every good piece of media has three kinds of characters:
-the protagonist everyone can root for
-the komaeda
-everyone else
learnt some fucked up news about tumblr’s policy changes and it turns out i really will have to find a new site to locate to. im not sure yet. ive seen mastodon and pillowfort as options. maybe ill make accounts on both and try them out. leaning towards pillowfort because mastodon is so twittery
breaking news: harry potter has quit his job as an auror!
stating that ‘i have no idea why i thought that was a good idea, holy shit’, potter has since relocated to diagon alley and reopened florean fortescue’s ice cream parlour. in a comment, potter said ‘yeah. yeah, this seems more like it’ and added ‘i mean, he gave me ice cream that one time. loved that guy.’
All Pottermore stories and other HP related extra-canon are hereby replaced with this text post
Honestly one of my biggest pet peeves in fiction is when monsters are malevolent for no reason. Is it “evil”, or is it just hungry and vicious? If the monster is a dangerous animal with no ultimate evil goal, what are its motivations and why is it hellbent upon menacing the heroes?
I found the last Jurassic World movie unwatchable because the behavior of the predatory dinosaurs was so unrealistic. Why are they hurting themselves and endangering their lives to attack the humans? If it is merely hunger, why are they ignoring freshly dead, easily available meat in favor of chasing humans through dangerous obstacle courses? If it’s the hunting instinct, why is it so much stronger than every other instinct of self-preservation? Are they sick? Are they rabid?
I just. Ugh! Unless an animal is portrayed as intelligent enough to want revenge, is influenced by supernatural powers, or has some useful plot reason for wanting to kill anything and everything it can without care for its own life, I don’t buy it. It’s not scary to me. It’s stupid and frustrating and I sit there waiting for the big reveal that mind control or demons are responsible.
On the other hand, antagonists that are genuinely mindless – like non-sentient robots, alien terraforming programs, or weird diseases – are much scarier to me because of their lack of malice or reason.
One of the experience i got reading through Mogami arc after having heard some of its reputation, is when you reached that point of the arc without knowing it’s THE arc and Dimple goes and says “His name…is Mogami Keiji” and you felt that cinematic chills and ominous background music like..like some Voldermort/Darth vader/Khan name drop shit and you’re like…”Oh shit it’s Him. It’s mogami mob psycho” Even though from the point of character or blind reader it should be “Who???” instead.
An unfortunate side effect of The Internet being what it is, is that there is no line drawn between the personal and political. Any statement is readily interpreted as a political opinion, and any voiced frustration with one’s personal life that in any way intersects with broader political issues is read as “this person believes that they experience systematic oppression for this”.
@wellofloneliness What I am talking about is when something like “Man, it sucks how no one wants to visit my house because I own a pet python” is instantly interpreted as “Oh, you think you’re oppressed because you own a snake!” Or, if you complain about how you are afraid that high rise jeans are going to go out of style and you won’t be able to find them in stores again, it becomes “Oh, you think you’re oppressed because department stores don’t cater to your 90’s mom preferences?”
Innocuous personal griping gets amplified and skewed into ‘oh this is an expression of your secret problematic beliefs’. I saw it recently on a post where a straight girl mentioned sadly that she gets less desired attention from guys after she cut her hair and people jumped on her for all kinds of stuff she wasn’t actually implying at all. There was no reason to think she had anything against sapphic women, or that she thought that men should hit on butches, or anything like that… but it was taken as a Grand Statement rather than the mild personal struggle it was almost certainly meant as.
Oof yeah I’ve seen that before. I think ‘aimless complaining with no real purpose, malice, or political motive’ is a pretty natural human behavior and I’m not sure why people are so reactive to it. Some folks are suggesting this is an American thing, and maybe so. I wonder why that should be.
There’s a related idea that ‘if you complain about it, you must want to do something about it’. If you disliked how someone was rude to you, you must want some kind of retribution, right?
I remember when I made a post about being frustrated at how difficult it is to find well-made manual labor clothes in women’s sizes that are actually meant to be worn for working. People took this to mean that I think that women dressing fashionably in flimsy clothing are like… bad or foolish people, while others were offended that I would complain about an inconvenience rather than Taking Action and learning to sew heavy denim or petitioning companies or whatever.
Edit: Another manifestation of this is "Oh, you don’t like X show? Why – what’s problematic about it?” as if disliking something for trivial, non-ethical/political reasons is unthinkable, which I think leads people to try to force ethical justifications for their not liking things. Which is… honestly really destructive.
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