#respect the audience

[swan-orpheus]

Tech's Death And Proper Narrative Closure: A Cool-Headed Almost Rant

So whether you are for or accepting of or against the killing off of Tech, I have to ask: is it acceptable that we get no episode that exists mainly for the purpose of addressing his death?

Does not a major character in a show about clone family not rate an entire episode to acknowledge their passing?

It cannot happen in the frenzy of last season or the beginning of this one, but it ought to have occurred once everyone reunites and crosshair reconciles. We get a beautiful acknowledgement of Crosshair's grief over Mayday, but nothing for his batchmate?? We get everyone looking down in silence for a few seconds before moving on. Then we're catapulted into the next mission. We even get various side quests that take up entire episodes as well as random guest appearances from old characters who do little to nothing to advance the story of the bad batch and likely only drop in to foreshadow future content. So now we're promoting future shows atop his unackowledged corpse. nice.

The post character death grief episode is standard practice in shows. It gives the characters and the audience a safe space to process their feelings. It is an in-scene, on screen acknowledgement of the death and what everyone is feeling, but having a hard time expressing. We see it visually from time to time teasing an eventual conversation that never arrives. At the very least you have an episode that is ostensibly about something else but that heavily features particular themes and is symbolic of said grief before sitting everyone down in the closing minutes to formally address it with all relevant parties present. It's called closure. Sure events do not always give one closure, but people hold their own ceremonies and commune with one another in order to achieve the closure that life does not always kindly bestow.

Why deny the audience this basic kindness and sign of respect?

Whether down to poor writing or blatant dishonesty about the trajectory of the plot and/or handwaving...

I deem this unacceptable.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[lotus-pear]

it doesn't matter how babygirl ur fav man is, he will ALWAYS be ten times sexier as a woman

[demigods-posts]

imagine a world where the heroes of olympus series was one big crossover. a world where we meet an eleven year old boy named jason, no last name because it reminds him of his mother — a drunk who literally threw him to the wolves as a toddler. jason, who's earliest memory is chewing on a stapler and his older sister tending to the wound on his bottom lip — but he hasn't seen or heard from her since they were separated years ago. jason, who grew up reaching for the sky like a purpose, desperate for a chance to prove himself. jason, who fought to save the world at fifteen years old. and jason, who finds himself in the grand canyon four months later with no memory of who he is or where he came from, feet away from some frantic sixteen year old girl in search of some dude named percy jackson. imagine what this could have been.

[thatqueerbat]

catching up on docs streams, and he's talking about religion/spirituality and how it guides people's beliefs etc. he mentions how (generally) people like to be outraged by things [that dont affect them], like who other people are, and then immediately says 'if you're lgbtq you'll know what im talking about'

and i absolutely do. and its so wild to me how he just. drops that in. then starts talking about how it shouldn't matter who you are, how you can still do be incredibly religious and respect queer people, that the most important thing is that your beliefs don't hurt other people. how you should respect pronouns, that being 'indoctrinated' into being queer isn't a thing.

all whilst he's mining for diamonds using a freaking mega tunnel bore. like its any other conversation you might have

which it certainly is, for me. but a 40 something cishet man? not your standard casual conversation topic, not usually. and even though i already knew he was a supportive guy, hearing a conversation like this outside of an explicitly queer space, unprompted by a queer person. just solidifies what kind of person he is. and gives me faith that even outside of queer specific spaces, important conversations are happening, its not just us protesting and yelling into the wind, no one giving a shit. and its happening in some pretty unexpected places. which id say is pretty neat. its nice to have some hope for a change.

(all that to say, this is a docm77 stan household)

[eggcats]

Idk if this is a controversial belief or not, but I genuinely believe Alastor would like Verosika Mayday

Like: she's a woman, she's a singer/performer, AND she uses her powers over attraction to her own advantage, and I think Alastor would find that funny and respectable as someone unaffected

Also, imagine how hilarious everyone else's responses would be to them just. Getting along like besties.

[gingermintpepper]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ghilankisser]

Solas haters stop telling Solasmancers about how much you hate him and want to kill him challenge

[starrylightseeker]

This might be a hot take, especially on this site, but some of u are getting on my nerves.

Atp I don't think some of you realize how entitled and ridiculous you sound🧍‍♀️demanding and whining that there is no male mc and it's wild to me, and hear me out, if u wanna imagine it w a male mc go ahead no one is gonna stop you. But ure going "not only women play this," "it's about inclusivity"

Here's the thing. Imagine if someone goes into a BL space or a space made specifically for mlm as the target audience, and then women come on and start demanding and whining about adding a female mc because of inclusivity and that "not only guys play this." Or going into a wlw space and demanding a mmc.

Do y'all not see how stupid that sounds????? It's the same thing because the target of those is wlw and mlm...

(I know lots of women enjoy BL/mlm and I've NEVER seen them try to force themselves into the story by demanding a fmc)

I even saw someone with this horrible ass take: "if there is space for skin tones, there is space for lgbtq" and that..... there are so many issues in that sentence. For starters, women of color exist, being able to change the mc's skin color in a game like this SHOULD BE THE STANDARD🧍‍♀️comparing that to including an mmc and/or sexualities in a game made for women attracted to men is not the fucking same and the person who said that is just gross and the main reason I'm writing this.

You CAN be here in this space. You CAN play the game even if you're nb or a guy or a lesbian. You are welcome to play, the game is awesome!! Just also respect the fact that the main target audience is women cause some of you are getting so fucking infuriating w the things you say.

You came into the game knowing who the target audience was. Pls learn the difference between otomes and dating sims.... they're not the same.

[c1nto]

=> zenkaiger x BL <=

[aarafox]

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of reposting of artwork in the helluva boss fandom, idk if it’s people who are new to tumblr/the fandom but there’s one thing I want to make clear:

Reposting - the act of uploading a pic of someone’s art to make a new post - is NOT a good thing to do. Reblogging - I hope we all know what that is - IS a good thing.

IF you want to repost an artwork, because it’s only on Twitter/X or for other reasons, approach the original artist to ask for their permission. If you don’t receive permission, DON’T POST. If you do receive permission, CREDIT THEM WITH NAME AND/OR LINKS.

If you don’t know who the artist is, use reverse google images or saucenao.com to look for a source. Can’t find the original artist/source? DON’T POST THE ART.

A work of art posted without permission or credit is considered stealing, because others will believe YOU made it and therefore YOU will receive the credit, which is unfair. Artists put a lot of time and work into their pieces and deserve to be credited/respected. Putting “credit to the owner/creator” under the art is not enough; other users still won’t be able to find the actual creators and it’s no proof that the artist gave permission for their work to be posted elsewhere than their own blogs/accounts.

I know many people find pictures on Pinterest, but the artists often aren’t credited there either. Don’t upload these artworks if you don’t know who made it.

Hope this helps!

[mollysunder]

The funniest thing about Jayce is that while yes, he's juggling other peoples' interests/loyalties, he's only sort of malleable and mostly kind of uncontrollable. People can tell Jayce something and he will in fact listen to it, absorb the new information, but it's a genuine gamble to guess what he does with that information.

Heimerdinger tells him exactly how to avoid punishment for his trial and Jayce DOESN'T do it. Jayce decides to defend himself and the merit of his work. The Medardas want hextech weapons (for varying reasons), Viktor says no, meanwhile Jayce already has blueprints laminated and framed in his room.

Jayce didn't ask to be a Councilor, but he immediately throws himself into rooting out corruption. When Mel tells him he's gonna need to play ball to stay alive politically, Jayce goes, "Ball is life". Then Jayce manages to amass enough political capital to kick off HEIMERDINGER of all people.

Second to Jinx, Jayce is the character that asserts the most agency in the cast. People really try to pull Jayce in this and that direction, but his character, his morals, just who he really is pushes at any supposed binary others try to place him in. The choices he makes always align with his core, and it inevitably puts others in a position to accept the consequences of bringing up the issue to him in the first place.

[mabelmidnight-takeover]

just a reminder that the pjotv is gonna be the first contact of many kids to the percy jackson world and probably will influence a lot of them to pick up books for the first time so everyone please be nice and tag tlt spoilers. let kids (and adults) feel the same enjoyment you did while finding out about the pjo world for the first time

[horror-aesthete]

Renfield, 2023, dir. Chris McKay

[lunar-years]

It's interesting that when Keeley is telling Ted about the implications of that photo of him and her leaking to The Sun, she says "Jamie is going to go mental" but it's not followed up with "he's going to think i cheated on him" or "he's going to break up with me" or "it's going to ruin our relationship" it's instead followed up by, "there's going to be photographers all over us!" And later when she's talking to Rebecca it's, "My god, Jamie would've been so pissed off with reporters poking around in our love life." There's something to be said for like, she never once expresses doubt that Jamie won't hear her out on the truth or believe what she tells him. The major focus of her concern is just keeping their business out of the press. Their relationship in season one is far from perfect but there's a lot of implicit trust between them.

[astranauticus]

soliloquy

(edit once again i drew something with my ipad screen brightness too high and now that i've posted it nothing is visible. sad!)