#which is just better in every respect

[theromanticrationalist]

Oh my gosh, the episode where Sheldon spends quality time with Bernadette was SO CUTE - and I don't even really like Bernadette as a character! He was so sweet and tender with her, and he designed a whole D&D campaign so that she could role play herself enjoying things she couldn't because of being pregnant. I feel like my heart was just bursting with how sweet and utterly thoughtful that was. Sheldon is absolutely pure in every way. 🥰 Which makes me want to talk about how this show treats Sheldon. It is like they kind of go back and forth between him being an actual complex character vs the weird man-child who everyone shits on. (By the way, Sheldon isn't a man-child, Leonard, Howard, and Raj ARE man-children...*ahem!*) After Sheldon and Amy have gotten back together, I feel like they've kind of reverted him back to the latter, although not every episode, thankfully. I absolutely LOVED the Sheldon birthday episode where Amy tries to celebrate him, and it causes him to have a trauma response from his childhood. Beautiful - as in beautiful character work from all involved! I don't like that they've kind of looped Amy in on the "let's shit on Sheldon" campaign at times. Like, of course I love that Amy is his foil - constantly challenging him, taking the time to explain situations to him to let him know when he is being inconsiderate and rude, and not giving into all of his unreasonable demands (which everyone else does WAY too often! Grow a backbone, guys!). That's all good! Yet, I feel like they've made Amy a little too mean to him at times. It is feeling out of character to me how much Amy is exhausted and annoyed at Sheldon. Sometimes I'm like, she does enjoy spending time with him right?? RIGHT??? I mean, I get it. Sheldon is A LOT, but it is SO obvious - to me any way - when Sheldon is being genuinely himself vs just being a jackass. I know Amy's love language is very different from Sheldon's, but I think Amy would be understanding and acknowledging Sheldon's love language, because she's incredibly smart, a neuroscientist, and is head over heels in love with Sheldon! Also, that there is nothing wrong with how passionate Sheldon is about things: contracts, trains, fun facts - I think he's so adorable. I kind of miss weird little Amy who could match Sheldon in his idiosyncrasies. She does still manifest, but not as much as she did earlier on. I feel like the writers believe that in order for Amy and Sheldon to work, one of them had to be the "normal one". I absolutely disagree with that.

[clumsypuppy]

someone left me a comment asking abt my pokeask days so....... i drew my old muses ^_^

[ilynpilled]

jaime turning women down constantly more bc he is very monogamous and in love with someone else right now for the first time and is also kinda scared of actually having sex with someone other than cersei is sm better to me than “i respect the kg vows of chastity so intensely rn actually because i changed into a good and serious person” or whatever lol

[basket-of-radiants]

Why were you so disappointed by Rhythm of War?

This has been sitting in my askbox for years. I've taken several cracks at answering, only to get frustrated with the subject matter and burn myself out every time. I didn't like Rhythm of War. More than that, I didn't like it in a way that tainted my enjoyment of the entire series. And despite what it may seem, I don't actually enjoy discussing things which I don't like. I always want to talk from a place of good faith. Which is why now that my feelings towards the series are a little more positive, I think I can finally answer this.

I'm going to try to stay away from specific plotpoints and story beats for this post, because my goal isn't to nitpick (if for no other reason than it would take a week to write this post), I'm just looking to talk about my overall impressions. I think that might mean the only spoilers here will be structural? idk, if you haven't read Rhythm of War yourself then you should probably do that before looking for other people's opinions anyway. 

I liked Way of Kings when I first read it. I didn't love it at the time, but I liked it. Certainly enough to keep reading once I'd finished. One thing that made me a bit uncomfy, however, was the war against the Parshendi. They were this unknowable enemy which the book was not interested in knowing. An inhuman army. Their main purpose was to kill Kaladin's friends, or else be killed by Dalinar's armies. And yet the Parshendi, and the parshmen in the form of Shen, did show hints of personhood. And so it bothered me how Dalinar spoke so casually about how the Alethi had decimated their numbers, how the others used the war as a means to amass wealth and power. (It didn't bother me in a "this is a bad book" way but in a "these characters are bad people" way.)

One of my foibles as a reader is that when a book is very clearly treating one side of a conflict with more humanity, I tend to be a bit predisposed towards the other to account for that. And with the Alethi clearly being the invading party and superior military force, there was also some underdog favoritism. I didn't really like how the book treated the Parshendi. This is to say that going forward, the singers would be more important to me than any other through line.

So imagine my delight at reading Words of Radiance and meeting Eshonai, one of the Parshendi, who even gets her own point of view sections! They were no longer being treated as a faceless mass, we were getting to see things from their perspective as well. And it became plain to see the damage the Alethi had done to them. I couldn't really bring myself to root for Dalinar or really any of the humans against the listeners. I couldn't even bring myself to like most of these characters. I still enjoyed the book but once it became clear there wouldn't be a peaceful conclusion, let's just say that I wouldn't have wept for Dalinar and Adolin if Szeth had managed to off them. Like everyone in the book, I assumed that going forward all the parshmen would be turned into evil voidbringers in the everstorm and that the listeners were mostly dead. Except for Rlain, and Eshonai because I'd read or been told that book 4 would be Eshonai's book and thus had assumed she was fine. (Oathbringer spoilers, she was not fine.) So ultimately it was still a bit of a downer way to end the book. 

So imagine my delight at reading Oathbringer, where for the first time singers were being treated as people, full and real people, and where the human characters could no longer ignore or dismiss them. We met Khen and the others, common singers who were sympathetic and just wanted freedom from bondage. We see Venli grapple with the loss of her home. We see Leshwi and Moash connecting with and understanding one another. We learn of a history where singers were the original inhabitants of the planet. Parallel to this, Dalinar is having a truly excellent character arc about confronting one's past actions and acknowledging them to move forward and do better. I loved Oathbringer, for some years it was my favorite book, and I was excited as hell to see what came next. At the time, it seemed to me that there is a clear direction the story is going. Two books about needless war, and then a third where the main cast is forced to acknowledge the personhood of their enemies. This was so cool, all of my feelings from the previous installments were being validated, the characters were going to have to face what they've done in the past and outgrow their militaristic mindsets, I was so sure of that.

Imagine my disappointment when that does not even remotely resemble the direction the story went in Rhythm of War. RoW presented a clear, straightforward “us vs. them" narrative, where every character was totally fine with killing singers. Characters aligned with the singers were either flattened into wholly evil versions of themselves (Moash) or were expected to turn on their side in favor of the humans (Venli.) Because clearly there was no reason good people would be on the side that's all former slaves trying to stay free. Maybe there's some sort of accord or understanding between Navani and Raboniel that I might have found meaningful if the seeds of mutual understanding weren't already there in Oathbringer and then apparently ignored for a year by all the characters.

I have a lot of issues with how the listeners are handled in these books. (Here's some elaboration.) Following OB, I had thought that all my concerns were going to be addressed. Following RoW, I knew they never would be. 

Which is my main complaint, because that's the thread that matters most to me in this series.

I have a lot of other Things as well. Gonna just talk about a few big ones. 

One outsized source of disappointment that may seem a little petty, and which probably is, is that I felt mislead by the premise of the book. It had been announced that this book would center Venli and Eshonai, and I was unbelievably hyped for that. That did not really turn out to be the case. The purpose for their backstory chapters felt less about exploring them as people and contextualizing their arcs, and more about filling in gaps of world history. In the main plot, Venli was a POV character and she certainly played a role, but honestly not a very important one overall. To me she felt like a side character in her own book. I don't think it's controversial to say that the main character of RoW was Navani. A lot of people really like Navani and are happy about that. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people, and I found it all the more difficult to enjoy her when it felt like it was coming at the expense of some of my favorite characters. 

This particular gripe somewhat comes down to preference, obviously everyone prefers to read about characters they like more than those they don't, and it can go both ways. (For instance, on a craft/technical level RoW is probably the superior book to W&T, but I liked the latter a lot more because of my stupidly outsized attachment to Szeth and Nale.) But I do think there's something of a real criticism in how the book would rather focus on the feelings of a queen rather than those of a genocide survivor, and how the former's are given significantly more weight and import. It ties in with my main criticism, I think. 

And then there's how human/human racism had also been wholly cast aside as a plot point. Jasnah fixed slavery so that's resolved, and the only person who still cares about structural racism is the evil bad bad evil villain Moash/Vyre, who is now wholly irredeemable and who you're allowed to totally write off because he's sold his soul to Odium. I've already talked a lot about this. Other people have already talked about this, probably better than me. The writing was actually on the wall for me in OB, but again, RoW was when I fully accepted that this was never going to be addressed. 

There's something else that probably deserves its own discussion rather than being quickly tacked on at the end here, but here we are. This book changed how the series approaches war. 

In WoK, war was very clearly portrayed as a bad and inglorious thing. It was brutal, it was painful, those at the bottom died cruelly and unceremoniously and pointlessly while those at the top turned a profit. Every day was a new horror. The enemy were never evil, they were always just more people forced to go through the same thing. Through the next couple books, it felt to me that even if the characters had accepted war as necessary, there was still a tragedy to it. Conversely, in RoW (and W&T) war is basically a series of boss battles, in between which our protagonists can kill dozens of footsoldiers with barely a thought in the same way WoK had criticized.

Final note on all this, it sucks how we have no perspectives from the former-slaves-singers demographic. Those guys are really thrown under the bus, and seemingly get no self-determination now or ever. It was a glaring problem to me in RoW. Conscripted and enslaved humans and singers probably have just as much ground to form mutual understanding as a fused and a queen. (In fact they already had. In Oathbringer.)

In essence, RoW disappointed me because it left me with the distinct impression that none of the series's most important through lines (well, most important to me) were going to be resolved well. I liked W&T, but I haven't revised my opinion very much about the overall handling of these topics across the series. Maybe one of the reasons I was able to enjoy W&T so much more was because I no longer had such high expectations.

[mensahbots]

i like that we see hints of a sort of intuitive rapport in this scene between mensah and pin-lee! that little forearm touch especially made me go 👀👀

[itwoodbeprefect]

i think that "oh no! the pet turtle was safely delivered to a clearly professional place that will take good care of it while the main characters go on a holiday trip, but unbeknownst to them the vet that works there is the turtle owner's unpleasant ex who found it weird to talk to turtles!" is my absolute favorite cliffhanger i've seen in a while

[gibbearish]

every time i see discourse about fundraisers go by on here im just fully struck with the realization that not a single one of you people have either taken a cybersecurity fraud prevention course or bothered to take one singular second to consider the website youre on. this is the broke bitches website. none of us can afford to fund our mutuals' grocery bills, much less entire evacuation funds, and CERTAINLY not FAKE evacuation funds taking advantage of genocide victims. all this shit abt how people are deliberately choosing not to fund every post that passes their dash because they hate palestinians literally just does the work of actual scammers for them by laying the high-pressure sales tactics groundwork, and the "do you guys have any idea how hard it is to keep coming up with new attention-grabbing fundraiser posts?" ones just ring EXTREMELY hollow because YEAH! YEAH I DO! and so does everyone i follow! and everyone they follow! because all of us are FUCKING BROKE and surviving on crumbs! i just saw one that said "i make sure to keep $40 in my wallet at all times so i can give $20 to any panhandlers i see, this is the same" and its like!! good for you, thats very nice, but like!!! you need need NEED to take a step back and realize that /being able to do that/ is a position of privilege, not the default setting to be a good person. i wont discount that some people do ignore fundraisers specifically because of racism because Of Course, but like. a) yelling at them isnt gonna make them stop, or more accurately yelling at /everyone else/ isnt gonna make those people stop, and b) trying to apply that as a blanket motivation for everyone just. realistically doesnt work. not donating is a nonaction, it is the literal default status, and while in specific situations you can use CONSISTENT absence of SPECIFIC actions to track a person's motivations SOMETIMES, broadly speaking that just. doesnt work.

there are 8 billion people on this planet. most of them will never know you exist. of the ones that do, most will not be able to help you. of the ones that can, most will not be on the broke bitches website passing the same communal $20 around. consider your audience and stop shitting on fellow poor people for having the gall to need to be careful with their money. and if you are genuinely only posting your fundraiser to tumblr, like. im sorry, but you need to anticipate not reaching your goal and prepare accordingly. theres a reason the last big scam scandal people talk about actually getting the money is like. all-or-nothing era, as a website none of us have the funds to make that kind of thing happen anymore or the security to risk it. a fundraiser not meeting its goal on here is not a personal sleight against whoever made it, its just how life goes sometimes. and it's unfair and it sucks and we should help however we can, but. sometimes you just arent able to help someone else, and continuing to feel responsible serves only to torture yourself. and blaming OTHERS serves only to move that guilt from yourself off onto another person. i imagine that has to be where a lot of the vitriol comes from, is people who cant afford to donate more getting pissed at people they see as having the funds but choosing not to share them, but again, sometimes you just are not able to achieve the goals you set out towards, through no fault of the specific parties involved.

people on tumblr choosing to buy groceries rather than potentially donate to a scam are not your enemy and are not the ones facilitating a genocide. we're all victims of the same horrific system, the question is just how that system manifests its influence on each of us. poverty kills just as thoroughly as a bomb. everyone is just doing their best to survive, and as much as we like to pretend that everyone should be a perfect selfless angel that puts others before themselves no matter what, humans are by default a selfish species, and it is a lot easier to say what youd do in theory than actually do it. and there's a reason you have to put on your own oxygen mask before helping the person beside you, youre of no help to anyone if youre too dead to do anything.

[pardonmydelays]

god i love sundays

[cocococonutcat]

I don't even hate my job i just can't deal with my coworkers

[fromtheseventhhell]

Arianne being excluded from the show was one of the worst decisions D&D made cause it led to the collapse of the Dorne plot, which could've been adapted so well to screen if they had actually cared to put in the effort

[brionysea]

me when sokka is the only thing holding team avatar together

[leori-the-unlearned]

rereading IDW sonic is giving me a better picture of just how skewed tangle’s recent characterization is :(

i know continuity marches on and all but man. tangle is the only one getting THIS bent out of shape all the time and it sucks. she’s the everyman (she really shouldn’t be) and keeps getting mistaken for a different character trope by each new arc’s writers

[slayerdurge]

i'm like maybe 60/40 on whether evelyn would chose vivienne or cassandra as divine (leaning towards vivienne)... evelyn has a personal history with vivienne bc as the youngest in a very long line of trevelyan children she was given to the templar order as an infant and trained as a templar for years until her magic manifested and she was carted off to the circle... then she ended up becoming a knight enchanter which is how she met vivienne... but although they genuinely really like each other they are fiercely competitive (which is actually part of what they like about each other) so i'm not sure she'd want vivienne to be divine over herself... but it's impossible to chose yourself... plus i think she'd actually rather continue to lead the inquisition anyway even if she could chose herself... and i think that although she thinks she can't truly manipulate vivienne she definitely can make mutually-beneficial deals with her and predict her actions... plus she likes the idea of giving power to another clever chantry-supporting mage who knows how to play the game as well as she does... cassandra is another matter bc they also get along really well... and evelyn was raised to respect/fear seekers... and she thinks cassandra is even more trustworthy and predictable than vivienne bc she'll always do whatever she thinks is right... which can also make her hard to manage in instances where they disagree... but they don't disagree often... so i can just imagine evelyn actually staying up late in skyhold struggling really hard with this decision... leliana is not an option bc evelyn doesn't believe in fully abolishing the circles... but the choice between those other two is hard... she genuinely could go either way... but i think i will probably go with vivienne for maximum chaos (and to complete my trilogy of mages who wreak as much havoc on thedas as possible)

[scorpiusmalfoylovesoscarwilde]

I KEEP GETTING RECOMMENDED SO MANY DRAMIONE TWEETS HELP

I don't understand where they're all cOMING FROOMM why do they all HATE ASTORIA WHAT DID MY GIRL DO TO YALL BFFR LEAVE HER ALONE 🗣🗣

[bitegore]

ngl i think i kind of was a genius for being like 'yeah this character is a scary killyou cannibal scary killer who scary kills you' and then realizing that the way my worldbuilding works out is that there's a nonzero chance that if you leave literally any body parts over they can just come back, depending on what they believe in their heart of hearts can kill them. Of course she'd start eating her kills. She probably tried normal stuff first and then realized it didn't work and she had to try harder if she wanted to actually keep them dead.

[feral-coffee]

I never expected to see anything like this. I'm fairly used to being the ... token, I suppose, or at least I was when I still had community to interact with.

Everyone else into flogging was just whack whack whack, hard, hard, hard, until the sub had enough*. I had my own technique, I kept people guessing as the Dom and as the sub, I learned to accept that not everyone does it like me and sometimes it's the Dom that ends up ending the session because they imagine I couldn't possibly want to take it that far and what could it mean I though something was lacking.

I haven't even finished the video yet and it's like hearing my own thoughts in another person's voice. And yes, mix it up, go hard to the point of crossing over into blood play if that's wanted, go soft and gentle, go moderate and let the sub wonder if it's a prelude to hard or soft. Go hard to bring sensitivity up, soft to work with that sensitivity and turn it into a very intense and loving caress, go moderate to keep the feelings maintained so the hard and soft remain balanced, tolerable, enjoyable. Read your sub, give them what they desire while subverting their own expectations by making the next time the whip comes in contact with them a surprise.

Keep it safe, of course, keep it consensual, of course, but don't let it become dominated by rules intended to keep it uniform and boring. Keep it new, take it to new levels and find new ways to transcend the everyday drudgery of life.

These people would get me.

Seriously, if you understand and work with the emotions of the whole session and say fuck the aesthetics of it, any audience you have, as well as partners will absolutely adore the part of the overall aesthetic they'd been missing before. It goes from basic and cold and formulaic, to real, heartfelt, and deep, and to me, that's everything.

*Not shaming the community - some do like that. I was just different. We were all different in our own ways.