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It's interesting how the original point of the Kobayashi Maru was that Kirk cheating was an indication he was unprepared to deal with the inevitable and if you just watched what everyone agrees is the best Star Trek movie you'd walk away with that understanding, but Spock's resurrection completely nullified that so ever since it's just been "yeah Kirk hacking the simulation was a big dick power move by a king chad".

#star trek #james t. kirk

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Bloodia Punch ‘Marvel Vs. Capcom’ SEGA Dreamcast

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radical feminists will talk like “i will only accept trans men into my feminism so long as they’re willing to detransition or feminize themselves, if not i dont care if they live or die and actively joke about transsexual male’s difficulties in ‘female’ spaces they need access too” and people will log online and go “wow. can you believe how radical feminists will accept trans men into their feminism? 🤔 suspicious”

#terfs do not treat trans men better than me you stupid fucks

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october 31, 2005

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Arthur Adams

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Young and Dangerous, Andrew Lau (1996)

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The thing about comparing Kipperlilly's grudge to hating DEI and affirmative action is that those things are exactly what she's advocating for. The Bad Kids are not receiving accommodation for anything - and in fact Aguefort seems like the type to despise things like accommodations and would tell disabled people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, but I digress -rather, they have direct connections to massive save-the-world plots three years in a row now that puts them way ahead of everyone else. Though they put in hard work, that doesn't change the fact that no one else working as hard as they can will ever equal being told to go stop a god from coming back and coincidentally your dad (a) worked directly with that dead god's primary agent in the past and (b) is now a super cool angel secret agent who will directly assist you in the task. Oh, and also, your teammate's parents are the dead god's primary mortal agents. And also they kidnapped your other teammate's dad because he's a powerful demon lord so now she's involved too. And you all happen to end up on Leviathan, where Fabian is an instant celebrity who immediately gets a cult worshiping the planks he walks on because they all work for his rich undead infernal dad.

The issue is that people keep mapping it to the real world and seeing "tragic backstory" like it would be IRL, which is a mistake. It's not a disability. They don't go to normal school to become accountants or NASA engineers, they are there to be doing exactly that shit that their backstories rope them into. Like, this isn't Buffy, they aren't saving the world incidentally, this is school for saving the world to pursue a career in saving the world. Spyre functions so differently from IRL that everyone is dramatically failing to comprehend the actual situation everyone is in.

And the thing about hating affirmative action is that it presumes someone only got into whatever not because they have skill, but because of their race or something like that. That's manifestly different from what's going on here. Kipperlilly has no doubt the Bad Kids are incredibly powerful and skilled - but their backstories gave them opportunities to use that power and skill that no one else will ever have regardless of effort or even luck. The Bad Kids can't go five seconds without tripping over the revelation that the BBEG for the year is one of their second cousins. That just doesn't happen to other people, period. The world revolves around the BK's in ways it will never revolve around anyone else so the Bad Kids will always get the massive adventures to save the world and be the top of their class because they're personally connected to the narrative.

Remember, Brennan has confirmed that other AA students do not do shit like that. They do exactly the sort of missions you'd expect them to - go in dungeon, fight monsters, come back. It's not "uh, the Rat Grinders should have just gone out and saved the world too", that's not how it works. AA students are not usually expected to, their rat grinding is just a more tedious and efficient version of what they would be doing otherwise. The BK's don't get involved with these plots simply because they're the most heroic heroes ever who seek wrongs to right, they do it because every single time everyone but Gorgug (who is for the most part absent major narrative stakes) was born someone that would get those in's, feats reproducible by no one else.

"Ah, but the Seven-"

The Seven prove the tragedy of it. Because Kipperlilly is right, but she's also wrong. The brilliance of BLeeM this season is that he's crafted a narrative inseparable from the meta of how the game works. In a very real way this is like the Dungeons & Dragons versions of Tron. The fact that it's a series of fictional TTRPG sessions is essential to the universe and it's story, in a Twin Peaks-ian way.

Because, see, it's not actually, technically magical trauma that gives out those narrative advantages. Magical trauma is just the most obviously visible side-effect. What the issue actually is is that, as everyone has noted over and over again, the Rat Grinders are NPCs, and it is therefore impossible for the world to ever bend itself around them the way it does for the PCs. Except, most are just saying that as a funny haha joke.

No, like, literally, that's the issue. They will always be in the shadow of the handful of people that the people constructing their world, their timeline, their very existence, has decided matter. They are doomed by narrative causality to be "boring". And I'm going to take a moment to say here, isn't it crazy no one is talking about this when we just got done with Neverafter which was all about this exact thing????? Like, literally the BBEG was the Authors. That is the situation here, more or less.

Anyway, there will never be a demon attacking that due to a curse is only vulnerable to hot licks from Ruben's guitar passed down from the first gnomish rocker. Mary Ann will never be the prophesized liberator of kobolds enslaved in dragon dens. Ivy will never find out her father was secretly a super-soldier for the Council of Chosen who before he was assassinated left her notes detailing a sinister plot within the government of Solace.

People keep having a hard time with this because it intuitively doesn't feel right to ever classify something like losing a father in any context to have some kind of bright side. But if you take nothing else away from this post, let it be this: Adventuring as it's done in Spyre is not something done in the real world. Adventuring is something everyone chose to go to AA to learn and put into practice as their long-term career. And in that, absolutely these things give the PCs a completely one hundred percent insurmountable leg-up on the thing they're all in competition for.

And it being completely insurmountable in that way further goes to show the difference between hating that situation and hating affirmative action. Even AA is not a guarantee that a specific member of the majority will lose out on something and a specific member of the minority will get it instead. As soon as the character sheets were rolled everyone else at Aguefort may as well have just gone home and started studying to be accountants because the main characters had been chosen. Or they could keep going and hope they get a spin-off, I guess.

But Kipperlilly does keep trying, for she doesn't really comprehend the true eldritch horror beyond her existence shackled to the bits of a bunch of comedians, and her solution is to adjust for those unfair advantages.

Which is affirmative action.

How is that not obvious.

#dimension 20 #kipperlilly copperkettle

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A very large percentage of everything I say has the exact same energy as "we traveled all the way back through time to call ya' a cracker."

#sorry for being a hater #it will happen again

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Artist is zero808w

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Japonya: Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka

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I swore to myself I'd wait until the season was over to make a KLCK edit because she's had such little screen time but then I heard this song for the first time and I was physically incapable of stopping myself.

#I realized just now that this could be read as trans subtext #everything I do is trans even accidentally #trans fem Kipperlilly is canon Brennan said so in my dream last night #dimension 20 #kipperlilly copperkettle #brennan lee mulligan #ally beardsley

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When I first learned about The Scarlet Pimpernel it was almost comical, like, the first superhero with a secret identity was a guy who saved aristocrats from the guillotine? Of course that's how writers of the early 20th-century would view the French Revolution, right? Of course they'd see it as the Poors being mean to the Rich Folk!

But then you dig into the French Revolution, and I mean really dig into it, I mean if you know anything about it at all beyond memes, and this is one of my my hottest political takes for sure, you start to realize, oh, actually, the French Revolution was horrific.

Fun fact! While aristocrats were a disproportionate amount of those executed, they were still only like...I think 20%? The vast majority of those executed were not even nobles!

I don't mind general guillotine jokes and the like, but stuff about Marie Antoinette specifically does get my goat a little. "Let them eat cake" was a fabrication that went along with lurid accounts of her having lesbian sex for the sake of slandering her, and those things can't be seperated. "Let them eat cake" is inherently sourced in lesbophobic misogyny on top of just plain not being true.

Thankfully no one but tankies thinks the Russian Revolution was worth a damn or that anything the PRC has ever done has been to the benefit of literally anyone, and tankies, as we are born knowing intuitively, are not serious people.

#it slightly bothers me that a Let Them Eat Cake reference is the start of one of the all-time greatest opening moments of a song ever #but that's more my OCD than anything like damn it I just want to ignore that because every time I hear it I go feral over how good it is #and don't want to have to think about it being inaccurate

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