#or like. he seemed like he could

[markwateneymemorialcrater]

Please note. The orange one is not included because A. He isn’t a billionaire. And B. Calling him obnoxious is too kind for him.

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[oopdeathnote]

Imagine if you locked Light and Patrick Bateman in a room together. They would be having the most generic conversation but you wouldn’t be able to hear it over the sound of their overlapping internal monologues. There would be a few seconds where their monologues both play in sync to say something misogynistic.

[amid-fandoms]

honestly if phan wasn't real i'd roast dan so hard like. you live with that and you're gay and you didn't manage to pull it? skill issue

[tiniest-hands-in-all-the-land]

Carry me home

[theribbajack]

"Now, the vow will be honoured, and my Lord brother's soul will return."

Radahn stans keep winning, but I personally am in Miyazaki's walls rn

[soularluni-2]

he’s just a kitty

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

This wine tastes like pigs blood!

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[choccy-milky]

MC doing what we all wished we could do (aka napping on the floor with ominis )😴💕

[stars-obsession-pit]

Tim has found his soulmate (not a soulmate AU, just in the like “i think we’re totally meant to be together” way). Well, okay, it’s entirely one-sided so far, but he’s sure SpecterNova will reciprocate once they’re in proper contact.

He’s already found everything he publicly can on the youtuber, but he’s still digging deeper. It’s weirdly difficult—his love must like his privacy!—but he’s making headway.

On the other end, Danny is getting nervous about the dedication of his new internet stalker. Even with Tucker’s help in setting up his online security and the scrambling effects of ectoplasm, they can tell that the person is still making progress. They don’t seem like they’re a part of the GIW, but that doesn’t mean their search can’t harm him in some other way.

He really hopes he doesn’t have to change identities again. Having to do it the first time to flee the GIW was bad enough, and he’s been liking his current life.

[tanatola]

pathologic 3 announcement made me return to the classic game and finally play it properly! i think my favorite part of the bachelor's route is when he talks to maria kaina (or whoever's in her body at the time) and they explain that their planned Utopia isn’t even supposed to be a 'perfect' place but instead 'the mystical manifestation of a world inscrutable and inaccessible to men' going back to the original meaning of the word irl and instead of despairing Daniil fervently agrees that this kind of unimaginable leap is worth it, no matter where it actually leads

[wojtekaneko]

Knives Out: 13th century edition

[sophfandoms53]

Anyway shout out to Dewey who constantly looked like he was having the worst time of his fucking life in the pitches

Just an 11 year old pissed off at the world it seems😭

[monobmp]

Thought about that tid bit of Bill mentioning that he can delete memories

[anghraine]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[can-a-tuna-fish]

Give him $25 and he will come home with a bag full of food that hasn’t seen the light of day since the early 90’s.