where kindness, respect, and understanding should be. I’ve encountered men who would spit their hate, their misogyny, their violent fantasies at me without a second thought, men who have shown me how easily they can strip away my humanity to satisfy their own needs. Some are rapists, some are worse, and they all seem to revel in their cruelty, hiding behind screens. They have taught me that, to them, I am just an object—a body, a pair of tits, something to use and discard. They’ve shown me how quickly love, admiration, or even simple respect can turn into venom the moment they don’t get exactly what they want.

Being on here has been like swimming in polluted water, beautiful on the surface but poisonous underneath. What started as a space to share myself turned into a source of harm that corroded my mental and physical well-being. It was more than just being objectified—it was the sense that I didn’t even matter as a person, only as a vessel for gratification. And that feeling sank deeper and deeper, leaving wounds I’m still working to heal.

I’ve met a few kind people here, people who saw me for more than just a body, who offered me small glimpses of kindness, understanding, and friendship. To those few: thank you. Your kindness did not go unnoticed, and I wish you nothing but peace, joy, and all the love you deserve. To those who saw my humanity and respected it—I’m grateful.

But to the rest: those who degraded me, insulted me, sent me threats or slurs, and preyed on my vulnerabilities—you’ll reap what you sow, one way or another. I don’t hold anger toward you, but I do pity you. And I have no intention of letting your words and actions follow me into the future.

There’s been a silver lining in all of this, and it’s one of the few positive things I’m taking with me. Through all of the toxicity, I discovered something important about myself. I realized I am a lesbian, and that I no longer want to be viewed as something for men to consume. I am worth so much more than being reduced to a body on a screen, worth more than any like, reblog, or message notification. I deserve to be seen, truly seen, as a whole person, and to be loved for who I am, not what I look like or what I can give to others.

This is goodbye. For those who truly cared, I’ll remember you. For those who didn’t, I’ll leave you behind, along with this platform that no longer serves me. I’m taking my life back, my self-worth back, and finding peace in spaces that don’t drain me.

Thank you, and goodbye. ♡´･ᴗ･`♡

[katerinaaqu]

Yes I know a bit on the ending of Blood of Zeus

Again that is my point. If he wanted to do something as bizarre as what he did why use Odyssey and not an original story like PJO did. I do not like that either but at least the dude made the effort to create original characters like Blood of Zeus did. The mangling of the Odyssey that I saw in Epic has me even more as "why the heck did you pick the Odyssey? Just write your own story at this point with your own characters"

Actually yes it is surprising because it shows how much half a brain the world has that they pick a clear entertainment material that is also altered to THIS degree and take it for granted. Again his "warning" speaks more on the audience than the creator and again we see people like him or Hollywood who has the power to bring more people to this and instead of respecting the material they are working with they don't just have the "I don't care" card they have the "screw the plot" card and they change THE most critical parts of it and that seems as deliberate as it can be to me.

Again one can use greek mythology as a starting point without mangling a story. So many people used greek mythology to their original stories. See for instance Sinbad by DreamWorks how they inserted the Sirens. They didn't re-write the Odyssey they created an original. And they also inserted Tartarus and Eris and all. We have others that inserted greek mythology in their stories. The Odyssey has already be mangled enough. At this point I wonder if people do not like it enough to respect its story and its plot especially with the latest cringe that we got in this saga.

I have no idea what the "he owes us" even means. Again I never said he owes us anything. Likewise I do not owe anyone a thing by speaking up against the mangling of greek mythology over the years that people treat it like another fandom instead of the important cultural and religious significance it had for ancient Greeks (while mind you they do not mangle the same way other mythologies). I do not owe anyone to like them or see them positively either. Some I might and some I might not. Of course Jorge can do what ye wants. It is a free world. But people like me have also the right to say "we have had enough that samples of our ancient culture are being used as a stepstone for people who do not create original stories and they don't even put the courtesy to follow the source".

No it is not expectations. I am way past that! I was beyond the expectations from Cyclops saga. Right now is clear disappointment that the parts that made Odyssey famous and subject of debate for millennias were deliberately changed like they were not important to the story. That is the feeling it gives to me.

Little Wolf had me cringing because of the plot it was linked with because again it disregarded Telemachus situation and problem. Telemachus was not some whiny kid that could fight at any time and needed push. He couldn't face the suitors because they claimed the law of hospitality and he had no right yet to rule in his own accord and only Odysseus could send them away. He also needed to know about his father. Little Wolf made it sound like Telemachus was able to fight back at any moment he had the help of Athena and still had his ass handed to him. In the Odyssey he was proven a great fighter by the side of his father. The song was great of course but again it could fit at any context. Not Odyssey

I disagree. For starters I found the original much more epic because it's epic-Ness was not boss fights. It was the savagery of nature and the need of a man to survive and surviving against all odds. What epic did to that plot I can never appreciate sorry. I appreciate the songs but what epic did to Odyssey I can never appreciate. The plot was just yet another "screw the original i have other plans"

Just write your own story at this point. Make another character deflect Circe and Circe say "she was in love once before" remembering Odysseus, make some other arduous trip with a different reason behind it, make some other characters kill the sirens if you so much wanna write that thing. Not the Odyssey that has like one of the most detailed accounts to Odysseus's trip and even his emotions and all. Just pick an original story...

New Epic saga and it's horrible... to give you an idea, Odysseus fought Poseidon, stole his trident and made him beg for mercy

hmmm a god begging a mortal for mercy is not exactly on par with Greek religion and stories. How did that scene made it into the final version?

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[b4kuch1n]

siren

[yume-fanfare]

undead girl time! toxic yuri also

[significant-narratives]

because i am who i am as a person, i looked up minty’s astro chart in honour of his birthday and like… your honour that’s the future heart of our team…

[unproduciblesmackdown]

among the boundless billions zaniness like laugh track as it definitely has that moment of expressing "rolling my eyes as The Left makes a kerfuffle of Acting like they have a stance as a veneer over the true belief that [xyz] is cool & chill actually" like what, approximate 0.000% chance wendy isn't, as usual, given the Objective Stance of "yeah yeah ohh we are cancelling involved parties talking about how we Don't watch this But. we all love this damn epic movie & already have it memorized so shut the fuck up, kids today" like. don't wanna really delve into how much billions thinks taylor or anyone is "really" trans / nonbinary like not too much benefit of the doubt in this material including what does provide info abt that specifically

& the general like [head in hands. what do you think any of this could possibly be about (you're the one that made your show at all about Power)] of "yes, it's bad/wrong to be someone that someone has done something to / victim of something" like that to be anti misogyny All Women Must Be Epic Winners b/c there's something to be proved: that they don't Deserve to be victims (of misogyny), not taken as a Given. while when we see some epic winner men stepping on other men (who need not all be guaranteed Winners so as to say misogyny is wrong), that's often Good, well beyond any assumption that various forms of basic disrespect / violation / patterns of emergent/entrenched power difference as Bad (for being things done to people, not for there being people they're being done to), & generally billions has to take an extra step when ppl get shitted on & tell us the Specific Cases when it was undeserved actually & someone was being mean to a specific person who didn't deserve that. & the specific cases when hey guess it wasn't that bad(tm) or when hey It's Okay that you're someone something was done to, in this case. & tell us what we were supposed to know all along like when someone who something was being done to (wrong Of Them, whether b/c they inherently deserve it no matter what, &/or b/c they failed to be someone who could make it Impossible to do anything to them, which, how do you do that besides being The Authority / Superior yourself, exactly? nonrhetorically? what if the in group vs out group / fascism / authoritarianism protected Me?) was actually being treated Too Well b/c ah well the abuse meant you were getting any attention, maybe it meant you were claimed as any superior's property, maybe it meant you weren't Already disposed of, as all Losers were in the end, You're Welcome.

obviously referring to winston where it's spelled out all the abuse towards him was deserved, & More than he deserved in the case of rian having more access & taking advantage of that, all for billions' enjoying its own sendoff there of, again, maximizing violation & violence short of [real violence is physical & leaves bruises / draws blood / Literally kills] which would be distasteful in general But doesn't it make wags look like the winner & winston the loser is that the former's completely unrelated completely impersonal ego blow gets way amplified taken out on winston, the most vulnerable recurring character when spyros as [first & ultimate Everyone Hates Him role] is more entrenched in there & billions still magnanimously pities tuk, as it does winston too, just not quite as much. again that like completely surface level realized power fantasy of forcing the mirror up to the Inferior so they're like nooo my inferiorityyyy & in doing so like, the projection in that lmao, we get it re: the valuing of & need(tm) for such Power Tripping & Reaffirming My Superiority & My Ego Restored; Everyone Claps like good god. & then for all ben & tuk are the slightly softer Two Too Nice Boys duo to the rian & winston quant duo, also like too nice i guess but not as much, ben is in charge of tuk but Any instance of rian being in charge of winston outstrips them in that "yay interpersonal abuse" dynamic, like then in the end billions may be like "yeah it's possible to be mean to them unlike how being mean to winston is actually Nice b/c he deserves everything he gets, we only vicariously enjoy it vs Feeling Bad for tuk & ben sometimes (still magnanimously & it's Not That Bad / just goofin)" like ben & tuk still Fail by not being people it's impossible to do anything to. & not Exceptions who anyone is really being Too Mean to. like if they were women, in which case, no problem surely with a "positive" kind of victim blaming where there is something Inherent that Will be victimized so hey how about to cancel that out there's this special Paternal Protection you Need always, Or Else? :) but instead they are men who are asian & is ben gay & w/tuk & winston nobody mentions glasses or fatness but billions doesn't really do much or very in depth textual mentioning of Anything, even w/nonzero mention that there may be gender & race in this world. a gay man, once. no disability. we just Know who are the inferiors who deserve it when they're treated inferiorly, or if they don't, they start deserving it when they fail to stop/avoid it, but if you start mentioning the factors behind who we all totally agree is inferior like whoa nobody was Saying any of that? being the real agent of oppression on the basis of the factors only You spelled out, much? nonbinary? i never say anything about the Gender Binary when i'm subscribing to it, sounds like You've created & enforced it. obfuscation & deflection onto [so Just Normal nobody has to label, explain, or argue it] couldn't serve a purpose & protect the existing power differences as they are. maybe You're the problem? perhaps you brought it upon yourself & now you're causing too much trouble standing up for yourself while everyone else's criticism is laser focused on you as the prior & continuing negative actions done to you are taken as a given / unquestioned / covertly protected to overtly encouraged?

anyway so wild if the Completely Normal(tm) Victim Blaming is uncritically recreated & oft embraced for "if you're watching this & don't wish you were axe / find him appealing" [billions as a sequence of vicarious power trips] purposes in this series....but a bit wild considering like this is your multiseason show that wasn't just purporting to be those power trips for [enough demographic & apparently specific personal tastes overlap w/creators] & was at all purporting to question the matters of power at play in the material, or yknow, at least to not be completely superficial material while said material is textually & thematically all about power difference being leveraged, how, the consequences, & so on. thus i will have to intermittently talk about it forever like this like lord unbelievable. & the funny little & sometimes less funny less little characters it has trapped in there so that those of us who were never meant to be in the audience can be cursed with this knowledge. like i have some feedback. "imagine not victim blaming" & "imagine adjusting your perspective can go beyond superficial layers added to politely defer to some other ppl while they're present but really like cmon do they deserve that. am i not just saying what we're allll thinking"

[vermillioncrown]

this is how temptation to write occurs:

start reading in new fandom

latch onto a meow meow

start a folie à deux with an enabler (@rozaceous 👀)

fandom haunts my dreams, dream some weird/funny shit

(if it stops here, i can still break free)

look up fandom geography, draw hypotheticals on sourced maps

imagine the fictional economic development of specific industries/sectors of an industry

[apoloadonisandnarcissus]

@gilgys-ring: thank you, for your contribution, friend. You made some interesting points. I’m replying through here because I’ve already answered to some of the ideas you gave, above, and it will be relevant to what I’m about to write here.

I also agree that some binding probably happened but I don’t think it necessarily HAS to be on purpose because someone wrote that Sauron might have stabbed her with the crown knowing that he wound would suck her into the Unseen world but he didn’t stab her fatally and so giving her time finally yield to him and hand over Nenya which he could have used to heal that wound as a reward for joining him. He wasn’t above trying literally every tactic in the book to get her to “decide” to join him but since she refused every trick he resorted to violence and the fact that he took the 9 but didn’t take nenya looks to me like he desperately needs this picture to hold that when she joins him he “convinced” and not outright controlled her to do anything because he wants her to yield to him “of her own will”.  

If the blood binding happened, it has to be intentional: this has been Sauron’s desire ever since 1x06, when he was still Halbrand (aka “Repentant Mairon”). This was what he proposed to her in 1x08; you bind me to the light, and I bind you to power. He wants this; giving Galadriel his power, and harvesting her light for himself.  

And, yes, Galadriel’s soul would go to the Unseen world, no matter Sauron’s true intention with this (this is a confirmed fact by 2x08):

As for Nenya, we still don’t fully understand how the rings of power work. From what we saw in 2x01, Nenya chose Galadriel as its ring-bearer; this can be a clue that the Three rings of power might have a “will of their own” like the One ring has.

Meaning: Sauron knows that Nenya belongs to Galadriel, and only her can surrender it to him. And this is most likely the reason why he just didn’t take her off her hand (like he did with the Nine).

Galadriel surrendered Nenya to Elrond in 2x04 for safe keeping, and Adar was able to retrieve the ring by force in 2x07, only he was the one who ended up returning it to Galadriel. We see this dynamic with the One ring, and how much it wants to return to its master, Sauron, in “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. What if the Three work in the same way? 

I have a hard time believing that he actually puppermaster-controlled her to do anything because he wants her to yield to him “of her own will”.  Also I don’t remember if we ever saw him puppetmaster-controlling anyone to a point where they changed their thought, just deceiving with multiple people and then puppetmaster-control with the guards stabbing each other for example. But deceiving Celebrimbor was also never about puppetmastering him but showing and telling him stuff that changed his perception and the guards seemed terrified when he puppetmaster-controlled them right? Unlike Galadriel when she was about to give him Nenya.  

You are correct, because Sauron isn’t a “master-puppeteer”; what he does is “planting seeds” on people’s minds. He’s like a demon whispering in your ear, giving you hints on what to do. Celebrimbor explained this to the audience, in 2x05: “It is a game you play, is it not? Sowing seeds in others' minds and then convincing them that the fruit is of their own thought.”  

However (and this is why this reblog is important), the concept of “free will” is a major theme in Tolkien lore. Sauron might “plant these seeds”, but it’s ultimately other beings’ choice to follow what he says, or not. Sauron is a personification of evil in the legendarium, which means others have the choice to either follow him (evil), or turn away (good). That’s why Sauron tells Celebrimbor “you chose this”; because he, indeed, has. He has chosen to follow evil.  

“That’s why I think he just though she finally got it and gave a shot and she played along to idk fuck with him?” 

Like I said in my OG post, this is underestimating Sauron’s power. He’s one of the most powerful Maiar in existence. Galadriel doesn’t have the power to deceive him, even if she wanted to.  

Another thought was that he stabbing with the crown was symbolic for him whether he knows of any binding power of the blood or of the magic. He’s petty and angry in that moment and he doesn’t use the sword but stabs her with the symbol of his earlier proposal to elevate her above everything else in Middle-earth to show her how hard she fucked this up for herself and what she forced him to do to her if we know one thing about that guy it’s that he’s melodramatic as fuck. Also I agree that he obviously didn’t want to kill her because if that was the case he would have just done it. Maybe he learned from his fuck-up with Celebrimbor to try and control the damage even in anger. 

Sauron knows blood magic, indeed; he’s been a master of it for thousands of years (probably for longer than Galadriel herself is alive). This is why blood binding theory is the one I subscribe to. 

Morgoth’s crown was a symbol of Morgoth’s power and his desires. I talked about this on this post. However, Morgoth’s goal wasn’t to rule only Middle-earth, but the entire world (Arda) by corrupting it. Had him stabbed her with any other crown, maybe, but with this specific object, I don’t think so. Because Sauron’s offer wasn’t to make Galadriel queen of Arda, but queen of Middle-earth.

Sauron doesn’t stab Galadriel in anger; in fact, we see him stopping for a bit, while he’s looking at her, and then he goes for it. This means this was something he did on a conscious and intentional way, and not on a fit rage (like with Celebrimbor).  

Blood binding and Sauron’s intentions

My pal @rey-jake-therapist and I were in one of our usual friendly discussions about this topic in one of her posts, but since the theme digresses so much from her original intent and I’m pretty much spamming her OG post by now, we decided to move the debate to here, and invite the fandom to join in.

As customary, Rey always presents good and challenging counter-arguments to mine. Because it's possible to disagree and keep it civil and friendly. This is good fandom etiquette, and this is the point of debates, after all: sharing different ideas and perspectives on the same topic. We usually end up agreeing on disagreeing and it’s all good in the end.

What were Sauron’s intentions and goals in stabbing Galadriel with Morgoth’s crown in 2x08? 

2x01 / 2x08 parallels: “Only blood can bind.” (Adar; 1x05)

1) Binding/Enslaving Galadriel to his Will

Rey made the case for Sauron’s intention of possessing and dominating Galadriel using Morgoth’s crown. And that we should focus on present intentions, and not lose yourselves in “what if” scenarios (with this I totally agree, so, let's focus on the present time).

This theory states that Sauron wanted to enslave Galadriel to his will, by having her handing over Nenya, in submission. This would explain why Galadriel seemed “bewitched” while removing Nenya from her finger, and almost surrendering it to him.  

This means Sauron has “outgrown” his intentions from 1x08, when he wanted to serve Galadriel (due to his Maia nature; he was created to be a servant to a Vala). Now, he wants full power, and he’s not willing to share it with anyone else (Galadriel included):

Sauron only wants to dominate/possess Galadriel now: she humiliated him when she refused him in 1x08, he developed an obsession for her, so he punished her with physical pain (the stabbing), and attempted to possess her so she would follow him.

And so, if blood binding theory is true, this would work like the Nine and the Nazgûl, with Galadriel not only being a servant, but a slave to Sauron. This theory can also imply she would have, indeed, become a Ringwraith herself, as her soul was entering the Unseen world (“Shadow realm”) when Gil-galad and Arondir found her.

This is a very strong theory, and I think many fellow fans share this view, as well. Would it pass Sauron to do something like this? Absolutely not, and it would not be OCC for him to have this intention, at all.

So what’s my problem, you might ask?

This facial expression right here:

Unless Charlie was having a case of fatigue eyes due to extensive use of contact lenses (speaking from personal experience), there’s no explanation for Sauron getting all teared up when he believed Galadriel was about to join him, if his intention was to enslave her to his will, and that’s what he was doing here.

And no, Galadriel can’t deceive him. This is underestimating Sauron’s power: he’s the “great deceiver”, and only he can deceive himself, really. And if they are, indeed, blood bound, Galadriel couldn’t possibly hide anything from him. And I already made the case for how Galadriel was about to join him, freely, in another post.

2) “You bind me to the light, I bind you to power”

Speaking of Sauron’s intentions, we need to remember the creator of this character and what he says about him. Tolkien tells us (in Letters 131, 153 and 183) that “Annatar” still has “fair motives”: he’s a reformer who, truly, wants to rebuild/heal Middle-earth, and he’s genuine in this endeavor (nevermind his methods, that’s why he’s a villain). Rey counter-argumented this does not translate in a desire to serve Galadriel, and she’s correct.

However, what was his intention in 1x08?  

And if Sauron still has a genuine concern in healing Middle-earth, what if his intention with Morgoth’s crown was giving Galadriel his power, while harvesting her light for himself, just like he wanted in 1x08? And if this was his intention, why would he keep her soul “trapped” in the Unseen world? What if he wanted to make her queen of the Seen and Unseen world? Not a mere queen of Middle-earth, but as nearly as possible to a literal Goddess he could serve?

Because Sauron/Mairon can’t escape his nature, he was created to be a servant, a Maia to a Vala. And, right now, he doesn’t want to serve Morgoth. Even though he does it, unconsciously, and perhaps he recognized this after he killed Celebrimbor in a rage fit (something that’s completely OCC for him, because that’s not who he is; Sauron is a control freak, a mastermind).

This scene with Galadriel happened after that; and Sauron cried because, when he looked up at Celebrimbor, all he could see was Morgoth’s bounds on him reaching the surface. And that chaotic destruction is Morgoth, not Sauron. And he doesn't want that at this point on his character arc in Tolkien lore. I think this is when Sauron makes the decision to bind himself to Galadriel, one way or the other.

I absolutely disagree with the idea that Sauron stabbed Galadriel to punish her or kill her: if that was his true intention he would have used Morgoth sword (he was already using it in his duel with Galadriel the entire time), not a powerful dark magic object infused with own blood (because Adar used it to destroy his previous physical form), nor he would have carried that thing around the entire time while mentioning "binding" twice (“I never believed I could be... Until today. Fighting at your side, I... I felt... If I could just hold on to that feeling, keep it with me always, bind it to my very being, then I...” (1x06); “The door is still open”).

“Binding” (usually connected with “blood oaths”) and “enslaving” are two different kinds of blood magic. Because the Nine rings of power are pieces of jewelry meant to be worn by ring-bearers, with a small dosage of Sauron’s blood (along with other specific spells). Morgoth’s crown not only has a lot of Sauron’s blood on it, but we also don’t know what kind of dark magic it actually contains: we only know it was made to hold the Silmarils and it can destroy Sauron’s physical form (implying that, maybe, Sauron doesn’t have much control over this object?).

Sauron accidentally sharing his power with Galadriel is nonsense to me, as well. He's ancient, has been around since before the world existed (he helped create that very world), has been a master in blood magic and every sort of sorcery for thousands of years, and he’s one of the most powerful Maia in existence, but isn’t aware he would be giving Galadriel some of his power by binding himself to her? When he clearly mentions this in 1x08? "I bind you to power". Because Galadriel appears to be seeing the world in a whole new way in 2x08 epilogue (and even her eyes look off):

Besides, Galadriel is suppose to be a powerful sorceress of her own right in Tolkien lore, mastering several powers. In the legendarium Galadriel own power was amplified by Nenya, yes, but this isn’t the case in “Rings of Power”, because we haven’t seen her displaying any magical powers in Season 1. She won’t have any other powers in the show (besides healing and foresight/visions), completely cutting off with Tolkien legendarium? If the show keeps it true to the lore on that bit, where did her powers (look into others’ hearts and minds, and communicate telepathically) come from? Will they “magically” appear out of nowhere? When and how? But, if these powers came from Sauron it’s because he wanted it to happen, and that was his intention. And if that was his intention, what was his purpose with this if not to serve her?

And Sauron does share power: he does share his power with those he wants to enslave; via the rings of power. That’s why Celebrimbor tells him he’s their prisoner, and not their master. However, these are two very different kinds and degrees of magic. Because with the rings ("enslave") he can control how he wants it to go; while sharing his actual power with another living being ("blood oath") is uncontrollable. He can’t possible know the end result of it.

I know there’s a popular theory that Adar was blood bound to Sauron, but I don’t think so. Adar not only doesn't have any magical powers, but he wouldn’t be able to kill Sauron himself, if that was true. Blood binding is a blood oath, and it’s forever, unbreakable, and it prevents beings from harming or acting against one another (physically) in any direct way. That’s why “Rings of Power” introduced the clue that Sauron might be blood bound to Morgoth in 1x03; and that’s the reason he could never leave nor forsake his master even when he came to resent him.

This means, that, in "Rings of Power", Sauron, most likely, only has Morgoth as a reference to blood oaths. And he probably thinks this will go the same way with Galadriel, and he’ll keep her light to himself, allowing him to keep Morgoth at bay. Only her “light” is merely aesthetic, really. The light that shines on her hair and eyes is the light of the Two Trees of Valinor, and it shines on every Elf that was born during the Years of the Trees (and not only her). Because Galadriel is a complex and nuanced character, and ticking bomb that can turn dark at any minute.  

[airenyah]

i completely understand the ohm obsession and i cannot thank you enough for all your insights on acting (his and also in general) too! i LOVE reading what you have to say and learning from you at the same time! watching series (i also just watched the latest 10yt ep) feels like an even more involved experience now because i can actively analyse the acting (i keep coming back to your post to see how ohm does such and such) too! thank you x1000000 and please know that i am consensually kissing your ginormous brain <3

anon, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh thank you so much for your lovely message, it delights me greatly!!!!!!!!!! I read your ask earlier and I was sitting in my bed at the time and once I’d finished reading I kind of just fell forward, burying my head into my blanket and squealing like a little child for like a minute, that’s how happy your words made me 💕

I’m so glad to hear that I managed to explain things clearly enough that others (in this case you specifically) can get something out of it!! honestly, I’ve been so shy when it comes to talking about acting here on tumblr because I feel like I can’t express what I mean very well. And the problem is what I’ve mentioned so far really is just a quick overview, there are many concepts I definitely forgot about (obviously I don’t have a list in my head, I just notice things as I’m watching) and those that I did talk about, well, I really didn’t go into a lot of detail there, it was more of a quick summary (there is SO. MUCH. You really can’t sum up 3 years of drama school into one single tumblr post hahaha)

and also, unfortunately I can’t just go and analyze a clip second by second while you listen. I mean okay yeah, in some cases and for some specific concepts gifs will do the trick (like in my bbs ep 3 sniffing scene analysis) but with a lot of things it’s just easier when you have the entire clip with sound and all, where you can also jump back and forth and then maybe go find another example for comparison to make things a little clearer

because often a performing concept or performing technique will be easier to understand when you’ve seen someone do it “wrong”. I’m saying “wrong” here in quotation marks because I’m only putting it that way for the sake of simplicity. There isn’t really a right or wrong here, it’s usually much more about “if you perform it this way then you’ll likely have this effect on the audience, if you perform it that way then you’ll likely have that effect on the audience. Which one do you wanna achieve as an actor?” Though, one can definitely say that performing a certain way will touch the audience more or they will have an easier time following the story and the emotions compared to performing it a different way. Again, it’s a lot like food: put sugar in one recipe and it’ll taste amazing and people can’t stop eating, put sugar in another and people will refuse to eat it because it tastes so bad to them, put sugar in yet another recipe and it might be perfectly edible but would probably be a whole lot more enjoyable without the sugar

what I mean by that is: it might come to situations where I’ll be like “this actor has this aggressive undertone 90% of the time and we’re half-way through the drama and it’s starting to annoy me and make me dislike the character and the relationship” or “this actor has no thoughts behind their actions and so watching them just bores me” (yes these are real-life opinions that I’ve recently had. No I will not be revealing said dramas publicly, but if anyone reading this is curious then feel free to come into my dms and I might spill the tea)

comparing various scenes of an actors using a technique well with actors using that technique not so well really helps with learning how to analyze acting because you’ll see the different effects it’ll have on you as a viewer when someone uses a technique well vs someone who’s bad at it

I do have some “bad” examples that I could tell you about and fun fact: that even includes แค่เพื่อนครับเพื่อน BAD BUDDY SERIES (my most beloved <3). but as I’ve said before, I just don’t feel comfortable sharing the negativity publicly, because I don’t wanna hurt anyone’s feelings. And I don’t like getting into arguments, especially public ones, so I don’t want to get any stupid comments on my posts or in my ask box. However, if you’re curious my dearest anon, you’re very welcome to come right into my dms for some deeper discussion on that. And you don’t have to be nervous about revealing your identity, because sharing my observations with you in even more detail would definitely bring me great joy💕 (this goes for anyone reading this, btw, feel free to slide into my dms fsjksd)

in fact, I wish I could do this one acting analysis project with you that I did with my friend!! quick backstory: back in november 2021 I watched this old korean drama and I ended up getting super obsessed with it because I realized there were remakes from other countries which I then also ended up watching and comparing all these version was a suuuuper eye opening experience for me when it comes to “well used technique” vs “badly used technique” (I learned A LOT from this when in regard to acting) And then half-way through the semester something came up in the uni course my friend and I attend together and I ended up mentioning some acting concept and realized that said kdrama & remakes were a perfect example of that and I wanted to show her

And this turned into this month long project throughout november 2022, in which I selected a sequence that had the exact same plot and context in both versions and I showed them to her in several rounds and let her do the analyzing first without me telling her a thing. So the first time around she got absolutely zero info from me, she knew absolutely nothing about the plot, or the characters or anything. I turned off the subtitles as well as the sound and let take a look at ONLY the visuals. For the 2nd round the only thing she got in addition was the sound but I still didn’t tell her anything about the plot or the characters. In the 3rd round I finally told her about the plot and had her watch everything with the context in mind. And only in the final round did I turn on the subtitles. After every round we spent at least an hour discussing everything that she saw or noticed or how she felt watching it but I didn’t tell her any of my own thoughts. I wanted her to make up her own mind first and discover things for herself. It was a quite interesting project, both for me and for her! And yeah, I wish I could do this with you because I’m sure it would be eye-opening for you! (you don’t happen to live in austria, do you? 😂 well, maybe we could figure out a remote solution with screensharing or something...)

also thank you for calling my brain ginormous 🥰 i'll accept the compliment, but let me tell you, it really isn't that big yet!! i wish you could hear what my fave monologue teacher and my camera acting teacher always had to say in class!!! and also, you should really hear what my mom has to say on performing, i feel like such a baby next to her. seriously, the THINGS she SEES?????

story time (sorry i know this is super long already): we were watching the eclipse together, right, and at some point after weeks, towards the end of the series when akkayan start dating, we were just watching this episode, right? and suddenly my mom goes: *pointing at khaotung* "he seems tense, his inner balance seems off"

and i'm just sitting there like "???????? what are you talking about???? they're literally just lying down in bed, HOW can you tell???????"

she tried to explain it to me but i was just left super confused. i think it was an episode later (or maybe the same episode but some scenes later?? i don't remember) there was another scene where they were standing upright and my mom hit pause and went "here, do you see how [insert explanation]" and i was like "oh. okay yeah. yeah that makes sense. i think i know what you mean". and then during the finale (i think?) there was another moment where i even noticed something before my mom said it and then she pointed it out and i was like "yeah i caught that too!!!!"

i also showed her the only friends trailer and there's this one shot where khaotung is sitting on the bed with book, right? and my mom paused the video and went "huh? that's funny. half of his body looks tense while the other half looks completely relaxed" (half meaning left/right, not upper half and lower half). again i was just sitting there like "HOW?????? HOW DO YOU EVEN SEE THIS?????"

(admittedly, my mother works in the medical field and she's close to finishing a 2(?) year training program as a massage therapist, so i guess she'd know about tense bodies from having first hand experience hahaha)

well, i'll stop it here bc i'm sure this is already over 1000 words long again oops. if you've made it all the way down here, then i really appreciated that and give you forehead kiss (if you like that, of course. if not then i'll give you a hug or a highfive or a wave or whatever else you're comfortable with). then again, you've also read my 3.7k analysis on ohm's acting so…

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[britcision]

The trick is making those words and their meanings accessible for everyone

Young kids learn all the words for snow in their cultures

Most adults in the western world never learn exactly what quantum physics describes, or the names of half the tools in a standard toolbox

Good scientists build a glossary appropriate to the understanding of their audiences

(They use words you’ll understand when speaking to you)

The takeaway is: scientists are not doing it on purpose, the government is by making it hard for you to learn what those words mean without spending a lot of money

If someone can persuade you that people who use technical terms look down on you for not knowing them, you’re less likely to believe those people if they say something that someone doesn’t want you to know

Like that climate change is real

It is intentional, deliberate anti-intellectualism to make you trust anyone but the experts

We combat this by learning what those specific terms mean, and by teaching our scientists communication tools and not denigrating the humanities

The whole “scientists use big words on purpose to be exclusive” is such a bunch of anti-intellectual bullshit. Specific and concise language exists for a reason; you need the right words to convey the right meaning, and explaining stuff right is a hugely important part of science. Cultures that live around loads of snow have loads of words to describe different types of snow; cultures that live in deserts have loads of words to describe different types of sand. Complex language is needed for complex meaning.

[blazehedgehog]

Soaking this in

If you don't know what this is, here's an explanation: Both Fortnite and Call of Duty employ something called "Skill-Based Matchmaking" (SBMM for short), and it has become the bane of a certain subset of players who very vocally yell about how it is ruining multiplayer games.

In short, the game secretly and quietly keeps track of your "skill level." Even if a game has both ranked and unranked modes, it is always tracking this skill level stat that reports back how quickly and easily you're getting kills. When you connect to a new match, it tries to group you with players near your skill level.

The idea being you start with zero skill stat, and by playing the game well, your skill stat levels up until you eventually plateau and you are forever playing the game with people that are just as good (or bad) as you are, within some level of variance.

This means if you're one of these career streamer guys or a Youtube clip compilation sort of dude (or both), then you very quickly get put into high tier matchmaking pools with all the other career streamers and wannabe esports pros. Hence the very loud, very vocal complaints, because if you're one of those guys, the idea of having a "casual match" goes away. Everybody is always firing on all cylinders and you're expected to do the same in order to keep your rank and not look embarrassing to your captive audience.

So Activision apparently ran an experiment per Charlie Intel (article here) where they reduced SBMM's effectiveness, meaning the big fish pros and the little tadpole casual players were thrown into more games together.

The result was a sharp uptick in players rage quitting matches early, some even quitting the game entirely and never coming back. The report notes that while player retention for players with a high skill rank was improved, they make up such a small percentage of the player base (apparently less than 1%; the article has some grammar problems) that servicing them really doesn't make sense.

As it turns out, low level players don't want to get hopelessly destroyed by wannabe esports pros. And those pros make up such a small percentage of the player base it doesn't make sense to keep feeding them more low level chum, even though they are the hungriest for it. As more and more low level players permanently leave the game due to frustration, it turns into a wasteland where high level players are getting mad at each other until they also get frustrated and leave as well. SBMM ensures long term health for a game's multiplayer ecosystem.

And being a Fortnite player, it's so validating to hear this. "SBMM is ruining multiplayer" was always a narrative coming from streamers and youtubers who were frustrated by having to actually TRY instead of being able to score easy clip compilation fodder on clueless newbies.

Enjoy sticking to your smurf accounts now, I guess.