#stories with a moral

[the-eye-care-advocate]

The Gaze Beyond Walls

Aeyesops presents "The Gaze Beyond Walls". Discover Lily’s tale of extraordinary vision and the unexpected challenges it brings. A story of power, secrecy, and learning the true meaning of responsibility. #ShortStory #LifeLessons #Optometry

Some talents require more self-control than others. The Story In the quaint town of Astwood Bank, there lived a girl named Lily, whose eyes held a secret power. She could see through walls as if they were made of glass. This gift was hers alone, and she guarded it fiercely, knowing the world wasn’t ready for such a marvel. Lily’s life was ordinary in every other aspect. She went to school, had…

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#aesops fables #aeyesops fables #eye care story #optometry #optometry students #short stories #stories for optometrists #stories with a moral

[nerdpoe]

A Favor for a Gift

Danny's new to the superhero scene, and he gets on rather well with Martian Manhunter.

He decides to give J'onn a gift, because he came across J'onn in a melancholy mood, and the Martian explained that he was homesick. Danny learned a lot about Mars and Martian culture, after telling him that he could vent to Danny if he wanted, and wants to do a little something to help J'onn out.

He goes to the Zone, searching for Martian ghosts to talk with. He finds Ghostwriter. Or rather, Ghostwriter finds him.

He proposes a deal.

He'll let Danny have two very old, very rare Martian books; but in exchange, Danny owes him. Big Time.

Danny....asks what the favor would be, cuz he's not about to agree to that without knowing what he's agreeing to.

Ghostwriter needs Danny to go enter into a Ghost Fighting Competition, the biggest in the Zone, because the prize is a book that not only does Ghostwriter not have, but the only copy of it's kind ever.

Danny agrees; he kicks ghost ass all the time, a fighting competition shouldn't be a problem. Pff. He'll be fine.

Okay he's a little nervous.

He pushes it down.

He gets one of the books early, as trade for even entering the competition in the first place, and rushes to give it to J'onn.

He's trying to psych himself up for the fight, but his intrusive thoughts keep making him remember the fights he's lost. He's just not good with stage fright! Fighting as a hero is one thing, but fighting in a competition is nervewracking!

~~~~

J'onn, getting a surface read of Phantom's mind, is concerned.

Due to Phantom being dead, not all of his thoughts are...legible. J'onn only gets flashes here or there, maybe emotions.

J'onn just got a flash of a coliseum, with stands filled to the brim, and another flash of Phantom losing in a fight.

Phantom is nervous.

Phantom, who's powers are so strong he can fight on equal footing with Superman, is nervous.

It is not the normal anxiety he can feel from the young ghost, it is something else.

Phantom tells him that he knows where another book is, he just needs to win it.

J'onn has heard of how Vicious Infinite Realms Ghosts can be, and it is reasonable to assume that Phantom being nervous is a direct result of a fight he knows he can't win.

A fight he's going to try to win anyways. For the sake of a book.

Phantom is worth more than a simple book.

Phantom disappears before J'onn can request that he not do that, leaving the Martian standing there with a book older than he is, with the knowledge that one of his friends is about to face...something. Some sort of danger.

And all J'onn can do is wait.

Naturally, he refuses to do that and calls the JLD to track down Phantom.

#dpxdc #dcxdp #dp x dc #dc x dp #phanfic #story prompt #royal rumble au #martian manhunter hunts down phantom #he is very worried about his ghostly friend #by the time jld gets him to the infinite realms he realizes he shouldn't be #he instead decides to watch the fights as moral support #he is very proud of phantom #look at him go beating up ghosts four to five times his size

[whalesfall]

btw. your search for the most morally upright and ethical piece of media that has the most correct “representation” will destroy your ability to find the most profound and beautiful and human of stories. and may even destroy the stories themselves before they are created. if you even care.

#the search for the Ideal Representation is both unattainable and soul-crushing. childrens cartoons moral codes are not #the best way to judge a piece of media #and the stories created by the very people in the communities that are most silenced are always the first ones to be #targeted for their Problematic Factors #as if any story can properly encapsulate the breadth of every complex human experience in one go #something isn't inherently deserving of being reduced to Irredeemable Media status just because you cannot personally relate to it #on the other hand approaching every single story as if its only value is its Shipping Status and how you can #incorporate it into your identity (and stake your Moral Uprightness based on how Ethically you consume said media) #is not necessarily any better. but different post is needed. #aughhhh bite bite chomp kill

[zevranunderstander]

i dont think i will ever be over dragon age 2. like. bioware made an epic fantasy story about a chosen one having to save a country and stop the apocalypse and then they made the second installment of the series be about the sociopolitical climate in ONE city through the lens of a family of refugees fleeing from the war of the first game and just. made it about political tensions and class dynamics and the influences of living in a church-mandated state and the growing tension over an occupied piece of the city and political killings and interpersonal conflict and power and its story is ENTIRELY character-driven. it has easily the most iconic set of companion characters. the premise of living through a story told over the course of ten years and knowing from the start that something really bad will happen in the end was so fresh and exciting. the fact that the acts really built on top of each other andhow much the city changed over time. and the game was so mature in terms of the topic of fighting against oppression in so many ways (im usually generous and say that the short development time left some things a bit wanting), and as much as some people say that the game treats mages and templars as being equally bad, i don't think that that is actually true about the game and it very earnestly tries to grapple with some pretty complex political dynamics.

and then the game completely flopped financially and was almost universally hated for its queer themes and its sympathy for "terrorism" and a lot of the things that stemmed from basically having no production time at all and then the studio just made another epic fantasy story about a chosen one that has to save the world from the apocalypse

#myposts #da #dragon age #i feel like. dragon age origins is dark fantasy. dragon age 2 is a political thriller that is at times too really dark #and dragon age inquisition is a fantasy game with a moral complexity suitable for 10-year-olds #whose themes are all over the place and that has zero thematic coherence or any real vision for what the fuck they are doing with the story

[bloodybellycomb]

"Red white and royal blue is too cringy" "heartstopper is too unrealistic" yeah maybe but so is every single other rom com under the sun. Why does queer media always need to be realistic and profound while straight stories get more freedom to be silly and fantastical?

#red white and royal blue #heartstopper #lgbtq #being cringy and unrealistic is just like #a staple of the rom com genre lol #as more queer stories are being highlighted #not everything is going to appeal to everyone #and that shouldnt been seen as some kind of moral failing #birdy chirps

[justarmor]

ok but having miles hold gwen up with his web in the exact same way as when tasm2 gwen died, AFTER THEY LITERALLY TALKED ABOUT GWEN SUFFERING A TERRIBLE FATE AFTER FALLING FOR SPIDERMAN!!! and then to reverse that later on with gwen being the one to web him Like That and miles being the one to cut the thread and let himself fall, i’m going insane

#i just got back from watching the movie a second time #and my brain is still buzzing #so i couldn't word this properly #i'm sure people have pointed this out before #BUT IT'S JUST!!! THE PARALLELS!!! #THEY DID THAT #break the cycle dont let anyone else tell your story!!!! #across the spiderverse #across the spiderverse spoilers #spiderverse #gwen stacy #miles morales #sofia rambles #atsv #atsv spoilers #gwiles #ghostflower

[bigfatbreak]

warmup of the day is: here's to hoping for another year

#ooc #warmup #i had a nasty customer today so i was thinkin bout it is all #thought i might doodle my thoughts out #this doesnt mean we dont still get sick. fatigue and chronic illness are always around the corner. and our environment is rough #but its kinda nice. #anyway i guess the moral of this story is ill fight a thousand shitty karens before i let my sister die of the plague thank u

[liquidstar]

When my brothers and I were little, there was a tiny playground across our house, and at one point there was a wasp's nest right next to it. I remembered messing around and getting stung, but not the whole context. I brought it up with my mom and apparently this was the order of events:

My little brother got stung first because he was sitting too close. He comes home crying, and me and our other brother are like "those wasps STUNG our brother? We have to avenge him." So we get dressed up as warriors and bring plastic swords with us to the playground. Our mom warns us not to mess with the wasp's nest and we're like "we won't!"

So we leave and immediately start messing with the wasp's nest. It's down low, so after thwacking it we put rocks in the way of the entrance, and the wasps start to freak out. Of course we got stung and came home crying.

Our dad gets home around the same time, and our mom explains what happened. Instead of lecturing us on why you shouldn't mess with wasp's nests, he's like "those wasps STUNG my kids? I have to avenge them."

So he grabs a caulk gun and goes to leave, and our mom is like "PLEASE don't mess with the wasp's nest" and he's like "I won't."

5 mins later he comes back and is like "I got stung."

#moral of the story is we all got our impulse control from our dad #he got stung the most. by the way.

[rainyinautumn]

Did someone say COMPLETE DATA ANALYSIS OF ALL THE DEATHS IN THE LIFE SERIES? No? Well. I did it. Here are some neat graphs for you guys to look at so that you don’t have to deal with the gigantic spreadsheet I did!

Let’s start off with the big bad question: what gets people killed in this game, anyway?

Note that a CAUSE OF DEATH is not the same as a KILL. Cause of death is what pops up in the chat when someone dies (ex. PearlescentMoon was slain by Smallishbeans, BdoubleO100 fell from a high place). The cause of death does not always account for player responsibility (ex. TNT traps). Generally, a player is only considered to be someone’s cause of death if the death occurs through direct PvP combat. HOWEVER, responsibility for an indirect kill such as a trap still goes toward a player’s total kill count—for example, Joel has 14 kills overall, 10 of which are direct enough for him to be considered the actual cause of death. After all, axes don’t kill people without being swung by someone.

A few other whacky things about kill counts:

Self-inflicted deaths do not count toward a player’s kill count (ex. Grian doesn’t get a kill for jumping off Monopoly Mountain at the end of 3rd Life, Scott doesn’t get a kill for blowing himself up at the end of Double Life).

When it comes to Double Life, soulmates are considered to share their three lives. No distinction is made between Soulmate A's life and Soulmate B's life, and each death only counts as one kill (ex. Joel gets one kill for killing Scott with fireworks, even though that also killed Pearl (however, Pearl’s cause of death is still Joel, as her life is considered the same as Scott’s)).

Using the /kill command does not count toward your kill count. Grian.

With that cleared up, let’s look at kill counts.

By the skin of his teeth, Grian leads the pack in total kills. The top three you see on that graph are the only players who have a KDR (kill-to-death ratio) of more than 1—for you folks who are unfamiliar with those, a KDR of more than 1 means you kill other people more often than you die. Less than 1 means you die more often than you kill other people. Here are the highest and lowest KDRs in the series:

“What’s this?” I hear you say. “Jimmy Wet-Paper-Bag-of-a-Man Solidarity DOESN’T have the lowest KDR in the series?”

No. No, he does not, and it’s actually really funny you should ask.

Because of Last Life’s mechanic of life transferring, even players that have been in all three installments of the Life Series don’t have the same death count. Eight players died more than three times in Last Life. Another eight died exactly three times. And one player only died twice.

By virtue of starting on yellow and never receiving any extra lives in Last Life, Jimmy holds the record for fewest deaths in an installment of the Life Series with just two deaths in Last Life. He is the only player to ever die less than three times in a game. This means that although he has just one kill, he has fewer total deaths than BigB (who has died a very standard nine times), the only other player with one kill, so his KDR is higher. Congrats, Jimmy, you’re not last in everything. But you are still the only player without a PvP kill.

Speaking of PvP, it’s time to look at how people do that! Here’s a graph of the top five weapons that tend to land PvP kills the most in the series:

And now here’s weapon preferences by game:

[Double Life not depicted due to lack of PvP deaths—only 4 occurred, using a diamond axe, a diamond sword, fireworks, and an iron axe respectively.]

Despite 19 more deaths occurring in Last Life than 3rd Life, the two actually have the exact same amount of PvP kills (28). It’s interesting to note the strong preference for bows in 3rd Life, which was a much more warlike game and had several fairly formal battles where people fought from a distance. Last Life required an overall sneakier strategy, resulting in a higher use of traps. In combat, non-ranged weapons like swords and axes were generally preferred due to fights often starting in close proximity and without warning, courtesy of the Boogeyman curse. Comparatively, Double Life saw remarkably few PvP kills, likely due to each person being twice as accident-prone by virtue of being linked to another player—in fact, with a total of 12, accidents accounted for three times as many deaths as PvP in Double Life and overall for more than half (57%) of the deaths in the game.

As for individual player stats sheets, here’s an example of one of those:

If you want to see one of those for ALL 17 PLAYERS, you can go to this slideshow! More details about the stats can be found in the presentation notes of each slide. And, if you have a really specific question and want to get into the nitty gritty, feel free to send me an ask! Hope you guys enjoyed the data!

#moral of the story: stay away from high places #and Joel and Ren #and always assume Grian is up to something #life series #3rd life #last life #double life #overrainylyzed #I don't think I've ever analyzed something harder before in my life honestly #relevant rainy things

[ecileh]

#been seeing too many people mad that every story isn’t a perfect parable of highest morals lately #ao3 writer #fanfiction #astarion #bg3 #don’t like the tags don’t read it!

[opera-ghost]

it's immensely funny to me how andrew lloyd webber read this passage from the book and was like yeah the journey down to the phantom's lair is this really breathtaking magical gondola ride where christine is just captivated by the strange and fantastical beauty of it all (see below)

when in the novel they're both like in a rowboat in the dark with christine scared out of her mind and confused as hell while erik is paddling like he's out for an extreme day of fishing and just staring christine down for the entire duration of the journey without blinking once . like mind you his eyes quite literally GLOW in the DARK and he's just fucking staring into her soul and silently rowing and probably not even breathing like

#AND IT'S SOMEHOW STILL HOT #i always forget that by this point in the book there's no “i am your angel of music / come to me angel of music” like in the musical #like she has no idea who this mf kidnapping her is and when she says “who are you where is the voice” he's just like 🙄 #and when she DOES find out that *he's* the voice and he's been pretending to be an angel sent by her dead father for 3 months #it's when he's just set her down in his sitting room that's filled with a bunch of stupid pretentious flowers #and he's like “don't be afraid you're in no danger” despite the fact that she's been taken FIVE STORIES BENEATH THE OPERA against her will #by the guy who's been manipulating and lying to her through the goddamn walls #ohhhhhhhh and then fans have the audacity to get mad at christine for trying to snatch his mask like THIS MF ABDUCTED HER???? #(still love him though <3) #(his morals are questionable but so is my interest in men😍) #phantom of the opera #poto #poto shitpost

[idrawstuffsometimes]

The prophecy has been fulfilled

#moral of the story: be nice to art teachers #theyll just let you do anything #art #shitpost #traffic smp #trafficblr #secret life #life series

[brown-spider]

Real talk tho that therapist Spider-Man needs to get fired cuz what the hell was that.

That was so insensitive like bro you aren't even funny 💢

#ppl like him are why some ppl give up on therapy I'll kill him #idc if he's heard the same story over and over again hes supposed to mentally support EACH of his clients!! #does anyone wanna face me in a joust over this issue? #i bought the horses and the equipment i just need someone to joust me over any type of small argument cmon joust me #Spiderverse #across the Spiderverse #atsv #Spiderverse 2 #spider therapist #therapist spiderman #atsv therapist #peter parker #atsv peter parker #uncle ben #atsv uncle ben #miles morales #atsv miles #clips/screens #atsv gif #spider speaks

[osfi-am]

So um that new spiderverse short?

#fanart #miles morales #spiderverse #spider man: across the spider verse #spiderman atsv #spiderman fanart #spider man #miles morales spider man #spiderman into the spiderverse #a spider verse story #spider within

[fangirl-nadir]

#so many people seem to miss the point of these books #stormlight archives #brandon sanderson #cosmere #cremposting #I swear all of the hated characters are the ones who do anything remotely morally nuanced #Shallan #Moash #Dalinar #people seem to completely miss how important their bad decisions are to the story

[bill-the-dog-for-the-check]

Today was Yom HaShoah, the day that Jews remember the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the industrialized genocide of the European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1941-1945.

This is a really simple opening statement, but bear with me--I think it gets a lot more... 'yeah, buts' than most people may realize. And I think a good way of illuminating that is to break down the difference between how gentiles and Jews commemorate and remember it.

In my experience, gentiles seem to view the Holocaust as the ultimate example of mankind's barbarity to mankind. Like, the distillation of evil, the most obvious example of dehumanization and bigotry brought to its horrifying and extreme conclusion. They emphasize Nazi Germany's responsibility, elevate the instances of non-Jewish Frenchmen and Poles and Germans who made efforts to save Jewish lives, and generally view Nazi oppression as a catastrophe of whom Jews were one of many victims. And they emphasize the Allied Powers' role in ending it by liberating the camps and invading Germany. Hence why International Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on January 27th, the day Auschwitz was liberated.

But Jews have a different perspective.

We view the Holocaust as the most extreme manifestation of--but far from the conclusion to--mankind's barbarity to Jews. Not to his fellow man, per se, not to some universalized insert minority here slot, but to Jews, particularly and deliberately. The Nazis could never have accomplished their genocide were it not for the two millennia of anti-Jewish hatreds and dehumanization embedded deep in the institutions and political structures of European society. They didn't have to persuade Europe that the Jews were incurably evil, the Europeans already believed that. The Nazis had 99% of their work done before they'd even come to power, work that was done by the the Russian Empire, the Romans, Martin Luther, Christian Passion Plays, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the centuries of blood libels, the Fourth Lateran Council, the New Testament, the Spanish Empire, and on and on and on and on. It's as if some people think Hitler just woke up one day, out of the blue, with a total hatred of Jews and managed to use propaganda to convince the previously 100% tolerant Germans to hate Jews, too. Antisemitism did not begin or end with the Holocaust.

The sole responsibility of Nazi Germany in the Holocaust is also just... not true. Vichy France rounded up 13,152 Jews in the Vel' d'Hiv roundup, with not a single German participant, and sent them off to be murdered in Auschwitz. Vichy passed antisemitic legislation without any outside coercion--French Jews were hiding as much from the French police as they were from the Gestapo. France, of course, was the home of the Dreyfus Affair--antisemitism was and is a deep part of French society. And it isn't just France. Ukrainian nationalists participated in the Lviv pogroms, killing maybe around 8,000 Jews, Poles perpetrated the Jedwabne pogrom, and that doesn't even bring in that countries like the US, Switzerland and Ireland and Britain blocked Jewish emigrants, and I could just keep going on, but I think you get the point. Quite simply, six million Jews interspersed throughout Europe don't get murdered if it isn't without the collaboration of--or at minimum, silent assent and indifference--of all of their neighbors. The Nazis were the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust, of course, but almost all of Europe collaborated on some level, too. And this is a history that gets wiped away in favor of the comforting narrative of the Allied Powers bursting into Auschwitz, killing Nazis, and being horrified by what they've found, and then the poor people in the surrounding towns having NO IDEA about what had been going on. I think this narrative is why gentiles have International Holocaust Remembrance Day when Auschwitz was liberated--when they 'came to the rescue'--and why we have Yom HaShoah on the day in the Jewish calendar that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began--when we died on our own terms in spite of our murderers.

Think of the tiny, unwritten, centuries old minhagim of small Jewish shetls and towns like Trochenbrod, which were entirely annihilated. The end of the burgeoning Yiddish cinema. Yiddish going from 13 million speakers to 600,000 today. See how many entries in this list of shetls end with "town/city survived, but all/most Jews exterminated." Imagine for a moment, the potential rabbis and scholars and actors and scientists and artists who could have lived, had they survived or been born of Jews did. Three and a half million Polish Jews, to around 15,000 to 20,000 Polish Jews today. Imagine if Thessaloniki were still a majority Jewish city. How many Jews worldwide would be alive today had the Holocaust never happened? I've heard estimations of 32 million, compared to the real life 16 million. To kill such a massive number of people from an already tiny minority group--that has real consequences. The cultural loss for the Jewish people is staggering and beyond human comprehension.

And yet, the Nazis deliberate targeting of us is, in many ways, being pushed aside. Magnus Hirschfeld was gay, yes, and advanced the Institute of Sexology way ahead of its time and yeah, the Nazis were homophobic. But they were homophobic for antisemitic reasons. They viewed his work as Jewish perversions BECAUSE Dr. Hirschfeld was Jewish. In fact, they viewed homosexuality as a creation of the Jews. But so many progressive queer people, especially those who run in antizionist circles, seem to be trying to co-opt the Holocaust as being their trauma, downplaying Hirschfeld's Jewishness and holding the Institute up as proof that queer people were the 'real' victims of the Holocaust, entirely shutting out the millions of Jews, Sinti, Roma, and Slavs who were murdered. You can also see this in anti-mask conservatives comparing masking mandates during the pandemic to anti-Jewish legislation in the Holocaust, or the comparisons of the ongoing war against Hamas as being a 'modern day Holocaust.'

This phenomenon, Holocaust universalization, gets so much pushback from Jews for a reason--it downplays the anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust. It's softcore Holocaust denial. And it's so ridiculous we even have to say that, as the whole point of the Holocaust was to be anti-Jewish, to be the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." It's 'All Lives Mattering' the Holocaust. Holocaust universalization, and Holocaust inversion--the phenomenon of talking about Jews, Zionists, or Israelis as perpetrating a 'new Holocaust'--minimizes and trivializes the astounding damage and traumas and death and destruction wrought by the Holocaust. It's a polemical lie, so incendiary and so insulting--imagine telling a sexual assault survivor that they're morally no better than their rapist--that the only thing it can be is antisemitic. It is beyond reprehensible to talk like that, but it's so mainstream and acceptable to do it. Activists who say these things need to examine their own rhetoric, because it's dangerous, antisemitic, and adjacent to Holocaust denial. Not a place I think anyone should want to be.

The Holocaust is not a lesson Jews should have learned, an educational seminar, a 'card' Jews play, a choose your own adventure novel, a philosophical meditation on the nature of mankind's evils, or an empty slate upon which to project modern politics, warfare, or your ideology onto.

The Holocaust is, quite simply, the industrialized genocide of the European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1941-1945. And today was Yom HaShoah, the day we remember that.

#antisemitism #jumblr #leftist antisemitism #left wing antisemitism #right wing antisemitism #jewish #judaism #holocaust #yom hashoah #antizionism #the holocaust is 'events that happened' #it isn't a narrative or a story which is meant to have a point or some moral to it #and it is not--it is NOT--your rhetorical gotcha or talking point to throw in the faces of the group who experienced it #holocaust inversion #holocaust universalization #holocaust denial #jewish traumas need to be treated with dignity and respect not used as a political cudgel against us #i don't think that's an overly complicated or difficult thing to demand