#theme: discourse

[derangedfujoshi]

Stalking is a crime, yes that includes your yandere boyfriend

Assault is a crime, yes that includes your whumper/whumpee scenarios

Being part of a mob is a crime, yes that includes your sexy son of a mafia boss

Killing is a crime, yes that includes your blorbo

Zoophilia is a crime, yes that includes you liking Nick Wilde

All your "exceptions" from what is and isn't condemnable in fiction are, in real life, a crime as well. Every dark trope falls in the "it would be a crime to commit this irl" category, it's not just the big age gaps with adult/minor ships and the incest, it's ALL of them. All of them are crimes in the real world, by law. The sentence may vary but you'd still be sent to prison. "But I only like it in fiction!"

So do we.

So do we, so can you get off your high horse and just admit that liking dark themes in fiction, ANY dark theme, does not reflect your moral compass in real life and for the love of everything STOP pretending fake murder is better than fake incest? You sound preposterous.

[tossawary]

It's very ironic to get comments on "Scum Villain" fics that are essentially revenge fantasies against certain characters, given... uh... everything about "Proud Immortal Demon Way" and how the story of SVSSS interacts with that in-universe story.

Sometimes, it's mildly amusing. Sometimes, it's a little disturbing, depending on how violent and disproportionate the fantasy is, because even if I've written some villain as a real asshole, I don't want to open my inbox to people wishing death and gory violence on anyone. A couple times, it took me a hot second to figure out that the violent fantasy wasn't directed at ME specifically.

Thankfully, that extremism is quite rare, so it's more often people wishing milder physical pains or, uh, complete social humiliation on certain characters, sometimes just for the "crime" of being mild inconveniences or slightly unfriendly to the fic's protagonist. Most of the time, I assume this is some form of playful exaggeration on the commenter's part, a reader exorcising mild annoyance at a fictional antagonist and expressing some sympathy or compassion for the hurt protagonist. A reader mentioning they kind of want to see a character grovel pathetically for forgiveness only to get kicked in the face is not necessarily a reader who wants that revenge fantasy to actually happen in the story.

Sometimes, though, it is hard to tell if someone genuinely thinks that all of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect should be destroyed because Luo Binghe was abused or Shang Qinghua was overworked. Like, I sure hope this is just hyperbole! I sure hope that you don't honestly think that "an eye for an eye" or "I take two of your eyes and also your tongue because you took one of my eyes" are, like, reasonable justice policies! I sure hope that you don't sincerely think that collective punishment is in any way a good thing and that a random junior disciple on the tenth peak (who probably doesn't even know who Luo Binghe is) deserves to suffer because the original Shen Qingqiu was a really shitty person.

But revenge fantasies like "Proud Immortal Demon Way" are popular for a reason, so I can never quite be sure! In every fandom, you have Peerless Cucumbers demanding that villain characters be castrated or killed for being abusive pricks, who cheer on the fictional revenge fantasy of hurting someone ten times as much as they hurt you, and some fans would be absolutely horrified by that kind of "retribution" in real life and others would... cheer that real life "punishment" on as well.

I don't really have a strong point to make with this post! This post is too long to be a casual reminder: "Hey, I hope you're always keeping in mind that messages you send on the internet are being directly received by real people who 1) can't read your tone and 2) don't know your 'real life' opinions to immediately know if you're joking." And I'm focused more here on how amusingly ironic this type of commenting is in regards to SVSSS and PIDW specifically.

Like, it's fun sometimes to get a little "Peerless Cucumber" about our favorite protagonists! (Shen Yuan said a lot of shit on the internet about PIDW but apparently generally doesn't really want people in SVSSS to suffer.) But once your revenge fantasy starts getting a little too detailed in regards to public humiliation and social ruin, torture and dismemberment, arson and leaving someone to get eaten alive by fire ants, making everyone who ever mildly slighted you beg for their life at your feet... It's like, "Bro, I don't think this comment is even Peerless Cucumber levels anymore. You are straight-up getting into original Luo Binghe territory here."

[myfandomrealitea]

Fucking insane how people will see something I post that they agree with but they have to virtue signal that they're not a proshipper before expressing their agreement/support even when the post has nothing to do with proshipping.

[centrally-unplanned]

Atomic bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki: Based or Cringe?

Hiroshima = based, Nagaski = cringe, we having it both ways today baby!

But okay to not meme, this is a very complex question. Fundamentally, the mass-scale strategic bombing of civilian targets in World War Two was a dubiously effective policy that killed millions of innocent people. I judge no one for strategically bombing tank factories with the accuracy you had in 1943, that is just the harsh realities of that war, but that is not a description of what Allied strategy was (or not just, they also bombed tank factories). There were legions of air power proponents executing a strategy of "maximizing civilian casualties to break the back of the enemy", killing babies was the point, and the horrors of things like the firebombing of Tokyo are literally inconceivable to those who have never been in such times. Morality is not divorced from results - if it worked, if it made Germany & Japan surrender after a night of bloodied streets, then I would be hard-pressed to fault them. But that isn't what happened. It probably did something, sure, but the calculus is grim.

From that lens you can see Hiroshima as a culmination of a horrible strategy; but I don't think that is the only lens you have. World War Two was, in my opinion without peer, the highest stakes conflict humanity has ever fought. Nazi Germany's combination of dystopian vision and backed-by-steel ambition makes it the worst government to ever exist; Japan is certainly in the top 10 as far as these things go. And while we with our tables of GDP and steel output can say the Allies had it in the bag, that is never how people fighting a war see things.

Additionally, the methods of World War Two emerged from the almost-as-cataclysmic horrors of World War One; a conflict that utterly destroyed the governments of half the countries that fought it in. And their replacements were...not great! It was not a war that broke imperialism to usher in liberalism, even if steps were made that way. After WW1, people were desperate to find a way to fight the next war in a way that wouldn't condemn themselves to endless trench warfare they had gone through, one that wouldn't bring them to the brink of collapse, even if it fucked over the other guy.

Strategic bombing was born from this impulse - its founders truly hoped it would break the back of opposing nations, that once you "won air superiority" and started smacking Berlin the white flag would be raised. This didn't happen, but you didn't know that in 1941. Or in 1942. Or in 1943. Maybe it's just around the corner in 1944? You really want to stop now? 90% of Strategic Bombing Commands quit just before their enemy's will is finally broken, don't you know? In hindsight it is easy to say, in 1944, that they should have taken to foot off the pedal, that the war was won, and that this strat wasn't the way. And to be clear, they should have, they should have done that. Better men would have done that. But that is the high bar I am holding them too, not the floor. In this time period most people just didn't think civilians got spared in war, it was a different time. Morality's aim is universal, but the steps of the individual towards them can only be contextual. I think they were wrong, and to be clear by 1945 it was becoming quite obvious that the war was over and this was unnecessary. But few of us are so immune to the sins of inertia in a war.

From that lens, Hiroshima is the most justified civilian-targeted strategic bombing conducted in the entire war. Because unlike the inertia-creep of the Dresden firebombing, it had a very clear purpose - compel the Japanese government to surrender by demonstrating a weapon they could not hope to defeat, something that would save tens of thousands of American lives and likely hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. I believe it did do that - not only do I think it was at least as important as the Soviet declaration of war, but the one-two punch of timing them together was a calculated psychological blow that certainly didn't hurt.

But more importantly Truman was not privy to the sessions of the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, he could only guess where they stood. Within that context Hiroshima was a calculated gambit that makes sense; because strategically bombing civilian targets was the order of the day at that time, and that all the big solo-military targets were essentially bombed away at that point, the idea of some kind of "display" against a dummy target or something - to a government the US had barely any communication with, wasting a scarce resource - was just not politically in the cards. Hell, neglecting to bomb Kyoto for cultural reasons, and doing things like dropping leaflets warning civilians ahead of the attack to flee, were already tail-end of the humanitarian practices of the time. I cannot armchair judge Truman for making hard calls with the stakes as high as they were.

However, Nagasaki was a classic interia case. It was done because the US had the bomb and we were bombing cities. It made even less sense than campaigns before, because now the US had a "reason" to think surrender might be imminent, so giving it a few days had far more logic. This one I judge much more harshly. It was the decision of a system that just did violence by default. Which of course it was, it was World War Two. But results are morality - Hiroshima probably saved Japanese lives. Nagasaki did not. Them's the breaks.

[ingravinoveritas]

If at this point you still think Michael and David would somehow be uncomfortable with people shipping them after they've just created their own actual couple-themed Christmas card, I don't even know what to tell you...

[anti-endo-help]

hey!! uhm.. how do I say this. what the fuck is wrong with you??

seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you.

all this implies is that anti-endos are a cult, which is actively.. insane to think?? also, the conversion camp thing is just.. i'm speechless??

implying that trauma survivors, many of which have religious or cult trauma, are a cult is fucking deranged and a rather dog shit take.

go fuck yourself, you ableist piece of shit.

[ID: STOP! this blog is a strictly anti-endo space! pro-endos and endo neutrals, shoo! shoo shoo!]

[daisywords]

thinking about this post but also it's more than that. do you ever think about how stories starring men are allowed to be about humanity but stories starring women have to be about Womanhood

[a-confused-spoon]

"Arcane was always about love" very very close! It just featured loving characters and relationships, which isn't the same!

It was actually about how "love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress" as reflected by Silco's monster ideology to achieve independence and the Council constantly neglecting Zaun, twin sister city of Piltover, for prestige on the bigger picture, and on a minor scale how Jinx had to let go of the idea of Vi's love to fully embrace her potential, and Jayce focusing more on what he can do as a councilor instead of as a scientist (his legacy) and with Viktor (who he loves), and Ekko being unable to let go of his love for Powder even if for the sake of moving forward in the battle against Silco, and Mel having to choose between her love for her mom and the peace pact that Jayce puts on the table for the sake of both cities, and Vi not understanding that destroying Silco and his empire would've driven the sister she loves so dearly away- y'know, it was an ever present thing (as core themes usually are I believe) around which the rest of the themes were written (class divide, found family etc).

And what the story tackled with said core theme was specifically - I can't stress this enough - how hard it is to make that choice because there's not an obvious answer and it's not the same one for every case, especially when there are consequences outside the one's personal sphere, which was exactly why every decision the characters made drove the story forward.

But yes, if you were to transfer the "didn't he try to kill you?" / "Sometimes the best thing we can do is to forgive :D" exchange from s2 to any point in time of s1 it would sounds absolutely natural and reasonable within the context of the story because you should be able to find it you to forgive those who wronged you in the name love- or love conquers all or whatever it is that you mean with "arcane was always about love"- was certainly always the point.

...fyi I'm not saying that s2 can't or shouldn't be enjoyed for what it is (as I know I partly did before taking a step back and questioning a couple things), I'm just saying it made the show lose track of its center point and I think it's something worth noting.

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

oh btw the existence of real witches with magical powers destroys any commentary toh was trying to make about the witch trials.

because guess what? the witch trials were just a glorified form of misogyny. it wasn't directed towards people with actual magical powers (obviously) or even people with any power or autonomy at all. the witch trials was a way to make sure that women stayed powerless and any attempt to be an individual, outside of social expectations, would get them killed.

so applying all of that to a setting where witches are real and can defend themselves defeats the whole point. yes, these witches are still nice people (mostly) but the commentary about puritan dogma and the witch trials doesn't really hold up because they're mixing it with fantasy. witches aren't an oppressed group, they are not helpless and tortured in the way women were in the era of witch trials.

i think real world social commentary could definitely be applied to a fantasy setting and carried out efficiently, but not in this instance. toh trashes the direct connection between witch trials and misogyny, and makes it seem like people who publicly burned women at the stake or hanged them.. kind of had a point because witches exist and are naturally stronger than human beings. it doesn't matter if the witches are good or not because this is no longer an act of discrimination and oppression, as it was in the real world.

[mahou-furbies]

Ah Princession Orchestra has character profiles on the website! Let's see...

...ohhh

Oh no!!!

"Theme colour: yellow"

You will be a green mahou in my heart Nagase...

[dykedvonte]

Mini rant below and in the tags, the only time I’ll talk about this and my personal take on it.

The way people talk about hypothetical male Anya on Twitter and the idea of how Mouthwashing would play out if the genders were swapped makes me remember how people still don’t take sexual assault and rape with male victims with the same gravity, especially when the perpetrator is female.

[chilledstrawberrysoda]

My ultimate aftg pet peeve is when someone from booktube or booktok reads the books one time and thinks they can make a video explaining it like no get out of here, I have read these books 10+ times over the last 9 years and listened to the audiobooks 5 times and this morning I still noticed something that I misinterpreted upon the first 15 read throughs. I think the only person that would be genuinely qualified to do a full plot analysis and breakdown would be Nora because these books have so much nuance and complex characters and world building that reading it once is not enough to explain it to other people.

[mihai-florescu]

"Fiction isnt reality itself, but it does affect reality, so you have to be mindful of your own consumption and how you interact with it after, especially if you're going in a fandom setting" is not a crazy statement to understand, and yet it feels like it on the internet

[anxiouspotatorants]

Fiyero Tiggular did not sing the entirety of Dancing Through Life — fear infested depression disguised as nihilistic warts and all — for so many to just write him off as the handsome but shallow popular guy

[synchodai]

Idk where all these takes thinking that Helaena was indifferent to Jaehaerys's death come from. She literally said she was sad about it. Her rationalizing that she shouldn't be is very realistic grief processing for a neurodivergent person. I've worked with children on the spectrum who will tell me that they're angry or sad and are trying not to be because they know it'll make others even more upset or because a scraped knee heals eventually and all these other rationalizations.

But they are upset. And like what Alicent did with Helaena, you have to tell them having emotions by itself isn't a bad thing. Most of the time, it's simply something you can't control or reason away. Alicent was doing well to tell her daughter that she had a right to her grief — that she shouldn't use "other people have it worse" as a way to push it down.

Alicent has her own wonky processing by believing it was her fault that Jaehaerys died ('the gods are punishing me for my sins. an unrelated accident happened because i, personally, have done awful things' aka classic catholic guilt). So she was seeking absolution from her father who refused to give it to her.

But Helaena does. Helaena forgives her. In a way, I interpreted this scene as both of them comforting each other in the ways they needed. When Alicent shrugs off her own grief and begins talking about how she's more worried about Helaena, her daughter tells her what she wanted to hear by giving her that absolution.

Could the scene have made it clearer that this mother and daughter are helping each other with their radically different ways of processing grief? Could I have misinterpreted the scene? Of course. But as it was, it was pretty clear that Helaena was sad about Jaehaerys.

[melonefelone]

Do you think if Arcane came out a few years ago there would be Jayvik animatics to Colors by Halsey or x reader fics based on Daddy Issues by The Neighbourhood of Silco or an insane amount of Genderbent Vi art to make Caitvi straight or-