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enderspawn · 3 years

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It's alright if u don't wanna answer this cuz this argument gets people really riled up but do you think c!Techno is a tyrant or nah?

Cuz many c!techno apologists argue that he isn't just cuz he's an anarchist but I've also read a lot of essays that go against it and it'd be really interesting to see ur opinion on this

i think he, in some contexts, can most definitely be called tyrannical, yes. a tyrant? no.

to avoid spamming ppl w discourse we've all def heard before (and bc this ended up MASSIVE (like 2.3k ish), but fairly in depth bc i didnt wanna speak out of bad faith and wanted to be EXPLICTLY clear-- oops), the rest will be under readmore

so heres the thing i want to preface: i used to really LOVE c!techno. i joined beginning of s2, right when exile started, and he was arguably my favorite character. since then though i've fallen out with him a LOT, to the point i almost... actively despite him at times (though mainly in a toxic kind of way which i can acknowledge is flawed).

in short, his actions started to speak louder than his words and i lost investment in his personal character struggles because of the actions he took (doomsday was my breaking point. i get feeling angry and betrayed, as well as seeking revenge against lmanberg, but his actions went too far for me to CARE and it hurt so many more characters as well.)

so when i speak, i come from a place of disliking him but also somewhat understanding the position c!techno apologists come from: i used to be one of them myself.

NOW, do i think he's a tyrant? no. for reference in my analysis, i try to look up the definition of terms to make sure they are utilized properly. while "tyranny" and "tyrannical" can have multiple uses, tyrant itself is a more specific term. to combine the top two definitions, a tyrant is referring to "an extremely oppressive, unjust, or cruel absolute ruler (who governs without restrictions, especially one who seized power illegally.)"

techno's position as an anarchist, imo, DOES indeed make him unable to be a tyrant. tyrants are rulers with very clear power over others from a structural way. anarchists are about the lack of structure or power over others and instead viewing the people around you as equals in power.

in forming the syndicate, they very explicitly worked to not designate a leader and instead make it so that no one would have any power over the others systemically. techno may have taken a integral role, yes, but it doesn't make him suddenly "the leader", its a role that wouldve had to be filled by someone (even if it was democratic to decide who to invite, they'd need someone to hand over the invite itself yknow? like no matter WHAT there needed to be A ROLE)

one could argue that he IS a leader in the shadow hierarchy of the syndicate (which, yes, is a real and professional term used in management courses despite sounding like it comes from a 4kids yugioh dub) in that everyone CONSIDERS and looks to him a leader without him having any actual structural basis behind it, but to argue that allows him to be a tyrant is in bad faith i believe. especially because to the people he would be "ruling", he ISNT oppressive, unjust, or cruel. they are his friends and support network and critical for a lot of his personal development (since feelings of betrayal and trust issues are critical to his character and why he acts the way he does). I wish we were able to SEE this develop more, but oh well.

but like i said: tyrant is fairly specific in definition. TYRANNY, and thus TYRANNICAL are not as limited. I've discussed their definitions here. originally, i made that post because i was angry at a take i had seen that claimed that, like you said, because techno was an anarchist and not part of any government or leadership position, he couldn't be tyrannical. to which i heartily disagree.

for something to be tyrannical, they simply must have an overarching/oppressive power over someone or something. it would not be inaccurate if i were to say that something is "under the tyranny" of a concept, because what it means is that something is under the power of another thing/concept. you can frankly call anything tyranny if it is widespread/overarching and you don't like it. mask mandates? tyranny, its forcing me to act in "rigorous condition". hell, theres even such things as tyranny of the majority in which people agree too much on one thing and it gives them unfair power or tyranny of the minority where people with minority opinions have too much power (thats a very grossly oversimplified definition of both, but it covers the base idea well enough for my point)

the point im making above isnt meant to be taken as "anything can be worked to be defined as tyranny thus it is a meaningless claim", it is that tyranny (and again, thus tyrannical) are very open and nonrestrictive terms.

to make it easier to define, alongside the definitions provided i want to add an explicit clause that is (imo) implied in the original definition: tyranny is... well, bad. that is to say if someone has power over a group but literally everyone is fine with it and agrees to it, its not tyranny. thats just a group of people getting along and one happens to have power over another. a leader does NOT equal a tyrant (as discussed above), so leadership should not be equated with tyranny.

thus as an example: wilbur acting as president (before the election) may have been "unelected" with power over his citizens, but no one was upset with that power. thus, he is not a tyrant and not acting tyrannically (as well as the fact his power was, arguably, NOT rigourous or absolute but thats another topic for another time). SCHLATT however IS a tyrant, as his power was absolute (he did not consult his cabinet) and forced people to comply instead of them complying willingly, thus he was acting tyrannically.

now to finally get to the damn point of this essay: where does c!techno lie? honest answer? it depends slightly on your perspective, but it depends a LOT on the future of the syndicate.

techno is incredibly clear in his goals: no governments, no corruption. in fighting with pogtopia, he is actively working to topple a tyranny-- he isn't tyrannical for doing that.

when he strikes out on nov 16th, it is because he opposes them forming a new government. when they oppose him and disagree, he launches an attack against them. is this tyranny? maybe, but probably not. he IS trying to impose his own physical strength and power (as well as his resources) over the others to stop them from doing what HE doesn't want them to do.

however its more nuanced than that:

1. hes lashing out emotionally as well as politically. he feels betrayed by those he trusted and he believed that they would destroy the government then go (i'm ignoring any debates on if he did or did not know that they planned another government, though it is a source of debate). but typically idk about you but i dont call tyranny for someone fighting with another person.

2. he also may be acting with good intent again, in HIS EYES. if tubbo was part of manburg, whos to say he wont be just as bad? he, in his pov, is likely trying to stop another tyrant before they rise.

3. and finally, and tbh the most damning from any perspective: he gives up. he quickly leaves then RETIRES without intent to try and attack again until he is later provoked. tyranny is defined by it not just being power, but power being USED. if he doesn't use his power to try and impose any will, then he's not tyrannical.

Doomsday I am also not going to touch very in depth on for much of the same reasons. My answer is again a "maybe", depending on the weight you personally place on each issue:

1. he's lashing out as revenge for the butcher army and as revenge against tommy for "betraying" him (though this one we explicitly know he was ignoring the fact tommy did not want to go through with it, however he still did trust and respect tommy regardless so his feelings are understandable anyway)

2. he sees new lmanberg as corrupt and tyrannical (which is undeniable: house arrest for noncompliance, exile without counsel, execution without trial, etc), and thus obligated to destroy it

but also, theres the implicit understanding he's doing this to send a message: do not form a government, or else. its a display of force that also works to warn others unless they want a similar fate. phil even explicitly states that he is doing so to send that message, so one could assume techno is doing the same alongside his personal reasoning listed above.

what i just described is the use of a oppressive and harsh (physical) power in order to gain compliance from people (that compliance being 'not making a government'). does that sound familiar? exactly. it follows the definition(s) of tyranny given previously. technoblade is acting in a way that is, by very definition, tyrannical.

so the debate shifts: is he valid in doing so because he is trying to PREVENT corruption and tyranny. like i said, new lmanberg was undeniably corrupt at points. i held nothing against techno for trying to topple manburg, so does that apply to new lmanberg as well? short answer: i dont know. it depends on your specific opinion of what is acceptable. its like the paradox of tolerance: to have a truly tolerant society, you have to be intolerant of intolerance. to have a truly non-tyrannical society, do you need to have a tyranny enforcing it?

personally (and bc im a lmanberg loyalist /hj) i say it is. regardless of the corruption of new lmanberg, they are also giving a threat to EVERYONE. even those who are innocent, they are presented with the exact same threat and rule set: if you make a government, you will be destroyed.

(which, small divergence here, is part of why debating c!techno is so frustrating. so many times you end up hitting a "well it depends on your political views" situation and there ISNT a correct answer there. im here to analyze characters for fun, not debate political theory)

so: the syndicate then. this is where this debate really "took off" and i think its due to one very specific miscommunication about its goals and plans. the syndicate, upon formation, declares itself to stand against corruption and tyranny. when they are found, the syndicate would work to destroy it. so heres the golden question: what do THEY define as corruption and tyranny? if you were to go off c!techno's previous statements, seemingly "any government" is a valid answer. however, he also states he's fine with people just being in groups together hanging together.

what then DEFINES A GOVERNMENT for them? what lines do they have to sort out what does "deserve to be destroyed" and what does "deserve to exist freely"

this is a hypothetical i like to post when it comes to syndicate discourse:

i have a group of people. lets say 5 or so for example. they all live together and build together. any decisions made that would impact the entire group they make together and they must have a unanimous agreement in order to proceed, but otherwise they are free to be their own people and do their own thing. when you ask them, they tell you they are their own nation and they have a very clearly defined government: they are a direct democracy. does the syndicate have an obligation to attack?

there is absolutely no hierarchy present. there is no corruption present. but, they ARE indeed a government. is that then inherently negative? my answer is fuck no (see the whole "difference between a tyrant and a leader" thing above).

but THATS where the issue of this discourse LIES. in some people's eyes, the answer to that is YES. techno's made it clear "no government" is his personal view, but does that spread to the syndicate as a whole? do they act preemptively in case it DOES become corrupt? is it inherently corrupt because its a government, regardless of how it is ruled? the fact of the matter is because of how little we've seen the syndicate work as a SYNDICATE, we don't know that answer. so we're left to debate and speculate HOW they would act.

if the syndicate were to let that government exist, then they are not tyrannical. they are showing that they are working to stop tyranny and corruption, just like in pogtopia again.

if the syndicate were to destroy/attack that government, then they are tyrannical. simple as that. they are enforcing a rule of their own creation without any nuance or flexibility under the threat of absolute destruction.

miscommunication in debates comes, in my opinion, in the above. of course theres more points of nuance. for example:

would the syndicate allow a government like i had described with early lmanberg, where there is an established hierarchy but everyone in the country consents to said leadership? on one hand, there is no tyranny or corruption present which is what they are trying to work against. on the other hand, theres more a possibility of it occuring. perhaps they'd find a middle road between the two binary options of "leave or destroy" i am presenting, such as checking in occasionally to ensure no corruption occurs.

but if they were to destroy it without, for lack of a better word, "giving it a chance" they would be, in my opinion, tyrannical. they would be going aginst their words of opposing corruption and instead abusing their power to gain compliance.

your/others opinions may differ, again it depends on if you see it as worth it to possibly stop future tyranny or if a hierarchy is INHERENTLY a negative thing.

part of the reason so many blog gave up this debate, beyond not getting very clear answers for the syndicate, is because of the nuance present. there. is. no. right. answer. every single person will view it differently, because there is no universally agreed upon truth of right or wrong here. BUT, i hope this helps shed some light on the discussion and my thoughts on it

#dream smp #mcyt #techno #syndicate analysis #YEAH IM MAINTAGGING WHAT OF IT #also i-- idk if it should be crit tagged? i tried to be as fair and open as possible #lemme know what yall think #ANYWAY ANON IM SO FUCKING SORRY THIS THING ENDED UP 2.3K WORDS LONG #I JUST RLLY WNATED TO BE THOUROUGH AND AS FUCKING CENTRIST /HJ AS POSSIBLE FJDKSLFJ #its very nuanced and theres no right answer but you sure as hell know mine now #answered #anon #im at work rn im gonna get fucking fired for this FJDKSFJKL #/HJ HOPEFULLY IN THAT I AM AT WORK BUT I WONT GET FIRED #og post #(jeb bush voice) please clap

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satellite-trash · 4 years

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(kind of depressing) psychological analysis of jack atlas --involving ramen.

So, if youve watched YGO 5Ds entirely (meaning the subbed version as the dub never finishes the ending season) you’d have picked up on Jack’s obsession with instant cup ramen, which would be fine for any character really but it seems out of character for the pompous, upper-class (wannabe), arrogant luxurious Jack Atlas aka THE KING.

But actually it reveals a lot about him, and actually is really depressing... There is a massive link between ramen and his lost childhood.

In season 1 we see NO sign of this obsession or even care for ramen. The only thing he obsesses over to any degree is a) duelling Yusei to claim King b) saving Carly from the Dark Signers or arguably c) trying to figure out his own character as a king (after beaten by Yusei)

But, in Season 2 where he is (arguably...) “redeemed” from villain to teammate/rival, he gains a bit of comedic flare with his obsession with the cheap ramen cups. (and expensive posh coffee). The coffee obsession suits him. But cheap instant ramen?

His obsession starts Episode 80, where Lazar/Yaeger steals Team 5Ds’ engine programme as well as a cup of ramen. Jack’s reaction is... comedic?

He’s more pissed at the fact his ramen was taken than the whole important, irreplaceable engine programme theft. Comedic. But his irritation at losing ramen continues in episodes 114-5, where again lazar/yager steals some ramen he wouldve bought and his reaction is...

He is in total fear of just not having ramen. In fact, he even hoards it - shown in episode 115 where he brings it out to give to lazar.

This is the episode that makes all this comedy turn dark and really depressing.

He reveals that the flavour of ramen reminds him of childhood at Martha’s, sharing it with Yusei, Crow, and the other orphans. This means that his obsession is like a psychological association to childhood, like sensory association, like how many people can recognise and get nostalgic over smells and tastes without even knowing why. Jack hoards and eats ramen defensively because he longs for childhood - whether its the relationship he had with friends or the carelessness of childhood, he misses it in comparison to adult life. I mean... who can blame him - theres a reason why so so so many conditions exist mentally that cause people to retract into childhood behaviours, like the whole AdultBaby lifestyle (wont get into it but the platonic side of it is a longing for childhood often lost) or where people continue hobbies such as certain toy collecting etc that they did as kids, OR that they longed to do as kids but just couldnt do for whatever reason/restriction.

he even wants recognition from Yusei for remembering that flavour/memory:

This is why he makes no mention of this in Season 1. Jack S1 was all about the present -no future nor past. He hated his past in Satellite w Yusei etc, openly wanting to ignore it, perhaps guilty for stealing Yusei’s card etc or overall hating that limited and depressive situation. (I have a headcanon Jack genuinely fell into a depression in Satellite and just acted to get out, but thats too deep for this current time lmao)

Because he didnt want ANY reminder of his past (hence hatred of Yusei, Crow, Kalin, and the entirety of Satellite, or “Satellite scum/trash” as he calls them in the dub), he doesnt want ramen.

But, S2, he is reformed and has his old friends back, and even martha has accepted him back. So, he realises the error of his ways, and reclines into his lost and mentally more stable childhood. Through ramen.

His childhood wasnt happier - satellite was at its worst, they were struggling, he had no freedom, in comparison to the S2 situation where he achieved duelling fame, has friends back, and satellite and Neo Domino are united (kinda)

BUT maybe he wants to go back and correct things? Or live a guilt-less and resent-less life again, not having done any wrong? I mean this is impossible to say, but clearly his ramen obsession, now being linked w childhood, means a longing to go back for some reason.

It’s clear he shows regret or sadness over childhood/lost childhood: the only time he cries in the show with tears are over memories from childhood with ramen;

His face is streaming with tears because of Lazar’s story about ramen and childhood which he related to. He is SO intensely emotional over ramen that it does come of as comedic, which is really strange for the rival character as serious/uptight as jack. I mean, could you imagine Kaiba ever acting like this over, idk, cereal? maybe one time he shared a bowl of cornflakes with mokuba and now he cries every morning eating his cereal because of those memories. idk.

this is 115 when Sherry cuts the pile of ramen boxes out of impatience, Jack is IN HORROR of his prized collection being attacked like this. its like she’s cutting up his childhood memories or something. I mean, it basically is, apparently.

...

His comment to Crow summarises all this, 114. He has just screamed at Lazar for stealing “his” ramen (it was the old lady’s but ok jack) Crow asks him to calm down

its right, he cant, no one can. Its something in his mind relating to his childhood, losing ramen or even being in a situation where his ramen might not be “his” safely, unsettles Jack. Ramen represents his childhood in some regard, and the anxiety of losing it causes him to become incredibly defensive and on edge.

im sorry for this random and kinda deep/depressing take on Jack. I know we should be thinking positive rn in the current global pandemic, but i just needed to get this analysis thing out there (more a rant actually) because it really struck me when S2 made jack have a weird “comedic” element about him, in his reformed state. It’s not so much comedic, but deep and suiting his character. His obsession over ramen is not just a gag to make him more like a good-guy now he is teammates with Crow and Yusei etc, but it develops his character and gives him reformation in a completely different sense -- it doesnt force his goodness out by just making him into a comedy-relief, but rather gives him emotional backing for his mistakes and wrongdoing in the previous season, and actusally makes it kind of depressing how he arrogantly tried to forget and destroy his past in Satellite with his friends.

gimme any thoughts you have on this, if you made it this far through the rant (i applaud and love you if you did!!)

i thought of all this because in the current global situation, most people are limited inside and getting depressing, sometimes its better to mentally retract and go back to better times when this whole thing wasnt going on, and for Jack that was childhood. Sorry for philosophical rant lol, at 1am in the morning for my part of the world~

here is funny pic to say sorry and lighten the mood~

(that chef has seen some dark things in his life... )

#jack atlas #yugioh 5ds #yugioh #deep #character rant #im really sorry lol #ramen #cupramenshipping #there is a reason that exists eeeeee #psychology #have a good night as i wont now

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frienderbender · 3 years

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(Metalrat) I’m required to ask about Pickles or Magnus for the character breakdown game. XD Hope work goes well today! :)

i can do both! :] and thank you, work was ok today. better than last week anyway.

ill put it under a cut since its two characters and it will get a little long haha

PICKLES

How I feel about this character: i love pickles sm i think hes such an essential character not just in terms of being the drummer but really with his personality. i love how the others confide in him and i just love how hes arguably the most emotionally intelligent comparatively. just a cool dude. if i had to pick one member to hang out with, it would be him

All the people I ship romantically with this character: as ive said, im really casual about shipping in general and will probably enjoy just about whatever with him, but i do like pickles and nathan, and if i had to pick a favorite charles/band member ship, it would probably be him and pickles? maybe? that said, i feel like my fave pickles relationship is still him and magnus?? but preklok, obviously. i dont think they would ever fully reconcile or get back together, and i really enjoy the dynamic of them as exes. that said...i do still find myself feeling a little warm when i think about them being sweet and madly in love before everything went down.

My non-romantic OTP for this character: LOVE pickles and tokis friendship. wonderful. fantastic. perfect. i think toki took to pickles really early on and often went to him for advice or comfort. good stuff.

My unpopular opinion about this character: uhhhhhhh i dunno. i cant say ive really seen anything so often that rubs me the wrong way when it comes to like, characterization or whatever. ive definitely read some fics here or there where i was kinda iffy on some stuff, but in general i cant say theres anything big that comes to mind. i feel like people seem to be generally on the same page with him, which is interesting

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: i really wish we got to see pickles during his snb days! like actually during the height of their popularity yknow?? i wanna see the band perform back in the 80s and all that. also i really would like to see more family stuff, but that goes for everyone tbh...maybe see him when he ran away and all that. ALSO. ALSO. i NEED to see him interact with his nephew its important.

pickles just has so much to him and i just wanna explore it all!! hes such a fantastic character

MAGNUS

How I feel about this character: i love you grandpa. nah but fr though i think magnus has so much potential, i think hes fascinating

All the people I ship romantically with this character: like i said, him and pickles. man. just super interesting. i think him and mma is really funny too but like in a one-sided "so what are you doing after this ;)" way that ends with mma just impaling him yknow. purely for comedic purposes lmao

My non-romantic OTP for this character: man i wouldve done anything to see him and toki actually hang out. on my ever growing list of episode ideas ive written, at the top is an episode of him and toki hanging out at mordhaus and the rest of the members just trying to avoid him lol

My unpopular opinion about this character: uhhh idk i think hes both a goofy villain and also deserving of more analysis? if that makes sense? i think being both is possible; i know a lot of my faves from other things fit into that exact box. i also think there was a time when the original dethklok really did love each other. i think magnus really did care about them. he wouldnt still have that photo if he didnt, right?

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: more screen time...please.....and my absolute dream episode would be a whole episode about them before they were famous, so magnus would be there too. give it to me now‼️‼️

i just really enjoy magnus and he has one of my favorite character designs. just deserved more to him i think! i feel like all the stuff was there to do more but we didnt get that and its a shame! maybe he will reappear in the new movie, but im not getting my hopes up haha

#asks #ask meme #thejollybeardcollection

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morelike-bi-light · 5 years

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As much as I love our meme culture where we romanticize or slam our favs, I do genuinely think there's really interesting flaws to explore with all of the Twilight vampires. It's not developed super well in the series, not front and center since whether we see main characters make mistakes with consequences largely depends on how Meyers personally feels about them and what they represent to her, but the complexity exists and there's a whole heap of potential to explore.

Like Carlisle's need to 'save' and how it conflicts with itself. There's that post that points out exactly how selfish his decision was, seeing as how he views vampirism as damnation, and yes! That makes it so much more interesting. What would he be without this conflict? A pretty one dimensional saint figure with a million PhDs. I love that Carlisle spent hundreds of years denying himself company and then crumbled beneath a single Chicago mother's plea to save her son, in my mind as an excuse to soothe his own crippling loneliness. And then when he had someone to exist beside, he just... he did it again, ostensibly because Esme deserved better. And again, this time for Edward. Then he did it for Rose. And then they picked up Alice and Jasper, and I wonder if he felt that much more guilty knowing that if he'd just waited a decade or so more, he might've found family anyways without having to 'damn' the others. Exploring how that interacts with his religious beliefs? Sign me up.

Then there's Rosalie's resentment. It's been covered in much better depth by other users, and I think I've reblogged those posts, but the validity of her anger and fear of losing the only things that give her comfort in a life she never chose bears repeating. Not to mention how this possibly affects her relationship with her coven - it's like when your child or spouse or sibling or best friend who has depression. How do you interact with a loved one who wishes they were dead? Who thinks life, even with you, whom they claim to love, is a prison? How do you interact with the man you believe to be your soulmate when you genuinely believe that you would be better off having died before meeting him? What does it say about her sense of self prior to death versus as an immortal?

Which leads perfectly into Edward's self-flagellation. He murders and feeds, because he's a monster who deserves to feel like one - but he's not the only one who suffers from that (though we give him some points for understanding that from the get-go and targeting people he thinks deserve it). But then he feels bad for acting like a monster and he has another reason to punish himself. He deprives himself of joy and distances himself from his family because how dare a monster like he ever find comfort in others like him, and how dare he enjoy a life that's so unnatural - but his family suffers alongside him. But then he feels guilty for being a dick to them, which gives him another reason to punish himself. He sends Bella mixed signals by alternating between caring, coldness, and cruelty, because he wants her to be happy but he also doesn't want himself to be happy - but Bella suffers because of this. Then he feels guilty about putting her safety at risk, which gives him another reason to punish himself. It goes on and on, and this line of thinking hinders his growth as a character through the entire series without being properly addressed.

Bella's bull-headedness. Jasper's survivalism. There is so, so much to be said here. Even with the three least developed of the coven, Alice has her impulsivity, Esme has her passivity, Emmett has his impatience.

On the flip side, we have the native characters, who are all either poorly developed or most characterized through off hand, arm's-length negativity, so as to make the vamps look better, and all I want for them is more content exploring all the good they have to offer.

Like, Jake's defining quality is his loyalty - Smeyer may have butchered his character, but I'm not talking about the bullshit she had him do in the last two books. I want to see more exploring how warm and good and patient and generous he is with his friends, no matter what it is he's up against, be it social conflict or an emotional crisis. I mean, in the books, we only ever get to see him really care about Bella. What about Embry and Quil? There's an entire foundation to their friendship that's hardly brushed by canon. I want to see his loyalty to his father and sisters and the memory of his mother. IT is interesting when loyalties conflict, preferably with greater nuance and weight than the Uley vs Cullen dilemma, but what's more satisfying is getting to see Jacob act in his element. I wanna see his other good traits explored too, the ones that exist outside of the necessity that he be a good friend/alternate LI for Bella - like the passion he has and his down to earth attitude.

And don't get me started on the Uley pack. Sam himself had so much potential to be a nuanced foil to Carlisle - I'm going to need to make an entire other post on it, it gets me so worked up, so keep an eye out for that! But also there's Paul, who is literally just an angry caricature version of Emmett, Emily whose entire characterization is built on a mess of racist and sexist tropes, and how many of the others even get characterized at all?

And Leah. Was she done the dirtiest of not only all the native characters, but also all the females? Arguably, yeah. I'd say so. Again, there was so, so much potential to explore her even in subtle ways through the later narrative and literally next to none of it was fulfilled. By the end of Breaking Dawn I was genuinely irritated, even as a kid, because it felt like Leah had been pointed out time and time again as being so special - only important native woman, only pack member to have been ostracized through the entire series, and the only female werewolf, hello - only for none of it to be relevant literally at all to the major plot. There wasn't even any follow up. Why is she the first female wolf? What does that mean for the future of the shapeshifters? (I'm absolutely thinking about this for my - probably shorter than planned - fic, jsyk.)

Thank God for Seth, I guess. We all love Seth, but still I think even he is basically just a puppy's personality given human form. It's as if Smeyer thinks that complexity is counter blank to goodness, friendliness, and openness. (And I think this is an issue with Emmett, Alice, Esme, and Angela, too, to be fair. It's just that where those four are just Defined by a trait - boisterous, fun, gentle, and nice in turn - Seth's behavior specifically plays into a... cutesy... paternalism? That makes me narrow my eyes a bit.) Anyways, I wouldve liked to see his feelings about Charlie and Sue, or about his sister's transformation and his father's death, or uh, any of the violence against the newborns many of whom were literally his age from Eclipse? And not just in an, oh, sad boy is sad kind of way. He's not a care bear - there's gotta be some conflict about what he's been through seeing as it's a LOT.

To be real, though? In some ways, I'm actually okay with it that Smeyer dropped the ball on so many of her characters, while still giving us what we have to work with - largely because it's actually so cool to think about all the potential buried in the content we have, waiting to be unearthed. It's why, regardless of when or why it started and how long it should've lasted, I don't see myself exiting the Twilight fandom for a long time. There's so much work to be done, you know, stuff to be said, and I think it's been and is and will be a beautiful conversation. This was just meant to be a long meta, but really, I have to take a moment and celebrate everyone in the fandom who has kept it alive and funny and interesting, whether you're a staple like @howlonghaveyoubeenseventeen and @shittytwilightaus or you're just here to reblog and enjoy. We all sort of rediscovered this thing we liked in our childhood and just collectively decided to fix it and make it something worth loving as the people we are, and it makes me proud to be here!

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 5 years

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This is fucking amazing

it’s like the red wedding all over again

Except nonsensical horseshit writing tier, but richly satisfying only since all these casuals got their long time fandom comeuppance that D&D decided to break away from fucking pandering to over the years, to glance at the cliffnotes GRRM gave them like “oh yeah, this is how we should end it huh”.

It would seem none of the casuals cared how shite the show has been for four seasons until it came for their fav.

“YASSSSS QUEEEN SLAY, BURN THEM ALL”

but then pikachu face and ragepost onto the telegraph.co.uk when she does exactly that.

It’s like they have never considered what a medieval sacking is really like (there’s a reason why losing a siege is so distressing).. let alone remember such at the beginning of the series. Or that, perhaps a deeply traumatized most-likely-inherited insanity gene incest baby teenaged girl who has made a habit of disobeying better advice to exact draconian (ayyy) punishment on those who cross her would.... strike to instill fear and assert power over those she feels and sees drifting support to a future rival. It’s always been her kind of response (crucifying the great masters in meereen), so why would it be different here? And that would be the case even if she isn’t insane. It’s arguable that Daenerys is an attempt to write a humanized Sauron, arriving with scary foreign armies from the east to conquer everything and all.

And i do intend to focus on Daenerys here because it’s clear she’s the only character in the television series who has not had her storyline merged with others or completely derailed or invented it seems. The TV ASoIaF was condensed down to fit her story over maintaining the disparate many storylines that got lost in this process. However, even in Daenerys’ case, she too lost alot of contextualization that wouldve prepared for this ending the way Ned’s actions set up the keener audience for his telegraphed, eventual death.

One of the earliest annoyances I’ve had with the show from as early as season 3 or 4, was the plot armour afforded to Daenerys, when in the books it was clear she was constantly making poor judgements and was being needlessly totalitarian and governing as a literal entitled teenaged girl would... not to mention her brash Feel Good ideological policies reterritorializing the slaver cities that eventually began to completely fuck up the economies and societies there into total brutal collapse that she eventually flees from on the back of her dragon. This never happened or was handled with softer gloves in the show.

It’s like the politics and the obvious (no matter how poorly written by the show runners, we see bits of GRRM shine thru here) themes of how shit feudalism and humanity’s tendencies was lost among the greater audience here. Let alone the oft-referred to quote by GRRM of, “if you think this has a happy ending, then you haven’t been paying attention.”

Not that it has been particularly easy to in recent seasons, because of D&D’s show leading, causing the show to go fullbore fantasy shock. But this, nonetheless...

The previous episode was clearly a snap back to the book storyline and it’s only so jarring because it hasn’t been set up properly in the show yet ... and I feel I’d want to place blame on the (cathedral pew) audience here as much as I do, the showrunners (and the actors for ballooning rates in light of the show’s ongoing success constraining budgets for a wider cast, but w/e) if only because it were them who cried the loudest at “irresponsible” film making like showing medieval people... being medieval to eachother... The casual audience begged and protested to see a reflection of contemporary society, actually a model for contemporary society (no rape! no sexism! no racism! no patriarchy!) instead of the flatly backward, jarring medieval one it started out with and became popular from. They recoiled at any attempt to make the women characters fallible or prone to being anything less than examples of smug girl power. case in point: the complete bastardization of the Dorne plot to sand snek BAD PUSSY

youtube

This casual audience had a hand in pushing the show into doing the fantasy feel good schlock with no stakes that the series originally intended to upend.

The fantasy tropes introduced to the series were intended to be subverted only to expose and critique society and human nature toward a broader theme of War is Bad, medieval patriarchy is fucking shitty to live under, and we will continue to kill each other over a petty Game and disregard looming existential threats -- explicitly the one established in the first chapter of the first book... After all, the books were written by a very anti-nuclear weapon, environmentalist and cynical left-leaning feminist GRRM (BTW GRRM is no profound mind about any of these qualities). But the show came around to do safe, shocking deaths and radical plot departures simply for the subversion of expectations with no rationale or meaning besides. All of which, a long time ago, had infuriated me, but now ive radically lowered my expectations and come back for the memes and schlock, lol... So it’s endlessly hilarious to see the casual audience and media be completely assblasted over this episode. Actually i was losing it during the last episode simply because i knew how most people would be reacting to it.

Anyway, i am looking forward to the hilarious conclusion next week.

#asoiaf #got #game of thrones #i guess this is an #effortpost

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karazrel · 5 years

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lena luthor // kara zor-el // steve rogers // peggy carter // bucky barnes

oh damn asdfghj i did kara and bucky so ill do the rest under the cut

lena

How I feel about this character: I LOVE LENA WITH ALL MY HEART,i honestly didnt expect to love her as much as i do but i love her as much as kara which is a Lot

All the people I ship romantically with this character: kara and sam

My non-romantic OTP for this character: alex and brainy!!! i loved their newly developed friendship in s4 it was a definite highlight

My unpopular opinion about this character: i dont think she’s in the wrong for developing the kryptonite? she had a very good reason to do so and we’ve seen cases of kara/clark being ‘influenced’ into hurting people so like.. it’s a very logical fail-safe. yes she probably shouldve done it under deo supervision but like she said, the deo supposedly doesnt exist and it’s not like she can call their hotline so i think they blew it out of proportion cause they wanted to generate some needless conflict and that was the easiest way to do it

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: i want her to have a very solid arc in s5, with a full spectrum of emotion. like i want to see her angry and resentful at the start, because she has every right to be and then i want kara to slowly and tirelessly chip away at her walls until she finally gets through to her. and like i need it to be resolved in more than a couple of episodes, this is arguably one of the biggest reveals in the entire series and it’s something that they need to spend a season if not more on. ideally id want them to be tentative allies by the end of s5 and then s6 is about slowly rebuilding their relationship. I JUST WANT THEM TO DO THIS STORY JUSTICE.

steve

How I feel about this character: pre-endgame steve? KING!!! endgame-steve? renowned homophobe and racist

All the people I ship romantically with this character: bucky and sam

My non-romantic OTP for this character: nat and thor

My unpopular opinion about this character: steve was never in love with peggy. she was the first girl who ever treated him well and im sure he thought he loved her, but it was a week long crush over seventy years ago. it was never a tragic love story and the only reason he held onto her after tfa is because she represented the time period he considered home. he shoudlve moved on after aou and he had up until endgame came along and fucked it all up.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: god the pre-serum endgame steve theory would’ve been a fucking masterpiece. steve going to vormir and giving up the serum. then going to the battlefield and picking up mjolnir... CAN YOU IMAGINE. it wouldve validated the fact that it was always steve who was a hero and not the serum making him into one.

peggy

How I feel about this character: kinda indifferent? back in 2010 when she was the only female character around i liked her but now that we have better developed characters im kinda mehh about her

All the people I ship romantically with this character: i have not seen agent carter but she and agent sousa are apparently cute so them i guess?

My non-romantic OTP for this character: no one asdfghj

My unpopular opinion about this character: they did her a huge disservice by hinging all of steves nostalgia on her. they reduced her to a fantasy and didnt even allow her the courtesy of speaking in endgame cause they knew that fantasy would fall apart the second she opened her mouth. ALSO why the fuck would this married lady with children have a picture of a man she worked with 10 years ago on her desk instead of her actual family?

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: wish she couldve beat steve’s dumb ass the second he showed up on the doorstep of her family home and sent him packing

#OOOF this was long #anonymous #asks

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curly-q-reviews · 5 years

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ROAD TO THE OSCAR MAYER WIENER AWARDS 2K19

Black Panther, 2018 (dir. Ryan Coogler)

Nominated for: Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Best Motion Picture of the Year, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing

ok y’all lets get this party started with a movie i didnt get to catch in theaters (i think i ended up renting it) but people were absolutely raving about it all of last year, and for good reason i gotta say! it was one of the better marvel films that came out last year (though in my humble opinion Infinity War takes the gold)

speaking of marvel lets talk about it for a spell! lets have a lil sit-down chit-chat shall we!! cause its kind of insane how much of an american media phenomenon marvel has become, they are arguably single-handedly responsible for reviving the superhero movie subgenre and now these types of movies bring hollywood more dineros than they probably know what to do with (besides make more superhero movies). what used to be a niche market where only your most hardcore of nerdy types dared to dwell has been embraced into the mainstream wholeheartedly, and now its hard to imagine the american film industry without them.

from a film critique standpoint, marvel movies seem to be a hit-or-miss as far as quality, however i cant really think of a particular marvel movie that i thought was a total piece of hot garbage (the first two Thor movies come close but they were more boring than anything else). however last year was a real success for the studio, they just kept pumping out quality movies left and right and once disney managed to get its grubby lil mouse paws on Spider-man it was a done deal baby. DC and other companies have tried again and again to recreate the success that Marvel has managed and so far they’ve failed to various degrees. Marvel’s just got that special something with their cinematic universe, some magical combo of great actors and creative directors and an ever-expanding budget that keeps them staying at the top every time.

so whats my stance on superhero movies??? well theyre not my usual cup of tea but i gotta say they’re real damn entertaining. i kinda view them like a high-speed ride at an amusement park, super fun and thrilling and exhilarating and just a real good time! but thats about as far as it goes for me, and im sure thats the same for a lot of people. to be honest its kinda refreshing to have movies that quality-wise are up to my standards that i dont have to think too hard about. so for me the movies i typically go for are like museums, whereas superhero movies (and action movies in general) are like a carnival. both entertaining and fun, but the latter is just all about letting loose and not wondering about the why’s and how’s. when i think about it, this kinda mindset is for sure a factor in how these movies got so popular, because with the shitshow that is our current government and the potential imminent death of our planet people are once again looking for movies as a form of escapism, rather than a way to get deep and philosophical and ask the tough questions and see something profound.

with that being said, despite some exceptions that have proven me wrong to my utter joy and delight (im looking at u Logan), i expect movies that are nominated for wiener awards to be more like museums than like carnivals y’know what i mean? u catchin my drift??? u takin what im dishin out???? the academy awards have a long history of prestige, of nominating the best of the best of any given year. quite a few movies that won oscars are now considered to be timeless classics. which is why superhero movies, at least the typical marvel types that are chocked to the brim with CGI and epic massive fight scenes and explosions, dont really strike me as anything that could eventually become a timeless classic. the amount of computer-generated effects alone will make these movies feel really dated as soon as like five years from now with how fast technology is progressing. i just dont see it happening.

and that brings us to the first wiener award nominee ill be talking about, Black Panther. this isnt director Ryan Coogler’s first time at the rodeo; his first feature film Fruitvale Station received critical acclaim in 2013, and the spiritual Rocky sequel Creed actually got nominated for some oscars a few years ago. so we’ve got a promising and talented director at the helm which is a great start! we’ve also got a stellar cast with the likes of michael b. jordan (who has been in all of Coogler’s films so far), lupita nyong’o, angela bassett, and forest whitaker in the bunch. it also has the astronomical financial backing of Supreme Overlord Disney so u know this is gonna be some high-quality shit.

so i’m gonna tell y’all why i think this movie got nominated for so many oscars, because in a way i do think this movie is deserving of noms from the academy. theres no denying that it is very groundbreaking for a movie of this scale and magnitude to have a black director and a nearly all-black cast. in fact, i think a lot of the crew members (including set and costume design) were black as well. thats fuckin huge my guy. and this movie was by no means a flop either; it ended up being one of the highest-grossing films of 2018 and stayed in theaters for a loooong-ass time. and not only were the people on this project mostly black, the movie itself is a story praising and showing off the beauty of african culture without exotifying or demeaning it in any way. like i can say 100% without a doubt that this movie deserves its best costume design nom cause holy shit the outfits in this movie are stunning, just the perfect blend of ancient/current tribal african aesthetics and a more futuristic sleek style that any fashion enthusiast can drool over.

i cant say much about best musical score or best sound mixing or anything like that cause it all seemed like typical marvel stuff to me and wasnt all that memorable. however i can say that the production design on this movie, while it didnt impress me as much as costuming, did still impress me. the one thing i gotta knock it on is all the fucken CGI, like whole entire towns and landscapes were digitally rendered. i wouldve been a lot more impressed and would agree more to the production design nom if they used more practical effects and real sets/locations.

so. best picture. this is where i feel the most conflicted. cause this is where i now have to look past all the pretty fancy visuals and music and look at the actual meat of this movie, its story and characters. usually best picture noms also get noms for things like best actress, best script, and best director, cause those are all really important elements of a good film. ur movie can look and sound as pretty as it wants but if the storys shit and the characters are shit and the actings shit then u dont have much going for u.

and by no means am i saying that Black Panther was shitty in these aspects, it was just well. passable. it was ok. but nothing to write home about

we got some good performances from newcomers letitia wright and chadwick boseman, lupita kills it as always, but then everyone else was like. okay. michael b. jordan didnt really do his best in this and idk if its the script’s fault or something but it was weird. and speaking of the script it was uuuuhhhhh well. not great. every time i think about that “what are those” reference i die a little inside. and the story overall wasnt really anything new when u break it down, just another “son of king struggles to take his place” narrative. and that aspect of the story couldve actually been more developed into something interesting, i found myself really intrigued with the political scenes. but there just wasnt enough of that cause they needed to make more room for the PEW PEW POW EXPLOSIONS

granted, movies with lots of shimmer but little substance have been nominated for best picture before (just look at James Cameron’s Avatar which is apparently getting a sequel now????????). and its not even that this movie is completely devoid of substance cause theres some interesting things going on plot-wise, and some stand-out characters too (shuri is the boss and no one can tell me otherwise). its just, u know, a good superhero movie. nothing really profound about the story itself except for the cultural, historical, and social context behind it.

so lemme get back to why i think this movie got a best picture nom. i think the academy wants to keep up their appearance of being #woke now by continuing to nominate more than one poc-heavy project each year, but they seem to be caring less and less about the actual overall quality of these movies. and theres even some movies on the noms list that i think actually have what it takes to be a strong oscars contender, like If Beale Street Could Talk and BlacKkKlansmen. but i think in Black Panther’s case, they were under a lot of pressure to give it top noms (or any noms at all) because of the intensely positive response this movie got, as well as the accusations of racism to people who didnt think it was as great as fans were saying.

also i have no doubt that Supreme Overlord Disney like threw piles and piles of money at the academy like they tend to do (cause i’d bet good money thats the only fucken way Incredibles 2 got nominated for anything)

well anyway ive gone on long enough about this, lemme know what y’all think. really the only nom im iffy about when it comes to this movie is Best Picture, but the others i think are well enough deserved, especially costume design. so i guess the one thing i struggle with is this: does a movie becoming a pop culture phenomenon and being groundbreaking in its cast and crew count as enough for it to be nominated for the top prize of the wiener awards, despite any fallbacks in script, direction, and acting? idk man im just hoping it doesnt get the award by default or something but then again maybe after watching all the other nominees it may turn out that the rest of them were worse than Black Panther i guess i’ll have to find out

stay tuned for my A Star Is Born review y’all stay fresh and funky eat ur vegetables stay in school u dont need drugs when ur high on life

#road to the oscar mayer weiner awards 2k19 #curly q reviews #black panther #oscars #academy awards #oscars 2019 #chadwick boseman #letitia wright #lupita nyong'o #forest whitaker #angela bassett #marvel #superhero movies #best picture #fruitvale station #creed #ryan coogler #thor #avengers infinity war

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midsvmmars · 6 years

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my main trigger for this current frustration regarding spiderman and the turmoil between the movies, interpretations, and fans comes from this post about how hoco is the better movie than any spidey one

i should start this off by saying i LOVE spiderman: homecoming as much as i love the original spiderman, that is not the problem, rather the perception of this post with over 7,000 notes and many replies of “FINALLY SOMEONE PUT IT INTO WORDS” and the blatant erasure of canon spiderman facts that are true to the story and important in favor of some lesser points and the fact that this post perfectly summarizes a lot of beliefs i see now

my first problem is “avoided uncle Ben (and his stupid mantra)” along with “ no edgy angst due to Uncle Ben’s mantra”

the fact that many people seem to agree with the fact that uncle ben and one of the most famous lines in comic history are stupid and don’t add anything to peters character other than ‘edgy angst’ is so beyond me. that edgy angst is the reason he became spiderman, that man is the reason he became spiderman, that stupid mantra is the reason he became spiderman. without it he wouldve been an inherently selfish teenager who used his powers to only his own advantage, with the mantra, ben, and angst he learned to teach himself against his misgivings and to be more selfless towards others and use his powers for good. without that there would be no spiderman, no movie, no nothing.

next is “no goddamn Harry Osbourne angst” and “The Villain Is Actually Father Of My Friend plot twist trope DONE RIGHT!!!” and “no moody friend to guilt trip him into saving himself”

the disregard of the osborns, harry specifically, is something very common throughout the spiderman fandom which i don’t get considering how important and complex they are to peter and the story and the fact that harry is arguably the most interesting character in the spiderman comics. harry osborn angst serves as a direct view to the repercussions of spidermans actions along with keeping it a secret from him. the motif that was placed in the first movie and throughout the rest of “don’t tell harry” reflects the consequences of his secret along with actually doing the villain is my fathers friend plot done right by acknowledging it throughout rather than writing the friend off completely. along with this the angst shows the internal turmoil of abandonment from his father and peter due to the hero life which is being hidden from him, and he has every right to guilt peter when in reality he has given peter everything and is still left in the dust by his friend. it shows the downside of being spiderman in a light that hits closer to home, making peter a more human character than perfect spiderman. of course i am not saying hoco shouldve included the osborns, just that they shouldnt belittle the characters and plot and ignore the importance of them to to the story in general.

next is the most popular “also, dad!Tony”

this is short and sweet. i don’t give a shit if you love dad tony/iron dad. i really dont care. what i do care about is the fact that people use it as true canon and enforce the idea that if you like spiderman you must like iron man, and that tony is the only true father figure in peters life. just don’t shove it down my throat. let me enjoy spiderman without having tony in my face constantly. thanks.

lastly is the repetition of michelle, who i have no problem with, rather the fact that i tend to see many people belittle his past love interests or really any other female in the spiderman series in favor of her in inherently problematic ways. instead of acknowledging michelles character on her own and how shes good, i’ve seen many people try to hype her up by bringing down other female characters and putting the “SHES NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS” tag line on her and making her seem better cuz shes less feminine and girly etc. LET GIRLS BE EQUAL AND HAVE THEIR OWN INTERESTS AND LOVE THEM ALL DONT BRING SOME DOWN TO BRING ANOTHER UP

but we can all agree the andrew garfield movies are shit pls and thank you

in the end i love the original and new spiderman movies so stop pitting them against each other and stop ignoring actual spiderman canon in favor of the mcu thanks 💖

#to repeat i LOVE THE NEW SPIDERMAN #TOM IS MY FAV SPIDERMAN #HOCO IS GREAT I LOVE IT SM

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demiboypercyjackson · 7 years

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Headcanon: one time on Will's birthday, all of the campers he's helped out in the past, whether it be in the infirmary or with LGBT stuff, all teamed up with Nico, hoping to make this the best birthday ever for the guy who helped them so much.

okay so this is my favorite thing in the entire world.

will is a total hermit, rarely ever comes out of the infirmary and doesnt hang out NEARLY as much as he used to, so when cecil and lou ellen start pulling him in any sort of direction outside he immediately assumes someone is injured. he kind of resigns himself to stitching someones ears back on, figures the day could be much worse, at least things are interesting at camp, but then cecil pulls him into a seemingly secluded place near the strawberry fields and will is like ? okay wheres the yellin and bleedin

but SURPRISE LOSER, its actually a huge party. people jump out, yelling surprise, throwing golden glitter and pink and white and blue and yellow streamers everywhere, a few people have noisemakers. will is surprised - this looks like just about everyone he knows, which is weird because most campers should be gone for school right now - didnt august start up a while ago? will blinks rapidly as he realized that the Mist is fading around them, bending his perception of reality, no longer hiding these big ol’ wrapped gifts and silly banners and a table with cake. he can barely focus on any of it, it all shows up so quickly. suddenly hazel is there, smiling at him the way she does, and she runs to hug him, says her hello. nico is right behind her, hugs him too for a little bit longer. that, to will, seems the most surprising thing of all; pda? from nico? with this many people? if it werent such a big party, will wouldve assumed someone had died. nico pulls away and will sees that chiron is there (because will is like his son, having been at camp for so long and having been taught healing by chiron himself, of course horse dad wont miss this) and pats will on the shoulder, giving his congratulations.

and wills just like “congratulations for what?” and everybody kinda freezes and looks at each other

“will,” nico laughs. “its august 13th. you know…. your birthday”

and wills eyes go so wide they might just pop right out of his head. “wait…. its my birthday?”

and then everyone is laughing and everyone enjoys pointing out the silly banners they made; “billy the bday boy” (“rude!” says will, causing more laughter) and “one year closer to death” and, of course, “celebration in progress, no terfs allowed”. they all make will grin and laugh. kayla and austin are sure to get will the first slice of cake, because thats the best part of having a birthday, and then they serenade him with a terrifying mash up of never gonna give you up and careless whisper. it is arguably the best song will has ever heard.

other birthday gifts include: a fanny pack, entirely white with a red ‘plus’/cross, its purpose not unlike leo’s toolbelt as it has the capability to give just about any general medical supply he’d ever need (the first thing he pulls out is a small card that says simply “Love, Dad”), as well as at least 4 new binders (one with weed leaf print that makes him laugh for like 10 minutes) and a comfortable sports bra that starts a chanting of “LET THE BOY BREATHE! LET THE BOY BREATHE!” that has him absolutely snorting with laughter, then some sweet collectable star trek trading cards as well as a special autograph of long-dead actor deforest kelley aka 'bones’, wills favorite character (a gift from nico, cecil, and lou ellen - the thing that made him happiest was knowing they got on well enough to collaborate). there were other things, odds and ends, some stim toys that will was excited for, a collection of trek and xmen comic books, some magic the gathering and mythomagic cards. the promise, from chiron, that they would start working on his 'light bending’ as will had called it now that he was old enough. hes so intensely grateful and excited and he thanks everyone a million times, lets people play around with his new cards and stims and, though hes wearing it, the fanny pack.

that is, until nico gestures to speak to him alone for a while. everyone goes back to cake, some poking at austin and kayla to give an encore. while his siblings play The Best Of Memes, vol. 420, nico leads will away and takes both his hands in his own.

nico is very quiet at first, very reserved, but he carefully explains the importance of his skull ring, then even more carefully, the importance of will to him in his heart. “and, because of this,” he whispers. “because of my caring for you, and your importance in my life, i want you to wear it from now on. this ring started my descent into a kind of darkness i thought i was meant to be in, i was meant to become. and you sparked the light that ended that part of my life. im happier now. because of you, and because of that struggling, i am happier now. i want you to wear the ring.” and will does. he wears it on his left hand, his middle finger, and he knows he’ll probably have to take it off aaaaall the time in the infirmary but right now that doesnt matter, because the ring is one finger away from a promise. it was odd to have such a romantic moment happening while boney m’s rasputin played in the background, but it was oddly suited to the moment and to their relationship.

all in all, it is easily wills best birthday ever.

- mod will

#will solace #trans will solace #autistic will solace #disabled demigods #chiron #solangelo #nico di angelo #cecil markowitz #lou ellen #cabin 7 #pjo #hoo #toa #mod will #iris message

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isaacathom · 5 years

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hintero as a 75% chance of having bastards on account of just being, a Fuck, but what impact that would have a different matter. I don’t think any of his bastards are currently on the chart, or at least i hope not because that means he’s been fucking /other peoples wives/ which is definitely one way to punish your wife for infidelity, i guess. fuck other peoples wives instead. boy howdy right. plus some of the kids in the right age bracket end up marrying his legit kids and boooooyyyyyy fucking howdy id pay for that ntot o be what occurs. some are also absolutely 100% not Shonyul bastards - for instance Lord Taren Ishir is 100% Larions’ legitimate son, because Hintero would never go so far as to even consider fucking Larion and she would probably murder him before he could.

the kerinston kids are a different matter in that they COULD probably be shonyuls bastards, but one would Hope they aren’t. Particularly Yumi Kerinston, who married Daleon Emaldo. While that would explain the early death of their son Brimeon Emaldo, its kinda Fucked and im not down for it. Even if Yumi was basically the last like, ~eligible maiden~ for a perpetual bachelor dickhead like Daleon, if they were actually half siblings even Hintero wouldve gone ‘surely theres Someone else’ and Yumi wouldve gone ‘yea I’m sure theres someone else. what about one of my Zubris cousins?’ and we would have avoided it. Even if Yumi isn’t aware of the relationship she wouldve tried to dodge anyway (she DID try to dodge, for what its worth)

Glorion Kerinston is safe re: incest shenanigannery but also What would be the point of that. not to mention I don’t even thing Undara would be particularly interested in fucking Hintero on principle, unless she was deliberately trying to fuck over her own husband. and while thats possible considering she’s an Ilnon supporter instead of an Ishir-Kerinston supporter? I don’t think she would tbh.

he probably didnt fuck his sister in law. probably. actually yea no he didnt fuck his sister in law. thank god eh. cucking his cousin is also unlikely even IF Stelia is the right age to potential be one of his bastards. Her being one of his bastards would not really change anything (Stelia and Brandeon still aren’t related) but it WOULD be kinda fucked, so, im gonna say he didnt fuck his cousins wife. He definitely didn’t fuck his actual cousin Riala - Princes Zaloren and Treveon are definitely not his kids. Theres 0 chance Riala would cop to that.

point being its... mostly unlikely he had bastards with anyone on the chart, so noone on the chart is his bastard. god bless. there is arguably room in the Tellis chart (specifically than Hintero fucked Marchioness Hana of Tellis), which would actually make Grelan probably his own son, which is a Fuck of a Way to go about it honestly. that would be funny... like extremely hilarious. because even though Grelan is like, 9 years younger than Muna and is not a succession threat, he would be a Shonyul and boy would that fucking shatter the Shonyuls, right. itd be fucking hilarious. whether that is a realistic series of events is a different matter entirely. its in character for Hintero to do it, and it perhaps adds an interesting twist to the idea of the Shonyuls deliberately betraying Brimeon (ie that it was actually a miscommunication between Hintero and Muna, with Hintero being genuine and Muna being insincere in her support of Grelan). Whether Hana would go for it? eeeeeh? She’s not exactly a character so I don’t really know what the fuck her deal is. Maybe she’s down, maybe she isnt. By the time she would be clowning around with Hintero (like march 392 or so, since Grelan and Brandeon are actually born the same year) she already has one kid, Lady Idena. There’s no issue in the succession way, and even were something to happen to Idena, Hana being the title holder (presumptive, her dad didnt die for 23 years after that) would keep her bastard son in succession so long as she claimed him as legitimate. Issues only arise on Hintero’s side as to whether he claims Grelan as his legitimate son.

plus theres the very nice fact that Grelan wouldn’t look out of place if he was hintero’s bastard. The only reason it was obvious that Brandeon was a bastard was because his presumed father, Brasteon Dovaldun, was from a family with a very distinctive appearance, with their red eyes and hair descending from notable Suungkee ancestors (elves, yall). Hintero and Hana, as probably full humans, have no such strange distinctions and its not as though a hair colour difference would be noteworthy. Both have brown hair, so the worlds your oyster in there. eye colour might be more of a tell, as Hana and her husband Yola have fairly light coloured eyes and Hintero’s are quite dark, but its something that can be hand-waved. if the politics or genetics were ever discussed, they would not have posed an issue. it honestly just boils down to whether Hana was down to clown, and since Im the Bitch in control here, I say why the fuck not. I think its fun. I think it plays more into the Hintero vs Muna dynamic which evolves over the course of 425 and the Second Vosti War. its fucking Great, yall. yeehaw. i just think its Neat. it doesnt even need to become public knowledge - all it needs to do is inform public actions. which it would :)c

he would have other bastards tho. is Yola Tellis another of his bastards, or just Grelan? In the 9 year gap its possible Hana and Hintero sort of fell out and that Yola jr is genuinely Yola sr’s son. since Yola jr isn’t Hintero’s kid at all. His other bastards are spread out elsewhere and are likely less relevant overall due to the smaller status afforded by their parentage (aka as not being imperial or imperial adjacent, unless some of them are Zubris or Birtons, who are just as imperial adjacent as the Tellis family). I don’t have charts for those families tho and i dont Plan to Make any. We’re gonna be chucking the other bastards in some minor families for ease. Too lazy to do it any other way :P

so the tl;dr Hintero definitely has bastards outside of Brandeon Wardis (who isn’t really his bastard, rather his wifes, but counts as his because like, legal shit), notably Brimeon IV’s legal heir, Lord Grelan Tellis. This will impact some of the character motives heading into 425 and the Second Vosti War :3c

#story blogging #>:3c fun times #im just complicating everything to do with the shonyuls because theyre a Very complex bunch

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justaddcolor · 7 years

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About Death Note

Watched the Netflix Death Note movie and… 😐.

Listen, I tried to just unabashedly like it. There are certainly things to like about it. But some things I couldn’t get past.

It felt equal parts campy 80s teen movie and survival horror and not in a good way. The film didn’t seem to know what it wanted. Having a teenage romance montage pasted over a literal murder spree does not feel good, and it’s not presented in a way that seems logical. I really wanted to like some of those bits too, because when he brings Mia in on the secret I honestly giggled, but it feels very jarring. At no point does this movie seem to want to be funny, so the violently stereotypical teenage/highschool movie tropes just feel dumb. The movie as a whole felt somewhere between what edgy college freshmen come up with after Philosophy class, and the kind of thing an aspiring school shooter would consider inspirational.

Like the thought “I hope this doesn’t provoke disenfranchised teenaged murderers” actually crossed my mind. Light felt like an idiot compared to the anime, and sure the movie makes the barest of attempts at labeling him an intelligent kid, but definitely not in any way that makes the ending acceptable. Without spoiling, if you care, they basically pull off the whole “you see, he planned this entire thing!” Which is pretty freaking wild considering Mia was the only reason he hadn’t been caught well before. But ok.

Ryuk looked cool and Dafoe’s voice acting was great but the whole “don’t trust Ryuk” thing felt way overstated. Mia’s transformation from girlfriend who is weirdly ok with murder to Harley Quinn but not at all likeable also felt kind of “wtf”. Its been a few years since I originally binged the Anime, so my thoughts were along the lines of “Ryuk/the book is making her go mad? Maybe? Or she was always like this??” The movie doesn’t exactly clarify.

The story feels like it can’t stand alone OR in context of the anime, because without that context it’s hella confusing and with it its pretty dumb.

There’s talk of a sequel? And I don’t want to have to watch it but like maybe it’ll be a full story instead of this weird hellishly paced thing. Like we spent so much time watching them fall in…whatever you call a romance based on murder cause it’s not love. Meanwhile I want backstory man. I think the phrase Death God was mentioned once, and not even like “I’m Ryuk, a Death God, meaning…”

Also, the sequence with Watari trying to track down L’s identity honestly what the fuck was that that could’ve been a movie all by itself tbh. You mean to tell me L was raised in basically Black Widow’s red room but for detectives and you want to cut into that with scenes from a high school dance???

Basically, it was a mess, but with potential? LIke honestly, most of my complaints feel more closely tied to the Director and Editor(s)’ choices. Pacing, writing etc. However, Nat was blah at best.

But before I move on, here’s that part where I bring up the whitewashing thing so proceed to your safespace if you gotta.

Is it whitewashing?

Heck yea.

Does that make it unwatchable?

Let’s go with a solid…ehh?

Ok so here’s the thing, making it an “American story” is not a bad thing at it’s core. We do it all the time. Heroes from fiction have been changed to suit a culture for like. Ever. Fine.

The two problems are

1. Like a lot of stories, they’re born of specific regional conditions or cultural histories, and some things will literally get lost in translation if we have to Americanize everything. Shinigami, for example, have a specific place in Japanese culture and religions. Even Light’s perspective on justice may be a product of his origin- Japan has a nearly 100% conviction rate because their legal system basically considers you guilty until proven otherwise. So it’s not that these stories can’t be shared worldwide, its just that sometimes special care needs to be taken. And this movie didn’t even attempt to adapt those things, which I really think wouldve made this whole experience more forgivable. For an American audience they could’ve easily said Ryuk was some kind of demonic manifestation or the Grim Reaper or anything. Instead they just decided most of the audience was familiar with the anime, and therefore in the know. Statistically, that’s probably correct. But nobody wanted the sparknotes version of Death Note, and it’s doubtful that this movie will be able to hold itself up on the benevolence of anime fans.

2. And arguably the biggest- In America especially, we supposedly pride ourselves as being ethnically diverse. So if that’s the case, its unfair, and even illogical to say that the American everyman that all can relate to must be white.

Specifically I remember watching the first scene of the movie. It serves to introduce the Lead and his moral position. They do this by showing him respond to another student being bullied. That student is, at least at a glance, Asian. Wow. Guess there are Asians in Seattle? Wild.

The only other Asian character is Watari, and I’ve got to say, considering they took the effort to change Light’s name to make him fit his new ethnicity, it looks pretty weird that they left his race alone. Read into that if you want.

And for the record, as much as I like Lakeith Stanfield, no, that’s not better. Erasing Asian characters is not ok just because the actor isn’t white. Spaces should be accessible for actors of all colors. And frankly, when Hollywood does shit like this it just perpetuates the idea that all non-white people are basically interchangeable. Although yes, I liked his acting. I felt uncomfortable just looking at him, and I’m hoping that was the point.

And yes, there are perfectly legitimate reasons to change the ethnicities of actors.

My community college cast a Latinx person for the lead in Raisin in the Sun. That’s due to a legitimate shortage of black talent. Hollywood casting agents do not have that excuse.

Watching the movie I wondered if they might really ride the “disenfranchised white youth with a bad home life” angle, because making a statement about American culture and the excessive number of mass killings would’ve been waay more interesting than the thing I did watch, and statistically would’ve given a great reason for why the lead had to be white other than what basically boils down to “probably unconscious racism”

I’ll be honest the whole film was way better when I imagined if not for the Death Note Light would be attempting to construct pipe bombs for the school’s basement or something. That entitled, self righteous kind of justice? The misdirected teenage rage and angst? Could’ve framed his entire spree much better, especially considering where the movie would’ve ended without that pretty blatant fix it.

#death note #netflx #long ass review #tw: sjw shit #:P

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caredogstips · 7 years

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Katy Perry’s naked vote reveals more than she required | Barbara Ellen

The singer is not the first potent female to apply nudity to raise awareness. But note that humankinds simply dont perceive they have to behave this way

The singer Katy Perry, a Hillary Clinton supporter, has produced a Voting naked video, counselling people to vote in the US election. Madonna responded with her own Voting naked photo on Instagram, demonstrating her bare shoulders, also counselling people to back Clinton, saying that ladies need to support each other. Girls Run The World now they have to get out and start supporting one another. No more misogynist feminists! No more misogony[ sic ]. Get out and vote, wrote Madonna, with good planneds, albeit bad spelling.

The image was later removed, together with the one where Madonna had photoshopped Clinton between her legs.( Stay classy, Ms Ciccone !) Both singers endeavours did the job by effecting a media commotion. Were their actions successful in a deeper feminist room? In my view, quite the opposite.

Its obvious what they were trying to do; in fact, Perry says that her whole target was to be click-bait. In fairness, Perrys video is ditsy-humorous rather than sexualised. Her tits and genitals are blanked out with pitch-dark, modesty-style pieces; her “hairs-breadth” is styled as a rats nest with lollipops sticking out of it. While “hes still” up, Madonnas image simply opened the mark of nudity.

Theyre not the first to call nudity to raise awareness.( Famously, there was the Peta campaign Id rather get naked than wear fur, featuring various supermodels, one of whom, Naomi Campbell, went on to rather tell the side down, by, you approximated it, wearing coat .) Moreover, the latter are doing it for a good campaign , not out of a feeling of the now-routine monetised, sexualised exhibitionism.( I dont are well aware of you lot, but, as a heterosexual lady, Im officially with Kim Kardashians constant updates on the position of her tits and arse .) Likened with that, its pretty cool that Madonna subscribed Perry substantiating Clinton.

However, theres something fear, something distinctly non-feminist about these naked voting efforts. In that, with the semi-exception of the actor Mark Ruffalo, a fellow Clinton supporter( whod previously jokingly promised to go naked in his next cinema ), there were no prominent males opting for the nudity-equals-attention option.

There were no equivalent husbands running around butt-naked with modesty rows and lollipops stuck in their “hairs-breadth” or provocatively reclining their bare shoulders into the camera lens. So why did these improbably famous, successful women do it?

To an extent, wheres the harm? This is an era where retaliate porn edges on epidemic diseases and there have been wretched attempts to shame celebrities with their own embezzled explicit images. Its arguable that by manipulating their own nudity, Madonna and Perry are subverting the world-wide sexualisation of women.

The logic here is that theres a constant scrabble to look at famous ladies naked, to reduce them and all other women to body parts. Well, these famous ladies can play this game on their own terms and youll listen to their theme too.

At which place, the polemic frays and deteriorates. If the status of women feels that the only acces she can authority attention is by taking her robes off, then her word is a shriek lost in a hurricane.

However good the case, it doesnt make up for the core rationale that the quickest, easiest mode for the status of women to get attention is to disrobe. Men simply dont was of the view that they have to behave this acces they envisage the quickest, easiest space to get attention is to open their mouths.

The fact that both these successful women play-act their well-intentioned ethical striptease on behalf of a selected candidate just does it seem even more skewed and desperate.

If, among other things, Clinton is fighting for respect for women beyond their worth( or absence of it) as sexual/ post-sexual objectives, then Id wager that the very last thought she necessitates is for even her boosters to peddle sex.

Foxhunting? Call the dogs off for good

Members of the Holderness Hunt in East Yorkshire, as a brand-new canvas found that any attempts to repeal the Hunting Act “wouldve been” deep unpopular among the majority of the British public. Image: John Giles/ PA

When are people who resist the foxhunting outlaw going to accept theyre drummed? An Ipsos Mori poll says that any attempt to repeal the Hunting Act would be deeply unpopular with 84% of the British populace. The canvas was commissioned by the League Against Cruel Sports, which could hardly claim no bias, but the findings are clear enough. There was also vast opposition to hare coursing( 91%) and deer hunting (8 8 %).

So by an overwhelming majority, the British public expresses the hope that the hunting proscription stay in place. Whod have thought it? Well, actually, most people would. Common sense to indicate that the only people who oppose the hunting forbid are the relatively limited number who hunt. Normal parties are unlikely to say: Well, I dont hunt myself, but I still feel very strongly that they should abolish the laws and regulations censoring the practice of live animals being chased and ripped to parts by hounds, pursued by pony riders in masquerade costume costume.

However often the pro-hunt vestibule tries to chassis this as matters of personal freedom, most people are quite rightly repulsed by the idea of swine being made to suffer and die for what is effectively only a niche boasting seek. In 2016, the vermin control arguing is too becoming silly. There are quite a few city foxes these days. Should we start insisting that competitive cyclists chase them around the streets, must be accompanied by packs of braying hounds? Perhaps skateboarders could join in?

Polls such as this make a mockery of environment secretary Andrea Leadsom went on to say that she intends to take a fresh look at the foxhunting forbid. Heres your fresh look, Ms Leadsom 84% against, and not likely to go down much in the near future.

Sooty and Soo: greatest glove story ever told?

Matthew Corbett with Sooty, Sweep and Soo. Picture: FremantleMedia Ltd/ Rex Feature

Readers of a delicate disposition, please look away now there is news of a Sooty-themed copulation scandal. In the 1960 s, there was a sequence when Sootys creator, the late Harry Corbett, showed Sooty should have a girlfriend, Soo. Some parties, including the displays farmer and a BBC governor, were scandalised, saying it puts in place sexuality into a childrens programme. The issue generated so much contention the director general, Hugh Carleton Greene, had to intervene.

All of which has been indicated by Corbetts son and Sooty-heir, Matthew, in the documentary, Sooty Ungloved , which only enjoyed its, ahem, world premiere in Guiseley, West Yorkshire, where the Corbett family lived for 35 times. Ive yet to view Sooty Ungloved , but Im thoughts a Watergate-vibe, boasting Sweep interviewed with his face in semi-darkness.

In the end, the DG regulated Sooty could have Soo, but that the puppets must never touch( what sordid traditions was Carleton Greene foreseeing ?). What a wonderful tale, entertaining, but also a bittersweet comment on the lost innocence of a person. A lost opening, more; having regard to the possibility, Sooty and Soo could have achieved great things, stimulating school sex-education classes.

Statement will be opened later today

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post Katy Perry’s naked vote reveals more than she required | Barbara Ellen appeared first on caredogstips.com.

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apsbicepstraining · 7 years

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The secret of savor: why we like which is something we like | Tom Vanderbilt

The Long Read: How does a anthem we detest at first discovering become a favourite? And when we try to look different, how come we end up looks a lot like everybody else?

If you had asked me, when I was 10, to forecast my life as an adult, I would probably have sketched out something like this: I would be driving a Trans Am, a Corvette, or some other muscle vehicle. My residence would boast a mammoth collecting of pinball machines. I would sip sophisticated alcohols( like Baileys Irish Cream ), read Robert Ludlum romances, and blast Van Halen while sitting in an easy chair wearing sunglasses. Now that I am at a point to actually be able to realise every one of these feverishly foreseen flavors, they view zero interest( well, perhaps the pinball machines in a weak minute ).

It was not just that my 10 -year-old self could not predict whom I would become but that I was incapable of suspecting that my flavors could experience such wholesale change. How could I know what I would want if I did not know who I would be?

One problem is that we do not apprehend the effect of experiencing situations. We may instinctively realise the authorities concerned will tire of our favourite meat if we gobble too much of it, but we might underestimate how much more we are to be able like something if only we consume it more often. Another issue is psychological salience, or the things we pay attention to. In the moment we buy a consumer good that offers cashback, the offer is claiming our courtesy; it is likely to be have influenced the buy. By the time we get home, the salience fades; the cashback croaks unclaimed. When I was 10, what mattered in a car to me was that it be cool and fast. What did not matter to me were monthly pays, side-impact crash shield, being able to fit a stroller in the back, and wanting to avoid the impression of is available on a midlife crisis.

Even when we look back and be seen to what extent much our flavors have changed, the idea that we will change evenly in the future seem to be mystify us. It is what remains tattoo removal practitioners in business. The psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues have identified the illusion that for numerous, the current is a watershed instant at which they have finally become the person or persons they will be for the rest of their lives.

In one venture, they found that people were willing to pay more money to check their favourite strap play-act 10 times from now than they were willing to pay to see their favourite banding from 10 years ago play now. It is reminiscent of the moment, looking through an old-time photo album, when you visualize an earlier picture of yourself and declare, Oh my God, that “hairs-breadth”! Or Those corduroys! Just as photographs of ourselves can appear jarring since we are do not ordinarily read ourselves as others encounter us, our previous appreciations, viewed to areas outside, from the perspective of what looks good now, come as a surprise. Your hairstyle per se was possibly not good or bad, simply a reflection of contemporary penchant. We say, with condescension, I cant believe parties actually dressed like that, without realising we ourselves are currently wearing what will be considered bad flavor in the future.

One of the reasons we cannot predict our future preferences is one of the things that stirs those very preferences change: novelty. In the social sciences of experience and likings , novelty is a rather elusive phenomenon. On the one side, we crave originality, which defines a arena such as manner( a battlefield of ugliness so perfectly unbearable, quipped Oscar Wilde, that we have to alter it every a period of six months ). As Ronald Frasch, the dapper president of Saks Fifth Avenue, once told me, on the status of women designer storey of the flagship store: The first thing “the consumers ” asks when they come into the accumulation is, Whats brand-new? They dont want to know what was; they want to know what is. How strong is this impulse? We will sell 60% of what were going to sell the firstly four weeks the very best are on the floor.

But we too adore intimacy. There are many who believe we like what we are used to. And yet if this were exclusively true , good-for-nothing “wouldve been” change. There would be no new prowes forms , no new musical genres , no new makes. The economist Joseph Schumpeter was contended that capitalisms character was in educating people to want( and buy) new situations. Makes drive economic change, he wrote, and buyers are taught to want brand-new happenings, or circumstances which differ in some respect or other from those which they have been in the habit of using.

A lot of days, people dont know what they crave until you demo it to them, as Steve Jobs gave it. And even then, they still might not miss it. Apples ill-fated Newton PDA device, as charming as it now examines in this era of smartphone as human prosthesis, was arguably more new at the time of its release, foreseeing the requirements and actions that were not yet amply realised. As Wired described it, it was a entirely new category of invention passing an entirely new building housed in a pattern part that represented a completely new and daring design language.

So , novelty or acquaintance? As is often the instance, the answer lies somewhere in between, on the midway spot of some optimal U-shaped curve storying the new and the known. The noted industrial designer Raymond Loewy sensed this optimum in what he worded the MAYA stage, for most advanced, yet acceptable. This was the moment in a product design repetition when, Loewy quarrelled, defiance to the unfamiliar contacts the threshold of a shock-zone and fighting to buying changes in. We like the new as long as it reminds us in some way of the old.

Anticipating how much our flavors will change is hard-boiled because we cannot find past our intrinsic resist to the unfamiliar. Or how much we will change when we do and how each change will open the door to another change. We forget just how fleeting even the most jarring novelty is also possible. When you had your firstly swallow of beer( or whisky ), you probably did not slap your knee and exclaim, Where has this been all my life? It was, Beings like this?

We come to like beer, but it is arguably incorrect to bawl brew an acquired feeling, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett indicates, because it is not that first taste that people are coming to like. If beer gone on savor to me the room the first sip tasted, he writes, I would never have gone on drinking brew. Place of the problem is that booze is a scandalize to the system: it savours like nothing that has come before, or at least good-for-nothing delightful. New music or prowes can have the same effects. In a New Yorker profile, the music farmer Rick Rubin recounted that when he firstly sounded Pretty Hate Machine, the album by Nine Inch Nails, he did not care for it. But it soon became his favourite. Faced with something discordantly novel, we dont ever have the reference points to absorb and digest it, Rubin alleged. Its a bit like memorizing a new expression. The album, like the brew, was not an acquired savour, because he was not hearing the same album.

Looking back, we can find it hard to believe we did not like something we are today do. Current popularity gets projected backwards: we forget that a now ubiquitous hymn such as the Romantics What I Like About You was never a make or that recently in vogue antique babe identifies such as Isabella or Chloe, which seem to speak to some once-flourishing habit, were never popular.

It now seems impossible to imagine, a few decades ago, the gossip provoked by the now widely cherished Sydney Opera House. The Danish inventor, Jrn Utzon, was essentially driven from the country, his mention extended unuttered at the ceremony, the sense of national gossip was palpable towards this harbourside monstrosity. Not exclusively did the building not fit the traditional anatomy of an opera house; it did not fit the conventional word of private buildings. It was as foreign as its architect.

The truth is, most people perhaps did not know what to shape of it, and our default setting, faced with an insecure unknown, is detesting. Frank Gehry, talking about his iconic, widely admired Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, admitted that it took a couple of years for me to start to like it, actually. The inventor Mark Wigley suggests that maybe we only ever learn something when some structure we think of as foreign causes us and we withstand. But sometimes, many times, in the middle of the fighting, we end up loving this thing that has elicited us.

Fluency begets liking. When shown personas of buildings, designers have rated them as least complex than laypersons did; in other words, they read them more fluently, and the buildings seem less foreign. The role of the inventor, shows Wigley, is not to give the client exactly what he was asking for in other words, to cater to current taste but to change the notion of what one can ask for, or to project future delicacies no one knew they had. No one supposed an opera house could look like the Sydney Opera House until Utzon, taking his idea from a peeled orange, said it could. The nature changed around the building, in response to it, which is why, in the strange messages of one architecture commentator, Utzons breathtaking build appears better today than ever.

A few decades from now, person will inevitably look with dread upon a new house and answer, The Sydney Opera House , now theres a build. Why cant we construct acts like that any more?

This argument for example, Why isnt music as good as it used to be? manifests an historic collection bias, one colourfully described by the designer Frank Chimero. Make me let you in on a little secret, he writes. If you are hearing about something age-old, it is almost certainly good. Why? Because nobody wants to talk about shitty old-time stuff, but lots of parties still talking here shitty brand-new material, because they are still trying to figure out if it is shitty or not. The past wasnt better, we just forgot about all the shitty shit.

The only guarantee we have of savour is the fact that it will change.

In a 2011 sketch on the substantiate Portlandia , the obsessive sardonic catalogue of the hipster mores of the Oregon city, an exaggeratedly posturing persona known as Spyke with chin whisker, lobe-stretching saucer earrings, and a fixed-gear bike is evidence treading past a prohibit. He pictures some people inside, equally adorned with the trappings of a certain kind of cool, and establishes an supporting nod. A few days later, he agent a clean-shaven guy wearing khakis and a dress shirt at the bar. Aw, cmon! he hollers. Guy like that is hanging out here? That barroom is so over ! It exclusively gets worse: he ensure his straight-man nemesis astride a fixed-gear bicycle, partaking in shell artistry, and wearing a kuki-chins beard all of which, he churlishly warns, is over. A year later, we check Spyke, freshly shorn of whisker, wearing business casual, and having a banal gossip, roosted in the very same barroom that produced off the whole cycles/second. The nemesis? He procrastinates outside, scornfully swearing the bar to be over.

The sketch wonderfully encapsulates the notion of savour as a kind of ceaseless action machine. This machine is driven in part by the oscillations of originality and knowledge, of hunger and satiation, that strange internal calculus that effects us to tire of food, music, the colouring orange. But it also represents driven in part by the subtle the two movements of parties trying to be like one another and beings trying to be different from each other. There is a second-guessing various kinds of skirmish here , not unknown to strategists of cold warera game theory( in which players are rarely behaving on perfect information ). Or, indeed, to readers familiar with Dr Seusss Sneetches, the mythical star-adorned mortals who abruptly trench their decorations when they detect their challenger plain-bellied counterparts have idols upon thars.

That taste might move in the kind of never-ending repetition that Portlandia hypothesised is not so far-fetched. A French mathematician named Jonathan Touboul identified a phenomenon of searching alike trying to look different, or what he called the hipster influence. Unlike cooperative systems, in which everyone might concur in a coordinated fashion on what decisions to build, the hipster result follows, he hints, where individuals try to make decisions in opposition to the majority.

Because no one knows exactly what other people are going to do next, and information is also possible noisy or retarded, there can also be the times of brief synchronisation, in which non-conformists are inadvertently aligned with the majority. Spyke, in reality, might have had to see several people doing shell art maybe it even suddenly appeared at a store in the mall before soon jam-pack it in. And because there are varying degrees of hipness, person or persons may choose to wade into current trends later than another, that person is followed by another, and so on, until, like an astronomical adventurer chasing a dead whiz, there is nothing actually there any more. The quest for distinctiveness are also welcome to generate conformity.

The Portlandia sketch actually goes well beyond appreciation and illuminates two central, if seemingly contradictory, strands of human behaviour. The first is that we want to be like other parties. The social being, in the degree that he is social, is virtually imitative, wrote the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, in his 1890 notebook The Laws of Imitation. Imitating others, what is known as social learn, is an evolutionary adaptive strategy; that is, it helps you exist, even prosper. While it is considered to be in other species, there are no better social learners than humen , none that take that knowledge and continue to build upon it, through consecutive generations.

The sum of this social learning culture is what draws humans so unique, and so uniquely successful. As the anthropologist Joseph Henrich documents, humans have foraged in the Arctic, reaped cultivates in the tropics, and lived pastorally in deserts. This is not because we were “ve been meaning to”, but because we learned to.

In their journal Not by Genes Alone, the anthropologists Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson use the sample of a bitter flower that turns out to have medicinal value. Our sensory structure would understand the fierce as potentially harmful and thus inedible. Instinctively, “theres no reason” we should want to eat it. But someone eats it regardless and experiences some curiously beneficial make. Someone else assures this and imparts it a try. We take our medicine in spite of its bitter experience, they write , not because our sensory psychology has progressed to make it less bitter, but because the idea that it has therapeutical quality has spread through the population.

People imitate, and cultural activities becomes adaptive, they insist, because learning from others is more efficient than trying everything out on your own through costly and time-consuming trial and error. The same is as true for people now speaking Netflix or TripAdvisor evaluates as it was for primitive foragers trying to figure out which nutrients were poison or where to find irrigate. When there are too many alternatives, or the answer does not seem obvious, it seems better to go with the flow; after all, you are able to miss out on something good.

But if social reading is so easy and effective, it creates the question of why anyone does anything different to begin with. Or indeed why someone might vacate innovative activities. It is an issue asked of evolution itself: why is there so much substance for natural selection to sieve through? The master or innovator who was attacked in his daytime seems like some kind of genetic altruist, sacrificing his own immediate fitness for some future payoff at high levels of the group.

Boyd and Richerson hint there is an optimal balance between social and individual learning in any group. Too many social learners, and the ability to innovate is lost: people know how to catch that one fish since they are learned it, but what happens when that fish dies out? Too few social learners, and beings might be so busy trying to learn situations on their own that national societies does not thrive; while people were busily fabricating their own better bow and arrow, person forgot to actually get food.

Perhaps some ingrained sense of the evolutionary utility of this differentiation is one reason why humans are so snapped between wanting to belong to a group and wanting to be distinct mortals. Parties want to feel that their feelings are not unique, hitherto they experience anxiety when told they are exactly like another person. Think of the giddy anxiety you feel when a co-worker is demonstrated by wearing a similar clothe. We try some happy medium, like the Miss America player in Woody Allens Bananas who responds to a reporters interrogate, Differences of mind should be tolerated, but not when theyre extremely different.

If all we did was conform, there would be no delicacy; nor would there be penchant if no one conformed. We try to select the right-sized group or, that the working group is too large, we elect a subgroup. Be not just a Democrat but a centrist Democrat. Do not just like the Beatles; be a fan of Johns.

Illustration by Aart-Jan Venema

When discriminating yourself from the mainstream is becoming too wearying, you can always ape some version of the mainstream. This was the premise behind the normcore anti-fashion tendency, in which formerly forcefully fashionable beings were said to be downshifting, out of sheer tirednes, into humdrum New Balance sneakers and unremarkable denim. Normcore was more conceptual skill activity than business case study, but one whose premise the most different stuff to do is to reject being different altogether, moved the manifesto seemed so probable it was practically wish fulfilled into existence by a media that feasts upon novelty. As new as normcore seemed, Georg Simmel spoke about it a century ago: If obedience to fashion consists in impersonation of an example, conscious inattention of pattern represents same mimicry, but under an inverse sign.

And so back to Spyke. When he felt his drive for peculiarity( which he shared with others who were like him) threatened by someone to areas outside the group, he moved on. But all the things he experienced were threatened the chin beard, the shell arts and that he was willing to walk away from, were no longer practical. We signal our identity simply in certain regions: Spyke is not likely to change his label of toilet paper or toothbrush merely because he hears it is shared by his nemesis. When everyone listened to records on vinyl, the latter are a commodity material that allowed one be interested to hear music; it was not until they were nearly driven to extinction as a technology that they became a mode to signal ones identity and as I write, there are stimulates of a cassette revival.

In a revealing experimentation carried out within Stanford University, Berger and Heath sold Lance Armstrong Foundation Livestrong wristbands( at a time when they were becoming increasingly popular) in a target dormitory. The next week, they sold them in a dorm knows we being somewhat geeky. A week afterwards, the number of target dorm circle wearers dropped by 32%. It was not that people from the specific objectives dorm detested the geeks or so they said it was that they thought they were not like them. And so the yellow segment of rubber, tattered for a good stimulate, became a means of signalling identity, or savour. The only path the target group could avoid being symbolically linked with the geeks was to abandon the feeling and move on to something else. As much a sought for novelty, brand-new experiences can be a conscious rejection of what has come before and a distancing from those now enjoying that penchant. I liked that stripe before they got big-hearted, becomes the common refrain.

What our flavours say about us is primarily that we want to be like other people whom we like and who have those appreciations up to a extent and unlike others who have other savors. This is where the idea of simply socially reading what everyone else is do, get complicated. Sometimes we read what others are doing and then stop doing that act ourselves.

Then there is the question of whether we are conscious of picking up a practice from someone else. When someone knows he is being influenced by another and that other person to know each other very, the hell is exhortation; when someone is unaware he is being influenced, and the influencer is unaware of his influence, that is contagion. In delicacy, we are rarely presumed to be picking up happenings haphazardly. Through prestige bias, for example, we learn from people who are regarded socially substantial. The classic rationale in sociology was always trickle-down: upper-class people hugged some preference, beings lower down followed, then upper-class people scorned the taste and cuddled some brand-new taste.

Tastes can change when people aspire to be different from other parties; they can change when we are trying to be like other people. Groups transmit experiences to other groups, but savor themselves can help create groups. Small, apparently insignificant differences what kind of coffee one boozes become real spots of culture bicker. Witness the varieties of mark now available in things that were once preferably homogeneous merchandises, like coffee and blue jeans; who had even heard of single ancestry or selvage a few decades ago?

There is an virtually incongruous cycles/second: private individuals, such as Spyke in Portland, wants to be different. But in wanting to express that difference, he seeks out other persons who share those changes. He conforms to the group, but the conformings of these working groups, in being alike, increase their gumption of change from other groups, just as the Livestrong bracelet wearers took them off when they accompanied other groups wearing them. The be adopted by delicacies is driven in part by this social jockeying. But this is no longer the whole picture.

In a famed 2006 venture , an organization of people were given the chance to download anthems for free from an internet site after they had listened to and ranked the hymns. When the participants could see what previous downloaders had chosen, they were more likely to follow that behaviour so popular songs became more popular, less popular songs became less so.

When parties established selects on their own, the choices were more predictable; beings were more likely to simply pick the sungs they said were best. Knowing what other listeners did was not enough to completely reorder publics musical penchant. As the scientist Duncan Watts and his co-author Matthew Salganik wrote: The best carols never do very badly, and the most difficult anthems never do extremely well. But when others alternatives are evident, there was greater risk for the less good to do better, and vice versa. The pop chart, like delicacy itself, does not operate in a vacuum.

The route to the top of the charts has in theory get more democratic, less top-down, more unpredictable: it took a viral video to assistants induce Pharrells Happy a pop a year after its liberate. But the hierarchy of popularity at the top, formerly launched, is steeper than ever. In 2013, it was estimated that the top 1% of music acts took residence 77% of all music income.

While record firms still try to engineer notoriety, Chris Molanphy, a music critic and obsessive analyst of the pa maps, disagrees it is the general public fouling one another who now decide if something is a reach. The viral wizard Gangnam Style, he notes, was virtually coerced on to radio. Nobody operated that into being; that was clearly the general public being charmed by this goofy video and telling one another, Youve got to watch this video.

Todays ever-sharper, real-time data about people actual listening action strongly fortifies the feedback loop-the-loop. We always knew that people liked the familiar, Molanphy responds. Now we know exactly when they flip the depot and, wow, if they dont already know a lyric, they truly throw the station. For the industry, there is an almost hopeless is making an effort to alter, as fast as possible, the brand-new into the familiar.

Simply to live in a large city is to dwell among a maelstrom of options: there are seemed like it was gonna be by numerous guilds of importance more choices of things to buy in New York than there are preserved species on countries around the world. R Alexander Bentley is an anthropologist at the University of Durham in the UK. As he applied it to me: By my recent count there were 3,500 different laptops on the market. How does anyone make a utility-maximising alternative among all those? The costs of reading which one is truly better is nearly beyond the individual; there may, in fact, actually be little that scatters them in terms of quality, so any one acquire over another might simply manifest random copying.

For the Spanish philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset, columnist of the 1930 pamphlet The Revolt of the Masses, journalistic shipments from adventurers seems to thrust one into a vertiginous global gyre. What would he stimulate of the current situation, where a spurt of tweets comes even before the interrupting report proclamations, which then turn into wall-to-wall coverage, followed by a recall piece in the next days newspaper? He would have to factor in social media, one has a peripheral, real-time awareness of any number of people whereabouts, achievements, status updates, via any number of platforms.

Ortega announced this the increase of life. If media( large broadcasters creating audiences) helped define an era of mass society, social media( audiences establishing ever more gatherings) help define our age of mass individualism. The internet is exponential social discover: you have ever more ways to learn what other parties are doing; how many of the more than 13,000 reviews of the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas do you need to read on TripAdvisor before making a decision? There are ever more ways to learn that what you are doing is not good enough or was already done last week by someone else, that what you like or even who you like is also liked by some random being you have never met. This is social learning by proxy.

People have always wanted to be around other people and to learn from them. Metropolis have long been dynamos of social alternative, foundries of art, music, and manner. Slang has always beginning in metropolitans an upshot of all those different, densely jam-packed people so often exposed to one another. Cities drive taste change because they furnish the greatest showing to other parties, who not amazingly are often the innovative parties metropolitans seem to attract.

With the internet, we have a kind of metropolitan of the sentiment, a medium that people do not just exhaust but inhabit, even if it often seem to be repeat and increase prevailing municipalities( New Yorkers, already physically exposed to so many other parties, use Twitter “the worlds largest” ). As Bentley has argued, Living and working online, people have perhaps never imitation each other so profusely( because it typically costs good-for-nothing ), so accurately, and so indiscriminately.

But how do we know what to copy and from whom? The age-old ways of knowing what we should like everything from radio station programmers to restaurant steers to volume critics to label themselves have been substituted by a mass of individuals, connected but apart, federated but disparate.

Whom to follow? What to prefer? Whom can you trust? In an infinite realm of selection, our options often seem to cluster towards those we can see others representing( but away from those we feel too many are preferring ). When there is too much social affect, people start to think more like one another. They take less information into account to make their decisions, yet are more confident that what they are thinking is the truth because more beings seem to think that way.

Social imitation has gone easier, faster, and most volatile; all those micro-motives of trying to be like others and hitherto different can intensify into explosive erupts of macro-behaviour. The big-hearted ripples have got bigger, and we know that they will come, but it is harder to tell from where, in the vast and random ocean face, they will swell.

This is an edited extract from You May Too Like, published on 30 June by Simon& Schuster( 12.99 ). To ordering a transcript for 10.39, going to see bookshop.theguardian.com or announce 0330 333 6846. Free UK p& p over 15, online guilds only.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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Apple is innovating, just not in the way you think

We know why Tim Cook is smiling.

Image: mashable

A good quarter for a company can make critics forget what they were talking about.

In the days leading up to Apples first quarter 2017 earnings report, which encompasses last years holiday buying season, many pundits were engaged in hand-wringing over Apples fortunes and futures. Questions included:

How big a decline would we see in iPhone sales?

Was the MacBook Pro and its lack of traditional ports a complete disaster?

Could Apple ever innovate again?

No one predicted the blockbuster quarter Apple ended up with, which included a record-breaking $78.4B in revenue. The champion product was none other than the once-flagging iPhone, specifically the bigger, pricier iPhone 7 Plus. Wed heard about supply shortages when Apple introduced the phone last fall, but most assumed this was due to orchestrated scarcity to inflate interest and keep demand high. In reality, demand was very high all on its own.

SEE ALSO: iPhone 8 concept combines camera with Apple logo

During the earnings call on Tuesday night, Apple boasted double-digit growth for iPhone sales in virtually every market. The company sold an astounding 78 million iPhones last quarter. And Apple CEO Tim Cook noted the amazing success of the iPhone 7 Plus.

In other words, Apple rode to this unprecedented success at least in part on the back of a smartphone that looks a lot like last years model (and 2015’s) and where the innovation is mostly found under the hood (as is often the case now). One has to assume that water resistance and the double cameras that enable one-button optical zoom (and that awesome Portrait Mode) were more of a turn-on than many thought.

Apple continues to win not by out-innovating competitors, but by grinding away at its corral of excellent products, polishing them with smart, new features that enhance but never confuse. Its a rational, risk-averse approach to success. Apple might remove a port, but it wont introduce a curved phone. It knows what its customers like and what they can withstand. The insanely good iPhone 7 Plus sales prove that Apple accurately predicted the negative impact of removing the 3.5mm jack (with there essentially being no impact at all).

A little help from a rival

The company has surely benefited from Samsungs astounding Note7 flameout, but thankfully not by using that companys hardships to drive people to Apples alternatives. Tim Cook never mentioned what happened to Samsung, perhaps smartly recognizing that the high road would allow Note7 refugees to come willingly to Apples shores.

The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus success acted as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed” for other parts of Apples business.

Even if the iPhone business wasnt growing, Apple is crazy rich.

IPhone sales are a big driver for the services business, noted Apple CFO Luca Maestri during the earnings call. That’s not a surprising statement: iPhones needs apps, music and content. The App Store, Apple Music and iTunes deliver that.

Eighteen percent year-over year growth in the service business this quarter is proof of that impact and, with Apple saying that the number of people transacting in the App Store is doubling, a sign that Cook may get his predicted doubling of Apple’s service business within four years, especially if it does go deeper into original content and adds a TV subscription service to the mix.

If there is pent-up demand for the iPhone 8, one can only imagine what will happen to the company’s services business if that phone ships next fall.

Even if the iPhone business wasnt growing, Apple is crazy rich.

The companys heap of cash is also an indication that Apple will continue to buy innovation where it cant find it internally. Naturally, $246 billion can buy a lot of relatively small companies (Twitter?) and maybe some big ones (Tesla, anyone?). (I’m basing this on cost to acquire, not the actual size of the companies.)

Mac in black

Another indication of just how well things are going for Apple is the Mac business. Its unit sales grew by a tiny 1% year-over-year, which might be seen as condemnation of Apples MacBook Pro port strategy. However, Mac revenue increased more robustly quarter-over-quarter, resulting in a 26% Mac revenue bump. Cook indicated on Tuesday that there were some supply constraints with the MacBook Pro with touch bar. If that didnt exist, perhaps the Mac picture wouldve been even sunnier.

Apple’s MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Image: Lili Sams/Mashable

Even in the wearable markets, Apple appears to be winning. Though the company refuses to break out sales numbers, Cook said the Apple Watch is the best-selling smartwatch in the world and added that the company couldnt make enough of them to meet demand. The Apple Watch sales figures are grouped into Other Products, which fell 8 percent year-over-year. However, there was a massive spike, 70 percent quarter-over-quarter, which could be attributed to the smartwatch. Also blended into that number are the new AirPods, but they arrived late in the quarter and may have had little impact.

Even the iPad, which has been free-falling for years, saw a bit of a turnaround in the last quarter. With the allure of large-screen iPhones like the iPhone 7 Plus, I dont think iPads will fully come back, but Apple is working hard with the iPad Pro line to reposition the tablet as an office and even enterprise tool. It may succeed and, as ever, Tim Cook promised exciting things on the horizon for the iPad.

Is Apple as innovative as it once was? Thats probably a question of perception. After all, its best innovations the iPod, iPad and even arguably the Mac (it was the first consumer computer with a graphical user interface) were all smart re-imaginings of other peoples failed, stalled or still-in-the lab product ideas.

Apple will introduce new features and products and maybe even product categories in 2017. But it may be time to accept that Apples greatest innovation is figuring out how to build, maintain and grow a wildly successful consumer electronics business. Its not as sexy as boundless product innovation, but it works.

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