#world marketing

[shroomerr]

Somebody call for viet miku?

[lastoneout]

the whole guilt-tripping language in posts about important topics paired with how I'm still getting bitches in my notes talking about why it's actually good to tell "bad" people to kill themselves continues to prove to me that a lot of people have absolutely no concept of social justice or activism outside of assuming the worst of and then viciously attacking strangers on the internet

[tobiasdrake]

My understanding of evil, age 0-10: MY NAME IS SMOG SMOKESLY AND I RUN THE POLLUTION FACTORY, IT PRODUCES POLLUTION!!! MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

My understanding of evil, in my teens: You can't really boil things down to good and evil. People are complicated. Everyone is the hero of their own story, and someone who seems evil to you is actually doing their best from their own perspective. If you could walk a mile in their shoes, you'd understand. There is no such thing as evil.

My understanding of evil, in my twenties: Look, it's basically just tribalism. We are all necessarily thrust into competition with one another. There are always going to be winners and losers. Whining about evil is just being upset that you lost the game.

My understanding of evil, in my thirties: MY NAME IS SMOG SMOKESLY AND I RUN THE POLLUTION FACTORY, IT PRODUCES POLLUTION!!! MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

[marcyonacross]

how the fuck are we all doing ghesties

[credit to @spinchs-field for the chart]

[starcurtain]

Teyvat's "Most Down Bad" Award Goes to Alhaitham for a Second Year Running

Seeing everyone making fun of Alhaitham for his "stalkerish" tendencies in this event is funny, because I feel like a lot of people missed that "Be literally everywhere Kaveh is" has been Alhaitham's MO from the day Kaveh appeared in the game.

From only grabbing his house keys after Kaveh returned from the desert (he couldn't have had both sets of keys at the end of the Archon Quest unless he went home and got Kaveh's copy) to ditching conversations to get back to his house only after Kaveh came home, to showing up without any warning or explanation in Kaveh's hangout with some ridiculous excuse about hearing his voice through noise-cancelling headphones... Refusing to offer any help in the Temple of Silence story quest other than staying in the library with Kaveh...

Since when does Alhaitham willingly cover anyone else's duties?

But this trend of "Be everywhere Kaveh is" didn't start when they were adults. It was already in place when they were still Akademiya students--and it's a trend that didn't end even when they had their fight.

Even when they weren't speaking, Alhaitham dogged Kaveh's every step through published responses to Kaveh's research articles in academic journals. He insisted on keeping a line of communication between himself and Kaveh open, even if the only way to do that was through very public ideological clashes. Pulling Kaveh's pigtails to get his attention lolol. It's implied that, for at least the few years between their fight and Kaveh moving in, this was the only communication between them--Alhaitham's refusal to allow their connection to entirely fade away. (And the fact that this is revealed in Kaveh's character stories--through his precious journal that records the moments of his life that had the most impact on him--shows just how deeply he values the fact that Alhaitham didn't give up.)

Another relevant side note: Alhaitham never asked Kaveh to give up his half of their house. Knowing half of it belonged to Kaveh, knowing that Kaveh may one day want to reclaim his part of it, knowing that it was listed as theirs, Alhaitham moved into the house and made zero effort to change its ownership. He was completely fine with living in "his and Kaveh's house." The stories suggest it was only months later (or even longer) that Kaveh even noticed he had the house, and he transferred away ownership of his portion without Alhaitham ever asking him (or even seemingly wanting him) to do so.

Please, let that sink in. Alhaitham actively left his grandmother's (presumably comfortable) house to move into "his and Kaveh's house," with no apparent explanation for why, and after doing so, he made no attempt to change that "his and Kaveh's" label. He moved into the house with no promise that Kaveh wouldn't show up on the doorstep the very next day and move in too. It almost feels like another deliberate provocation--I've moved into our house, are you going to come stop me? LBR, if Alhaitham had had his way, Kaveh would have been living there with him from Day 1...

There's also the fact that Kaveh literally can't write on a single message board anywhere in the entire nation of Sumeru without Alhaitham hunting his messages down and responding to them (which absolutely no one else does, by the way).

"NUH-UH!" "UH-HUH." "NUH-UH!"

Alhaitham's own character stories tell us explicitly that one of Alhaitham's defining character traits is "He is never where you need him to be," yet somehow...

Shot, and chaser:

Any time Kaveh is in the slightest bit of need or danger or just wants Alhaitham near, Alhaitham is "coincidentally" exactly where Kaveh needs him to be, whenever Kaveh needs him to be there.

Alhaitham didn't just "happen" to run into Kaveh in Port Ormos, an entirely different city from where he was supposed to be working. He didn't just "happen" to read the same terrible book as Kaveh when we know he otherwise would not waste a moment of his time on poorly-written literature...

He didn't just "happen" to appear when Kaveh was upset and needed a distraction in the House of Daena during Kaveh's hangout. He didn't just "happen" to be sitting around waiting when Kaveh needed answers after the Archon Quest. He didn't just "happen" to find Kaveh's academic publications and every single message board posting and respond to them at length and in public.

Which is exactly what Kaveh's mother told Kaveh he needed.

What level of down bad is "Abusing your powers as an Akademiya employee to keep tabs on your crush's library loans"? Just asking for a friend.

The only person for whom Alhaitham just "happens" to be available is Kaveh, over and over and over again--because he is very deliberately making himself a constant presence in Kaveh's life.

(Like, out of all things, I think people really underestimate the devs deliberately paralleling the romantic relationship between Kaveh's mother and father with Kaveh and Alhaitham's relationship. If you want to point to one thing that says "These two characters are intentionally queer-coded," it doesn't get any more obvious than this.)

Alhaitham, are you not embarrassed to be this transparent??? 🫣

[razztazzel]

I forgot to post this a few days ago

Last post for now

[ohkate]

Mickey Milkovich is not dumb.

[clouvu]

Save me french yuri... Save me

[livvywritesworld]

another thing that’s so interesting about lee’s characterization and all of the foreshadowing that went into her part one & two storyline is that she describes her way of just knowing things as someone tapping her on the shoulder. like common old wives’ tales: the devil tapping someone on the shoulder and that person turning to him. her pattern recognition skills are purely autistic traits in her, but that feeling in the pit of her stomach that someone is watching her is that very literal manifestation of her CPTSD. all of the clues are there but the viewer can’t put them together until the very end, because lee doesn’t remember a single thing until we get to that final act, and by then she’s almost reverted back to her girlhood self. she’s 100% 9/10 year old lee harker, the same age as ruby carter, and lee and longlegs have the same touch of the devil inside them so that after cobble’s death, there is still an adult agent, the only child to survive longlegs, and that adult agent isn’t mentally an adult anymore. instead she’s a 10 year old girl with a driver’s license and a gun, begging her mom and carter not to do something that can’t be undone. at the end, her gun doesn’t run out of bullets. she’s only shot three times. instead, she runs out of luck. because ruby carter is going to be lee harker in twenty years, and both of them surviving with pieces of that darkness inside of them despite everything, despite all of lee’s efforts and all of her mother’s efforts, is actually kind of bittersweet and intensely devastating.

[vaguely-concerned]

in shambles over lucanis' big ol' 🥺eyes while asking rook if they can come with him to plan caterina's funeral and the barest pretense that it's because spite might pull something. spite, who we have no reason to infer from how that goes down says or does anything during that whole thing. I do so love the consistency of the background hum of 'hm. you know lucanis perhaps the real problem here isn't so much the demon thing but a lot more about the life experience you've had up until now that makes you think wanting a friend to come along to help you bury a loved one is something you're not allowed (nor frankly know how) to ask for'

*agonized rook voice* LUCANIS lucanis you must understand I would go with you into hell itself. I will live in your heart, die in your lap and be buried in your eyes. and moreover I will come with you to your grandma's funeral arrangements fuck sorry about your life 😬

[communistkenobi]

The deeply moralist tone that a lot of discussions about media representation take on here are primarily neoliberal before they are anything else. Like the shouting matches people get into about “purity culture” “pro/anti” etc nonsense (even if I think it’s true that some people have a deeply christian worldview about what art ought to say and represent about the world) are downstream of the basic neoliberal assumption that we can and must educate the public by being consumers in a market. “Bad representation” is often framed as a writer’s/developer’s/director’s/etc’s failure to properly educate their audience, or to educate them the wrong way with bad information about the world (which will compel their audience to act, behave, internalise or otherwise believe these bad representations about some social issue). Likewise, to “consume” or give money to a piece of media with Bad Representation is to legitimate and make stronger these bad representations in the world, an act which will cause more people to believe or internalise bad things about themselves or other people. And at the heart of both of those claims is, again, the assumption that mass public education should be undertaken by artists in a private market, who are responsible for creating moral fables and political allegories that they will instil in their audiences by selling it to them. These conversations often become pure nonsense if you don’t accept that the moral and political education of the world should be directed by like, studio executives or tv actors or authors on twitter. There is no horizon of possibility being imagined beyond purchasing, as an individual consumer in a market, your way into good beliefs about the world, instilled in you by Media Product 

[slythereen]

driver no. 16 getting #33 again because why wouldn’t he be

[thethoriumreactor]

so like….. chaggie college au anyone

I’m thinking designs based on their demon forms instead of like human before dying give me ur thoughts yeah

Charlie fell first vaggie fell harder it’s canon

[hacked-wtsdz]

Why do so many Americans, and non-Americans too, seem to think that slavery was a specifically American thing? Like, I presume that most people know that it wasn’t, but I hear so much discussion of American slavery and its impact, and so little of any other kind. It also makes slavery look like a strictly white-slaver black-slave dynamic, which, again, I presume most people know it isn’t, but nobody talks about it as much as about American-type slavery. The Roman slave market, which existed for centuries and had slaves of all races, the Korean slave market, which was gigantic, the Ottoman slave market, in which North Africans and Middle Easterners enslaved people of different races, including Europeans. My point being that slavery has existed for centuries, and has heavily impacted our whole world, and yet some people seem to believe that slavery existed only in an American-type way. At the moment, there are more slaves in the world than ever before, and yes, most of them are from Third World countries, but nobody talks of real-time slavery either. Not as much as of past American slavery anyway. I genuinely wanna know how that came to be.

[royaltea000]

Two young knights