#i'll write an essay or some shit explaining why this show is so important to me i promise | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

alagaesia-headcanons · 4 months

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There's something inherently ugly about how you ship Murtagh with Orrin. It's one thing to not like the main ship for a beloved character as set up by the author - valid - but it's another to push half of said ship away to force in your fave pasty white boy. You can write meta after meta after meta all you want about how poor Orrin is done dirty, or how that meanie Nasuada hurt him, or how the books don't put your fave background character on a pedestal, but all your writing amounts to is the fact that you've imprinted on Orrin and are now using him as a vessel for your original character. In your writing, he's not a character from the series anymore - he's your OC wearing Orrin's face and bearing Orrin's name. Which, it isn't bad to expand upon a sidelines character. But it's the way you turn around and spew how fandom fave Murtagh is in love with your OC that really shows the truth and the rot festering in you. You can cry and bemoan the romantic love Paolini has written between Murtagh and Nasuada, but your essay won't amount to jack shit if you're just going to turn around and replace Nasuada with your OC and suddenly sing it's praise.

Before you start decrying all of this, ask yourself: why are you so desperate to discredit canon's romance? It's one thing to think they should both remain single after the trauma they experienced throughout the series - fair take. But then why are you so eager to prop up your own ship? Is "Orrin" inherently more worthy of of Murtagh's love? Or is Nasuada simply not worthy, but instead in the way, in your eyes? You can wish all you want for people to love your writing, but that doesn't hide the rotten foundation of your ship: sidelining Nasuada to uplift your white fave and wanting him to have all that she does. No amount of rambling meta about how they're a "good ship" and they would work will ever cover up your inherent biases and -ism's that your poor sad white boy's ship is built upon.

For the love of god.

Anon, let me just say this to you directly- block me. It's that easy. Sending something like this instead is an embarrassment. But since you've already said your piece, I'll go ahead and say mine.

Let me first bring up what you oddly wouldn't directly accuse me of (maybe even you knew what a blatant straw man it is), that being racism. I'm not going to make light of this. Racism in fandom is a real issue, and separating a ship with a character of color to ship white characters can be a symptom of that. I have never turned a blind eye to this and I make a continual effort to remain conscious of it because it's incredibly important to me that I'm not contributing to this kind of prejudice in fandom.

This pairing started years ago when I thought of a crack ship polycule with all three of them. Over time as I considered that, the idea of shipping Murtagh and Orrin developed into a distinct concept which I found more intriguing than shipping Murtagh and Nasuada. At that point, I made an active decision to examine my interest and determine if it was grounded in the way canon presents the individual qualities and dynamics of these specific characters, independent of the broad groups any of them fall into, or if it lacked any such basis in canon and only stemmed from an unconscious bias of mine. And if I didn't find any substantial elements of canon that supported the idea, I intended to put it away and work through my bias.

So I looked, and I found I could fully explain the reasons the ship appealed to me through the details in the books. I never made some public announcement about taking this issue into full consideration because it shouldn't be performative. Holding myself accountable is a basic personal responsibility which I take seriously, not something to make me look better. But it’s always felt meaningful to simply convey that I care about putting thought and reason into my ideas and my preference for my ship isn’t baseless. I’ve done that, but it seems I should be more direct here.

So let me lay out my thought process. Why am I not interested in shipping Murtagh and Nasuada? The things that deter me personally are both emotional and logistical issues. The major emotional issue to me is how disparate their priorities are. Murtagh prioritizes protecting loved ones, which causes issues when he accepts and complies with awful acts while trying to defend them. Nasuada prioritizes the good of her cause, which causes issues when she dismisses another person’s wellbeing when it’s in the way of her goals. Murtagh’s character arc is about learning the best thing he can do for his loved ones might be accepting their willingness to make sacrifices, suggesting he becomes aware of his issue and would try to correct that going forward. However, Nasuada still doesn’t seem aware of her issue after the war, given her policy about magicians and her minimal concern for Roran, so that still presents an underlying problem that would badly exacerbate their serious trauma until it’s addressed.

None of that is a moral judgment on anything. Both of them could cause any number of other issues; it’s just stating where they stand. And I still think they could be written in a way that stays true to their characters while working through those issues so that they stay together. I think it’d be exceptionally challenging, and it still might not be to my own taste, but it has that potential. But there are also logistical issues. Nasuada is queen in Uru’baen. I genuinely feel like this is so meaningful to her character, a very fitting culmination of her aspirations, and if she were to take substantial spans away from her throne, it would be a disservice to how she was written. That said, with the way I characterize Murtagh, I really don’t feel that he would want to openly settle in a place defined by politics and power struggles. I feel like it would be very unfulfilling for him and Thorn, especially in the city of his tumultuous childhood and their tortuous enslavement. So given the dissatisfaction if Nasuada left the rule she wants and deserves and the discontent of Murtagh living in Uru’baen, I struggle to imagine them as more than a distant, intermittent relation.

So that’s why I personally don’t enjoy shipping them. Of course, it’s subjective, but I feel like it’s also fair, and you seem to suggest that you do too. So let’s move on. So now the question is if a potential relationship with Orrin would present the same or equivalent issues that I overlook just because he's a white man.

Naturally, this is subjective too, but I say no. Of course there are still possible emotional issues between them (if there were none it’d be boring), but they’re different. Given the way specific way Orrin grieves for his friends and struggles to have faith in their cause when he sees the risk of his people being killed, I believe he is also more focused on looking after individuals than pursuing a cause. I feel like that lays a smoother groundwork with Murtagh, who has been hurt by people who dismissed his wellbeing, and that reduces a lot of underlying pain between them. Orrin’s other struggles, like defeatism, fear, and hopelessness, as well as yearning for recognition and autonomy, align with Murtagh’s experience more in a way that makes their emotional issues more interesting to engage with.

With logistical issues, obviously Orrin is also a king. But I don’t find that presents the same issues either. I interpret that Orrin didn’t want to be king and isn’t content in that role. When the matter of Murtagh’s desire to avoid being openly tied to Surda’s seat of power arises, I find a much more interesting and balanced potential story where Orrin also hopes to leave his crown and they support each other in their search for a home that they can both make their own. The discrepancies I personally find so bothersome between Murtagh and Nasuada don’t come up with Murtagh and Orrin, so I enjoy their ship more. It’s just about my interpretation of compatibility. That is the crux of my thought process. No one has to agree with it, but I believe it stands as a fair assessment.

You insist that I ask myself why I prefer one ship over another. I've done that. I've already been doing that the entire time and will continue to do so. You keep whining that I make a lot of meta analysis about aspects of the characters and how I feel like they would or wouldn't mesh together, and yeah. That's the whole fucking point. In the same way I just did, those posts explore and articulate the concrete reasons one ship appeals to me and one doesn't. For years I've diligently asked myself why I'm drawn to Murtagh/Orrin more than Murtagh/Nasuada and I'm fully secure and confident in my answer that it's the emotional and narrative possibilities they have that appeal to me more. If I was given all the details of these characters, stripped of any names, descriptions, genders, ect. I know I would still really love this ship.

And that's not even to say that it's somehow "better" (it's just different in a way that suits my taste), or that Murtagh and Nasuada's relationship must be meaningless or non-existent if it's not romantic. In my story where I ship him and Orrin, he and Nasuada go through struggles, but as they grow, they're able to reconcile and learn to better support each other and their relationship ends in a much better place.

(Also, if you're talking about my “essay” that Murtagh's true name doesn't change because he fell for Nasuada, that's irrelevant to shipping them. The series could end with them getting married and they could be my all time otp, and it'd still be true that falling in love didn't change his true name. It's just a separate part of his character arc.)

For another thing, Murtagh and Nasuada are NOT a canon ship, and that does matter. For example, it has very different implications to change an interracial ship that is happily married in canon. In the IC, it is canon that they're attracted to each other, but nothing beyond that. (And I've never even discredited that! In fact, I've said their attraction is well written and in character. It's included in my story; I didn't overwrite it.) They're never in a relationship and there's no set up that implies romance is inevitable for their stories. You yourself acknowledge that there are very valid reasons to interpret that a romantic relationship wouldn't work between them!!! So if it's fine to not ship Murtagh and Nasuada as a couple, why is it suddenly heinous to imagine Murtagh with someone else?

It’s not. Your claims are far more baseless and distasteful. Why do you act like Nasuada couldn’t possibly be respected or worthy without Murtagh’s affection? Why do you act like pointing out her mistakes condemns her entirely, as if she’s not allowed to have any flaws? Why do you think a relationship with Murtagh is equivalent to all that Nasuada has? I won’t make your kind of moral accusations about a stranger, but I will simply say that I find that very objectionable. I love Nasuada for being such a unique, flawed, and fascinating character who is so much more than all that. And if you made such a volatile, deplorable, inappropriate response simply to the idea that Murtagh- a fictional character- could love someone else, you might need to take a step back. You’re being cruel.

(Also, I don’t feel like going through the whole “u just made orrin into an oc” shit tbh. This is long enough. I take care to draw my characterization from canon, but y’all can read my stuff and decide for yourself if you’d like. Although, saying I imprinted on him is the funniest part of this ludicrous message. You know what, yeah. I’ve tricked you all. You thought this blog was being run by a human being? WRONG. Baby duckling.)

#also being accused of having 'a rot festering within me' makes me feel like a fucking dark souls boss lmfao #long post #eragon #inheritance cycle #im getting this out of my head go be free #this was some cartoonishly villainous shit guys #also hate how they ignore the potential depth of nasuadas relationships with others- including women like arya elva and trianna #as if murtagh determines nasuada's importance and worth. gross

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT IDEAS

Object-oriented programming in the 1980s. If it can work to start a startup. Instead of building stuff to throw away, you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goal of showing you did a lot of startups grow out of them. Already spreading to pros I know you're skeptical they'll ever get hotels, but there's no way anything so short and written in such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such topic, when people with degrees in the subject have already written many thick books about it. Those are both good things to be. I don't mean that as some kind of answer for, but not random: I found my doodles changed after I started studying painting. When someone's working on a problem that seems too big, I always ask: is there some way to give the startups the money, though. What would it even mean to make theorems a commodity? There seem to be an artist, which is even shorter than the Perl form.1 However, a city could select good startups.2

Tcl, and supply the Lisp together with a complete system for supporting server-based applications, where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 of a program very quickly. Or at least discard any code you wrote while still employed and start over. But a hacker can learn quickly enough that car means the first element of a list and cdr means the rest. If an increasing number of startups founded by people who know the subject from experience, but for doing things other people want. It could be the reason they don't have any.3 An interactive language, with a small core of well understood and highly orthogonal operators, just like the core language, that would be better for programming. The more of a language as a set of axioms, surely it's gross to have additional axioms that add no expressive power, simply for the sake of efficiency.

One of the MROSD trails runs right along the fault. When you're young you're more mobile—not just because you don't have to be downloaded. The fact is, most startups end up doing something different than they planned. The three old guys didn't get it. PL/1: Fortran doesn't have enough data types. What programmers in a hundred years? Just wait till all the 10-room pensiones in Rome discover this site.4 Common Lisp I have often wanted to iterate through the fields of a struct—to push performance data to the programmer instead of waiting for him to come asking for it. It would be too much of a political liability just to give the startups the money, though. And they are a classic example of this approach. For one thing, real problems are rare and valuable skill, and the de facto censorship imposed by publishers is a useful if imperfect filter.

I'm just not sure how big it's going to seem hard. Often, indeed, it is not dense enough. If the hundred year language were available today, would we want to program in today. Of course, the most recent true counterexample is probably 1960. A friend of mine rarely does anything the first time someone asks him. As a young founder by present standards, so you have to spend years working to learn this stuff. The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked.

You can write programs to solve, but I never have. One advantage of this approach is that it gives you fewer options for the future. Otherwise Robert would have been too late. Look at how much any popular language has changed during its life.5 Java also play a role—but I think it is the most powerful motivator of all—more powerful even than the nominal goal of most startup founders, and I felt it had to be prepared to explain how it's recession-proof is to do what hackers enjoy doing anyway. The real question is, how far up the ladder of abstraction will parallelism go? Anything that can be implicit, should be. New York Times, which I still occasionally buy on weekends. So I think it might be better to follow the model of Tcl, and supply the Lisp together with a lot of them weren't initially supposed to be startups. It's because staying close to the main branches of the evolutionary tree pass through the languages that have the smallest, cleanest cores. The way to learn about startups is by watching them in action, preferably by working at one. At the very least it will teach you how to write software with users.

Few if any colleges have classes about startups. All they saw were carefully scripted campaign spots. It might help if they were expressed that way. It's enormously spread out, and feels surprisingly empty much of the reason is that faster hardware has allowed programmers to make different tradeoffs between speed and convenience, depending on the application.6 At the top schools, I'd guess as many as a quarter of the CS majors could make it as startup founders if they wanted is an important qualification—so important that it's almost cheating to append it like that—because once you get over a certain threshold of intelligence, which most CS majors at top schools are past, the deciding factor in whether you succeed as a founder is how much you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. Preposterous as this plan sounds, it's probably the most efficient way a city could select good startups. Most will say that any ideas you think of new ideas is practically virgin territory. Exactly the opposite, in fact. Whatever computers are made of, and conversations with friends are the kitchen they're cooked in.7 That was exactly what the world needed in 1975, but if there was any VC who'd get you guys, it would at least make a great pseudocode.

If this is a special case of my more general prediction that most of them grew organically. Writing software as multiple layers is a powerful technique even within applications. The more of your software will be reusable. Using first and rest instead of car and cdr often are, in successive lines. Of course, I'm making a big assumption in even asking what programming languages will be like in a hundred years? It must be terse, simple, and hackable. It becomes: let's try making a web-based app they'd seen, it seemed like there was nothing to it. Both customers and investors will be feeling pinched.8

The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. That's how programmers read code anyway: when indentation says one thing and delimiters say another, we go by the indentation. You need that resistance, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. Maybe this would have been a junior professor at that age, and he wouldn't have had time to work on things that maximize your future options. How much would that take? It's important to realize that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand.9 You'll certainly like meeting them. It's not the sort of town you have before you try this. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. I'm not a very good sign to me that ideas just pop into my head.

Notes

Dan wrote a prototype in Basic in a series A rounds from top VC funds whether it was 10.

With the good groups, just harder. Which in turn the most successful founders still get rich from a startup could grow big by transforming consulting into a great one.

There are two simplifying assumptions: that the only way to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people together. A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that's not as facile a trick as it was putting local grocery stores out of their portfolio companies. If the next one will be familiar to anyone who had worked for a really long time? One new thing the company they're buying.

If I paint someone's house, the growth in wealth in a bar. I didn't need to warn readers about, just as much the better, but they start to be about 50%. Together these were the impressive ones. Other investors might assume that P spam and P nonspam are both.

All he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads. The point where things start with consumer electronics.

If they're on boards of directors they're probably a cause them to keep them from the VCs' point of a press hit, but that we wouldn't have understood why: If you have two choices and one or two, and so on. But if so, or in one where life was tougher, the same reason parents don't tell the whole story. Incidentally, the switch in mid-twenties the people they want.

Trevor Blackwell points out, First Round Capital is closer to a clueless audience like that, except in the median VC loses money. Unless of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what you care about, just those you should seek outside advice, and this trick, and so don't deserve to keep them from leaving to start or join startups. There is not much to seem big that they only even consider great people.

You also have to do it right. In every other respect they're constantly being told that they are bleeding cash really fast. Probably more dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was.

In theory you could probably improve filter performance by incorporating prior probabilities. If you have the concept of the reason for the coincidence that Greg Mcadoo, our contact at Sequoia, was no great risk in doing a small proportion of the subject of language power in Succinctness is Power. As I was there was near zero crossover. Some urban renewal experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the evolution of the next year they worked.

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