#not only the main characters

[ziggityzigg]

Writers, can we whump Eret, son of Eret?

[albaharu]

thank u dungeon meshi for the dwarves

[danyllura]

I love that in Catching fire Katniss comes to the conclusion the other tributes are trying to keep Peeta alive because they must see how amazingly perfectly wonderful he is. When in actuality that’s just her having a crush and everyone else recognizing that if Peeta gets hurt Katniss will go fully feral and unhinged and probably try to kill everyone and then herself.

[yardsards]

"i don't ship laios and marcille-" oh yeah same, their relationship is so much more compelling to me viewed through a platonic lens than a romantic one

"-like, marcille clearly hates laios" are we reading/watching the same series??? did you just stop after the first couple chapters??? look at their relationship development, that's her friend! her bestie, even!!!

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Happy Thistle Debut Day!

[bixels]

April-Jacqueline angry expressions.

[cracklewink]

Discord redesign idea I had! He has three heads representing the three types of ponies that are constantly bickering.

[the-nefarious-vampire]

"you only say you're autistic because you want to feel special and different" actually finding out i was autistic made me feel significantly less special and different. before i was autistic i was Strange and Unpredictable in some sort of Unknowable way which Surely meant i was Predestined for Greatness (like storybook character). now im just some fuckin autistic guy like any other. i significantly prefer it this way btw

[ruporas]

birthday party (id in alt)

[chloesimaginationthings]

You should totally have Jeremy meet the gang if you haven't already!

I definitely should, so far this is the only time I’ve drawn him in the comic!

[umblrspectrum]

hi heres art so you pay attention to me now go read the tags

[aroaceleovaldez]

the dynamic of demigods thinking which other demigod is the most powerful is always amusing to me because. like, we know the big 3 kids are all the most powerful. That's just a fact of their universe. And then we know nearly every character views Percy as the strongest demigod, and most people are very rightfully intimidated by him.

and you look at the powers of the Big 3 kids and there's Percy, but then you realize Nico is just kind of objectively more powerful than him but simply chooses to hang out in Percy's shadow like he's Percy's scary dog privileges. Like, the two of them are pretty equally capable of causing multiple different apocalypses. Nico just also has like four different instakill powers and it's not like he doesn't use them. He very much uses them! Not infrequently, even! And they don't seem to take a significant amount of energy from him! And other demigods are pretty intimidated by both of them! But Nico makes a conscious point to keep his cards close to his chest and not let on exactly how dangerous and scary he can be if he wants to. People are already scared enough of him without knowing anything about him and he doesn't like that. Percy doesn't think about that nearly as much, and so usually just goes in guns blazing and that's part of why he's considered a wildcard. And then Nico himself puts Percy on a pedestal, so those who do know more about Nico's abilities then presume Nico knows something they don't about Percy that implies Percy is even stronger than him.

And even on a meta level Nico's narrative role requires him to be functionally more powerful than Percy, because he very often serves the purpose of getting Percy out of situations he can't handle on his own. That's just part of his function as a character! But also narratively he can't overshadow Percy so he just takes a backseat of his own accord and that's very amusing to me.

[errorwarblesrr]

I know it's a comedy manga, but the ww manga probably has one of my favorite manga interpretations of Link. Mainly because he feels accurate to his games. He's quiet, he can talk, but he mostly just communicates his thoughts through his actions and body language. He's also just a silly little guy.

[anghraine]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[dirtytransmasc]

if they don't give Helaena one scene that doesn't strip her of her agency or just treat her like fodder, I'm gonna scream. if they don't give Helaena one scene with her dragon, I'm gonna scream. if they don't give Helaena one, better yet, multiple, scenes with Aegon, her brother, her husband, the father of her children, I'm gonna scream.

[sammygender]

girlcoded sam readings are like. his arcs are so tied up with control and bodily autonomy and sexual assault and otherness and cleanness and a desire for freedom and rebellion against oppressive masculine forces to the point where an examination of his show-long arcs looks like a thesis on The Female Gothic. he’s never afforded the respect or the power of characters like john and dean and is in fact narratively punished whenever he isn’t subservient to them. both the show itself and the fandom surrounding it treat him like dean’s bitch wife. he is textually compared to female characters multiple times, by the narrative and by dean.

and then meanwhile girlcoded dean readings are like. Eldest daughter core! (his father handed down ultimate control over every aspect of sam’s life once he died like a family heirloom)(he is THE patriarch). Yes he does the cooking yes he does the cleaning (which he doesn’t even…. and even if he solely did all the housework how does that make him Girl Coded unless it’s being delegated exclusively to him like its his role and he’s punished for not conforming to it… which is not happening…).

like girlcoded dean readings rely on stereotypes about women in real life. girlcoded sam readings rely on noticing how much the narrative constructed around sam falls into tropes used in fiction almost always about women. even things like his psychic powers! the way people are always swarming around trying to ‘corrupt’ him! the fixation on his purity and innocence! the two readings are very different things