#this is in no way a criticism it's just something i think is cool to observe as someone not from the uk

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

Thinking about Lila, the only way I think she could work as the next Big Bad in a satisfying narrative way would be to tie her motivation more to the Miraculous than to the heroes

Like, if in Volpina she had actually been telling the truth about being descended from a former Fox user, and she feels that she's entitled to getting the Fox Miraculous back, and the Grimoire is her whole motivation for getting close to Adrien bc it's her only lead

Or if she got the plot where she's a secret Senti who's after the Peacock for self-preservation reasons instead of Felix, and her Senti powers are why her lies are so believable.

Or skip the self preservation and have her be made by a villain Peacock who had a vendetta against the order or a former Miraculous welder and Lila was made to just cause them problems who managed to escape and is just causing trouble bc that's what she was made for

Just like, something other than her being a petty 14 year old with the writers some unseen cosmic entity ensuring her plans succeed no matter how bad and nonsensical

Hard agree. This is what I mean when I criticize Lila's lack of motivation. If she had any of these things going for her, then her character would make sense. As is, she's just kind of evil because she's evil and that's really boring for this type of main villain unless you're going for a comedy villain. Someone whose main job is to make us laugh while giving the hero an excuse to look cool. Lila isn't the type of villain. She's a serious threat who clearly has some sort of goal and so she needs a motivation that fits a serious threat. It would be different if she was an evil queen who just naturally had power and chose to use it for evil, that setup makes sense, but she's not. She's... something else. What that something else is, I cannot say because we're five seasons in and we don't even know her freaking name.

[nalyra-dreaming]

Did Anne purposefuly write Marius as an arrogant self-important mediocre asshole (my impression after reading TVL) or did she genuinely think she was writing a mysterious intelligent cool dude?

I know every character in VC has done horrible things, I'm not really talking about morals here. It's just that when looking at Louis, Lestat and Armand I go "what a freak. Love that for him", even when they are being insufferable. I look at Marius and just go "ugh". I'm wondering if he was intended to serve the purpose of a universally disliked character?

:))) I mean, I wouldn't say he is universally disliked? (I'm neutral - I find him a fascinating character but don't really like him, if that makes sense).

Iirc Anne saw in him something like a hero of the VC (I think there's a FB post on that somewhere) and she definitely liked him.^^

I mean... Marius... is Marius.

He's writing the later constitution of the vampires in latin - with Lestat. A language which (most of) the young ones don't speak *coughs*.

But, anyways, there's this slight... side-tone to (even) Lestat's narration there which always makes me cackle:

"I was spending part of every evening working with Marius on a constitution that he was writing in Latin, that reflected far too much of his Roman principles, and strange Hellenistic disdain for the material and the biological, and then I spent time talking with the young ones about how they must and could protect themselves from discovery, while working with all the relentless digital surveillance of the mortal world. The spiritual, the practical, the timeless challenges, the challenges of the moment."

The weird disdain and too much reflection on Roman principles. 💀

That's pretty much as far as any open criticism of Lestat (of Marius) goes in the books, but then it cannot be dismissed that Lestat never became the pupil that Marius wanted him to be - for reasons. Because I think Lestat was very much aware of Marius abandoning Armand to the Children of Satan... something he would have never done.

So, I... think her writing of Marius was very much intentional. And the way the other characters react to him (and his actions) as well.

Whether you like him (or not) depends on what you see in him I guess and what you're looking for in a (fictional!) character, too.

I'm quite sure the show won't shy away from showing alllll the facets of Marius... and it will be hugely interesting to see them implement the character relationships.

[inflammatoryfandomblog]

I do find it interesting that ATLA managed to use a very black and white narrative (stop Evil Empire) to tell several character stories with some nuance, while TDP claims it has a nuanced conflict and flattens everything to try and make up for that, ultimately leading to protagonist centred morality more than anything. And if they didn’t want me to compare the two then they should have let go of the ATLA references right away.

you're right and you should say it.

the constant and shoehorned references to ATLA do not really do this show any favors. honestly might be part of the problem (why are there 7 primals with color-coded elves? to follow ATLA's pattern of marketable separable elements. why is it an adventure story with a core crew? because ATLA was like this too. etc etc.)

but anyway. yeah. ATLA had a very simple main conflict to provide a constant source of tension throughout the show (even if they dropped the ball at the last season re: the plot), and this structure allowed for episodes that explore other aspects of the setting and characters while still making everything feel relevant and tied together by said conflict. it's not some arthouse show by any means, but it has good compelling story work into it. genuinely great show.

tdp immediately opens up with the nuance and it never really delves deeper. you'd think that opening with characters being aware of the cycle of violence stuff would be interesting and the show would explore that more, but it just... flatlines there. there's no progression or graduation or exploration of themes as the seasons go on like in ATLA. very rarely are there new questions being asked or arcs that feel sensical.

honestly the main characters having to be perfect in every situation is the biggest problem with tdp. the mains are not allowed to have shortcomings or mistaken judgements or anything to meaningfully interact in any way with the nuanced set-up. they emotionally exist entirely outside it, which ends up making them the Messiahs of Peace Who Can Do No Wrong. good for fandoms i guess, people bitched and whined about bato and the water tribe for years. but it's not very good for storytelling.

and also, they're just bad characters and the writers can't put two and two together while still asking you to take their world very seriously.

anyways i'm just rambling at this point. good observation.

[bougiebutchbitch]

wow I've sure blocked or unfollowed a lot of people I used to really like and respect over their absolutely abominable opinions recently

[get-more-bald]

the biggest thing about X6 is not that he doesn't think of himself as human (though he doesn't, and according to some it's correct) BUT that he doesn't see himself as a Person

[prentissluvr]

tw long rant and swearing!

hey!! if you don't like something i wrote! shut the fuck up and move on!! thanks bye!! no hate is tolerated on this blog :)))

i don't care if you don't like the way i characterized someone in my story!! shut up and get a better hobby than hating on something someone has spent hours creating and pouring love into and accusing them of hating one of their favorite characters because you think that the fic they wrote FOR FUN and NOT FOR YOU is bad characterization/makes the character flawed in a way that you don't like because you have a poor understanding of what makes fanfiction fanfiction (and also humans human tbh lol). sure, they're maybe more flawed than in the actual show, but THATS THE FUCKING POINT OF FANFICTION!!! IS THAT ITS NOT A REAL PART OF THE SHOW!!! AND ITS WRITTEN!!! FOR FUNNNNN!!!!! AND NOT FUCKING FOR YOU AND YOUR FUCK ASS OPINIONS SPECIFICALLY!!!!!!!! and if you think it sucks, i don't care!! you are entitled to your opinion!!!! hate it so so so much but get the fuck over yourself if you think that telling me it's horrible and unrealistic and somehow creating a bad wrap FOR MY FAVORITE CHARACTER IN THIS SHOW is somehow a meaningful usage of your time or gonna get me to delete the fic or stop liking it or stop promoting my own hard work !!!! i'm proud of the things i write and nothing will ever change that. i hope you know what a shitty shitty shitty (and embarrassing) thing it is to do to leave a whole paragraph of hate under someone's hard work just because they interpret a fictional fucking character in a way that you don't like. genuinely genuinely get the fuck over yourself and find a better way to spend your time than caring more about fictional characters than real life people.

[rotisseries]

posts where people say they don't like zelink bc it's just another knight/princess ship kill me dead like wdym. are you shipping things based off the characters job descriptions

[theresa-of-liechtenstein]

man i’m still so hung up on the way that this professor handled music in the philippines. there were Choices made and though i agreed with a few of them, i found most of them straight up fucking baffling and it was disheartening to not feel heard or invited to contribute to the discussion despite this subject matter being uhhhhhhh my fucking lived experience just because i didn’t pay a twenty dollar membership fee to the fil-am org

[dirkxcaliborn]

I'd have to say one of the cutest, novel moments in a romance manga I read recently was when one of the characters noticed the other's behavior and thought it seemed like the other character had feelings for him, but then he told himself off for making assumptions about other people's feelings lol

[yourfourthparent]

something interesting about dick riordan is how he never compares white characters to food in physical descriptions but when a character of colour is white passing he still finds a way to compare them to food. it won't be about their skin but it'll be about their hair or their eyes. and yet he doesn't do it with white folks. huh. i wonder why that is (sarcastic).

[whlskr]

Finally finished this! Gotta type up his character info then I'll have my first character profile to post to @cauterizedpod! 🤫

[gaylittleguys]

book musings don’t mind me

I was really so disappointed with the long way to a small angry planet. As soon as I identified WHY it was bothering me, I just started getting so annoyed I just returned it without finishing it. I didn’t want to be disappointed because I really loved the setup and the characters, and thought it had so much potential! But I really just couldn’t get over the way it was written, and the way it felt like Nothing actually happened ever, despite there being SO MANY things that were happening. It just felt like none of it mattered? Things would come up and be resolved with a neat little moral or something to say and that’s it. But I was over halfway through the book, and I don’t think I learned more about anybody than I did in the first couple chapters. It felt so devoid of any conflict or imperfection that it just wasn’t interesting lmao. There was a review that compared it to a tv show like Firefly, and Yeah. It felt like it was trying to be an episodic tv show, with fun little side adventures with the same cast, but that’s not what I want out of a book! I’d go watch a show for that!! I want a cohesive story PLEASE. There was just too many offshoots and too many side plots that I just didn’t care and none of them were interesting. Which is a shame because the world building was very compelling and I Wanted to be invested, but there was just barely any focus on the interesting plot points. I just had such a hard time with it, and I couldn’t finish it. I skimmed through the rest of the book to see if it got more interesting, but it seemed like it was just more disconnected side stories. Which was maybe the point, but it just felt like….. uninteresting. There was nothing to be invested in.

[waywardsalt]

also also with fe engage i really love the battle animations. tbh the games ive played (3ds and switch fire emblem) have nice battle animations, but in engage they feel especially nice with more dynamic dodges and attack animations

[cheese-rat29]

watching early s6 is so funny because you get to see how the uk views the us and it's so wrong.

[txttletale]

Saw a tweet that said something around:

"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"

I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.

i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.

'depleting the global power and water supply'

something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:

running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours

gaming on your ps5 for an hour is 200 watt-hours

watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours

and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!

a single streetlight's typical operation 1.2 kilowatt-hours a day (or 1200 watt-hours)

a digital billboard being on for an hour is 4.7 kilowatt-hours (or 4700 watt-hours)

i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?

1-1.5%.

ah. well. nevertheless!

what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.

most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.

but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.

but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!

so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!

'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'

this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."

it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.

nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!

plagiarizing human artists

nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.

AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).

to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?

then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!

this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.

(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)

today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools

i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).

jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!

there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:

“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”

this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.

so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.

if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.

[kazoo-world]

okay. i debated not posting this because I was worried I’d get death threats (that says a lot doesn’t it) but it needs to be said, because its upsetting me.

a woman who publicly says she feels very sane and has “never been to therapy” and who breaks up with her boyfriend in part because he can’t just “”get over”” his depression to love her the way she wants/needs does not.

I repeat, does not.

get to use the imagery she did in her fortnight video.

I’ve been seeing gifsets and screenshots all day of her chained to a bed but ~aesthetic~ and being fed a pill after a cheeky side eye and strapped to a glamourfied ECT machine and no one has said anything about it so I will. those images are genuinely triggering for me.

people have been restrained, forcefed pills, and given electroconvulsive therapy or subjected to the electric chair for severe mental illness against their will. these are not fun props anyone gets to throw around to express that they feel depressed or in a “manic phase” or like they were “raised in an asylum.”

she doesn’t know how a real asylum fried my grandmother’s brain or real cops restrained me because I was psychotic and manic. she doesn’t know what it feels like to be dehumanised that way.

do better. demand she do better, too.

edit: I say that this content is triggering to say that it causes real harm. I do still have a responsibility to myself to curate an internet experience for myself. this does not negate her responsibility to avoid replicating harmful tropes in art which is deeply influential. she does not get to co-opt institutionalization or psychiatric violence as a romanticized aesthetic or as a metaphor because real people like myself have suffered greatly under the things she is representing as glamorous or cool. institutionalization silences and violates mentally ill people in a way that marginalizes them, and that experience should be treated with sensitivity and care rather than being commodified to reduce stigma. if she had experienced these things, I might feel differently, but other ableist content on the record and her statements on her life and art indicate otherwise. she is a woman with immense privilege and power and should not be using that privilege and power to punch down on mental illness.

edit 2: I want you all to know I have seen your criticism. I will not edit the post but I do respect that she has had mental health struggles since that outdated quote. That is my mistake, I own that. My apologies.

However, mental health struggles =/ experience with psychiatric violence. Experiences of mental illness are heterogenous. Aestheticizing, romanticizing, and glamourizing mental hospitals is straight up gross regardless of your experience with mental illness. It’s tasteless and offensive.

I do understand metaphors. I think that her calling her life an asylum as a metaphor is in poor taste. I think her representing her relationship struggles with the imagery of a mental institution is insensitive given the impacts that real asylums and mental hospitals have had on my life and the lives of many others like me, so I had to say something about it.

It’s ableist to assume that critics of your fav “can’t read”, “don’t understand a metaphor” or “don’t have brains” when they clearly demonstrate that they are thinking critically. Do better.