#view of socialism

[shithowdy]

hey this post on bluesky fucking sucks.

the dishonesty here is palpable. the op of this post complained that they spent hours editing a video only for it to get 200 views. this is only important if you think views/follower counts correlate directly with income. if you want to be an influencer who makes art, just fucking say so. but this is not the point of simply "being an artist".

you absolutely do not "have" to spend hours of your day making tiktoks and reels showing your workspace and process and daily life and upcoming releases. it is a conscious decision to spend your time being an entertainer for children who consume exclusively short-form media instead of enjoying and honing your craft.

please don't let posts like this make you think that this is the "only way" of being an artist in the social media era and that if you don't document your entire process, you're some kind of failure. don't let posts like this guilt you into thinking you aren't doing enough. freelancing obviously involves marketing yourself, i'm not saying "advertising your work is bad", but if you are at any time fretting over the tedium of making a process tiktok maybe take a few steps back and evaluate if the time you are spending catering to the algorithm is proportionate to the time you are spending actually doing the things you like.

[jingle-jangle-spurs]

Robert House watching The Courier rip all the copper wiring out the walls of the Lucky 38

[the-red-planet-mars]

please help

this is a breach of privacy

this is silencing teens who protest online

this is depriving teens of safe spaces

this is stupid

stop it

[fungi-maestro]

Happy tdov to fat trans people. 🏳️‍⚧️ Biggest thing that helped me as a trans kid was seeing older fat trans people. There were a lot of really irritating "advice" posts going around early in my time on the internet with a lot of misinformation in them, but one that I constantly saw (in addition to people claiming you should wear your pants rediculously low or only wear button ups) were posts saying you had to lose weight to transition. Can confidently confirm that is completely untrue. 👍

[kindest-little-fella-in-town]

hear me out…. hear me out………

[cozymochi]

What kind of stuff would Nyoka, Cecil, and Emilio post about on Magicam?

i put too much effort into this post that’ll flop 💖🤡

Optional info to read under cut, but it actually answers the ask. Thank u 🥺

Emilio posts about his life a lot, not to Cater levels of constant posting but enough to pretend to be the influencer that he isn’t. Travel photos, latte art, anything really. But his follower size is decent and boosted by Kalim, but to be fair, Kalim follows ALL of his fellow dorm-mates if he can help it. (Featuring Emilio’s cousin Marisol ooo~ she’s been mentioned before and teased but SURPRISE! full face reveal on a random post 😳 IS THAT ELEN—- ) Lots of his family follow him there.

Cecil has two accounts, an empty one for lurking (and keeping up with school related things, it’s just his actual name) and one solely about his raven familiar Oleander, or “Ollie” being cute. He never posts himself or about himself. His follower count is low for Magicam standards, but he doesn’t really care. Lilia likes every single post.

Nyoka, being somewhat of a prominent figure thanks to his notable family hardly makes personal posts at all and never leaves captions or tags. He only posts if it’s from like… an interview or professional photoshoot of some kind and thanking whomever it was that conducted it. He has enough followers to be verified, so the lack of hashtags doesn’t really matter. The comments are full of—-

[peachdoxie]

Rereading Oathbringer, and it's once again so painfully clear to me that Lirin pushing Kaladin to become a surgeon was his desperate attempt to keep Kaladin from going to war. As a surgeon's assistant, Kaladin was exempt from being conscripted into the Alethi military, and sending him to Kharbranth would get him even further away from the war. I know Lirin gets a lot of flak for trying to push his views and desires onto Kaladin, but all I really see is a father trying his hardest to protect his son from the horrors of war while living in a society that venerates it.

[lorebird]

In which Ford struggles so badly to relate to other people that he wonders if he’s really human at all. The more isolated he becomes, the harder it is to reconcile with his own humanity.

[bywandandsword]

So I was just told something interesting

You know how a lot of these big Victorian houses have seemingly useless railings around windows that are clearly not balconies? Come to find out these sorts of houses were built so that you could close off parts of the house from each other, like if you had guests or were hosting a party or something. But staff still needed to be able to get around so these windows would be large enough that staff could go out one window from one closed off section of the house to the other. It also gave the effect that guests rarely actually saw staff moving around doing day-to-day tasks. And apparently, a lot of these windows had hidden panels that swung out and make it look like the window wasn't there from inside the room When I heard that, I immediately thought about a lot of modern criticism of older novels books that feature wealthier protagonists, who talk about their isolation and loneliness. I've heard people discussing these protagonists say things like "How can you be lonely when you're surrounded by staff? It must be their sense of class that prevents them from seeing the staff as people who they can socialize with". That is absolutely at play, don't get me wrong. But with the windows in mind and the knowledge that one of the marks of a good staff at the time was to be as unseen as possible, I think it's completely possible that these protagonists, and the real people they represented, really DID feel that they were completely alone in their houses. Not only were all these social structures in place to keep them separate from everyone else in the house, but also these physical structures that further limited interaction. Because we no longer build houses like this and a lot of older surviving houses no longer have this feature, it's a bit of context that modern readers aren't aware of

I think it's really interesting, cause it gives a whole new context to these stories and social life in the period, and also makes me wonder about what other context that we're not aware of when looking at history or fiction from previous time periods that would re-frame our understandings of the event of those times

[ackrsays]

› Como (não) conquistar o crush;

› capa teste, ainda estou pensando se vou doar.

Depois de 11 meses sem editar nada e ter ficado traumatizada com a minha chefe que mexia em todos os meus designs... aqui estou eu tentando editar ksksks orv é tudo para mim, obviamente tinha que ser com meus amores !

[theseawitch-1102]

The number 1 lover of beauty (and the biggest lover of himself) would surely have hired a painter to portray him during his years as a prince on his home planet. I don't think this man sees the lack of clothing as something s3xual (Not me giving the HC to Zarbon that he is ace) so modeling in this way would not have been something to be ashamed of. although perhaps some king of an interplanetary trade organization would like to have some of those paintings in his possession.

[brainrot-jikan]

im not the biggest alhaitham/kaveh shipper (because im a rare pair ho) but it seems to me that in alhaitham/kaveh getting-together fics tend to be... unequal.

the beautiful thing about alhaitham and kaveh is that they're both equally right and equally wrong and equally dicks about it. but the writers for alhaitham/kaveh much more frequently seem to give alhaitham the burden change (the burden of the character flaw) instead of kaveh.

in any good character arc, the main character has a fatal flaw or misconception, and by the end of that arc they have addressed that flaw in some definitive way. scrooge was a scrooge and learned that being that way was detrimental; merlin from finding nemo was overprotective to a fault and had to learn that he couldn't (and shouldn't) control everything and to let go; the wolf from little red riding hood learns that you should stop while you're ahead.

stories centering around romance tend to lean heavily on character arcs, which makes sense. and since romance generally requires two individuals to be vulnerable and open and emotional with each other, it makes double sense that alhaitham/kaveh authors zoom straight into alhaitham's lack of emotional vulnerability.

this bothers me.

in society, individuals are expected to experience and present emotions in a specific way. if someone dies, you cry. if someone smiles at you, you smile back. if you're at a party, you're supposed to be having fun. if you don't do these things, you're seen as impolite at best and a inhuman freak at worst. when these behaviors are frequent it's often viewed as emotional immaturity, or a lack of ability to feel at all. the inability or lack of willingness to conform to societies emotional expectations of you is seen as a flaw and a reason for exclusion.

alhaitham is canonically disliked and avoided for being the way he is. he prefers it this way, but that doesn't mean the people perpetuating this avoidance are in the right. they are the societal pressure to conform that alhaitham blows off. alhaitham could be the way he is for a lot of reasons: avoidant attachment style, trauma, following someone else's example (eg. his grandmother), or just his base personality. it doesn't MATTER. he is the way he is. kaveh having to accept that should be part of the story.

putting the burden of the fatal flaw on alhaitham, making the way alhaitham treats kaveh and the people around him the problem, feels invalidating. it implies heavily that alhaitham's way of interfacing with the world, alhaitham's very SELF, is incorrect. my suggestion is to flip a larger portion of that burden onto kaveh. kaveh 👏 character 👏 arcs 👏

some examples/recommendations:

- make kaveh project his insecurities onto other people but especially onto alhaitham; he's overly reliant on other people for his own self worth, and he perceives alhaitham's lack of positive feedback as a direct reflection of how alhaitham feels about him. but learns along the way that alhaitham doesn't hate him, kaveh's actual struggle is with hating himself and being unable to his own self as worthy of love. maybe throw in how you are responsible for your own recovery, other people can help but you can't rely on them to carry you through self actualization.

- or, kaveh tries to make alhaitham behave more like a "normal" person, to be more pleasant and emotive and forthcoming, and then realizes he's in the wrong for trying to make alhaitham into something he's not, possibly for all the wrong reasons (not because he likes alhaitham better like that, but bc society says that's healthier and a better/more conforming way to be)

- or you could go ahead make alhaitham's issues the main problem but they're too complicated to overcome in a short period of time, so kaveh has to accept alhaitham is doing his best in his own way and not push for unrealistic and unhealthy changes. he could alter his own behavior to give alhaitham space and time and a safe place to land.

that got sappy so it's past time for me to dip out. go forth and ship things; but maybe consider letting alhaitham be a rude stone-faced bastard if he wants to be.

[glitter-stained]

In which I am perfectly normal about the Todd Family

One thing I really really love about the Todds (their og post-crisis introduction, not the flying todds or whatever bs recent comics have pushed through) is how they challenge us to question not only our classist prejudice and the way it frames our judgment, but also the moral weight we put behind concepts of abuse, neglect or crime.

Look. The Todds weren't "good parents". Maybe they used to be, when he was little; but there was a point after which Willis Todd didn't take care of his son because he simply was not there, and Catherine didn't take care of little Jason, instead parentifying him and putting an extraordinary pressure onto him as her caregiver. They both criminally neglected Jason and Catherine's death under Jason's care must have been pretty traumatic, after which he found himself completely abandoned.

But what does it mean to be a good parent? Is it to be a good person who is also a parent? Is it to be good at parenting skills? Is it to not abuse or neglect your children and provide enrichment and a good environment to grow in? Is it to try your best with what you have, and hope it's enough? Willis became a criminal because he needed money to feed his family and that landed him in jail, unable to care for Jason. Catherine, whether she died of overdose due to her substance use disorder or cancer or ODed as an attempt to self-medicate the cancer pains with heroin, was unable to care for Jason because of an illness (in the US, which has a horrifying medical system which is systematically violent to everyone but the ultra-rich) and had to rely on him for caregiving until her death. Does that mean they were bad people? Bad parents? Was Catherine a bad mom who tried her best, a good mom in an impossible situation, a good person who was neglectful and/or abusive but never wished to be? Does the concept of good parenting even make sense? Here's a secret about abuse: abusive parents very rarely wish to be. They often don't consider themselves so, explain their actions with justifications regarding their intent to give their child the weapons for a better life, or explain away the responsibility. But they're not wrong: if you're raised in a culture that tells you that beating your children is the way to help them get a better future, it's justified to blame and criticise the culture that told you this, and can you really be called a bad parent when you were only trying to help? Neglect is more frequent amongst the working class, and that statistics is neither a moral judgement nor a classist stereotype: it's merely the logical consequence of a system that fabricates scarcity. Of course you're not gonna feed your child if you don't have the money to feed them -and if you need to feed them and steal the money (or earn it by working as a gangster) to do so, it's a crime, and then you get caught and get sent to jail and can't feed your child anymore. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Jason, upon his introduction, is a stereotypical "bad boy", a young criminal, who steals and doesn't go to school. And tiny baby Jason, from his twelve years and three apple tall, sneers in the face of anticipated moral judgement and says fuck that you don't get to say that, I'm only doing what I need to survive and there's nothing wrong with it, I didn't have any other option that wasn't degrading and dehumanizing. And this is why I like Batman #408 so much: this character, who is so young and funny and cute and goddamn sweet, is introduced committing a crime against Batman; as an alternative to doing crime, Bruce puts him in a school/group home that teaches its students to do crime. How perfectly cool that is as an origin story? It's a literal school that makes criminals (and punishes you violently when you refuse to comply). Bruce was completely well-intentioned, he just wanted to help a wayward child, but when the system itself is fucked up, when the system is actively trying to produce crime, what option does Jason have but to escape again, and go right back to committing the same literal crime? And of course, Jason's trust in Batman-the system-the adults- is broken, to the point where he doesn't expect Batman to believe him and intervenes at the robbery himself.

So is Jason a criminal? Are the Todds neglectful? Yes. Does that make him a bad kid? Does that make them bad people? What about bad parents? How much easier is it to be a good parent, when you have the money to do so?

Anyway I love the Todd family I love the themes and critique they pose I love Ma'Gunn both as Batman's foil and Jason's introductory antagonist I wish Jason's Robin Run carried on exploring these themes I love you Catherine and Willis and Jason Todd I love you Batman #408.

[legendaryandroid]

I don't think I've seen it talked about, but the reason Laios and Kabru are foils isn't only because Laios loves monsters and Kabru dislikes them, it's also because Kabru loves humans and Laios dislikes them. Like, Laios and Kabru both had bad experiences with people/monsters respectively and it shaped their worldview. Influencing what knowledge they decided to seek out and use.

Just as Laios knows the weakpoints to hit when fighting monsters, Kabru knows the weakpoints for people. Laios knows that the behaviors and skills are different between a red dragon, white dragon, and a wurm, and responds differently to each one. Kabru knows the behaviors and skills are different between Rin, Holm, and Mickbell, and responds differently to each one.

And they both enjoy doing this.

[cinnamonsikwate]

"why couldn't shuro have just been honest about what he felt with laios and falin it's not that hard" are you. are you White