#thats not a real choice

[vryivs]

seen so many bad lore takes recently so I deleted tiktok for the third time in one year

[morganmnemonic]

I can't stop thinking about the relationship between Jon and Helen as perhaps one of the most important ones in the entire show. They are narrative parallels for each other, and they both know it. They've both known it from the very start!

Helen walks into the Archives, paranoid, unsure of who to trust, and Jon sees himself in her. And he thinks "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." Then he can't save her. The next time they meet, she's a monster. They're both monsters. There was never any other way their stories could have gone, their fates entwined from the very start.

And Helen answers his original thought with one of her own: "Maybe if we can help each other, there's hope for us both." But Jon looks at her and sees everything that he fears becoming, and so he turns her away, and refuses to accept that their stories are still one and the same.

Helen went to the last person who was ever kind to her, the only person who both knew her as a human and had the context to understand what she'd become, and he hated her. He hated her because he liked Helen, and told her that she couldn't be Helen.

So she stopped trying to be Helen, and embraced being a monster. Reveled in it even. Then Jon wakes up from a six month coma, more monster than person, and tries so hard to cling to the things that mattered to him when he was human. Even with no support, even with the entire archives staff against him, he chooses humanity and compassion over and over again.

And this is a direct threat to Helen's world view. Their stories are entwined. If Jon can continue to be a person even after everything he's been through, then she could have clung to her humanity too, if only she'd tried a little harder. And that terrifies her! She wants to conceptualize herself as someone who was completely overwhelmed by forces beyond her control, who never had a choice but to become a monster. She want's to be an innocent victim. But Jon argues with his actions that they'd both had choices.

And, Jon, in turn, holds out hope that she might make better choices until the very end.

This is the conflict between them for all of season 4 and 5. Jon wants to prove that they can both be decent people, and Helen wants to prove that they were never going to be anything but monsters. This is why she's so devoted to trying to goad Jon into enjoying his newfound godhood. She knows that they are the same, and wants that to mean that he has a spark of evil inside of him, and not that she was always capable of doing good.

When Jon kills her, she loses her life, but wins the argument. Helen is nothing but a dangerous monster who needs to be killed for the good of everyone, and in the moment he decides that, Jon dooms himself to the same fate. Their stories are one and the same. "If i can help her, maybe there's hope for me too." he thought. But he couldn't help her, refused to, even, in the one moment when it actually mattered. And thus, there was never hope for him.

[lucabyte]

On autonomy, and what it means to be Obliged to Help.

Bonus:

[inkskinned]

the rise of AI art isn't surprising to us. for our entire lives, the attitude towards our skills has always been - that's not a real thing. it has been consistently, repeatedly devalued.

people treat art - all forms of it - as if it could exist by accident, by rote. they don't understand how much art is in the world. someone designed your home. someone designed the sign inside of your local grocery store. when you quote a character or line from something in media, that's a line a real person wrote.

"i could do that." sure, but you didn't. there's this joke where a plumber comes over to a house and twists a single knob. charges the guy 10k. the guy, furious, asks how the hell the bill is so high. the plumber says - "turning the knob was a dollar. the knowledge is the rest of the money."

the trouble is that nobody believes artists have knowledge. that we actively study. that we work hard, beyond doing our scales and occasionally writing a poem. the trouble is that unless you are already framed in a museum or have a book on a shelf or some kind of product, you aren't really an artist. hell, because of where i post my work, i'll never be considered a poet.

the thing that makes you an artist is choice. the thing that makes all art is choice. AI art is the fetid belief that art is instead an equation. that it must answer a specific question. Even with machine learning, AI cannot make a choice the way we can - because the choices we make have always been personal, complicated. our skills cannot be confined to "prompt and execution." what we are "solving" isn't just a system of numbers - it is how we process our entire existence. it isn't just "2 and 2 is 4", it's staring hard at the numbers and making the four into an alligator. it's rearranging the letters to say ow and it is the ugly drawing we make in the margin.

at some point, you will be able to write something by feeding my work into a machine. it will be perfectly legible and even might sound like me. but a machine doesn't understand why i do these things. it can be taught preferences, habits, statistical probability. it doesn't know why certain vowels sound good to me. it doesn't know the private rules i keep. it doesn't know how to keep evolving.

"but i want something to exist that doesn't exist yet." great. i'm glad you feel creative. go ahead and pay a fucking artist for it.

this is all saying something we all already knew. the sad fucking truth: we have to die to remind you. only when we're gone do we suddenly finally fucking mean something to you. artists are not replicable. we each genuinely have a skill, talent, and process that makes us unique. and there's actual quiet power in everything we do.

[faunandfloraas]

fav skz // Sick as!

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I'm sorry I let down my guard.

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[treasureplcnet]

bunch of bg3 sketches :)

[mykingdomforasong]

I do think the dumbest, most egregious overstatement of harm in fandom spaces is acting like someone is doing an active act of modern colonization because they ship two characters from a 2000s animated Nickelodeon show

[metanarrates]

its interesting to me that the common sentiment appears to be that han sooyoung intended for jang hayoung to be trans. I think there's room for multiple interpretations, but I view being trans in orv as being inherently tied to the themes of self-actualization, as well as the idea that a narrative is unable to be fully defined by either author or reader. put more simply, jang hayoung is trans regardless of either kim dokja OR han sooyoung's intentions in creating her, or in how they each interpreted her. maybe the version of her in the novel was meant to be something else, but in the reality of this world, she is a trans girl. han sooyoung's intentions kind of don't matter there because the text has moved beyond its author

[lover-of-mine]

Fought 'til you tethered me, swept under surfaces, never enough of it...

[fire-in-my-woods]

Me when Max Caulfield shows just how fucked up she really is

[arom-antix]

Viktuuri week day 4: Reinvention

[mountainashes]

I love Until Dawn (evidently) but omg everytime I play the game or think abt the game I end up feeling so gd sad. Like damn its bleak. Josh Washington genuinely has made me cry more times than I can count.

[klm-zoflorr]

What if we were nemesises..... And we were holding hands

[transimailisa]

genuinely love that the loyal pin has an approach to how misogyny can be the root of homophobia especially lesbophobia in that case

[rb19]

if gp's radio after max won monaco 21 is not in your top 3 'fav gp post race radio' you are doing it wrong……. "we have had some sad times around here, max… we won't forget those that makes it even even sweeter.. honestly i'm really proud of you.. nice job" 🥲