#only one more thing. i guess on a more personal level i hate this interpretation of kdj because i really relate to him a lot

[fulcrums501st]

in the end, art is obviously subjective and everyone had different expectations going into s2 based on their interpretation of s1 and how they interacted with it. Like you can pick and chose pieces of evidence to fit whatever argument you want lmao, selection bias and whatnot, and everyone is capable of it. so policing people opinions by throwing around the phrase “media literacy” is annoying. media literacy is about understand the text and it’s intensions in the light of the context it was written/created. People can have the same level of media comprehension of a work, and yet still have vastly different opinions on how well it was executed or how much they enjoyed it. Cuz again, art is mostly subjective.

I always see points I agree with and disagree with on “both sides” but I also rlly hate that the arcane discourse has become split into “sides” that assume ya either love the second season or hate it and think everything was awful. and I think that rlly inhibits thoughtful discussion from occurring, or at least less heated discussion. plus it’s pretty easy to curate the content you interact with so you’re only seeing people who already agree with you and so you aren’t exposed to other opinions as much. we naturally are more inclined to listen to and believe others whose opinions already align with our own. this happens on literally every social media platform lol, it’s how apps keep ya engaged. but it’s also how echo chambers of inaccurate and biased info emerge. but I digress.

Anyway, by critiquing something, you’re automatically associated with hating the whole season as if it personally killed your parents. Or if you praise parts of it, and like stuff the creators were trying to do, people assume you’re defending every single part of the season or you think there are no flaws. And I think there’s pressure to fully commit to one side before ya personally reflect on how you personally felt about the season.

There’s always gonna be wild takes on “both sides”. And both sides always rage and focus on the most wild takes on their respective opposing side to discredit the opinions/thoughts of the whole side, as if a whole group can be defined by one persons dumb post.

social media kinda makes this sort of thing inevitable, tumblr just less so than something like Twitter I’d say. we just gotta be aware that it’s happening

I guess this ramble applies to basically any online discourse.

my wife is a super active tumblr user and has been telling me about this media literacy thing thats been happening/talked about here and i have really struggled to understand it, to the point that i didnt really believe it was real or i was just misunderstanding her or it was a very small isolated thing. she was telling me about it and it felt like she was just exaggerating for shock value and to be funny and i couldnt even laugh cuz i was too busy trying to figure out what the fuck she was talking about. people dont engage with media where someone is a bad person? ok but like so what do u watch and read? what is a story without a villain? that doesnt make sense i literally cant believe it.

then i watched the arcane finale and after exhausting my usual sources i turned to tumblr for more fan art and good vibes and ohhhhhh BOY arcane tumblr is like the source pool of this behavior, it is overFLOWING with media illiteracy and i got to actually see it with my own eyes and i was floored. i cant stop reading. the takes get wilder and wilder and the fabricated scenarions, lies, gross misunderstandings and blatant inability to infer anything get worse and worse and WORSE. its like watching a car accident over and over and over and its fascinating.

like, i understand why and how someone would become a conspiracy theorist or join a cult or whatever extreme thing, it makes total sense to me and is inherently human to create reasoning that feels safe to explain things that shock or scare you i.e. why religion exists lol but this doesnt follow that logic at all. i assume folks think they are being extremely smart but i struggle to accept that when people are just blatantly lying on the internet and most of the stuff i read is about visual media and you can literally just watch it or cite clips and instantly debunk it all. its not click bait and its not rage bait because all the interactions are supportive and agreeing. like wtf happened here?

i've been obsessed since i started reading this stuff because im so intrigued as to how you get to such a ridiculous spot, and not just a couple people but a whole swath of people across all the fandoms all writing long essays of bad takes with the same therapy language and total demonization of any disagreement. i wanna understand what you get from soapboxing on the internet and backing it up with exaggerations and lies and blatant ignorance to basic human interaction? i wonder if these people have ever spoken to a person before or had any kind of relationships because this is like robot level ignorance. i wonder why you want this. i wonder why you think these opinions make you better. i wonder if you actually apply these opinions in your real life, do you treat all your relationships with the same clinical level of over explaining and always assuming the absolute worst.

anyways, thats it for now. i have so many thoughts and theyre all running all over each other and i already have a hard time writing a large amount at once so i gotta step back and maybe ill try to collect some thoughts and continue thinking out loud here or maybe anxiety will get the better of me. we'll see.

[july-19th-club]

a while back i read jane eyre for the first time since high school in anticipation of watching the 2006 wilson/stephens miniseries. it's incredible to reread these classic novels as an adult, because while i got all the words and understood the *content* as a teenager, i didn't at all find the book interesting or fun to read. anyway i think one of the reasons that book stood the test of time isn't so much the gothic intrigue and how fucked up rochester and his wife are . he sucks so bad in so many ways . but he keeps needing rescued from stuff and only jane can do it . he fucking breaks an ankle falling off a horse early in her employment with him and she's the one who helps him back to the house . his attic wife sets his bedroom on fire and jane's the one who finds him and puts it out before he dies of smoke inhalation . then attic wife sets the house on fire after jane leaves and the whole place burns to the ground, grievous death and permanent injuries, etc, etc. jane comes back yippee everything's okay again! austen heroes don't get wounded like that because they're far too sedate and busy engaging in social seasons and heathcliff is like not wounded physically so much as destroyed emotionally . but this dude strikes the balance for readers who best enjoy when a man is collapsing of various problems and literally cant survive a day without some governess to pour water on his four-poster so he doesn't fry to a crisp

ALSO . i particularly was interested in the passages just after jane first meets him where she talks a lot about how if he was a normal polite person, or even just like a normal Lord with like, a sense of propriety and good manor house manners, she'd have been shy and awkward and uncomfortable and would have hated him. but i think where some interpretations get it wrong is that she doesn't think his rudeness is HOT. she thinks it's good for her own confidence, in that she knows her own self-esteem and social comfort levels are so low that all the scripts of peerage and society make her crawl into herself and disappear. she doesn't know how to follow the scripts convincingly, she's been emotionally abused her whole life so she has no sense of self-worth, but he doesn't follow the script. which means she doesn't have to worry about following it either. which does wonders for her confidence levels because when she can just act in ways that make sense to her rather than second-guessing whether she will be Approved Of, she can actually be a person. and that's what she first appreciates about him: his ability to (more or less without trying or even noticing) facilitate that for her.

"The incident had occurred and was gone for me: it was an incident of no moment, no romance, no interest in a sense; yet it marked with change one single hour of a monotonous life. My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something, trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive."

[9w1ft]

I'm a gaylor myself so this isn't coming from a place of hate but I really don't think karlie and taylor are still together, I think taylor still references her in her art and probably will for quite some time because that relationship -- whatever the nature of it was -- left such a deep impact on her. but I really can't see them still being together, I think she's forced herself to move on from karlie and has since dated a lot of other women. that doesn't mean her feelings for karlie have faded, just that they will probably always be there but they broke up for sure before 2019, I think. folklore and evermore, midnights even, are all breakup albums, I just can't see how they could still be together. especially all her anger and sadness in those songs that are thought of to be for karlie (like my tears ricochet or exile or mad woman) also the cover art being shoot in bedfords, new york, the exact same place where karlie got married feels more like taylor revisiting this place to really say goodbye and mourn her for one last final time so she can move on

sorry, this got a bit long, I just don't understand the appeal or the reasoning for lsk's because taylor has indicated so many times that they are over, she's been mourning her relationship with karlie quite publicly since 2019 (wearing all black during the lover era) so yeah

hi! i don’t usually respond to these but i’m not sensing any ill will so i’ve decided to give a reply a go.

first off, for me, i kinda just interpret her wearing black in the back end of lover era because her masters had gotten bought by scooter. and maybe the fact that she decided to not come out. there can be other reasons, but i really do not think that her breaking up with karlie has to be one of them.

another thing i can’t shake is the fact that it was a very notorious troll/manipulative person on tumblr who spread the first rumor that they broke up in 2019, a fact that is well understood by a lot of OG’s, and this troll got in the head of a few popular kaylor and gaylor swift accounts at the time and in doing so she got a lot of people to fold. she then went on to write all this progressively unhinged fanfiction about taylor and karlie trying to make one another jealous and sleeping with all these women, presented with the same level of seriousness with which she pushed the breakup agenda. even to this day, i see present day gaylors talk about stuff that stems from narratives this account and a few other power hungry accounts spread around many years ago and it honestly just goes to show how a lot of well known gaylors may be platformmed up but that don’t really know what they’re talking about.. i only write this because the troll deactivated about a year ago (maybe they’re lurking on platforms with more malleable minds—once a troll always a troll—but at least they’ve left here), they were a really dangerous person.. and several have wild receipts to prove it.

anyways sorry i recognize that’s a tangent, i guess what i mean to say by it is, a lot of the sentiment surrounding the idea of a 2019 breakup and the reinforcement of the narrative by a gaylor community none the wiser stems from the work of someone with disingenuous intentions. a lot of “masterposts” or “realistic timelines” draw from what this person made up and it’s gone through enough filters for it to seem like credible sentiment but like, if you were there and you read all of what she wrote you know how silly it all sounded and how incoherently it was all written.

okay so to circle back to more of a content-centric angle, in my interpretation of the events that gave us folklore, evermore, and midnights, taylor had so much to be sad about. her mom had been very sick, the pandemic arrived and she had to cancel lover fest, she had to come to terms with scott b having sold her work to her sworn enemy… songs on midnights and folklore, and on her lover era apple music playlist allude to certain other things that may have had her in a mournful mood. things were bad! and i don’t doubt that her and karlie have been through a lot. but for me, when you’ve got a ride or die love, you don’t just break up. this has been something frustrating for me and others, i think, to see so many people treat a relationship as either being all systems go or broken up, as if long term partners can’t experience sadness together, difficulty together, even heartbreak together.

i don’t like getting in to touchy subjects so much but there’s just been too much pointing towards what i consider to be a rather simple narrative that is a natural progression for people committed and in love. how did the lover music video begin and end? whats a randomly specific word in a song she performed at the grammys minutes after someone was announced to the world? what about taylor’s envisioned future stands out about the anti hero music video? i think i’ll stop here but idk man 😆 poke around my archive if you feel like wasting a few days of your life… there’s just been a consistent flow of the same kind of hijinks that we’ve seen from them for years, and i’d say that there are many songs that back up everything i’d want in order to stay invested in seeing if what i believe is true.

now, i know i just wrote what reads like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to people not following kaylor. but im okay with that. i’ve accepted that. and i know that the whole patterns and koincidences and twinning and symbolism beat isn’t for everyone and so i respect people’s decisions to believe they aren’t together, but in closing i’ll just say im sometimes at a loss to see time and time again people suggest that kaylors believe in kaylor because they find it appealing or because they want to ship it. when it’s literally not that— it just makes the most sense to a lot of us!

also, does this look like the face of someone mourning?

[cinderflower]

Thoughts on SotE now that I've seen/explored essentially everything the DLC has to offer.

This post is quite lengthy so I've put it under a read more.

Overall, I did enjoy this DLC and most of what it included. There were only a few major issues I had with it and most of it is from a lore perspective (wow guess about what!) and a lot due to my own personal preferences. So I'll start with the positive, because there is actually a lot of positive with this DLC.

Gameplay: I really enjoyed the gameplay and world design of the DLC, the new weapons, etc. Overall from a pure gaming perspective this is primarily peak FS. While the bosses could be excessive at times with how few openings you get and how short those openings are, that didn't bother me at all for the most part. Most bosses felt fair and rewarding to fight and defeat and tbh at the end of the day that's mostly what I care about when playing these games. Metyr, Rellana, & Putrescent Knight in particular stand out as the two I enjoyed learning the movesets of and fighting the most (except Metyr's lazer beam spin attack, good god).

Level Design: The levels acting as self-contained areas similar to the base game was definitely appreciated and I did enjoy having to figure out how to traverse the map to get to the various places. Each area was unique and visually stunning - though the lighting and saturation at times was jarring. The frenzied flame area in particular stood out to me as something I'd love to see revisited again from a design and mechanics perspective. Also the Cerulean Coast and Trina's area were gorgeous.

Lore: Trina!! The main standout that I enjoyed was the Trina lore. Also the lore regarding the shadow realm, frenzied flame, the fingers, Ymir, Messmer, and Marika all felt mostly seamless with the base game with most having callbacks to lore scattered around in the main game itself. There's a few things I disagree with fandom's interpretation on already but that's to be expected.

Most of the positive is a lot of what people have already been saying so I'm not going to belabor the points too much.

Now, what didn't I enjoy?

Gameplay: The excessive re-use of base game mini-bosses, specifically the ones I already hated fighting (dragons, death rite bird, fallingstar beasts) ended up all feeling like a chore rather than being rewarding. Similarly, the furnace golems got really old really fast and the gimmick ones weren't even enjoyable to figure out - I'll absolutely skip them if I play through this again. Lastly, I'm convinced the Commander Gaius fight was designed in a lab to be utterly miserable to me specifically because it had every single mechanic I hate in a fight.

Level Design: Some areas were so incredibly barren it was a chore walking through them. As mentioned above the shadows and saturation at times was jarring so I do wish that had been cleaned up.

Lore: By far the lore I was most excited for is the lore that disappointed me the most, and not even necessarily because of the story it was trying to tell, but how it told it. I've always from day 1 been onboard with a version of Miquella that strives to make the world better from a sense of naive idealism that ends up leading him down a similar path as Marika once he sees that everything he tries fails to come to fruition, that he cannot undermine the Golden Order and the state of the world with what power he has and with the power he has at his side. I am onboard with a Miquella who piece by piece compromises his ideals in an "end justifying the means" kind of way - so my complaint is how they actually went about trying to tell that exact setup.

Before even the Radahn debacle, the heavy heavy heavy leaning into the bewitchment aspect of Miquella was so incredibly disappointing because it strips his character of what I personally found so intriguing about him: a character who lured people to his side for his sense of idealism, people who then had to come to terms with their own atrocities committed on his behalf for the sake of this ideal future, and all the complexities that accompany that. I always find that mind-control, bewitching, etc in fiction is an incredibly difficult tool to use in a way that is narratively satisfying which is why I detest the use of it so much, because it does exactly what it did here - it took the characters who had their own motivations, lore, and complexities pre-DLC and stripped them down to being either one-note, victimized, or it trivializes their own lore entirely. Primary casualties of this lazy writing choice: Miquella, Mohg, Radahn, and Malenia

Moving into Mohg - I just hate it, what can I say. It's all the above. The whole reason Miq needs his body is such a weak plot point that I have no words. The bewitchment takes this character who was such a beautiful narrative foil to Morgott, strips him of that complexity, and is now forever cast into the victim role. I'm not saying he isn't a victim, don't get me wrong, but to me it was more compelling when that victimhood was at the hands of Marika and the Golden Order. It felt satisfying seeing a character in contrast to Morgott who rose in the Erdtree's defense trying to make something new in response to being outcast and shunned. Sure, were the means at the hands of an Outer God? Yes. Was the blood cult cruel and wicked? Also yes - in fact, as I write this, Mohg seems more of a mirror of Marika than anyone else. Suffering under the current regime and creating an empire to overthrow it; but unable to claim godhood himself like Marika did, he needed a surrogate candidate for godhood, specifically the Formless Mother's godhood: Miquella (assuming only empyreans can become gods and Ranni's body is gone and Malenia is already under the influence of the Rot God). The reasoning for his kidnapping of Miquella is already there, so why did the DLC feel the need to cheapen everything about that narrative to just go "haha jk he was bewitched this whole time" ! Unsatisfying. Deeply disappointing.

Radahn is baffling, even now after sitting on the lore for a few days, it is utterly baffling to me. I get how the DLC set everything up so please don't try to explain it to me, I get it, but it just makes no sense when looking at what the base game set up and even Miquella's ideals? If Miquella is looking to build an age of compassion, why choose the character who wants to be a warmonger? They even re-state numerous times how Radahn finds that war suits him, which makes sense, because his character was about aspiring to be like Godfrey who was The Warmonger Extraordinaire. It made sense that between his allegiance to Sellia and his tutelage under the Alabastor Lords that he would hold back the stars (which control fate, though the DLC did muddy this up too, a post for another time) and would use that power to defend the control he had and seek out more control. But why would he seek it out at Miquella's side and make a vow for an age that would end in the lack of war? That would put him docile and complacent, nothing more than a tool, at Miquella's side?? Especially because if he idolizes Godfrey, surely he would have seen how when Godfrey no longer served his purpose, when there were no more wars to fight, that Marika cast him out - so why would he ever agree or make any sort of vow to that end? It makes no sense to me. It also absolutely makes the whole battle of Aeonia so trite and meaningless, so utterly devoid of any of the dynamic that made it compelling.

Which brings me to Malenia who actually got me interested in ER lore in the first place. It was her character that got me more interested in Miquella and consequently Mohg as characters. So what the DLC has done to her character is nothing short of tragic to me. What was the point of it all? Obviously for her scarlet rot to be cured is a big part and her loyalty to Miquella is as well and I do still believe she would go to would go to devastating lengths in his name (at least pre-DLC). But post-DLC? With the Radahn lore? Why would she entertain the battle of Aeonia in the first place? Why would she nuke herself and Caelid to try and kill Radahn if it was all "according to Miquella's plan"???? It cheapens the devastation, it cheapens her character, and it makes her look worse. Also Miquella was there as well as we see from dialogue with Freyja where he cures her of her rot so ??????? Why did Finlay have to single handedly carry her back to the Haligtree???? If this was all planned???? Someone please explain this to me because I cannot make it make sense.

The most glaring sins of all the above is that while the other lore the DLC expanded upon had roots and foreshadowing in the base game, the whole of Miquella's story in the way they decided to tell it - with the exception of Trina and his core motives - had nothing in the main game. It was all net-new information added in the DLC. And sure, DLCs are supposed to expand upon the base game and give new information, I don't disagree, but when everything else in the DLC has tie backs to the base game and this plot point doesn't? Not an item description? No environmental story telling? It's just bad writing. I refuse to believe the Haligtree statue is Radahn not Godwyn based on the base game lore, that's lazy as fuck justification. Similarly, I've seen people point to Loretta, and sure if Loretta was encountered in Caelid where all the Radhan lore was but she wasn't, she was with Ranni in the Ranni area so that's weak as hell too.

In summary: if this was the version of lore and Miquella that had been presented in the base game I would have absolutely no interest in the story or the character. If anything this DLC has served to actively sap out a lot of the excitement and joy I had in the series because it handled the main lore I was interested in so poorly (my opinion).

I'll probably still finish Field of Reeds as well as Truth and Blood especially now because I want to see the story through with the care that the DLC should have given to the characters, but beyond that? I can't see myself remaining invested in Elden Ring moving forward, especially not if the DLC canon seeps into the main fandom. I already dislike seeing the few Radahn/Miq things I've seen because of all the points above. If you liked the DLC and the Miq lore, more power to you, but I'll be cleaning up my feed to avoid a lot of it moving forward.

And my one last petty gripe: it's like they wanted the radahn/miq fight to echo the vibes of twin princes, but they utterly missed the point of why the twin princes fight from a mechanics and lore perspective was so interesting in the first place.

[ladyiristheenchantress]

Reading for others and Selling your Readings

So, you want to start reading for others and possibly selling your readings? Well you came to the right place. This post piggy backs off a google class I created on my discord pages, and today I will be going over tips and tricks for success and how to start making a side hustle out of divination! This is going to be a very tarot forward post, however this can be integrated into really any form of divination, the interview process for example is not reserved for only tarot and oracle cards! Big note: Make sure you are aware of your countries, state, and county laws revolving around divination. In some places its still illegal and criminalized and there is no point going to jail over this. Instead its best to raise awareness and talk to your local representatives about the issue.

The slides we will be using today

Part One: Knowing

The first section is all about getting started, and most great readers I can think of have 3 key things they recommened

Know your deck - What this means is actually taking the time to interview your deck and get to know its strengths, limitations, and how it will connect to your readings. When you understand your tarot cards voice, you are better able to apply messages for other people.

How do I interview my deck? To design an interview you need to create a spread that answers a few questions like "what are your strengths and weaknesses", "How do you prefer to speak to me?" and "How can I best listen and apply your advice?" Optionally it is always good to add sections asking the deck if it can read for other people, if it can read on the divine, and if it can process information that is changing.

My personal favorite is the one I am listing below.

2. Knowing your skills - This section is all about identifying your own strengths and weaknesses. Do you not really dabble in spirit work so you cant do spirit ID's? do you work with a trickster god so your decks often go missing? Do you simply just hate doing love readings and they bring you agony? All of these things are really valid, and its good to be honest with yourself. Start by picking out types of readings you enjoy, readings you maybe don't love or aren't skilled at yet, and then readings you just wont do. The ones in the middle category can always be worked on and expanded you may find you love them, but the ones that you just hate doing don't have to come at a cost just be honest and not offer them as a service. Another major aspect is personal associations to cards, Its important that as your using divination to make notes of personal associations you have to things, or how you interpret art on the card. This can help you better connect readings to your skills and give a more unique experience

3. Knowing your client - this is important simply for a marketing standpoint. If you are really good at deity readings it may be better to advertise your work on deity related servers rather than just spiritual ones. If you are a jack of all trades that may be vice versa. When you nail down the readings you love and hate doing you start to learn where you can successfully advertise to attract people who love the readings you do

Some important things and tips I can give as a tarot reader is to trust your intuition, and understand your skill level. When it comes to intuition some of the biggest blocks I see people have is "Well the reading isn't resonating with my spirit like usual" and its actually a really common thing! When people are transitioning to read for other people we become so used to getting that intuitive feeling that the cards just 'fit' but because the reading isn't *for* us we get an uncomfortable empty feeling or second guess ourselves. Have faith that your intuition is still working, just not on your behalf. Relax! If the client lets you know that it didn't resonate that's ok! Its a learning opportunity, it just means you have to re-look at the cards to find details you may have missed. With that also said, sometimes you are going to get a gut feeling that something is just not right, it will be different than that empty feeling or the little nagging self doubt voice. It usually comes as a whisper, a hand tremble, or sharpness in your spine that lets you know to redraw the card.

Another big thing that follows up with the third point is about your own skill level. The reason why there is so much emphasis on it is because your level will determine what readings you do, how much you charge for them, and how long it will take you to preform the reading. Its important that you are charging appropriately for practices, disclosing when you are new to something, or when you just aren't comfortable doing a type of reading for someone yet. It is always ok to say 'no' especially when a reading is out of your skill range.

Another really big thing to this is Practice, like I mentioned about finding your skill level so that leads me to another point:

Where can I go to find people to practice on?

In most cases, if you are a person of the internet you have a ton of options! There are dozens of discord servers and forums where you can practice your skills with people willing to trade or looking for free readings. Its best to avoid places like Instagram, tic tok, or amino for the time being because those places are more for building up a business rather than seeking out people to practice with. This is mainly because you will likely get overwhelmed with people trying to get free readings out of you, and servers usually have moderators that can help protect the peace while you are still learning.

A big thing I see is also about how to source tools for divination, lets say your in the broom closet and want to practice giving tarot readings but cant use physical cards, you can offer up readings using a digital deck (just make sure to disclose that) and get your practice in that way.

Part Two: Planning

Lets look at the aspects of giving a reading, We need to remember that for a lot of people divination is not only just an aspect of their spirituality but also a business for a lot of people. Some of the best readers I know actually aren't spiritual at all, but give such quality readings because they chose the study the psychology behind giving a reading. On the flip side, some of the best readings I have ever received was when the person was in tune with me spiritually, and got to know my beliefs as a client. It is a fine line for most people, and what makes these groups one in the same is they both took the time to really break in their practice, and see divination like an art form.

What are some things to note on the spiritual side?

Spiritually, we as readers are taking the time to use our tools to connect to the other side. Whether you believe tarot reads on paths, futures, or simply psychology, it can be a spiritual experience overall. I want it to be known even a complete atheist can still enjoy giving and practicing with divination, because at the end of the day you don't have to be any "type" of spiritual to practice.

Divination can be used to help other people through problems by offering another perspective, and as a reader that is a really fulfilling thing! Its nice when we can help others to see things they cant yet. Its also exciting to engage with the different questions a human can be faced with about life. As a reader there are so many beautiful solutions to problems, and divination can help with that!

Most commonly sold methods: Tarot, Oracle, and Runes

Most common services (as of 2022): Love readings, Yes/No questions, Deity and spirit questions

Ethical considerations and quirks are an important thing to cultivate as a reader. Its important to figure out where your ethics lie. Are you comfortable reading on a third party? Are you comfortable doing blind readings? What sort of things can you offer that would make you unique? As a general rule of thumb, its good to plan this out while you practice to see if anything is invoked in you. As you research different styles of readings you may find preset ethical takes online, some you will vibe with, others you will not. Take the information and evaluate it as you practice. Another big thing is confidentiality, if a reading begins to expose a deeper thing its best to talk to your client or leave it be if it isn't an immediate cause for concern.

Note: sometimes you get some seriously sick people asking for readings, confidentiality is great, however if someone is breaking the law or confessing a crime to you it is a good idea to stay calm, and report it to law enforcement if you can. It gets really difficult if the person is in another country and you are just reading online, but you can still pass it on to law enforcement who can possibly notify that countries police system. Above all else: If someone is making you feel uncomfortable you have every right to say no, block them, and move on. If it is someone physically with you like at a school or workplace setting who is making you uncomfortable, you have every right to deny service and seek out someone higher up who can help create distance between you and the other person. safety comes first.

What are some things to note on the business side?

On the business side, not only are we assisting other people, however we are also assisting ourselves. It is amazing when we can take something that brings us so much joy and use it to help turn a profit. When you begin actually selling your readings, you will come to find that a lot of math and marketing is involved like calculating where you want to be, how much to charge per card, how much to charge for other practices, how to market yourself to the world, its all things we have to factor when we are trying to make a side hustle out of this. Above all else, take care of you first! Make sure that you are keeping your energy and mental health in mind as you go through this journey

Average Pricings: $1-2 per card when first starting, averaging $3-4 a card, and on the high end some readers charge up to $17 per card. Usually pricings for spreads start at $5 per 3 cards, $10 per 10 cards, and $20 upcharges for voice chat or in person sessions. The average in person tarot reader will charge $70 per 45 min session

Average market: Highest money comes from tic tok, facebook, and instagram

Average Demographic: Usually within the ages of 23-35, mainly metropolitan areas

What are some things that makes a reader unique?

Style - Having a style or theme when it comes to how you present your readings is a wonderful thing. It not only makes you more recognizable, but it also draws clients in who are curious

Presentation - How you actually present your readings is important. If you are physically speaking to someone laying your cards so its facing the client adds a special touch, if you are trying to layer paragraphs online making sure they look cohesive with correct grammar and paragraph indentation is amazing

Timing - How long you can produce readings and with how much information can be used to set you apart from other readers. Plenty of readers upcharge for 'same day' readings, or charge more for blind readings because more intuition is being used

Extras - If you are willing to provide extras, online you can create custom spreads, crystal grid photos that represent the readings, or physically offer candy or for the client to pick their own deck

Personality - Having good customer service can apply to readings too, establishing your unique personality to a client is wonderful. Whether your setting up a 'no-nonsense' vibe or are smiling ear to ear, you can connect it to the deck the client vibes the most with.

Options - Providing options and some sort of consultation phase is a great way to start a dialogue between you and your client, giving plenty of room to ask questions and be honest about what's going on sets a really good mood for both of yall.

Examples:

Part Three: Doing

In this section we will be going over the most important things to remember while we are practicing, growing, and learning.

Always remember:

Your boundaries - The things you are willing and not willing to read on

Trends - What readings are the most profitable right now, why? Do you want to partake in them or not?

Clients - What types of clients do you tend to get? Do they tend to prefer a specific reading or style? Do you tend to get returning business or mainly one-off readings?

Where you promote - Where you promote is what you attract, so keep surveying the data analytics for what is most popular. For example: Psychics in Vegas tend to get the most skeptic readings, Beverly hills gets the most amount of pet readings, and Instagram pages tend to offer love readings the most

A big tip I have for new readers are on 3 things, time, spirits, and progress. When it comes to time make sure you are picking ways to charge for everything whether its VC, text, or in house, make sure you aren't running your clock and have methods to lead a conversation if a client is taking up a lot of time with stories that don't exactly apply. Next when it comes to spirits and deities it is important that you wait on those types of readings until you have protections and adequate research on different types of deities and spirits as to not possibly bring danger to yourself, clients, and are giving accurate information that preserves the cultures these being originate from. Finally when it comes to progress I recognize that it can be hard learning to say no, developing a back bone, and wanting to do more with your readings, just ride the wave as it comes! This takes time and I promise the more you work on your skills the more likely you are to succeed. Just make sure you are always honest with your clients and with yourself when you need to take a break.

What are some bad habits people should avoid?

Over cleansing - Sometimes we create this idea that you need to be triple cleansing in between each and every client, but in actuality this can create fatigue on our decks. Its kind of like showers: Some people shower daily just to get the gunk off, but they might not wash their hair or use a scrub every single shower because it strips the good oils from our hair and skin. Tarot can be the same, over cleansing it can strip it of energy. Its best to talk to your cards, have a charging station at the ready, and keep tabs on how they are feeling

overbooking - If you are currently enrolled in school full time, or have a full time job, it isn't realistic to take every single client at all hours of the day, that is the fastest way to divination burn out. Stager out clients between your real world schedule and set up a system that gives you time to transition.

Overdoing - Don't offer more than you can put out. Don't promise to do a 15 card spread in 30 min if you know your readings take longer. Don't offer freebies willy nilly because then it becomes an expectation. Make sure that you are properly valuing your work based off how long it takes you to create that product. At the end of the day you are offering a service, treat it like such!

Final Words

The divination community is an incredibly vast one that features all sorts of people, businesses, and more. Relax! This journey is a rewarding one, don't take it so serious that you start to fall apart. Have faith in your ability to research and practice, and as you grow don't hesitate to start finding communities that can help you grow as a reader.

Another big thing to watch out for is the rampant scam community. often times we see 'readers' come along who either make up some story about an ancestor leading them to you, someone cursing you for no reason, etc and making you foot the bill for their services. Or you get people who pretend to be tarot mentors and instead will copy paste things from biddy tarot while you pay 100 bucks a month. Be aware of people who are looking to take advantage of you, if it looks to good to be true it probably is. Be careful out there!

With all that said, I hope you all enjoyed this post, if you have any questions or comments feel free to drop them below. Thank you! Fair winds travelers

Tip Jar

[soft-pine]

spn20rewatch 2.03 bloodlust

dean's enormous crush on gordon walker is something that can be so personal.

i think the scene of dean talking to gordon about his emotions is really sweet; he doesn't get to open up that much.

DEAN: Yeah. Yeah, you know. He was just one of those guys. Took some terrible beatings, just kept coming. So you're always thinking to yourself, he's indestructible. He'll always be around, nothing can kill my dad. Then just like that he's gone. I can't talk about this to Sammy. You know, I gotta keep my game face on. But, uh, the truth is I'm not handling it very well. Feel like I have this...

it's interesting that later on sam interprets dean's like and trust of gordon as trying to replace john. i mean sam doesn't know this but dean is actively furious and heartbroken by john right now. and in fact, gordon's presence only reinforces that rift.

GORDON: Word travels fast. You know how hunters talk. DEAN: No, we don't, actually. GORDON: I guess there's a lot your dad never told you, huh?

i think the emotional journey between dean and gordon is really interesting in this episode. dean thinks gordon is cool, he opens up to him, wants to trust his instinct. but as gordon talks more about his hunting philosophy you can see the seeds of doubt in dean that end up turning him against gordon's desire to just kill lenore and the other vampires.

in fact though sam accuses dean of trying to replace john with gordon, it's the realization that gordon is similar to john in some ways that causes dean to pull back from him. gordon talks about hunting being black and white and easy. but that's exactly the thing in john's philosophy that dean is currently struggling with.

DEAN: What if we killed things that didn't deserve killing? You know? I mean, the way Dad raised us... SAM: Dean, after what happened to Mom, Dad did the best he could. DEAN: I know he did. But the man wasn't perfect. And the way he raised us, to hate those things; and man, I hate 'em. I do. When I killed that vampire at the mill I didn't even think about it; hell, I even enjoyed it.

something that always upsets me is the extreme violence of dean's fight with gordon at the end of the episode. i think it's pretty clear that gordon's characterization falls into a lot of racist tropes throughout the show. and certainly subjecting him to intense violence that is framed as almost comedic is definitely in line with that.

but i also do most of my analysis based on intra-textual information and there is something about the fight that just reads as dean acting out of an acute place of betrayal. and yeah, he opened up to gordon earlier and then gordon hurt sam. and yeah dean's really freaked out by how gordon treats lenore. but there is a level of the physicality in the fight that just makes me think.... they hooked up. like it reads to me as dean reacting in hurt and betrayal not just at someone who he opened up to emotionally but physically as well. anyway, take it or leave it but i watched it and i was like oh they fucked For Sure....

lastly, you know her, you love her, shot of all time.

[thinkin-bout-milgram]

Cat: Initial Thoughts

Venus here, sorry if this is shakier than usual! I have a lot less thoughts on this MV for one reason or another, so it’ll probably be faster and possibly less detailed, but I want to get my opinions into the world anyways.

Let’s just get to it!

T/W: suicide, substance abuse, homophobia

Kazui didn’t cheat on his wife.

As always, I’m using @onigiriico​’s super fast translation of the audio drama, so thanks so much!

In said audio drama, Es says Kazui was unfaithful. However, he says that “it didn’t even turn into infidelity.” Obviously, that implies that it could have been or that it got close, but he doesn’t say it’s actually infidelity, and in most senses, I’m willing to believe him.

At 2:20, Kazui has just recently had the apple sneak up on him again. He seems distressed, saying he “can’t be normal,” and then takes off his ring and says, cigarette in hand, “let’s take a breather.” His wife looks quite distressed. 

My best guess is that this is Kazui asking for a break. Now, obviously, it’s not the most faithful thing to be super tempted in cheating to the point of asking for a break. Still, it does mean that he did stop himself before he violated an active relationship where it seemed like nothing was wrong, so that’s a plus.

I’m not sure if it was just straight-up temptation or if he might have had an emotional affair with someone. Emotional affair would make some sense to me (more on that in a sec), but I have no idea who it would be with. I’m honestly hoping the interview questions might help us out there to an extent.

The person Kazui didn’t-quite-cheat with is someone who stands out from the other people Kazui meets.

This is largely based upon my interpretation of 1:08, shortly after the wedding sequence.

There are a ton of apples, but most of them are red. In fact, we only see one green apple. That green apple is the one that follows Kazui throughout the rest of this MV, and it’s the one that keeps sneaking up on him in the half MV. Because it’s the one he eventually bites, I think there’s plenty of reason to believe that this is the person he has relations with outside of his marriage.

I want to focus on the fact that it is green, because that obviously makes it stand out. I don’t think that this is just to make it more identifiable; I think there’s a point being made here.

Kazui IS gay?

Yeah, uh... I wasn’t sold on this one at first, when I first watched half, but as I think I’ve said before, the longer we go on, the more I think it’s true. Like, yeah, it does seem like there’s more to it than just Kazui having relations outside of his marriage.

The entire MV, he’s talking about the charade. He’s clearly living the life that a guy is “supposed” to lead; eventually, you get married to a woman and go down the journey of life together. Still, the fact that, even at the altar, he calls it “loving affection minus love” seems to imply that he feels, at least in retrospect, like the love was never present. He didn’t fall out of love with his wife, it simply wasn’t ever there. He married her out of obligation.

Through in the suspect interview questions about his childhood friend who he went fishing with or whatever and lines from Kazui’s POV saying stuff like “I can’t be normal,” and... I think Kazui is kinda just a closeted gay man?

I say “just” here, and I mean that literally. If you trust his audio drama, he says that he wants his “sin” to be found out, but even so, Es hasn’t found it yet. To me, my best theory is that he just has internalized homophobia and his big “sin” is the fact that he’s gay. I honestly kinda hate this explanation though, just because that is nowhere NEAR a crime on the level of the other prisoners, so please let me know if you disagree/if I’m missing something here.

Kazui has developed some unhealthy coping mechanisms.

I don’t remember if we’ve heard why Kazui smokes before. I know that Shidou says that he does it because he wants to be unhealthy, and Mikoto presumably does because he thinks it makes him seem cool or something. I don’t remember learning anything similar about Kazui.

Still, with the moments at which he pulls out a cigarette or a drink in this MV, I definitely feel like he’s using substances to dull the pain of... I don’t know, life? His constant lying and the self hatred that goes along with it, probably. 

Obviously, he went to the bar in the half MV, but this time, the devs are definitely trying to draw attention to it. There’s a line in the song that’s literally just “oh wow I’m drunk,” and that line is important enough that it shows up as background text at other points in the MV. 

I don’t really know what this means for Kazui character interpretation, but it’s something to consider. For whatever it’s worth, it does make me believe the self-pitying “act” a little bit more; if he didn’t actually pity himself/feel upset that he has to lie all the time, I don’t know what he’s drinking so much for.

Kazui’s wife committed suicide because... ???

This is one of the big places where I’m kinda stumped. Kazui says that she died because he told her the truth. If I’m right and his crime is being gay... I don’t get it? 

I know that divorce is pretty taboo in Japan, so my best shot at it would be that, in being honest with everything, Kazui asks for a divorce because he knows that he can’t ever love her. If that would mean that she’s dead socially or something, that COULD be a potential reason she would commit suicide? I don’t love that explanation, but it’s all that I have right now.

Other Things I Want To Mention But Don’t Have Full Thoughts On:

- In the first MV, Kazui bites the apple. In the second one, he bites the dove. There’s probably some connection here, but I honestly have no idea what it could be.

- “Love, it’s tacky, this two way deceit.” What two-way deceit is Kazui talking about? Like, I get him calling himself the perpetrator and her the victim if he’s saying she’s a victim of his lies. Still, if that’s the case, why would the deceit be two-way? 

- Copzui canon? I saw that undercover cop theory and mostly disregarded it as “probably too out there to be true,” but honestly, it seems basically confirmed at this point. The only struggle I have is what to do with the information. I don’t think that knowing he’s a cop really changes anything about how I read his character or the situation? Other than possibly suggesting that yes, he cares very much about social laws/rules and making sure society stays “correct.”

- What do I make of Kazui asking for an innocent verdict along with the premise of “I can protect the other prisoners”? I don’t really like him bargaining with his strength for a verdict--especially after Kotoko trial 1, I don’t trust bartered verdicts--but on the other hand, it’s true that it’d be nice to have him on defense for whatever the devs might spring on us between trials 2 and 3. 

Anyways...

CURRENT VOTE: INNOCENT

I was actually pretty shocked when I opened the votes and saw a slight guilty majority. To me, the big thing is that... well, I don’t really know why I’d vote him guilty. He’s useful to us, he doesn’t seem like he’s done all that much wrong. I can’t really come up with a genuine reason that I’d want to give him a guilty verdict at this point, so it’s innocent for me.

(Plus, if I’m not sure, I always lean towards a 50/50 so it’s more possible to change the verdict later. So, while he’s guilty-leaning, I’m DEFINITELY voting innocent.)

[supercrazyangel4]

HI RAXZ IT TOOK LONGER THAN EXPECTED AS IT'S BEEN A WEEK BUT!!! DURING ALL THAT I DIDN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT YOUR FIC/S It's just one of those pieces of fanwork that leaves so much of an impression on someone, that it just ends up sticking and changing what you initially thought of a character, because of how well done the things most would just move aside or chalk up for simple reasons. you seem to be the only person who really does get Chara like no other, and I hope it's not strange to say you write them almost as if you know them or you are them that I'm sorta afraid nothing else will live up to how you written them and asriel in ur fan fic LOL but no matter... i will prevail. I love how you were able to portray charas self hate and self harm, i love how you didn't hold back on the ugly side of it and how far and disturbing it can be especially for someone as young as chara. There's just something so realistic about it that don't see alot anywhere else. 

I also like how you made asriel be childish, childish in a way a kid can be bratty or selfish(?) in the first half, that might not be a good descriptor but my puter is lagging from the many many words I've written for this ask so I'm making do </3 the point is you really know how to write these kids. Also enjoy that the tone of each fic is starkly different from one another, asriels pov feels grounded in comparison to charas inner thoughts

HOPEFULLY this all makes a little sort of sense, I've read both of ur fics three times so I'm praying it does, amen. ANYWAYS……. Love ur brain, would love to hear any thoughts you have on utdr in general if you ever decide to share em…. godbless. perhaps i couldve worded this better in a diffrent time but oh well, we ball. i hope u have a great day emoangel44🫡 will be looking forward for ur new utdr stuff

FIORE!!! i have been waiting for this day.. thank you so much. ive had several people say that i really get chara including like, literal veteran chara fans. its very nice to hear, theyre pretty important to me as a character. which is rather funny because the only analysis ive ever actually written on them that wasnt fanfiction was an essay on how i think theyre kind of actually a little poorly written LOL. to understand someone you have to know their weakpoints i guess... even if on a meta level.

for my asriel interpretation i try to incorporate a lot of "flowey-isms" as i say. the way i see asriel is that he was always a bit of a bratty, selfish kid that struggled with low empathy. he chooses to do what he thinks is right because he knows its right and not because it provides him with positive feelings himself... i think thats even more admirable. as opposed to this is think chara is high empathy which is part of the reason they did what they did. asriel is just way more of a people person than chara and so comes off as more understanding, charas just naturally a bit off-putting no matter how hard they try not to be.

chara and asriel are quite different people so i tried to make that clear in how i write their perspectives. chara is kind of stuck in their own head and lives in a world with walls of misery and think prose. theyre very direct but also very metaphorical. its a weird combination but it gets easier to write when taking in account their canon dialogues (one day youll get a fic from me with a more light hearted tone where chara will get to make their dog puns and nerd jokes. maybe). this is also the reason i write them with a strange mix of first and second person. it just feels natural for our narrator.

asriel on the other hand is much much more of an emotional person and is much less formal in how he thinks. he has a lot more filler words and "i-think"s and "i-feel"s and such.

i figure ill write a bit on what inspired each fic.

for my chara fic, i actually started writing it while bored in class. it was inspired a narration line in one of the fights in undertale, the one i used for the summary. the main thing i wanted to play with was metaphors and metaphors upon metaphors. mainly related to charas self hatred though the lense of soil and dirt and flowers and gardens because of course.

for my asriel fic, the main thing i wanted to play with was, quite obviously, writing from asriels perspective. i had already written 2 fics from charas perpective (the 1st one isnt as good as the other two and was mostly written as a characterization and perspective test) so i figured it was time to give him a turn, especially since it we only realy got a peak and asriels personality through charas eyes and i wanted to show it off more. the other thing that the fic ended up centering on is something my friend said to me about how they felt my chara characterization was screaming to be understood under all the hurt. basically the thesis of this fic is "asriel did not fully get chara but he was also the closest anyone ever got by a long shot which counts for something".

if youd like to see my other undertale stuff, here is some poetry ive written about chara (and asriel), here is my art tag which is full of stuff with them (alternatively, just use my undertale tag if you dont want art of anything else), here are my chara and asriel playlists that i always listen to while writing, and here is that chara essay i mentioned.

speaking of my thoughts on utdr... i actually dont post the majority of them. but id absolutely love to talk about them. so if you (or anyone else) have any questions about my thoughts on utdr or want to start a discussion about it Please do. Im actually begging you. i need more engagement guys send me asks. thank you for reading this absurdly long response

[faksyan]

12/16/19 :3

ooohh boyy that got really long. lots of mgs rambles under the cut. thanks for the ask!!! very slight nsfw mention in the second one, nothing major.

12) the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

I'll be honest I'm actually still familiar with some of the games only on surface-level (fake fan I know), and I don't think I have anyone like that from those I know well.

Well, Paz, but I talked about her a bit in the last ask already. She is full of rage and loneliness and gets just a glimpse of real affection and friendship and I find a lot of these themes very compelling. And I guess all the women in general, because fandom spaces usually gravitate towards men, and with mgs it's even less surprising. I really, really like Eva in Snake Eater, but that's mostly due to my own interpretation rather than the writing. I feel like her understanding of love must be really interesting as someone who was taught to pretend/actually feel on some level love on command, and I also think it's interesting that she was the one The Boss opened to. I really wish so many mgs women's traits weren't so tightly linked with romance, man. Quiet is also so cool, but she too suffers from being reduced to just that.

I really like The Boss, she's such a interesting contradiction - cold and strict, but also full of love for the while world and ready to give everything she has to make it just that much better. I would love to see in more detail things about her and Sorrow, an actual game with her as a protagonist would be awesome. Strangelove's tapes in pw are absolutely fascinating as well, the one where she's talking to Joy's ai almost made me cry, and she generally has some pretty interesting take on some things. I really liked the part where she talks about how ai would be an amalgamation of people's consciousness rather than of individual's in the future, because that put into words part of why I hate ai-generated images and text that people call art.

16) you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

Well, I can get people liking anything on account of different tastes, so this is more about popular takes I don't really get because of how different my reading of canon is, I guess? Like the idea of bbkaz being abusive to a point where Kaz was having a horrible terrible time every day at every corner. I've seen it in some fics, and kind of get where people go with it, but I think Kaz "almost blew himself up with a grenade so he wouldn't be taken prisoner" Miller would rather die than be treated like shit. He would blow up their shared tent if it ever came to it ya feel me. He is too proud and too impulsive and too much of everything. They respected and listened to each other and I'd say a lot of their issues were kind of more subtle? in a way. What they had definitely wasn't healthy in many aspects, but it was in ways where they both could ignore/didn't feel were that bad at the moment, that type of thing.

I read through almost the entirety of ocelhira tag on ao3, and i could write a whole list of stuff about them that I personally see differently as that part of the fandom. I'm very picky when it comes to them, in no way those are bad, and I've /seen/ them being executed in a way I enjoyed, I just don't really get them. The main things I don't really see are, as follows:

That they hate each other (next to zero basis of that before the ending of v, and even this can be argued about.)

They would punch each other on the first meeting or shortly after (never seen either of them as people who would resort to violence in a more business-like setting. because that's how I see them approach what they have. Ocelot mainly uses violence in specific scenarios like interrogations and is good at controlling his emotions. Kaz is impulsive but he is a businessman to the bone. Maybe he'd punch Ocelot at some point but definitely not early on. I feel like the main instigator of random CQC is Snake after all, and without him they would figure things out differently.)

They would fuck on the first meeting or shortly after (Ocelot is weird about intimacy and doesn't trust anyone and is a spy who's probably never had friends or lovers, in any meaningful sence of the words. Also he's on aroace spectrum to me. I don't think Kaz would have sex with a person he genuinely despises even if he found them appealing, out of sheer stubbornness. If he hates a person he hates them, same reason why I don't think bbkaz would work in any way past v. Even if Kaz tried to hook up with Ocelot in the beginning, he would probably kill him for a mere insinuation. Give me the intricate details of getting to know a person and figuring shit out, they had nine whole years.)

There's probably more, but this is getting like. super long sorry my bad. And sorry so much of it is about ships, the platonic tags are barren as a desert I gotta write and draw some myself✌️

19) you're mad/ashamed/horrified you actually kind of like...

Vocelot a bit maybe (not necessarily romantic or sexual) because the whole concept of them having a close relationship could go a very fucked-up route (like a bit more than the average mgs level). Not really ashamed, that's why I like it, it has a sort of a Hannigram feel to it. Even in case where they genuinely care about each other, there are still some weird power dynamics and mind games and codependency. I just generally find ideas of brainwashing really unsettling.

Also I really like Huey as a character. am I allowed to say that. am I getting fed to the bears. I can and will elaborate at some point, I just really like characters who are unredeemable impossible hypocrites (hey, that's part of why I'm a Kaz Miller fan) and Huey is just. vastly misunderstood when it comes to what caused him to spiral, none of which helps his case but it's INTERESTING. Instead he's just being reduced to a punching bag without taking a look at what exactly led up to it all. Grantedly, I don't think Kojima thought about it that deeply at all, but it came out as a vivid critique of how society and especially military treats men who are disabled/not "masculine" enough/can't stand up for themselves. to me. and I like that.

[marzipanandminutiae]

I think at the end of the day we just have totally irreconcilable views on many things, not limited to 2019 LW and that Abby Cox video, so it seems silly to go on beyond this, but: yes, I have indeed watched the video in question, and I’m disappointed that you view any critique of Cox as inherently misogynistic and personally aimed towards her as a woman, rather than towards her as a historian and public educator who has a significant audience. I don’t doubt that there have been plenty of misogynistic critiques leveled against her, but that does not mean that all criticisms of her are inherently misogynistic, and I would guess that a reason she is frequently criticized is that she is very visible and has strong views, rather than because everyone who criticizes her hates women. She has a particular viewpoint, which is perfectly fine, but I wish she and her followers would look beyond it sometimes and have more empathy for women past and present who don’t share their views and like the same things they like.

Okay, listen. Whoever you are, your reading and listening comprehension seems to be worryingly lax.

I am not anyone's "follower." I happen to agree with this particular dress historian on this particular subject, but I'm not part of whatever organized mob of...what, feminine-presenting dress history enthusiasts? you imagine is attacking you

when did I EVER say that all criticism leveled against Abby Cox was misogynistic? the only thing I said was misogynistic was the tone of some of the original discourse over this video. criticizing a speaker for saying something you disagree with is not misogynistic, no. saying that a female academic "can't see past the end of her fashionably-powdered nose [I went back and checked the quote to be sure of it]" sure as hell is. nothing you've said about her argument is misogynistic, nor have I claimed it was

But speaking of claims, you have so far without substantiation asserted that she said true feminists had to be feminine-presenting, that she ignored the fact that many suffragists dressed conventionally to keep the focus of the press on their message, that she doesn't acknowledge historical women who didn't conform to gender norms. I have cited chapter and verse, so to speak, from the video to make the point that none of this is accurate. You have completely ignored that, and offered no evidence to back up YOUR interpretation besides, effectively, VibesTM

at the end of the day, you've taken a video about a fictional trope in the worst possible faith and made it personal. and decided that someone hates all GNC women, past and present, because you disagree with what she had to say- which you are of course free to do! you just seem incapable of doing it without putting words in her mouth

we agree on one thing, though: that we're not going to come to an agreement

[atoriv-art]

asks :)

guess who let them pile up for months (meeeeeeee)

tysm!!! i share a similar view wrt his hair :) i think it's a very fun way to interpret it given he's one of (/the?) only characters to ever go through a change like that! especially given his snake transformations i think it's completely plausible that he found himself mirroring the guy too much and wanted to distance himself from that lol

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thank youuuu it's one of my favorite things to draw honestly :) especially with the uchihas where their eyes are such an integral part of their character design hehe

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:D the positive reception to them honestly makes me really happy given they're a relatively obscure pairing hahahaha thank you!

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thank you so muuuch 🥺 my biggest goal with my art is capturing like, emotional snapshots of the little guys i like and i'm glad it comes through!! :]

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[ post linked ]

it's a fair question! i might elaborate more someday but atm the basic premise is that it's likely it'd be like a pragmatic deal between them? sasuke needs a source of strength and obito is both very powerful and a sharingan user, and obito has reason to look out for sasuke because of itachi hovering over his shoulder + if he trains sasuke correctly he can have a powerful ally on his side... which is i think?? the reason why obito let sasuke hang out with him for so long in canon but it went nowhere looooool

i find orochimaru's integration and then sudden exit from the plot to be a little bit messy so i like to think of ways of streamlining the process and just having sasuke be with the "main" naruto antagonists from an earlier date :0c with the rest of the kids still being with him as i am very fond of both karin and suigetsu ahahaha

i also find the idea of sasuke being in closer proximity to itachi during the timeskip (while still distant ofc) to be fun, like him being akatsuki-adjacent while itachi is also there brings fun scenarios to think about! + the fact itachi really doesn't like obito, so there's an added layer of 👀 as he hates that obito is the one training him but he can't really do anything abt it without showing his hand lol

and, the rest of the akatsuki interacting with a bunch of kids on a "friendly" level is a funny concept lmao

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grouping these together since i assume it was the same person ^^

kks headcanons: hmm i'm actually not sure! i think a lot about kakashi but im blanking on specific headcanons i have :P

top 5s: without much thought to ordering them i'd sayyy

characters: obito, kakashi, itachi, sasuke, and gaara or neji depending on my mood

pairings: sasuneji, sasugaa, kakaobi, itadei and kisaobi or sasusui

what got you into naruto: mostly being really curious about kakashi 😅 he seemed like the type of character i really would like so we watched a few episodes "for fun" just to meet him and then. you know.

thoughts on kakagai: i love kakagai i think it's super cute :)

do you like sasuke x naruto: people keep asking me this KSDJSKJD i'm ambivalent about the pairing, i can see why people like it but it's not for me

would you ever draw naruto (the character): possibly! just no real guarantee since i tend to focus on a small group of characters is all

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🥺 thank you so much!!! sorry about the 25 minutes hahahaha

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thank you so much!! if it helps any i struggle a lot with traditional art hahaha :P

i haven't ever drawn the rest of team 7 atm, no! if i ever do i'll definitely post it as it seems a lot of people are curious about them hahahah

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😭 tysm!!!!

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:D! i'm a firm believer that sasuke is one of the most sun-adjacent characters i've ever seen but alas he is cursed to be misunderstood because he's an emo boy 😔

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:] i'm glad!!! he's very fun to draw hehehe

[hot-take-tournament]

hi, I'm the original Barbie movie hot take submitter. now that the poll's over and with about 80 people agreeing with me in total (which is honestly way more than i was expecting...) i guess... yeah i should probably address some of these comments, because i don't know which are in good faith and which aren't, but like i said at the beginning of my justification, it's something that's really important to me on a personal level and i saw at least a few people expressing sympathy or wanting to understand better where i was coming from. (again I'm autistic and i can't be sure it wasn't just sarcastic remarks, but it looked like at least a few people were willing to listen.)

this sentence here is your warning that I'm going to continue to talk about my experience. if you hated my take and/or were disturbed by it and would be upset to empathize with my point of view any further, this is your reminder to just stop reading here.

...

so first of all, i did hold myself back, writing that submission. i mentioned upfront that i kept it short, but i guess it only looks shortened if you know how much i have to say about it. i didn't even know if it would make it in so i did gloss over a couple things that may have led to misinterpretation (though a lot of those notes felt like a "how dare you say we piss on the poor" sort of moment (reference to a response on a different post, which accused Tumblr users of having "piss-poor reading comprehension")).

....anyway, this is a more comprehensive and thorough version of my viewpoint. it is long.

the first thing i would like to address is that i noticed a lot of people saying i was pulling it out of nowhere and "projecting (derogatory??)". and.... like.... yes. i know that. i basically said so explicitly when i said "I disliked this movie for heavily personal reasons". that's the point of submitting it to a hot takes blog; this is something that i think most people will disagree with me on, because it's nowhere near the "objective" interpretation of the movie, but it's something that a select few might resonate very strongly with. this movie didn't actually say any of the things that I said it did, on an explicit level. but there were undertones of it the whole way through that triggered multiple breakdowns since its release, because of my particular media sensitivities that i didn't know would be in this movie. you can think of it like I'm accusing this movie of having "traces of peanuts" rather than being a peanut dish. if I'm allergic to peanuts it still sucks, and is unsafe for people with my triggers. (still my fault for going to see the movie, it's not like it's immoral for it to have triggering topics in it. I just regret it and am bitter that everyone seems to unanimously agree that it has no problems, that's all.) I also see that a lot of people were not bothered by these same things that I was, and I respect that. And I'm glad that people were able to enjoy it— my intention was mostly "it seems like no one hated this movie but me. did anyone else share this interpretation?".

...honestly, the movie itself, on an objective level, wasn't actually too horrible. it was kind of sad and depressing, but i would've left it feeling kind of mediocre if it weren't for its online boom. everyone seems to be praising this movie for being incredible and groundbreaking and progressive, but like this other anon said (https://www.tumblr.com/hot-take-tournament/724649240320671744/while-everyone-is-already-arguing-over-the-barbie?source=share), it really... just feels like politically regressing, to me. speaking as someone who is various flavors of non-binary (multigender), and who is transgender and intersex, i am extremely passionate about gender rights. and this movie felt the same as really old radfem ideals of feminism that boiled down to "what if we kept the gender essentialism but we made it so (cis) women were good and sacred (but still perceived as weak, helpless, useless, etc.)". I saw many similar sentiments in the notes of the original poll that I agreed with, saying the movie barely was feminist if at all. I especially agreed with someone (don't remember who) who mentioned that it was kind of misogynistic and backwards for all the women to get brainwashed instantly the moment someone suggests a patriarchy. this movie really said "women are just helpless little children that deserve the world, and the men need to carefully watch what they do and be kept in check, because if they get too confident they're naturally inclined to establish dictatorships and be cruel and evil to the women! and of course the women would roll over and accept it if that happened because they're just helpless little lambs that can't think for themselves" like how is that feminist? i thought everyone was on the same page here that women are people. like people with agency that can do things. and the movie just felt extremely.... belittling of women's actual capability to do things, and demonizing of men's emotions. like i thought these were points that we've already been through, societally. but no. "best feminist movie", "so progressive", "groundbreaking".... like... what?? it's groundbreaking because... there was a patriarchy and no one's ever done that before??? like what is this, the feminism version of "Disney's first gay character"??? is it progressive because Barbie had One Conversation with an old lady who was (sarcastic gasp) happy??? (Admittedly that scene was pretty sweet, I'm not actually upset about that one. but like why is that the highlight i keep seeing everyone come away with. like is it groundbreaking for one (1) old person to be happy?? i would've preferred if there were like. you know. just reasonable casual representation for diverse bodies (but that's ok I wasn't expecting something like that from a mainstream movie anyway.))

...and since a lot of people were upset that I didn't address Barbie herself: yeah, ok, I think the existential crisis stuff was pretty neat, I think she genuinely did a decent amount of growing over the course of the movie, I think her character arc wasn't too bad if you look at it from her point of view. but i think, like ken, she needs to be held accountable for the things she did BEFORE that character growth. a lot of people in the notes mentioned her "forgiveness" at the end, and... yeah, I guess I will admit that's "groundbreaking" for a movie this mainstream, but that is not a compliment. it felt so hollow to me, and again that's just "projection" because when I say "it felt hollow", I mean that it sounds exactly like things I was told by toxic friends as a kid. but I think a certain amount of projection is necessary to empathize with a movie, at least the way I watch them. I don't think that relating stories to your own experience is a bad thing.

.... right, back to barbie's whole thing with "forgiveness". to forgive someone is to put yourself in a social position "above" their own. it's unequal by nature— it creates a social unbalance where one party "forgives" (gracious, generous, implied power of judgement over the other) and the other party "has sinned" (in the wrong, by default should be punished, deserves to suffer unless they properly repent). this sort of punitive structure was used against me and some people close to me and so I have extremely personal triggers around disingenuous apologies and forgiveness. (no, I'm not saying that forgiving people is evil, and I'm not saying that Ken did nothing wrong. this is about Barbie now.)

i don't think Barbie should have forgiven Ken. and i don't think Ken should have forgiven Barbie, either (though he was never given the option, because that would be admitting that she treated him like garbage). i think if Barbie was going to "forgive" Ken, if she really wanted to have a real platonic relationship with Ken at the end of the movie, she should have first acknowledged that she had never been a good friend to him, that he was never treated well on a base human relationship level. and i think she should have apologized for it. a real apology where she empathizes and understands how she hurt him and tries to do better, and acknowledges that she was just as lost as he was. and then lets him forgive her, too. but instead she just cuts straight to her own "forgiveness", skipping past any potential accusations of her own treatment of him, to assert her own dominance and center his own wrongdoings. I think they should have either BOTH admitted they didn't know what they were doing and were shitty to each other, or they should have both gone their separate ways bitterly and with their self confidence intact.

like I've seen some people saying, both on my dash and in the notes of this post, this is a tragic movie about two sad lost people trying to figure out how to break social conventions for the first time, trying to understand how to be more than just a Doll with a Role. and naturally, a movie like that has both of them acting shitty to each other within those roles; Barbie from the start of the movie, because she doesn't WANT a relationship with Ken and she seems to hold this against him, and Ken throughout the movie as he tries to understand why he never seems to be enough. Barbie repeatedly condescends upon and belittles him and is constantly aggravated with him and makes him feel small and burdensome and whiny and exaggerative. she makes fun of his fun names and treats him like a stupid and annoying child. and while some of you in the notes are out here laughing and saying "welcome to the real world for women", "that's just misogyny"— and?? is the moral here that misogyny is funny when it happens to men?? because it does happen to men. i know closeted trans men that are subjected to it every day and it just. seems so low to say "misogyny is good" ever. no matter what the end of that sentence is. to imply that some people can deserve misogyny and mistreatment "if they're men" or "if they're annoying" or "if they're clingy" like... this is part of why i submitted this take. i thought we were socially on the page that misogyny is wrong and sucks. and just because this worldbuilding sets it up so that only Kens experience misogyny doesn't make it suddenly just? either it's a human right to be treated with dignity, or you are supporting misogyny. there's no way to say "but it's funny if i can be vindictive about it" without accidentally validating that defense.

...I went on a tangent again. but what I mean is that Barbie herself was an ASSHOLE to Ken. she didn't want him around but felt obligated to support him, and the solution to that should be to make it so he can support himself. but instead she just feels burdened by him and takes it out on him by belittling his suffering and treating him like his every complaint and need were meaningless or annoying. should it have been her obligation to deal with all of his needs? fuck no! but to act like she could, and wanted to, like she was his friend, when she really just wanted to be free of him... that sucks. and it actively kept him shackled to her. and like, she didn't know better, but neither did Ken. they were both lost souls hurting one another by participating in the only thing they knew: an abusive power structure. the only thing Ken did wrong was.... also wanting to participate in that power structure from the "wrong end". it wasn't okay when Ken did it, but it's notable that Barbie did it first. and that they BOTH needed to apologize for treating each other like shit. and they BOTH needed to empathize with and forgive each other, knowing that they're in a better place now and that neither of them knew what they wanted before. they BOTH fucked up and they BOTH suffered for it. if both, or neither, of them had forgiven each other, then this would've just been an interesting and pretty sad movie with at least some resolution.

.... but INSTEAD what happened was that only Ken was shamed and felt like shit, because he crossed the line that Barbie was supposed to have total dominion over. and Barbie was never held accountable for her treatment of Ken, even though it came from the same misguided and hurtful place that Ken's actions did. I'm not claiming that what Ken did was good, or that he's a pathetic little meow meow and everyone hates him for no reason. but Barbie repeatedly condescends and bullies him at the start of the movie to take out her frustration with her situation, and while it's understandable why she's frustrated, that's not okay to do to him, just as much as it wasn't okay for Ken to "turn the tables" on her so to speak. this is kind of an eye for an eye situation. he only did to her what he had already been experiencing himself. and then for her to be the only one to "forgive", implies that it was okay to do to him, and therefore that it's only wrong if he does it.

misogyny is not okay just because you put it in a specific setting or applied it to specific people. and the same thing for pretending to be friends with someone you hate and then bullying them???. it's not "funny" when a woman attacks a man, and if you think it is, that's rooted in misogyny itself. because why else would you not see women as "real" threats or abusers? abuse could only possibly be twisted around into something funny if you think it can't cause real harm, and that's steeped in the sentiments that women are useless, powerless, and helpless, and that men are inherently powerful and able to control their situation. im sick of it. i feel like this movie genuinely pushed back gender equality by like 20 years. not everything is Men Versus Women and if you're centering the gender binary that much like it fucking means that much, you're erasing non-binary people too?? I'm just. I'm just sick of it, I'm sick of gender essentialism and stereotypes and hollow friendships. sighs. ok sorry this paragraph was just a vent.

anyway. this movie would not have impacted me this negatively if it weren't for the way I hear people talking about it. as if it's amazing and the next step in gender rights even though it basically devolved the understanding of gender back into "maybe............. do you think girls could do things? without dating a man..? or is that a little silly.... no wow!! actually yes! women can sometimes... not date!!". (making a spectacle out of obtaining basic relationship agency???) ...and this is mostly, again, just my own triggers, which over the course of this poll I am realizing are real triggers for me, but... yeah. reminds me of my tirf friend group that shamed anyone who was too forward or too masculine. that would nitpick at people's social mistakes to keep them in check and on their toes.

tldr; I'm so fucking tired of gender essentialism and I went to see this movie thinking it was progressive hot shit just to discover it was Social Shaming But It's Funny Because We're Subjecting Men To It This Time. not very funny when I know so many transmascs who are punished for being women when they aren't. and Ken fucked up, but Barbie fucked up too. neither of them were good for each other and they were hurting each other the whole time, but Barbie never owned up to it and then on top of that "forgave" Ken in a way that was just personally triggering for me. (Not evil, not necessarily malicious. but upsetting for me on a personal level because of my sensitivities).

anyway. thanks for reading if you did. I'm probably not gonna check the notes on this one but just know that it does mean a lot, the few people who did agree with me. I wasn't even expecting 80 people, maybe more like 20. I was fully expecting to get 98% ratioed, considering how positively everyone talks about this movie.

(i hope you have a great day too, mod! my apologies for how long and impassioned this got. I hope this take was entertaining for you at least??)

.

[littlesparklight]

What are some very common interpretations among Greek Mythology fans you disagree with? Be it about characters, events, meanings...

dfjd Nonny I am one million unpopular opinions in a trenchcoat. But ok, a couple;

I mean. Paris. Basically anything about Paris that is The Common Take I'm anywhere from "not vibing with that" to "fuck off" levels of disagreement. The Judgement, the way he and Helen leave Sparta/what she feels about Paris, especially in the beginning, the general common takes on his personality, etc and so on. I guess what I hate the most (though I am a joyless curmudgeon who only very rarely likes shitpost-type things so that should be taken into account) is what most usually and fully but not exclusively appears in shitpost level takes; Paris as a blithering idiot who apparently can't even tie his own shoelaces level of stupid. God I hate it and I disagree. He might not be Super Smart or whatever but THAT? No.

Whether it's interpretation or not; the common idea of Apollo being made human to serve Admetus. He just. Is not made human. That is not how immortality/divinity works, it's just Wrong.

Achilles Wanting To Leave in the Iliad. Whether he means what he says during the embassy or not (and I can agree he might well mean it), if he actually wanted to leave and didn't want restitution more than he wants to leave, he would have left already by the embassy in Book 9. Because it's been ~two weeks since Briseis was taken. Plenty of time to leave!

Zeus being a bad king. He isn't, actually.

[orionsangel86]

I've written extensively about how the ending of Sandman has questionable implications, but damn, your response to that other post really made me think about the questionable implications of the start too. Like, it really does basically say "solitary confinement can be a good thing that leads to reform." Which. Yikes.

Then again, for a cosmic entity I guess there are very few other ways you could get through to them. And years of confinement for a billions of years old entity isn't the same as it is for a human because of the difference in timespan involved. But still... it's like when American TV shows started trying to make torture look good and heroic post 9-11.

It's EXTRA bad when taken in conjunction with the ending implications. Like, together it boils down to "solitary confinement is good thing because it made Morpheus reconsider his impact on the world, and thus he killed himself to make the universe better, which we should be happy about." Which is one HELL of a take to have!

It's really difficult to not find these interpretations when analysing the source material. There is some eyebrow raising stuff in the Sandman comics that I wonder exactly what Neil was trying to say with them.

I think a lot of these more controversial interpretations boil down to the concept that Morpheus is not meant to a relateable and human character. He is meant to be other, he is meant to be fundamentally flawed and unable to change who he is because he exists in such a way that human minds simply can not comprehend. The tragedy of the story however is that he DOES change, he DOES improve and he does so in such human ways that we as the readers easily slip into relateability and start viewing Morpheus as human when he fundamentally is not and can not be compared on our level.

I think its an issue the comics try to explore, and in some ways they do it well, whereas in others they fail because by encouraging people to care for Morpheus, to root for him as a protagonist, the comics ask us to see him as human - because we can only truly relate to characters on a human level. But the comics constantly go out of their way to remind us that he is not human, and therefore are stating that we should not care for him in human terms. It's a contradiction in my opinion that doesn't quite work the way its perhaps intended to.

It's not the first time that Neil Gaiman has struggled to get this concept across to his fans. Look at Good Omens. Every single ask Neil got about Good Omens for a long time after the show first aired was asking him to confirm things about Aziraphale and Crowley on a human level. I lost count how many times Neil would answer with a variation of "They are not human they are an angel and a demon".

The Sandman comics also get confusing because when they slip into Morpheus's own POV, we get his own thoughts on what he is. He is a personification of dreams. He is not "living" a "life" because he simply exists to serve the dreamers. He does not get his own "story" so he cannot relate to any characters in the stories over which he rules. We have to be careful when interpreting things from Morpheus's POV though, because most of the time its utter bullshit, but whilst we are in his POV it is portrayed as absolute fact. I fully believe the reason why so many people hate on Morpheus and easily dismiss him as a dreadful character who deserves all the shit he gets put through, is because they are taking what Morpheus believes about himself as truth.

The comics make it very clear that Morpheus' time imprisoned in the glass cage is good for him, that it triggered his change. That it gave him the chance to sit and think on the way he has behaved over the past centuries. It is basically putting him in one big time out. Go sit and think about your behaviour and perhaps you will learn to be a better person. On a human level this is indeed a horrible message.

Morpheus isn't human though, and it is clear that before his imprisonment he wasn't a very nice creature. The Men of Good Fortune comic is a good indicator of that. His behaviour in 1889 is appalling but in the comic this behaviour is clearly due to his seeing humans as lesser than him. He is insulted by Hob daring to suggest that he needs a friend, and I think it is also heavily implied that were he not imprisoned all those years, he simply would not have met Hob in 1989 once free on principle.

The show interestingly enough takes a completely different approach to this, but thats for a separate post.

My point is, I don't think Neil as Morpheus' creator views him in human terms, and I don't think he would have viewed Morpheus' imprisonment as some meta commentary on solitary confinement being an appropriate punishment that leads to reform. I think its much more nuanced than that. We can also interpret it as a commentary on how trauma can be a trigger for change. Morpheus is a victim of trauma for sure, and I certainly don't believe that the comics are advocating for people to suffer trauma in order to become better people, just that perhaps it can change your perspective.

It's a difficult topic and I am not sure I have explained my thoughts too well here so apologies for that. I think if its any consolation the show seems to be taking a different approach to the comic and I think the show also implies Morpheus began changing before his imprisonment. It helps as well that the show also seems to leaning heavily into the notion that we can and SHOULD view Morpheus in human terms, and relate to him and empathise with him. The show has already made him far more human in many ways, so I am curious to see how those changes will affect later comic stories.

[qprstobin]

So I agree with most of your fanon complaints but tbh I sometimes will still read fics with mildly annoying habits and just like, compartmentalize the parts that annoy me. I do it with the show too but I'm better at compartmentalizing with fanfic lol. Part of it is I follow a few really really good thoughtful fanfic writers so I haven't seen all of the stuff you've talked about. However I have seen the hiding veggies in meals headcanon & tho i didn't find it appealing or cute, it didn't bother me bc I interpreted as like an idiosyncrasy. Everyone's got em yk. my sister's friend is a literal genius, responsible, hard worker but also chaotic and will have these random Things that might make her seem immature. Like she does eat vegetables but if I heard that her boyfriend had to sneak them in her meals I wouldn't bat an eye.

That's completely understandable! There are plenty of things I don't like in fandom (either in this one or other ones) where I'm able to be like "I don't like this but the rest of the fic is good enough to ignore it" or "I normally hate this trope but I really like how this author wrote it". (I live by the rule that for all my complaining that anything can be tolerable/make sense if it's done well enough.) I used to be able to do that in this fandom but my tolerance level has dropped a lot lmao. It's much easier for me to do in say the Star Wars fandom. (Now that's a fandom with a lot of infighting!)

A big part of the issue is that it never is just one person or one thing lol. Someone writing something with a character being a bit childish or idiosyncratic is fine on its own, but when it's paired with a bunch of other questionable tropes or it's just done soooo much is when I start scratching my head.

Like I think I've mentioned before unrelated to this, but I do actually think that Steve probably is someone who likes to clean, a lot of the Stobin gang see him as something of a neat freak. On its own, Steve doing most or all of the cleaning because he's that anal feels really in character. It's when you pile all of these things on top of each other to where Eddie is doing nothing and Steve is doing everything that I'm like hmm. Don't like that.

Wrt to the veggie thing specifically... idk I guess you could take it as a quirky thing, but hiding vegetables in food hoping the person doesn't notice is literally one of the biggest stereotypical parent things I feel like? And I think it's having Steve specifically do it and Eddie not noticing that makes me side eye it.

Like lol, that's always the cliché, a kid moves out (normally a son) and you find out they aren't eating vegetables and only eating junk, so the mom has to do something to get her son to eat better. Which like I get it I have to fight with myself to eat healthy sometimes, most vegetables have a gross texture to them but lol my body feels better when I'm eating them so! It's especially the hiding aspect too like man Steve can even talk to Eddie about eating healthier? Finding healthy foods Eddie does actually like if he's that concerned about his health? He has to hide it like Eddie is a five year old?

And maybe you're right and it is meant to be more idiosyncratic but like I said, when you pair it with all the other shit fandom is doing it ends up feeling like just another way people have been writing tradwife/caretaker Steve lol.

[spinningbuster98]

Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) Ending: A not so unorthodox platformer

It’s Labyrinth Zone guys! You love Labyrinth Zone right? I sure love having to pretty much do a no-damage run through it in order to access the Special Stage! :D

In all honesty, I don’t really hate Labyrinth Zone (anymore), mainly because it’s not particularily badly designed beyond it’s very concept being fundementally antithetical to what Sonic should be about, which is something that could be argued about over half of this game anyway.

Star Light Zone is, of course, the second best Zone in the game. It’s the only other Zone that feels like it was designed with Sonic’s speed in mind and features some platforming so you’re not just moving to the right. It’s not as elegantly designed as Green Hill but it’s good enough. And of course the idea of having a cunstruction site during a starry night as a setting is both original and beautiful, especiallyn with the music

I actually like Scrap Brain Zone and think it’s the best final Zone of the Genesis games! It’s fittingly tough and though I much prefer the background of Act 1 with that dystopian city landscape, the fact that it essentially changes setting with each act makes it the most visibly dynamic Zone in the game, kinda foreshadowing how Sonic 3 would do things

I’ve seen people say that Sonic 1 has this progression where you start in more naturalistic settings and then go to increasingly more industrial settings, kinda in a way to showcase how technology is threatening to overtake nature. Nice interpretation! But it’s got holes. Mainly in the fact that this supposed progression is not as gradual as you’d think, mostly due to Labyrinth Zone being a mostly natural setting yet it’s sandwitched between two city stages. Maybe it’s just due to the Zone originally supposed to have been placed right after Green Hill. However even excluding this the only industrial setting with any negative connotations to it is Scrap Brain. Spring Yard and Star Light are normal cities, heck the latter is explicitly presented as beautiful, even more so than other natural settings like Marble and Labyrinth, maybe even more than Green Hill. To go from that to Scrap Brain isn’t exactly a gradual progression, it’s actually completely sudden

The general consensus around Sonic 1 is that it’s a good game, just not a good Sonic game

I...have issues with this idea

First off: to compare Sonic 1 with the games it spawned feels disingenious to me: there were NO Sonic games aside from this one (and the 8-bit version I guess), so there were no series standards to meet, mainly because they were still being formed. So I don’t believe it’s at all fair to compare Sonic 1 with the other games in the series in a liberal fashion

It is, however, absolutely fair to compare it with other platformers at the time. And it’s when we do this that things start getting a bit...uncertain for Sonic 1

I personally think that this is a decent game, it doesn’t have much wrong about it, however one should remember that this is a game that was specifically made to stand out from the crowd. The game was advertised as being different from other platformers at the time, Mario most of all.

And to be fair there are at least two things this game does that truly are unique: the physics based movement and the expansive level design. I can’t think of any other platformer at the time that featured these two elements. Sure Mario had a run button, but movement wasn’t as slick as Sonic’s, and his levels were usually straight lines filled with platforming challenges

However only a portion of Sonic 1 truly takes advantage of these factors. The rest of the game might as well be just a regular platformer like many others, and the issue is that, if we do judge these aspects by the standards of the time, then Sonic 1 ends up just...feeling unimpressive, if not downright full of itself.

This game’s pure platforming is decent, but it’s also nothing special, it’s very 101, nothing crazy or creative, hell sometimes it’s just flat out boring, like riding blocks on lava in Marble Zone. This game wanted to compete with Super Mario World and, I’m sorry, but in terms of being purely a PLATFORMER, that game absolutely runs circles around Sonic 1, no contest. It simply has far more creative platforming gimmicks and power ups. You might say that it’s an unfair comparison given that one is the fourth main title in a historic game series while the other is the first one of its kind and is still getting its bearings, but I’m not the one making the comparison here, it was Sega at that time, so I think it’s absolutely worth taking into consideration

Think of it this way: y’know all these Indie fan projects that are coming out that are clearly Sonic-inspired and every fan on the Internet is yelling that they’re doing a better job than Sonic Team themselves? Yeah imagine one of these games became official and that it was actively and aggressively advertised as being better than Sonic. Then you play it and it turns out to overall be more basic than Sonic’s own gameplay overall, while having a couple of genuinely cool ideas that aren’t used properly all the way. You’d laugh at that kind of game for having that kind of attitude yet being ultimately unable to fully like up to its own hype right?

But that’s pretty much what Sonic 1 is when compared to its main competitor. I wasn’t alive in 1991 so, at the end of the day, I can’t say this with absolute certainty, but I do believe I would have found Sonic 1′s marketing pretty laughable in the end. Honestly the main reason why I ultimately respect the game itself is mostly because its ideas will later be refined and the next few games will absolutely live up to the hype that the first one started to generate

And I guess that some might say that I’m completely wrong in my reasoning as, after all, the game was a huge success right? Well maybe, but I do wonder how much of this game’s success was really due to its quality and how much of it was due to Sega’s super aggressive marketing and the simple fact that it soon got bundled with every Genesis, especially the latter as do remember that, as soon as they stopped doing this, Sonic 3′s sales dropped a lot when compared to the first two games, despite Sonic 3 being....Sonic 3. Remember: sales and popularity do not neccessarily equate quality. Sonic 06 sold quite well at launch due to the initial hype and series like CoD nowadays are still very popular among the common crowd despite being largely ridiculed by many in the gaming community

And finally: no. I am not trying to say that “Sonic was never good lol. Cope and seethe fanboys”. Evidently a franchise capable of spawning over a hundred games lasting for 30+ years must’ve done something right in its early years at least

What I’m trying to argue is the possibility for Sonic 1 to just...be considered a pretty mediocre game overall, even on its own feet. I personally think it’s decent. PERSONALLY. But I think it’s got enough going against it that it can be argued that it’s actually less than that from an “objective” standpoint (if there’s anything like that anyway). I don’t like how people, at worst, talk about this game by saying “yeah it’s a bad Sonic game but a good game tho”, because I get the feeling that at times this is just born out of a fear of saying something bad about the progenitor of the series, like you HAVE to absolutely show your respect and reel in your criticisms or else! Except I don’t think that’s fair at all and this doesn’t just go for Sonic 1. You can respect what a game has done while also arguing that it’s not that good when standing on its own feet. Look at Metroid 1: that game is VERY important and I absolutely resoect it, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s an absolute mess, pretty damn broken even by the standards of the era.