#theme: discourse

[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."

[swordscleric]

I'm only halfway through the second phase of Predathos (which, to be clear is an incredible vibe for a bossfight, love a good head & hands/multitarget-same-entity boss) but I cannot shake the feeling of disappointment and just dissatisfaction I have had with this campaign that definitely started with Dusk/Yu, got followed up handily with the first Delilah/Sun Tree fight and then has been unfortunately reinforced with every discussion surrounding the Prime Deities since Hearthdell. This campaign is fascinating to pick apart, I have been really enjoying pulling apart why it isn't working compared to C1 or C2. But as much as I'm having fun dissecting where the worldbuilding has led to the current weaknesses in the gods' argument or reading other people's incisive commentary on the lack of personalities on the Ruby Vanguard's end, the "girlfailure" nonsense, etc etc, man do I wish this campaign was better than it is.

There are so many avenues of improvement -

Matt telling everyone to prep and write characters for this campaign instead of a C2-esque character-focused campaign.

Matt working religious organisations into the world properly.

The cast engaging with Marquet as a genuine location rather than set-dressing.

Otohan, Ozo and the rest of the Vanguard having more than "*insert snappy line here*" for their personalities.

No Delilah.

Bell's Hells having an iota of curiosity for anything outside of their own selves, including but not limited to: the gods, religious worship, the Elemental Titans and why they were sundered, how the people of Exandria feel about the gods, Vasselheim and its role in suppressing information about Predathos, Ludinus Da'Leth's plan and how it would still break the world if they did it in his place

I don't know why all of this fell into place in the way that it did, but it did. We can endlessly speculate why - the cast resting on their laurels after C2, not having enough time between the animated shows and Daggerheart and Candela Obscura and, and, and - but at the end of the day I really do hope that whatever form the final campaign wrap-up takes, they burn the damn questions asking the cast "what if the world was made of pudding and this character and this character kissed?" and instead pick questions that get them to introspect for a potential Campaign 4. Otherwise I don't know what will happen, but it sure as hell won't be Mighty Nein part 2: Issylra Boogaloo.

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

idk what's worse - a show where the themes are half-assed and not addressed seriously from the beginning, or a show where it first has a strong grasp of the message it wants to spread but then loses it later on and actively goes against that very message.

[ariadne-mouse]

In all this C3 discourse about what the main themes are I have seen viewpoints all over the board. I have also noticed some posts/tags/replies are particularly fired up saying that those who disagree with them are ignoring or putting down the perspectives of people of color. I have also watched some of these same users dunk on posts that are written by people of color, some of whom are sharing their family's irl experience under imperialism/colonialism, or why they either don't think that theme fits in C3 in the ways proposed by fandom or that it would have poor implications if it did, or even just saying that it's way more complicated than how the theme is being presented in these arguments - and then lump them into the complaint of "people ignoring perspectives of POC". Like, yes, it is absolutely a fandom issue that perspectives of people of color get ignored, shut down, or undervalued. But these perspectives are not a monolith and to pretend that they are - or that they must clearly be aligned with a specific view - is reductive and presumptuous, and indeed contributes to that very fandom issue. So in the fervor to decry those ignoring perspectives of POC, perhaps pause to consider - regardless of your own identity but especially if you are white - whether you might be doing that yourself in the exact same breath.

[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.

[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...

[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.

[mayasaura]

not to throw another coal on the discourse fire but the overwhelming whiteness of the tlt fandom and the series itself being clearly white written makes me particularly averse to certain people reading the whiteness as john's fault. "if john is so indigenous, why is the series classically themed 😏" nevermind all the immediate answers to that (and the immediate optics of that when you have white people questioning people's indigeneity based on their education and background, which happens all the damn time irl, and especially since those same bloggers do it to real indigenous bloggers who disagree with them LOL), do you know how CORNY it would be if white as driven snow muir was like here's my protagonist… Hinenui o te Iwa

Zjdhdg okay but hold on. That. That is a very good point.

Hinenui o te Iwa taught the Cohort haka, reinvented tāmoko, and organized the peoples into waka instead of houses. He summoned the heirs of each rangatira to Kurawaka to become atua. Which are of course identical to lyctors except in name.

[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.

[springtrappd]

i think one of the biggest reasons the mimic grates on so many people (including myself) is because it's pay-off without set-up. like. you can have a story about a machine that recreates the horrors of the past in a metaphor for the cycle of abuse & how trauma bleeds into future generations, sure, but you need to write that story first. you don't get to work backwards from your twist! that's not how stories work!!

[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.

[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-

[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.