#and if you don't think you have enough expertise to speak for me

[bonearenaofmyskull]

This will be my one and only post on the subject of post-s3 canon-compliant Hannigram...

...unless ofc the show gets renewed, which, at this point--it won't, lbr. Martha de Laurentiis was the show's champion and navigator of the rights issues, and she has literally died. If anyone else is championing it, I don't know about it. Maybe something can come through eventually as the new company leadership gets shit figured out, idk. But I'm not holding my breath.

That's the key point here which most of these asks don't seem to recognize: they want me to give an opinion on the state of the relationship, and whether or not Hannibal and Will can be together for a long term and maintain contentment in their relationship with each other: the Happy Ever After Question. But what these asks are most notably NOT doing--even though the askers always frame it as if they are--is asking me about the kind of storytelling would be likely in a continuation of the show: the Plot? What Plot? question. They want to have their plot cake and happily eat it ever after too. And it just doesn't work that way.

These are really very, very different questions. And what would happen if the show actually did come back has as much to do with what would have to happen to resurrect the show out of rights oblivion and then negotiate endless contracts AND how the creatives own lives and circumstances may have changed them and their points of view over the years, as well as the years themselves.

And because the show is very likely never coming back it's really a moot point now. Fantasize however you want. Write fic however you want. It's your damn story now, not the creatives. So in answer to the first, Happy Ever After Question, yeah, sure, why the fuck not. Let Hannigram have forever. But wait--you like plot with your porn? Then by all means give them some conflict. Tear them from the seams, their skin, their bones. Does that make you happy now?

But stop pulling down other people who are doing it in a different way than you're doing it, even if you can't understand it. Yeah, you know who you are....

As for the ~cANoN~ question, let's also be real for a second. If the show were renewed TODAY, it will have been more than a decade between seasons three and four, and Bryan Fuller has been pretty clear that Hannibal and Will are together during that time. So CAN they stay together for a period of years? Yeah, sure, why the fuck not. Obviously they HAVE.

But also--if the show were to come back, would they be destined for angsty shit and conflict and, yanno, PLOT? Again, obviously. It's a ridiculous notion that the show would continue without it. Flip side of that, though, is the equally ridiculous notion that seems to be floating around that if they can't be Disney princesses in their happily-ever-after together, then they can't be together at all, or at least, not for long. That's also absurd.

So let's touch base with what we know, and not what we each individually prefer.

Let's pretend--perhaps ambitiously--for a minute that if the show did ever come back it would be following the plan that we were left off with. It would stretch into 3 more seasons, with Cuban, Korean, and Cajun dishes iirc for episode titles. Bryan Fuller was pretty clear that season four would dive into an untapped portion of the books, revisit season one in a "really interesting way," and be pitched as Angel Heart meets Inception. Will might achieve happiness but not till the ending of the whole thing. That's what we know. Sorry I can't cite any of this; I haven't looked up a Hannibal article in half a decade.

So, leaving aside specifics and just getting to the question at hand, what we do know from season 1 is that Hannibal and Will were together. So, logically, they're probably together in any theoretical season 4. And OF COURSE they would be--they just spent all of S3 apart. You gotta vary this shit up. And they have to have internal and external conflicts, because writing 101. And the internal conflicts are meaningless--as would be all the rest of the preceding show--unless they're deeply and passionately invested in and love each other. That was the whole frickin' point of S3.

I don't honestly even understand how any of this is a question or a debate. Why are y'all even arguing in this the year of our lord almost 2024, and making me grumpy by sending me endless asks about stuff that's been answered for years and years. Why did I have to read with my OWN TWO EYES that someone who joined the fandom in 2016 (!!!) is so #FandomOld that people are afraid to argue with them????

...

So, y'all, this is all I'm willing to say about a potential continuation and ending of the show:

In a simple sense, the pattern the show was setting up is S1 & S4 Hannigram is together and solving crimes (at least in some weird Angel Heart way), S2 & S5 is semi-together, semi-apart Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane thing (with other stuff), and S3 & S6 on-the-run culminating in Something Big (probably at least partially apart). That doesn't mean this is the way the show would go, but it'd be very easy to write Clarice or an expy coming into the story to chase them down and end up mentored by them (either one or both) with this format.

As for the very final ending of the whole thing, the ending *I* would write may not be the same as what Bryan Fuller would write, but to me it seems both obvious where the show should go and that it would be completely and utterly satisfying to shippers and non-shippers alike. And I have run my theoretical ending by devout Hannigram shippers, and it met their approval. So if I can come up with something that both works for them and works for my sense of completionism in storytelling, then I'm sure Bryan Fuller could. He's way more practiced than me.

I have consistently said that I do not relate to the notion that it'd be better to have them together in one's imagination than it would be to actually see Mads and Hugh acting together in the ACTUAL SHOW, regardless of how that ends. Because here's the thing: my imagination is boundless and endless, and I can get an unlimited amount of Hannigram doing whatever the fuck I please whenever the fuck I please. More show, on the other hand, is rare as hen's teeth. I would take that miracle if I could get it.

The End.

#hannibal meta #hannigram #s4 speculations #s5 speculations #s6 speculations #bryan fuller #the rights issue #bear answers #bear replies #don't ask follow ups to this post #this is as polite as i can be and i'm barely holding on #i am not a proxy for bryan fuller #i do not appreciate being nagged #and if you don't think you have enough expertise to speak for me #then why do you think anyone else does either #if you want my opinion look at my posts #there are literally over a thousand in my hannibal meta tag #don't disrespect the amount of work that took by asking me to do it again #and DONT apologize #figure it out

[lisafication]

For those who might happen across this, I'm an administrator for the forum 'Sufficient Velocity', a large old-school forum oriented around Creative Writing. I originally posted this on there (and any reference to 'here' will mean the forum), but I felt I might as well throw it up here, as well, even if I don't actually have any followers.

This week, I've been reading fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3), a site run by the Organisation for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit. This isn't particularly exceptional, in and of itself — like many others on the site, I read a lot of fanfiction, both on Sufficient Velocity (SV) and elsewhere — however what was bizarre to me was encountering a new prefix on certain works, that of 'End OTW Racism'. While I'm sure a number of people were already familiar with this, I was not, so I looked into it.

What I found... wasn't great. And I don't think anyone involved realises that.

To summarise the details, the #EndOTWRacism campaign, of which you may find their manifesto here, is a campaign oriented towards seeing hateful or discriminatory works removed from AO3 — and believe me, there is a lot of it. To whit, they want the OTW to moderate them. A laudable goal, on the face of it — certainly, we do something similar on Sufficient Velocity with Rule 2 and, to be clear, nothing I say here is a critique of Rule 2 (or, indeed, Rule 6) on SV.

But it's not that simple, not when you're the size of Archive of Our Own. So, let's talk about the vagaries and little-known pitfalls of content moderation, particularly as it applies to digital fiction and at scale. Let's dig into some of the details — as far as credentials go, I have, unfortunately, been in moderation and/or administration on SV for about six years and this is something we have to grapple with regularly, so I would like to say I can speak with some degree of expertise on the subject.

So, what are the problems with moderating bad works from a site? Let's start with discovery— that is to say, how you find rule-breaching works in the first place. There are more-or-less two different ways to approach manual content moderation of open submissions on a digital platform: review-based and report-based (you could also call them curation-based and flag-based), with various combinations of the two. Automated content moderation isn't something I'm going to cover here — I feel I can safely assume I'm preaching to the choir when I say it's a bad idea, and if I'm not, I'll just note that the least absurd outcome we had when simulating AI moderation (mostly for the sake of an academic exercise) on SV was banning all the staff.

In a review-based system, you check someone's work and approve it to the site upon verifying that it doesn't breach your content rules. Generally pretty simple, we used to do something like it on request. Unfortunately, if you do that, it can void your safe harbour protections in the US per Myeress vs. Buzzfeed Inc. This case, if you weren't aware, is why we stopped offering content review on SV. Suffice to say, it's not really a realistic option for anyone large enough for the courts to notice, and extremely clunky and unpleasant for the users, to boot.

Report-based systems, on the other hand, are something we use today — users find works they think are in breach and alert the moderation team to their presence with a report. On SV, this works pretty well — a user or users flag a work as potentially troublesome, moderation investigate it and either action it or reject the report. Unfortunately, AO3 is not SV. I'll get into the details of that dreadful beast known as scaling later, but thankfully we do have a much better comparison point — fanfiction.net (FFN).

FFN has had two great purges over the years, with a... mixed amount of content moderation applied in between: one in 2002 when the NC-17 rating was removed, and one in 2012. Both, ostensibly, were targeted at adult content. In practice, many fics that wouldn't raise an eye on Spacebattles today or Sufficient Velocity prior to 2018 were also removed; a number of reports suggest that something as simple as having a swearword in your title or summary was enough to get you hit, even if you were a 'T' rated work. Most disturbingly of all, there are a number of — impossible to substantiate — accounts of groups such as the infamous Critics United 'mass reporting' works to trigger a strike to get them removed. I would suggest reading further on places like Fanlore if you are unfamiliar and want to know more.

Despite its flaws however, report-based moderation is more-or-less the only option, and this segues neatly into the next piece of the puzzle that is content moderation, that is to say, the rubric. How do you decide what is, and what isn't against the rules of your site?

Anyone who's complained to the staff about how vague the rules are on SV may have had this explained to them, but as that is likely not many of you, I'll summarise: the more precise and clear-cut your chosen rubric is, the more it will inevitably need to resemble a legal document — and the less readable it is to the layman. We'll return to SV for an example here: many newer users will not be aware of this, but SV used to have a much more 'line by line, clearly delineated' set of rules and... people kind of hated it! An infraction would reference 'Community Compact III.15.5' rather than Rule 3, because it was more or less written in the same manner as the Terms of Service (sans the legal terms of art). While it was a more legible rubric from a certain perspective, from the perspective of communicating expectations to the users it was inferior to our current set of rules  — even less of them read it,  and we don't have great uptake right now.

And it still wasn't really an improvement over our current set-up when it comes to 'moderation consistency'. Even without getting into the nuts and bolts of "how do you define a racist work in a way that does not, at any point, say words to the effect of 'I know it when I see it'" — which is itself very, very difficult don't get me wrong I'm not dismissing this — you are stuck with finding an appropriate footing between a spectrum of 'the US penal code' and 'don't be a dick' as your rubric. Going for the penal code side doesn't help nearly as much as you might expect with moderation consistency, either — no matter what, you will never have a 100% correct call rate. You have the impossible task of writing a rubric that is easy for users to comprehend, extremely clear for moderation and capable of cleanly defining what is and what isn't racist without relying on moderator judgement, something which you cannot trust when operating at scale.

Speaking of scale, it's time to move on to the third prong — and the last covered in this ramble, which is more of a brief overview than anything truly in-depth — which is resources. Moderation is not a magic wand, you can't conjure it out of nowhere: you need to spend an enormous amount of time, effort and money on building, training and equipping a moderation staff, even a volunteer one, and it is far, far from an instant process. Our most recent tranche of moderators spent several months in training and it will likely be some months more before they're fully comfortable in the role — and that's with a relatively robust bureaucracy and a number of highly experienced mentors supporting them, something that is not going to be available to a new moderation branch with little to no experience. Beyond that, there's the matter of sheer numbers.

Combining both moderation and arbitration — because for volunteer staff, pure moderation is in actuality less efficient in my eyes, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this post, but we'll treat it as if they're both just 'moderators' — SV presently has 34 dedicated moderation volunteers. SV hosts ~785 million words of creative writing.

AO3 hosts ~32 billion.

These are some very rough and simplified figures, but if you completely ignore all the usual problems of scaling manpower in a business (or pseudo-business), such as (but not limited to) geometrically increasing bureaucratic complexity and administrative burden, along with all the particular issues of volunteer moderation... AO3 would still need well over one thousand volunteer moderators to be able to match SV's moderator-to-creative-wordcount ratio.

Paid moderation, of course, you can get away with less — my estimate is that you could fully moderate SV with, at best, ~8 full-time moderators, still ignoring administrative burden above the level of team leader. This leaves AO3 only needing a much more modest ~350 moderators. At the US minimum wage of ~$15k p.a. — which is, in my eyes, deeply unethical to pay moderators as full-time moderation is an intensely gruelling role with extremely high rates of PTSD and other stress-related conditions — that is approximately ~$5.25m p.a. costs on moderator wages. Their average annual budget is a bit over $500k.

So, that's obviously not on the table, and we return to volunteer staffing. Which... let's examine that scenario and the questions it leaves us with, as our conclusion.

Let's say, through some miracle, AO3 succeeds in finding those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of volunteer moderators. We'll even say none of them are malicious actors or sufficiently incompetent as to be indistinguishable, and that they manage to replicate something on the level of or superior to our moderation tooling near-instantly at no cost. We still have several questions to be answered:

How are you maintaining consistency? Have you managed to define racism to the point that moderator judgment no longer enters the equation? And to be clear, you cannot allow moderator judgment to be a significant decision maker at this scale, or you will end with absurd results.

How are you handling staff mental health? Some reading on the matter, to save me a lengthy and unrelated explanation of some of the steps involved in ensuring mental health for commercial-scale content moderators.

How are you handling your failures? No moderation in the world has ever succeeded in a 100% accuracy rate, what are you doing about that?

Using report-based discovery, how are you preventing 'report brigading', such as the theories surrounding Critics United mentioned above? It is a natural human response to take into account the amount and severity of feedback. While SV moderators are well trained on the matter, the rare times something is receiving enough reports to potentially be classified as a 'brigade' on that scale will nearly always be escalated to administration, something completely infeasible at (you're learning to hate this word, I'm sure) scale.

How are you communicating expectations to your user base? If you're relying on a flag-based system, your users' understanding of the rules is a critical facet of your moderation system — how have you managed to make them legible to a layman while still managing to somehow 'truly' define racism?

How are you managing over one thousand moderators? Like even beyond all the concerns with consistency, how are you keeping track of that many moving parts as a volunteer organisation without dozens or even hundreds of professional managers? I've ignored the scaling administrative burden up until now, but it has to be addressed in reality.

What are you doing to sweep through your archives? SV is more-or-less on-top of 'old' works as far as rule-breaking goes, with the occasional forgotten tidbit popping up every 18 months or so — and that's what we're extrapolating from. These thousand-plus moderators are mostly going to be addressing current or near-current content, are you going to spin up that many again to comb through the 32 billion words already posted?

I could go on for a fair bit here, but this has already stretched out to over two thousand words.

I think the people behind this movement have their hearts in the right place and the sentiment is laudable, but in practice it is simply 'won't someone think of the children' in a funny hat. It cannot be done.

Even if you could somehow meet the bare minimum thresholds, you are simply not going to manage a ruleset of sufficient clarity so as to prevent a much-worse repeat of the 2012 FF.net massacre, you are not going to be able to manage a moderation staff of that size and you are not going to be able to ensure a coherent understanding among all your users (we haven't managed that after nearly ten years and a much smaller and more engaged userbase). There's a serious number of other issues I haven't covered here as well, as this really is just an attempt at giving some insight into the sheer number of moving parts behind content moderation:  the movement wants off-site content to be policed which isn't so much its own barrel of fish as it is its own barrel of Cthulhu; AO3 is far from English-only and would in actuality need moderators for almost every language it supports — and most damning of all,  if Section 230 is wiped out by the Supreme Court  it is not unlikely that engaging in content moderation at all could simply see AO3 shut down.

As sucky as it seems, the current status quo really is the best situation possible. Sorry about that.

#archive of our own #endotwracism #end otw racism #content moderation #sufficient velocity #i hate how much i know about this topic

[athena5898]

I often think when people hear "infantilizing a group of people", they think of it literarily that we are actively being made a infant. While this is a part of it, I think people miss the subtle things that end up causing chasms in their relationships with that group of people.

It's actually hard to pinpoint because it's never a singular event, it's many tiny things but the end result is always "I am the authority, I will always know more then you, I will never take your advice, I will never be honest with you (you know to spare *your* feelings), any disagreement is your fault, any problem in your life is my cross to bear and you must follow how I tell you to fix it, I will never stoop myself to understanding what your needs are as X group and will view everything from my own lens and judge you accordingly, we are not equals, and we never will be. (This is not a exhausted list, nor will everyone have all the same traits)

It is very hard to connect with someone who just automatically assumes a higher status to you just because of something you can't change. All the while the offender thinks what they are doing is actually a good thing. They are somehow helping you by just assuming they are better then you (which in the end, that's kinda what this is).

I have a few people in my life that I care for a lot, but they are not that much older then me yet they act like I can't possibly understand them and automatically shove this "child" label on my forhead.

And here is the thing, they will voluntarily bring up why they think this if you pay attention. It might be trauma they've dealt with, it might be that they have kids and you don't, age, or anything else like this. However I think it's important to note that I have friends who do not talk down to me and respect me as my own person with autonomy and also have these things going on in their life. So it's not like it's impossible to treat someone with respect and have these differences.

Now what do some of these subtle differences look like? There are many ways they can materialize but to name a few.

- Demanding the person solves a problem their way despite the person telling them why their circumstances do not allow that.

- assuming...well anything and all the time. These people have a tendency to think they know exactly what you are feeling and other such things and if you try to correct them then they will actually get upset at you or show some type of passive aggressiveness.

-Speaking on your behalf without asking permission

-never valuing your expertise on any subject. They are older/more mature then you, therefore to them they know more about everything. What's really fun (/s) about this is when they will explain to you, why you are wrong, by repeating what you said back at you.

- any reason why you can't do a thing, or why you need an aide is an excuse. You could do it if you *really* wanted to, but you are just being lazy. Now the real adult has to take up your burden.

- they do not/cannot listen to you. No matter what you say or how you say it, or if they even confirm what you say, there is always a part of them that is not listening. Or hell, they could of listened to you, but since what you say isn't important to them, they will quickly forget it and may even try and claim you never said anything to them.

- I'm not sure if this counts as infantilizing, but I notice that it happens a lot in tandem. While they think less of you and treat you like a child whose facts and opinions don't matter, all of this will change at a moment's notice when they need something from you...oddly enough something they probably normally do not take seriously from you on a normal day. Suddenly thrusting you with this burden of taking care of them even though they are never there for you in any meaningful actually helpful way most of the time. Like you will literally be demanded to stop what you are doing, and get over whatever you are going through to help them and their problem. I cannot explain how frustrating it is to be demanded to be the mature one while most of the time being denied respect.

I could go on, but honestly if I sat here and thought of every single tiny thing they do to make sure there is distance between you and them up on their self made pedestals, I'd be here all day.

The worst part on all of this is that I have no idea how to resolve it. People who do this are not inherently bad people, hell they might not even realize they do it. But this can actually make it more difficult to bring to their attention. I have tried many ways and many different times to resolve this, but I haven't been successful yet. Anyone who has corrected themselves were people who just had a little mess up but still obviously viewed me as a person from the start.

These subtle ways someone can dehumanize you, it can cause terrible rifts and of course the other person never understands why (see point above about not listening)

I am writing this as a autistic person, but I know there are others who go through this. Please check the ways you create artificial authority over someone.

Edit: someone reblogged this with hashtags about how we shouldn't do this to children either and I completely agree, I was using the term because it's the one often used to explain these things. Adding the edit cause I have no idea how to respond to the hashtag thing and I think it's a important thing to note.

#actually autistic #autism #disability #neurodiversity #neurodivergent #infantilism #blog #why do people gotta be weird about shit

[falling-endlessly]

Boomerang (part 3)

Vox x Female!Ex!Overlord!Reader

Summary: Your infuriating ex is planning something, and it's putting everyone on edge. But if he wants at the hotel, he'll have to go through you (and Alastor) first.

<— Part 2 Chapter Index Part 4 —>

—6 HOURS AGO—

"What," Valentino growled, claws creating cracks in the table from how hard he was gripping it. "The fuck did you just say?"

Velvette was no better. Her lip was pulled into a furious snarl, and for once her phone was nowhere to be seen. "Vox, are you out of your fucking mind?"

"Relax," Vox reclined in his chair, raising a brow at his murderous business partners. Velvette's eye twitched and the table creaked in protest under Valentino's fury. "I'm not actually going for redemption, damn, calm your tits people."

"What happened to keeping up an image for the brand?" Velvette banged a fist against her armrest, gritting her teeth. "The Morningstar bitch was literally humiliated on live television, and now you're going to personally advertise for her?!"

"The next extermination is coming sooner than ever, and people are getting desperate. This little publicity stunt can work in our favor," Vox crossed his claws under his chin, megawatt smile growing. "What's a little pity pitch going to hurt? Think about it, I can gather intel, fuck up Alastor's little project, and show Y/n where her allegiances should lie. Win-win-win," he chuckled ominously.

"Cut the shit, Vox," Valentino scoffed, leaning forward to sneer in his face. "It's obvious you're only going this far for that bitch. Can't keep a leash on your toys, hm?"

Vox grit his teeth, digging his claws into his thighs under the table. He knew this wasn't going to go over well, but to be talked down to by someone who was benefiting from him? "So what if I am?" He hid his rage with a large, mocking grin. "And by the way, where's Angel Dust? Haven't seen him around in a while."

Val's face twisted with rage. "You fucking—"

"Enough!" Velvette snapped, glaring at both of them. "I don't have time for this stupid shit. Get on with it or this meeting is over."

Vox's unhinged smile slowly relaxed into his charming PR one. "Of course, my apologies Velvette, Val. I can see why you're not...convinced yet. Let me fix that."

The projector on the wall suddenly sparked to life, displaying three pie charts and a legend with many colorful categories. He gestured to them from left to right. "This is a distribution of our profits from ten years ago, five years ago, and last year."

"We have eyes," Velvette droned boredly.

Vox's antennae sparked in irritation, but he continued regardless. "Y/n's helped develop countless programs and softwares, and with her expertise our earnings jumped thirty seven percent, especially during the collaboration between Voxtek and DeepSpace VR. Now, what happens now that she's taken her business elsewhere? Hell knows she has the computing power to run it without our servers—"

"So, we're supposed to just bend over backwards for a few bucks?" Valentino snarled, crossing his arms.

Vox's screen glitched as he struggled to keep his composure. Thirty seven percent was not just a few bucks. But he knew antagonizing Val right now was more trouble than it was worth. "Val," he chuckled, sauntering forward to rest a hand on the backrest of Valentino's chair, leaning into his space. "Since when have you said no to money?" His eye widened, rings spinning.

"Since it walked out on two legs and ignored us," Valentino snorted.

"Val, I need you to see the bigger picture!" He grasped both of Valentino's shoulders, moving behind him so he could speak enticingly into his ear. "This is an opportunity to keep our brand at the top, and get dirt on that radio bitch. The future is what matters, and we are going to be the ones pioneering it."

The projector flickered to one of the surveillance cameras pointed at an exterior angle of the hotel. Then, the image suddenly rippled to show an artificial video of the same property, but instead of the tacky hotel, there stood a modern building adorned with a bright, neon V logo.

Valentino's smile grew at his last sentence, and he turned in his seat, leaning his forehead to rest against Vox's screen. "I like your vision, Cariño," he purred, grinning wickedly to show off his golden tooth. "But, if your little money-making cocksleeve doesn't come back, well, don't say I didn't tell you so~" he said in a sing-song voice, long tongue coming up to lick languidly along the side of Vox's monitor.

Vox's grin froze on his face, screen glitching.

Valentino chuckled, pushing out of his seat before strutting away. "Oh, and Vox baby," he threw a saucy wink over his shoulder. "Come find me when you get lonely, yeah?"

The double doors slammed shut behind him, bathing the room in silence. Which Velvette quickly broke, of course.

"What the fuck, Vox?" She scrubbed a hand down her face. "All this for a profit we can afford to lose? Really?"

"Velvette," his smile twitched up to full, blinding attention again. "Have I ever let you down before? Everything is under control, trust me!"

"Uh huh," Velvette scowled, unconvinced. "You know, Alastor and Y/n are the only people you've ever really lost it for, and you're going to a place where there's both of them."

"What, you don't think I can handle myself?" His smile strained.

Velvette shook her head, standing up from her chair and approaching him. "You know, that PR shit might work on everyone else, but I can see through your bullshit, Vox," she gave him a hard stare. "Just don't fuck everything up, got it? Or I'll make you wish you didn't."

His fists clenched as she walked past him, smile dropping into a scowl as soon as she was out of view.

****

—PRESENT—

"Whatever you do, make sure he's at least ten floors away from me," you muttered to Vaggie, watching as Charlie gave the bane of your existence an awkward tour of the hotel.

The atmosphere was so tense and suffocating, it was starting to make you incredibly antsy. The others were no better. Angel was drumming his fingers anxiously on the bar counter, Niffty was curiously regarding the new "resident" and Husk was already chugging his second bottle of hard liquor. Holy hell, and you couldn't even forget about Alastor if you tried, the radio demon releasing a constant stream of static and looking about ready to sacrifice someone—preferably Vox—in an incredibly painful and sadistic ritual.

"I can't believe she's letting him stay," Angel hissed under his breath, rubbing his temples in exasperation. "Actually no, what am I saying? This is Charlie, of course she'd let him stay. God damnit."

A tap on your shoulder made you turn around, only to find your favorite stiff drink on the counter behind you. You nodded gratefully at Husk, taking the glass and throwing it back like water.

"At least the hotel's in one piece!" Niffty chirped, her one eye back to tracking any stray insects. "Less mess to clean up." Her knife gleamed as she stabbed a cockroach clean in half with a deranged giggle.

"This isn't going to end well," Vaggie scowled darkly. "He's going to try something, I fucking know it."

"Yeah, no shit," Angel groaned, Husk grunting in agreement.

"Or," Pentious chimed in, hair flaring thoughtfully. "He truly does want to redeem himself?"

There was a silence as everyone turned to look at him incredulously, before a unanimous, resounding "no," rang out.

****

"Anddd here's your room key," Charlie presented it to him with a flourish, beaming brightly. "We hope you enjoy your stay! Breakfast, lunch and dinner are served downstairs in the dinning room, or you can go out and get your own food! We'll get your survey ready for you tomorrow so that you can start building your schedule."

"Schedule?" He quirked a brow, taking the room key from her outstretched hand. "For what, exactly?"

"Oh! Um," Charlie laughed, rubbing the back of her neck. "We actually host group therapy activities and trust exercises with the other staff and residents! You'll fill out a short survey so that we can personalize—"

"O-kay, let me stop you there, sweetheart," he chuckled, grin widening condescendingly. "I think it's great what you're doing, really, I do. But I've already got a schedule, and a billion dollar company to run. I'm quite the busy man, you know?"

Charlie furrowed her brow. "But—"

"Seriously, my sales would fall and what would my clients say? Hm?" A crowd booing track played in the background as Vox shook his head like she was just some uneducated child. "So thanks, but no thanks." He shot her a wink, before the door slammed in her face.

Charlie blinked in shock, taking a few seconds to process that she'd been dismissed in her own hotel. Her shoulders slumped as she trudged away.

But that only lasted for a few steps, before she perked right back up. What was she thinking? Giving up so quickly on one of her clients?

Charlie grinned, smacking a fist into her palm. She'd just have to try harder.

Unbeknownst to her, a figure had been watching the entire exchange from the shadows. Your jaw clenched, claws digging into the drywall.

"Unbelievable," you shook your head in disdain.

****

As soon as the door shut, Vox deflated like a balloon.

"Fuckkk," he hissed under his breath, sliding down the door tiredly. "The hell am I doing?"

He allowed himself only a few minutes to wallow in self-pity, before he sighed, pushing off the floor and getting to work. In less than twenty minutes, he had the whole room wired to his needs, electronic Voxtek devices littering the previously empty spaces. Now he had a way to travel without leaving his room.

He was just about to dematerialize into one of his laptops when a familiar, chilling presence made him freeze.

"Why, you only just got here! Don't tell me you're leaving already," Alastor chuckled, tilting his head in mock concern.

The radio demon was leaning an elbow against his dresser, just casually invading his privacy. God, just his smug face made Vox want to kill him already.

"What's it to you, old timer?" Vox sneered, electricity sparking from his claws in agitation. "Unlike you, some of us actually have responsibilities. So if you don't mind—"

"Oh my, breaking your word to Y/n already!" Alastor shook his head with a grin, sound effects of a heckling crowd emanating from his microphone cane. "How very...disappointing. Truly, I'd expect better from you!"

Vox's eye widened, the swirling rings on full display as his teeth grinded in rage. "Y-y-y-you keep her fucking name out of your filthy, cannibalistic mouth! You hear me?" He glitched furiously, electricity sparking in glowing webs from his monitor.

"Aha! Someone's a little on edge," Alastor laughed in tandem with an artificial, mocking laugh track. "Really, that was too easy! You're losing your touch."

"Get the fuck out of my room!" Vox snapped.

"Gladly," the radio demon grinned menacingly, the corners of his mouth stretching to unnatural proportions. "But first, I came to deliver a little message."

Vox gritted his teeth, curling his fists by his sides. His electricity buzzed under his skin, ready to electrocute the fuck out of this crazy fucker if he needed to.

"If you and your merry band of idiots pull even the smallest stunt to sabotage the hotel," Alastor approached him, antlers growing as his eyes turned to radio dials. "I think you'll find out that absence did not make my heart grow fonder."

"What, don't tell me you actually care about this place," Vox grinned, baring his teeth. "The whole redemption thing doesn't really seem to be up your alley, no offense."

"Oh, of course not! Haha! Don't be ridiculous," Alastor chuckled like he'd said something hilarious, but it was overlayed with bursts of radio static. "But I'm afraid I've invested too much in this source of entertainment for you to ruin it with your cheap, unoriginal touch."

The message was clear: don't touch my things.

Vox curled his lip, unwilling to back down no matter how utterly disturbing Alastor's demon form was up close. It gave him chilling flashbacks of their last explosive disagreement. "Then stay away from Y/n," he spat.

Alastor's grin widened, eyes glowing an eerie green as he held out his hand. "Is that a deal?"

Vox grimaced, looking at Alastor's creepy, voodoo doll appearance. "Hell no, you creepy fucker."

Then, like whiplash, Alastor's demon form receded and the air became breathable again. "Well, glad we cleared that up, then!" He laughed exuberantly, twirling his cane. "Nice catching up, chum!"

The demon grinned as he disappeared into shadowy wisps of smoke, melding with the darkness against the walls.

Vox's jaw clenched, electric anger vibrating through him and rattling his teeth. "Fuck!" He kicked over the first thing he saw, which happened to be a wooden workbench. It took a few deep breaths for him to finally calm down and collect his thoughts.

When he was no longer at risk of causing a city-wide outage again (that had been fucking embarrassing), he made his way back to his laptop like he was originally planning to do, only to pause in shock when he saw the brand new device short circuiting, screen full of pixelated static.

An explosive rage convulsed in his chest, the lights in the hotel flickering ominously.

"You red bambi ass fucker!"

****

<—Part 2 Chapter Index Part 4 —>

Taglist: @pooplyface1423 @spookysisters @that-one-weeb-buts-its-the-main @neito327 @hxzbinwrites @coleisyn @bababahannah @yellowsubiesdance @dirk-strides @justaspectatorforfandomarts @harmoira @sunnyslug @gum-iie @lady-valtieri @mit-suri @whatelsecouldgowrong @sillysimplysilky @eternalera @aoiyx @hazellight11 @hopefully-not @tsuvvy @imcryinginemo @dinorawrss @rekoloid @ayesha-eroticax3 @sle3pyh3ad2 @l0verboyxoxo1111

#hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel vox #vox #vox hazbin hotel #hazbin vox #vox hazbin #vox x ofc #vox x you #vox x oc #vox x reader #vox x y/n #vaggie hazbin hotel #vaggie #charlie hazbin hotel #alastor #hazbin alastor #alastor hazbin hotel #alastor the radio demon #angel dust hazbin hotel #husk hazbin hotel #niffty hazbin hotel #sir pentious #hazbin hotel husk #hazbin husk #hazbin vaggie #hazbin hotel alastor #sir pentious hazbin hotel #angel dust #niffty #charlie morningstar

[impyssadobsessions]

DPXDC Enemy of my Enemy is the Worse "Excerpts" (Part 1?) I have more Ideas

Okay I kepy thinking about the prompt Enemy of my Enemy is the Worse I made LOL- (gonna post excerpts.) Probably wont fully write this.. as much as I like to right now LOL. If this inspires anyone to write, go for it.

"So now what? Going to vivisect me? Experiment? Rip my molecules apart like how my-Mr. Fenton keeps telling me." "Unfortunately, no." Agent K grumbles. "And its dissection, not-" Agent O tries to correct. "I maybe dead-but I'm not THAT dead." Danny rolled his eyes, flashing them at the two men in white. He can't believe any of this is happening. Oh he wished he listened to Jazz.. or Sam or Tuck more. He pulled at his ghost proof bindings, them having him ridiculously buried in the restraints. "Actually, Mr. Phantom, is it? I wanted to talk." Another bald man walks in, his suit notably black. Danny raised his eyebrow unimpressed, "What? Is it the Guys in Black and White now? Not that I'm against it, I'm all for equality, but it does seem a little off brand. I'm guessing the bleach bill is getting too high." Agent O was about to speak out- when the guy in black raised his hand to silence him. This guy only looked slightly amused, which gave Danny the creeps. "Of course not. That'd be ridiculous, though I'm not against inclusivity either. I'm Lex Luthor, and it is my recent interest in ghosts that had allowed the GIW to reach its full potential. " "So another annoying billionaire. Great."

"So you know of me? Perfect, then we can keep this simple. In truth, I am only interested in one ghost in particular." "We can capture him without involving ourselves with this scum-" "This GHOST has not only evaded my notice for YEARS, but has been stealing very valuable technology that would go beyond NASA's comprehension. Though I don't doubt your expertise, it has not come without notice that this particular ghost is seen the most-" Lex flicked his eyes down at Phantom. "With you." Agent K and O unrolled paper from their suits to reveal a picture of Plasmius. "The Wisconsin Ghost." - "Plasmius?!" Danny spoke same time the Agents did. Lex smirked at the Agents then down at Phantom. Danny took a moment to register what was going on before busting out laughing. "Really? What makes you think I'm buddy buddy with Plasmius? He's a total fruitloop and honestly- not surprise. He steals blueprints from my p---Dr. Fentons all the time." "You steal their items as well, if we recall." Agent K raised a brow. "Well-I- Just because- YOU USE THEIR BLUEPRINTS TOO!" "Enough. " Lex starting to sound annoyed, Danny felt like it was a win. Serves bastard right. Man did he hate billionaires. "I've observed your work in Amity Park. If I dare say you are quite similar to many of the masked vigilantes that plague this Earth. Even more heroic in my opinion." Danny was not biting at whatever trick Lex was pulling. Though he didn't miss the skip of his core at being recognized something other than a menace. 'He's lying to you.' he repeated in his head. Pulling on his bindings again to remember the real situation before him.

"That being said, I like you to do as heroes do and capture this criminal, then bring him to me." "Look, thanks for the compliment- but we both know I'm not seen as a hero. So why don't you quit the buttering 'cause I'm not interested in culinary and tell me what's in it for me. Even though I'm barely c-average on the best of days, I'm not dumb. I'm not doing this for free or just some lame you will be spared nonsense. Been there done that." Lex smirked again, "I'll grant you immunity from GIW and you can have your haunt back." "Wait? What?!" "But it took so long to capture him-" "IF you manage to capture Plasmius and bring him to me before GIW can." Danny glanced at the two agents as they puffed out their chests. Cocky. They really think they could capture Vlad? Then painfully reminded himself that they did catch him. "And if I don't agree?" "We DISSECT you and use you for very unethical and highly painful experiments that are legal on subjects like yourself." Agent K happily boast. "Riiiight." Danny clicked his tongue, "Add in that these guys are not allowed to be in a 50 miles radius from Amity and I'll do it." "No-" "Deal."

------------------------------------

Danny looped on back to the entryway as he finished swooping through every room of the manor. "Alright! Come on out Fruitloop! I know you're still here-" Just as Phantom floated down to land, he felt a hard punch in his face that sent him skidding across the room into the wall. "OOF" "Guess I should have seen that com...ming..." Danny rubbed his jaw, turning back to see who punched him. His eyes widening as he recognized the heroes he was facing. "Phantom. We're taking you into custody." "YOU CALLED THE JUSTICE LEAGUE ON ME?!" -----(Fight happens)--- Flash manages to hold Phantom, using his speeding molecules to keep Phantom from phasing through his grip. Danny gritting his teeth as the other heroes ready to capture him. Fine. If he can't phase through, he'll just phase in. Phantom uses his icy breath to freeze everything around them. Superman quickly uses his laser vision to melt the ice covering the room in mist, trying to keep themselves from being frozen. "Flash!" When the mist cleared the was no sign of him. Superman using his hearing to try and locate him- despite guarding his right side, he was kicked into the wall by Flash. Flash's eyes glowing bright green. "Well this is weird." -Proceeds to fight in Flash's body for a moment, until he gets knocked out of it. Danny's on his last legs, thinking he barely done a number on them (Not realizing he had been giving them quite a fight). Danny tries to reason again only to hear Amity Park doing great since GIW involvement. Still he isn't backing down. Even mentions Lex is backing them. He knows its only temporary peace if its really peace at all. Which he suspects is a big farce. Besides the portal still resides in Amity. GIW can't get a hold of that- portal. If he can't make them hear him out, then he'll show them why Vlad isn't just some victim. (Not realizing what Justice League may have already discovered) "Want to know why the number 2 worse billionaire is after Fruitloop?" standing up as the net placed on him burned and electrified him. It hurt so much, but he wasn't ready to quit now. Superman flew out in front of the others to block Phantom as Phantom tackled him. Phantom just uses rest of his strength to crash Superman through layers of floors til they reached the secret lab. Superman flinging Phantom into the other side of the room just as they landed, making him slam into a green tube, shattering it. The netting having dropped to the ground away from him. He coughed, shaking as a white ring dangerously popped around his waist shakily dancing, until Phantom sucked it back in. Not yet. The green ectoplasm from the tube soaking into his skin. His eyes widening as he saw what the green ectoplasm was from, jumping back with a disgust yell. He watched the clone fizzle out. "ALREADY? Really Vlad?" He shook off the creeps. "What is this?" "A Lab, du-UAHHHHHHH-" He found himself being spun around by Flash, and flung into the air where he was lassoed. Wonder Woman yanked on the rope tight, swinging him down into the opposite wall. He really was tired of being walled by them. Batman was quick to cuff him as Superman froze him in place. Danny raised a tired brow, unamused. "Are we chill now?" "No." "Thought so." ---bit more talking. Danny navigating his way through the truth of the lasso before using his wail as his last ditch effort to escape. Manages to escape through the portal as the lab collapses.

#danny fenton #dp x dc #dpxdc #dcxdp #justice league #crossover #fanfic #prompt #enemy of my enemy is the worse #lex luthor #danny phantom #dp crossover #writing excerpts

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

hi! i have a question i’m directing at you bc i’ve seen the idea going around tumblr but most recently on your post — if a student is caught using ai to cheat do you think that’s worth expulsion? should that be the best case scenario punishment? while i understand the importance of making it known to students the severity of using chatgp, at the same time i feel like that’s a very harsh punishment for being caught cheating. but then also at the same time! i’m not a teacher and i don’t know if it’s possible to teach a student to value their education and the opportunity they have for high learning if they don’t already personally believe that the opportunity is a gift. idk! this isn’t really a structured question but i guess i’m curious about how you (or in general, how professors) feel about expulsion for chatgp (i know you’re just one person and don’t speak on behalf of all educators lol but it’s just something i’ve been curious about)

Expulsion as in, ejected wholesale from the entire university, Do Not Darken Our Door Again? No, I don't.

I think what outsiders tend to miss is that students who do this, 99% of the time, are desperate. Something has gone terribly wrong, they're desperate to meet those deadlines and get that work done, and in my experience it's almost always wrapped up in neurodivergence (usually undiagnosed) and frequently a home situation that's made their lives a shit show and pushed academia to a back burner.

But, it's a more serious issue than high school cheating on a multiple choice quiz. Degrees are crafted to have quality assurance built in, and with good reason. The whole point of a degree is that it's proof of higher learning, and specialist knowledge - you get a higher salary (in theory lol) because your employer is paying for the very expensive training you've undergone. This is particularly important in something like medicine or construction, because if you haven't actually completed all parts of that degree you could kill someone; but even in my own field, if you fundamentally don't understand the physical processes of a sand dune as well as its ecology, and someone hires you to manage that sand dune... well, it's going to be an over-stabilised mess in about five years' time and you've killed the rare sand lizards and mining bees that were living there. And if your degree is a course in an institution who is famous for producing top quality environmental workers who know this stuff... well, you've just made your uni course look very, very bad in industry.

So unis are protective of their quality assurance, and that means they do not like cheaters. And I do agree with that, that's fair enough.

For me, though, I think the answer is not full expulsion. I would run it like this:

Confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that the student has indeed cheated. This must be confirmed.

IF NOT CONFIRMED: Mark the work strictly. Pair this with a viva - the student must be able to answer questions about the work from two lecturers with subject expertise, plus someone from the Academic Office (although that latter person can just observe only). This will determine how deep their knowledge is vs what they submitted, and should be factored into the overall mark.

IF CONFIRMED: Module fail, all marks for those credits set to zero, and the information included on transcripts (not why they failed, just that they attempted the module and got zero.) HOWEVER, the student is allowed one resit attempt; this might mean having to redo the year as a part-time student just to get that module, depending on how it's taught and how important it is.

All of the above with the understanding that their work is going to now be checked very closely going forward for repeat issues. In confirmed cases, a viva is now a required part of future work.

To be fair, mind, proving cheating is genuinely very hard, so depending on how strict the uni is, that's roughly the system that gets used anyway. Your work is very strictly marked, you get viva'd, and you usually fail on quality anyway (especially if your flavour of cheating was ChatGPT, because what it produces is shit.) After you've failed, gone through a resit period, and been capped at a pass mark for the fail, you realise pretty quickly that it would have been less stress and effort for a higher mark to just do the work yourself. And that's a learning curve everyone should be allowed, I think.

#asks #the professional world of careers and tasks

[mitskijamie]

Do you think Ted was a good coach?

Oof. Controversy!

This is a loaded question, because if you look at his end results, you can't deny that he's a "good coach" in the sense that he was able to completely turn the team around and take them to the top of the league. He was definitely doing something right!!

However I feel like I can't really call him a "good coach" with my whole chest because he doesn't know ANYTHING about the sport he's coaching, nor does he really seem to make any effort to learn (like, he doesn't understand the offside rule until 3 years after starting the job. Why?) He's certainly good as part of a coaching team, because he's excellent at building relationships and connecting with his players, but he would be nowhere without Beard, Nate, and Roy, because at the end of the day a team just can't be successful if their coaches don't know anything about the strategy/technique of the game.

Also, Ted's expertise is in coaching kids, not adult professionals, and that really shows in how he handles Richmond sometimes. His whole "winning isn't what's important, it's all about teamwork and having fun and being the best version of yourself :)" is a fantastic mindset for, say, the coach of a little league team, but (as Beard points out) not as wonderful for coaching professionals whose whole job is winning. They're not there to have fun and learn the value of teamwork, they're there to win. I get that the return to football as a fun childhood hobby is a theme on the show, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I feel like Ted doesn't always fully understand the gravity of the sport for people who are truly invested, and he doesn't always do a great job of balancing "having fun and growing as individuals" with like. Doing what these men are paid millions of dollars to do.

As a preschool teacher, I think the way Ted handles conflict is also very reminiscent of how adults handle conflict between young children, which is another thing that would make him a fantastic coach for a kids' team but works against him in a professional setting. In s2, for example, rather than just going to Roy as a superior speaking to an employee and telling him to get over himself and coach Jamie because he's a grownup and that's his job, he tries to get Roy and Jamie to talk it out and come to a resolution like they're two kindergarteners fighting over a toy. He was doing Social Emotional Learning on them, and even though it ultimately benefitted them as individuals, it was not the best or quickest way to deal with a workplace conflict like that between two adults. Can you imagine going to your boss like "hey, the person who's supposed to be training me won't talk to me at all or answer any of my questions and I'm kind of lost" and they were like "lol and what do you expect me to do about that? That's on you, I'm not gonna tell him what to do" insanity

TL;DR I think Ted is fantastic with people and that's a huge asset to him in coaching, but I don't think he knows anywhere near enough about soccer to be a bona fide "good coach" of a professional team. I also think the way he handles his players and their conflicts would be an asset to him if he were a kids' coach or a teacher, but sometimes is frustrating and infantilizing when applied to professionals

#ask #ted lasso #actually when he said 'you want me to tell roy kent what to do!?' I was irritated as hell I was like YES 😭

[gaymurdersalad]

Hi david, you seem awfully sweet! No offense to Legacy, but I personally think you deserve at least a LITTLE more credit, you're pretty caring. Hmm... Have some tomato soup! Sweet soup for a sweet guy :]

Wish I could stay long enough to be friends, but the soup council needs my soup expertise. Byeee! (whisper whisper: don't be afraid to stand up for yourself! you deserve the best, even if *someone* doesn't seem to think the same)

- the soup enthusiast anon

>I- I— I don’t—

>I think y’all are super sweet too, and— Thank you!— But, I… Ain’t nothin’ wrong!

>I don’t need t’… Uhm, stand up to nothin’. What- What should I be standing up to? Y’all— Oh, you all are bein’ silly, huh? Heh! I ain’t get much humor nowadays, sorry if I can’t catch the joke.

>Not too sure if I get it still… Shit, I- I’m bad at this, huh?

>… Y’all should be sayin’ all this stuff to Sportsy, anyways! I dunno why I’m the bell of the ball right now! Such a way with words, that one! Gah, he has me swoonin’ every time he speaks! I’m assumin’ y’all have met— He’s such a wonderful guy, you know that? Pretty easy in the eyes too, heh! I-

>I s- I should give this to Sportsy! He deserves a mot meal, anyhow.

>… Uhm… I- … I’ll… The smell is makin’ me kinda hungry, but that fella really should eat… When’s the last time he slept anyhow? Oh, god, I’m terrible for lettin’ this… I- Uh, oh god…

#murder salad #gaymurdersalad #gaymurderdavid event #hey soup enthusiast. I love you by the way #I always love reading your asks I’ve gotta get on answering them #not even gonna lie I saw you ask today and audibly clapped my hands and went YESS! SOUP ENTHUSAIST! #And now I really want some tomato basil soup and grilled cheese. I am about to devour some. immediately. thank you

[tallymonster]

Memories of Us Chapter 2 || Masterlist

Literally posting the first two parts and then passing out lol, same tags as last time, same inspiration from this art by @cheesy-cryptid , same everything basically.

Summary: Octavia goes to a place in the Upper City to meet her boss. Turns out it's extremely secretive.

Oh one thing I forgot to mention. The chapter titles are based on the song "I Caught Fire" by The Used.

Thanks again to my babe @micropoe10 for being my beta reader and best friend ❤️

also tagging @satanicspinosaurus because they're the first person to ask to be tagged (!!!!) Thanks for the support guys, it means A LOT.

Chapter 2

Could stay a while

Gale gave Octavia the very secret directions to the restaurant she was due to meet her boss in. It was a fancy place in the Upper City, secluded enough for only those who knew where it was could find it. Looking down at the piece of paper with the code to enter, she knocks on the door. A voice comes out of nowhere, loudly asking, "PASSWORD?" Nervously she speaks the phrase on the paper, instantly the door opens and the piece of paper is gone. "Wow, they really don't want people to know about this place huh?" "I would assume not, some of us do pay quite a bit of gold for the exclusivity." A haughty voice speaks out from behind her, a blush quickly develops on her cheeks as the realization crosses that she was not alone.

She quickly stammers "Oh it's my first time here, I was more surprised than anything." She chuckles at her own expense. The man behind her is cloaked in the light of a street lantern directly behind them. "Well, I hope you enjoy it, they say the first time is incredibly memorable..." The last word spills out with a sultry drawl, he walks past her and into the hallway, eventually fading into the darkness of the restaurant. The blush on her cheeks has definitely covered her entire face now.

Octavia takes a few breaths. Then steps into the dark restaurant. The interior of the establishment is lowly lit, almost completely dark, save for the candles on the tables and sconces on the walls. She looks around to the other patrons, all impeccably dressed in clothes that look like they would cost at least 5 months pay.

"This way, miss." Octavia is led to a private room towards the back, the waitress knocks on the red wooden door in front of them, a voice that sounds like Gale's calls out "I think she's here, let me go greet her!"

Gale comes out in a much nicer suit than his usual one, slightly fitted for a guy who you only see in cardigans and loose sweaters. "Okay, now I definitely feel underdressed, is there a dress code here that someone forgot to inform me about?" Octavia jokes, "Because if I had a reason to go buy a new wardrobe with my graduation money, it would've been good to know."

Gale looks at her slightly confused until he notices her wearing practically the same outfit she wore to work, the only exception was her blazer, it wasn't the one he accidentally spilled ink on when they were restoring some letters together earlier in the day.

He sucks his teeth and apologizes "I absolutely did, and I'm not sure how to make up for it yet, but I promise you look wonderful. You have your talents and expertise to speak for themselves! No amount of lavish clothing can eclipse that. Besides, Mr. Ancunin trusts me much more than anyone else. He and I have talked at great lengths about your impressive knowledge of the Heroes of Baldur's Gate. He's made remarks about it, seeming like you've been there yourself!" He laughs as he leads her into the room, would this be the time to tell him her family history?

As she approaches the table, a shadow becomes clear and his form begins to take shape. His hands are the first thing she sees come out from behind the cloak around his shoulders; slender fingers with a spider like length, lustrous skin like pearls, one reaches out and takes hers in a handshake. "My my..Made your way over from outside, darling?" That voice sounded like the man from outside."How was the walk over? Not too far in the back are we? I wanted to make sure our meeting was nice and private."

The waitress who led her down to this room lights a few more candles, replacing some that had apparently gone out. The barely lit room fills with warm yellow light and her boss becomes more illuminated by each one.

Octavia notices his hair first, a mop of silver and white styled into a messy tousle of curls. His ears were pointed, the few rings of hair that fell on them perfectly encircled around as if on purpose. She noticed something particular though, he was wearing sunglasses inside? In this dark place?

Before she even knew, she asked "Why are you wearing sunglasses inside at night?" Taken aback, her boss laughs loudly as he looks towards Gale, "You were right, cheeky little pup, isn't she?"

His grin grows mischievously. Gale shrugs and pulls the chair out in front of him, he motions Octavia to sit. She makes her way over and takes her spot, Gale sitting to her right. "Miss Octavia, I would be honored to finally introduce you to our esteemed head curator of the Baldur's Gate Museum of History, Mr. Astarion Ancunin."

Gale flourishes the last bit by extending his arm out to his right, Astarion dips his head in a small bow. "I do apologize for the last minute absence, my dear" he sips his wine and places the glass down.

"I believe you're both reaping the benefits of that excursion in the hard work you've been doing. Which is the cause of this little outing I've set up for the three of us. Obviously, I wanted to meet you beforehand, Octavia, but some things have to be sacrificed for the good of preservation. I take this work very seriously, I want to ensure these priceless artifacts don't get lost to time, as some things have before." He takes a slow sip of his wine, "I believe Gale has told you about his little interest in our Szarr art collection?"

Astarion playfully asks Octavia, as he turns to Gale, a devilish smile on his face, sipping more wine. "He has, actually, but I asked." she answers "Really? And what do you make of this mystery subject? You must have a theory, yes?" He places a hand under his chin, turning to look at her behind those dark lenses.

Octavia feels the same chill she felt when she first looked at the painting on the wall. She gulps,"Uh not yet, but I'm curious as well...the subject looks like a male elf, maybe about 40? No more than 100 it seems..."

She trails off a little, looking down at the table. "Whomever they were, they seem important somehow, like they were a favorite or something? A favored consort, possibly? I'm hoping that after Gale and I are done with this project, we may be able to find out?" She fidgets with her fingers a little under the table, hearing a pleased hum she straightens up and looks to Gale. He has a giant smile on his face, and gives her a reassuring nod.

A silence falls on the table as they turn to look at Astarion, his eyebrows come together.. he seems angry, perhaps annoyed, was he upset at her speculation? Her heart was in her throat, where was the waitress? She needed water and quick- "Why do you think that?" Astarion asks pointedly, taking a more prominent drink of his wine. "Why do you think that one is favored?"

Octavia feels a lump at her throat, she swallows and answers "They're in a lot of paintings in the gallery...I noticed them in at least a dozen...in the forefront of four, the background of 6...the main subject of two..it's quite a lot for someone who doesn't matter.." She hears a soft huff, not annoyed this time. "Interesting. Most people say that he's pretty or gorgeous or go on about his beautiful body, but you focused on the importance of the subject. I admire your insight, Octavia. I see why Gale tipped the scales for you."

#bg3 #astarion #baldur's gate 3 #astarion ancunin #baldurs gate 3 #bg3 astarion #gale of waterdeep #gale dekarios #astarion bg3 #fanfic #bg3 fanfic #astarion x reader #astarion x oc #fic tag: au #fic tag: headcanon #fic tag: slow burn #fic: memories of us

[utilitycaster]

Hey! Because I have seen various, various, various takes on Ashton’s actions in ep77– both on twitter (whew) and on here— and I am loving all of the different perspectives on it, I was wondering what your opinion was on the take that Ashton may have manipulated Fearne in the conversation they both had right before absorbing the shard.

Personally, I feel like it may be a bit more complicated than that, but I still don’t know.

Hey!

I think this post I made sums it up. It's not. Ashton tells Fearne precisely what they intend to do. He then does it. Fearne has the opportunity to refuse this request, or to tell the rest of Bells Hells, and she chooses not to. Yes, he compliments her and tells her that he trusts her to do the right thing when most wouldn't. Laudna asks Imogen to kill her if Delilah takes over in virtually the same exact language earlier than episode, and I don't think that's manipulative either:

Laudna to Imogen: And if anything happens and I become her little puppet, I trust you to make the right choice. (Implication this is a request for a mercy killing in the context of Delilah and Laudna's lives being inseparable; is understood as such by Imogen as demonstrated from her response and her later scene in the temple)

Ashton to Fearne: Things are going to happen, and I trust you to help me make the right decision, and I hope you trust me to help make the right decision.

The fact one is being brought up and not the other really points out that the Twitter talks out their collective ass ten times more often than they do their collective mouth; and the fact that they cannot distinguish "put Fearne in a somewhat uncomfortable position" from manipulation really points out that touching grass is not enough; they need to develop meaningful relationships with a wide variety of people in the real world.

Going along with a friend's stupid-ass decision that they encouraged you to join in and immediately regretting it is not, in fact, manipulation; it's your friend at most being kind of a dick and you exercising your agency to make your own stupid-ass decisions. It would have been wiser and nicer of Ashton to ask the party who wanted to take the shard, sure, but Fearne actively agrees with them that they should get it, and Ashton is not really defined by wisdom and being nice, and also, the above would be way more boring.

I don't want to go into this because it's a massive out-of-scope rant not limited to this particular situation, and I'd like to drag my sleep schedule back into a reasonable place tonight, but I think a lot of the more rancid discourse, whatever it may be but especially about interpersonal relationships between characters, arises for the following reasons, and I have little patience for any of them.

Thinking the only way to be a Good Person is to use 2023-approved therapy speak (and, frankly, frequently 2023 Rando on Tiktok claiming expertise who is actually a freshman psych students with no friends and a D average approved "therapy speak")

Relatedly, an all-consuming fear of any conflict, fictional, real, or otherwise, and the accompanying lack of any conflict resolution skills; this is also why they think this is manipulative, because if Fearne said no, that would be Conflict which is bad so positioning someone where conflict might be required for them to express themselves must be evil.

The genuine belief that you can only understand someone if you get everything right on the first try; either you read their mind perfectly or you have failed and are probably a manipulator or abuser for potentially leading to misunderstandings which lead to conflict which, as we see from the above point, is evil.

A refusal to admit that sometimes people are merely 1. assholes or 2. stupid. I frequently talk about opinions I cannot stand, and I almost as frequently get questions about how this opinion is problematic, and the vast majority of the time? It's not. I think it says something quite worrying, actually, that people are more comfortable and even eager to assume that a stranger is hateful or bigoted rather than merely inconsiderate or not that bright. Ashton made a poorly informed decision and made Fearne party to it. It was dumb and it wasn't really nice. That's literally it.

Anyway here's the five geek social fallacies; I recommend reading any Twitter Take(TM) and deciding how many of them they are applying to the narrative, cast, and fandom. See if you can get a full house.

(also upon re-reading this I'm pretty brusque and I promise it's not directed at you; I just genuinely think that the majority of the Twitter fandom, and certainly the loudest voices thereof, are so stupid a Detect Thoughts spell on them would fail on the basis of intelligence alone and the fact that their takes gain traction baffles and infuriates me)

#answered #dizegamble #critical role spoilers #cr tag

[odditycircus-2002]

When Baraka saw You grow Wings

(A small drabble idea that came to mind that I decided to write down for my mental health. Also because I know what it's like dealing with back problems.)

To clarify from one of my headcanons post for Mortal Kombat 1, when Medusa!Reader was transformed, you didn't immediately grow wings. That would come later on when you ran away to the Tarkatan Colony.

/

Barka noticed how you retired to your quarters earlier than usual, which wouldn't be too concerning. If it weren't for how often you lean against something while groaning in pain and how you're often scratching at your back. Yet, you would wave off anyone’s concerns, stating that it’s just temporary and manageable. Baraka isn’t too convinced though, judging by how sluggish you are by the next day from a lack of sleep. The former merchant and tribune may not have much medical expertise, but he wishes you’d let him or ANYONE of the colony look over you. It doesn’t help at all that you cover yourself head to toe in a hooded cloak and robes, or constantly wear a mask. A mask he’s never seen you without.

Baraka eventually gets his wish, in a way, when he and his hunting party returned with a decently sized boar/like creature only for a young man afflicted with Tarkat to run up to him, out of breath. “Baraka, come quick! There-There’s something wrong with the Healer!”

The afflicted man wasted no time to rush toward your dwellings where a sizable crowd of Tarkatans had gathered outside. They are murmuring anxiously amongst themselves, wondering what will happen to them if their only Healer dies. Immediately, Baraka understands the concern when he hears a strained scream echoing from your home.

"WHY DID HE LET ME LIVE?!?"

The former tribune barks for no one but him to enter, for now. The crowd parts away for him as he makes his way into your living space.

He pushes aside the curtains hanging in your doorway, spotting you on your sleeping mat. You are curled up into a tight ball with your back to Baraka, mask off to the side. Your sides rise and fall as you take in deep breaths, trying to manage the agonizing burning pain that wracks your back. “Y/N? Y/N, tell me what’s wrong, please!”

Baraka pleads as he kneels beside you, placing a gentle hand on your shoulder. Only for you to let out a pained groan, before you grab your hood to hide your face.

“Don’t look pleassse!”

You hiss out before letting out a shout you barely choke back. Baraka pulls his hand away before he gets up and looks over to your apothecary cabinet. He grabs a small pot he’s seen you use for newly torn open skin, before then reaching for a small bottle filled with painkilling herbs he recognizes from his military days. Baraka then grabs a cup to fill with water from a canteen you often carry before kneeling beside you to place down all these items.

“Just take this, they help with the pain don’t they?”

You manage to rasp out,

“Noooo… saving those… for … others”

Baraka’s eyes widen at your words before his brows furrow.

"I admire that even now you're thinking of the colony. However, you're no good to anyone if you don't help yourself first."

You open your mouth to refuse, only to shudder violently as another wave of pain fills your body. Once you're able to speak again, you finally reply

"F-fine. Just... look away... please."

Baraka nods

"Understood."

He then turns around, listening to you pull yourself up, at least enough to take the herbs and down the water. Baraka speaks again when he hears you open you open the small pot.

"I could help with your back."

Silence fills the air as you contemplate Baraka's offer, before you shift on your mat to lie back down with your back to him.

"Fine. You can look now."

Baraka faces toward you once more to find the pot open. He picks it up before taking a look at your back, only to find it to be writhing as if there was something stuck underneath the clothing, now stained with two dark spots that smell strongly of blood. Baraka moves his gaze toward the door at the sound of footsteps, as a member of his hunting party parts your curtain to inquire about you.

''I'll be caring for her. Make sure everyone gets their portions of the prey we caught. Inform the rest of the colony that we are not to be disturbed UNLESS it's an emergency. "

"Yes sir."

The other Tarkatan then walks away to carry out his orders. With no more distractions, Baraka turns his attention back on you. Without another word, he grabs the back of your tunic and tears it open like it were tissue paper. His eyes widen at the sight of what looks like two bleeding bumps writhing between your shoulder blades. Upon closer inspection, those bumps looked to be something like the tip of claws.

"How long?"

Baraka inquires.

"About a moon ago. I don't know what's happening to me... I'm really scared, Baraka."

A heavy silence falls between you, as Baraka gets to work on putting the salve on your back. The former tribune notes how it's firmer than humanoid flesh with F/C scales speckling your back. You let out a sigh of relief as you feel the cool salve dampening the pain in your back.

"Baraka?"

The man makes a noise of acknowledgment.

"Could you please stay with me? For the rest of the night, I mean."

You don't see the soft expression on Baraka's face.

"I'm not going anywhere, Y/N."

This proves to be true as for the rest of the night until the first light, Baraka stayed by your side. He only left to get you more water and food for you to eat, respecting your wishes and turning away as you do. He offered you a hand to hold as a stab of pain occasionally ripples through you. Eventually, you would pull yourself to his lap, wrapping your arms around his waist while burying your face into his stomach. Baraka didn't have to ask why you did this when a loud CRACK and SNAP echo within your dwellings.

"GAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!"

You scream as you dig your nails into Baraka's flesh. The latter lets out a reflexive growl but doesn't push you away. Your howl was loud enough to attract some passersby, including the Tarkatan from earlier, to poke their heads into your living space. Baraka quickly dismissed them and repeated how no one else was to enter.

After they left, the sound of wet tearing fills the former tribune's ears. Baraka watches with widened eyes as something like a folded clawed arm covered in blood starts to emerge from your back. You pant heavily as your hold on Baraka temporarily lessens, before you then start to sob quietly.

"Wh-why did he do this to me? Why? Why?"

A somber look settles on the afflicted man as he mutters some words of both encouragement and assurance, as you had done so many times for your dying patients.

"I promise you, I'll make the man who did this to you pay tenfold."

Baraka's not sure you even heard him over your sobbing, but he'll promise this as many times as you need to hear.

So the cycle repeats. You would shudder and spasm in pain, before you shriek in pain as the limbs in your back slowly emerge. Baraka would let you scratch him up and endure the ringing in his ears, before supporting you in any way he could. This includes water, some more pain medication, or an assuring touch. Finally, by first light, the pain stops.

The limbs on your back fully emerged from your back, which turned out to be full-blown wings. Your wings were bat-like and leathery, strongly resembling those of a Vaternian. Not for the first time, the colony's leader ponders what exactly you are or becoming. No matter, having you finally resting in his lap after an entire night battling your body, Baraka is glad to see you're alright.

#mortal kombat #mortal kombat x reader #mk x reader #shang tsung #mortal kombat 1 #Oddball writes #drabble #baraka x reader #baraka #mk1

[gplusbfics]

Anson Mount Talks About the Strike

Last weekend at Dragon Con I attened a couple of great panels with cast members of Discovery and Strange New Worlds. Due to the strike, discussion of the actual shows was off the table and so moderators and audience members had to limit their questions to other things. It worked nicely, IMO. Anyway, the one exception to the not-talking-about-the-thing was in a panel Saturday moderated by Garrett Wang (Harry Kim, Voyager) featuring Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, Anson Mount, Ethan Peck.

Wang kicked things off by talking about the strike for a minute and then handed things over to Anson Mount. I don't know if he knew in advance, but Mount proceeded to deliver parable about the SAG strike that was just epic. I had to wait a few days to locate video but once I did, I transcribed it to share. I've cued the clip so it starts right as Mount begins to speak, but I'm including Garrett Wang's intro in the transcript.

Garret Wang: I'm going to start right now with a discussion on the strike. Let's talk about the strike. I think we should. So a lot of people have misconceptions about the strike. Just to give us some facts, just to lay it out there: Onl7 87% of SAG's membership make enough per year to have health insurance. That threshold is what-- is it $26,000? Something around there, something very low. And that's not per month, that's per year. So not every actor is Tom Cruise. This strike is really not about greedy actors, this is about being treated fairly, about being treated with respect, which is not happening right now."

Anson Mount: Imagine you're sitting in a bar in Los Angeles and outside this big, stretch limo pulls up. The limo is hauling behind it a mega-yacht and the mega-yacht has got one of those helicopter pads on it, with a gold-plated helicopter on it. And from the back of the limo steps a guy with a $7,000 Italian suit, he's got a 24-carat gold tie pin, slicked-back hair, little pencil-thin mustache. He's got an assistant, whose got an assistant, whose got an assistant.

And he walks in the bar and he sees you and he sidles up next to the bar and he says, "Have I got a deal for YOU!" And you say, "Okaaay, what's the deal?" And he says, "Well! I'm starting a business in this brand new field called entertainment-- and I think you'd make the perfect business partner." And you say, "Entertainment, huh? Is that a very lucrative business?" "Oh, no no no no no, we're not making ANY money."

And you say, "Well, OK, what's in it for me, then?" And he says "Well! I will pay you to come in to work for me for one half a day for minimum wage and in exchange you will grant to me permission to use the video of you performing your expertise, as well as your expertise, for the rest of time, in perpetuity, whenever I want, without paying you any more money or asking permission."

And you say, "I don't know… Have you thought about to include me in this? Like maybe a little small percentage of profit, just a little like 2 percent." And he says, "You're insane! We're standing in the breadlines as it is!" And you say "Wait, wait, wait. If you say you're not making any money, 2 percent of nothing is nothing. You wouldn't have to pay me anything." And he says "That's a wonderful idea! I'll pay you 2 percent always-- of nothing." And you say, "That's not what I'm saying. So: let me put it this way. You must have an independent adjudicator or somebody who counts your numbers and lets everybody, all your shareholders, all your workers, know how the business is doing." "Oh, no no no, our numbers are all proprietary information." And you say, "Well, how do I know how the business is doing?" "Well, you'll just have to trusts me, of course."

And you say, "You know what? I just… under these given circumstances I'm not sure I want to work with you." And he says, "How DARE you?! I am going to walk straight out of this bar and when I come back -- and it won't be for a very long time -- but when I do, you'd better be here here waiting and you had better be grateful for my very generous offer of 2 percent of nothing!" And he whips his cape around and he walks out of the bar, followed by his assistant and his assistant and his assistant, and they all pile into the back of the limousine, and the driver tells his assistant driver, "Peel out!" With the mega-yacht, with the helicopter.

I think at that point, any reasonable person would turn to the bartender and say, "I think that guy's out of his fucking mind!" Right? Is it just me?

Garrett Wang: Anson, I gotta say, I've been on many panels and we've had many conversations about the strike, but no one has done a staged reading!"

--

Meanwhile, after dwelling a bit more on the strike, the conversation moves on to (necessarily) non-Star Trek topics and is highly enjoyable.

--

P.S. Yes, I still exist. No longer active on Tumblr but not because I"m boycotting or anything. We just drifted apart. I do still read Garashir fic but mainly just the same 20 favorites I saved to Instapaper, over and over :)

#anson mount #dragon con 2023 #dragon con #sag strike #strange new worlds #labor rights #labor unions #garrett wang #Youtube

[temperamentalaquarius]

so what do i have to offer to get a post with a scathing comparison of fanon Tim and canon Tim? 😂 this is an official request! the amount of cardboard cutout & self-insert Tim ocs i have found in the fanfics… it’s been really bothering me lately and your “bitch i might wing” posts give me life

I'm glad ur enjoying my descent, I am too ha ha!!

And boy do I agree with you. Tim is juuust white and twinky enough(but not nearly as much as fanon Tim enjoyers seem to think) on first spec for a lot of ppl to project on, so he gets...idk let's call it diluted. Short answer is that canon Tim would drop kick fanon Tim for speaking about Jack Drake the way he does.

Long rambling analysis is that fanon Tim leans into his time as Red Robin(because it's the only Tim comic they've read IF they've read it) which was more supposed to be a story of how someone behaves when they are so deep in their grief that they literally can't see which way is up than a display of how Tim normally behaves and thinks. Everything else is just kind of.. assumed filler based off of what his wiki says. As a result Tim gets written as this shy, spineless, borderline megalomaniac child who is ignored and undervalued when in 85% of canon he's the complete opposite(nu52 Tim is a blight). Where fanon Tim is a genius prodigy, canon Tim is the average smart kid with a big mouth who chose to be a hero. He had to contend with the knowledge and fear that he is not on the level of the other heroes and adapts to it by bringing antagonists to his level instead of meeting them where they are. He's interesting because he literally has to think differently but he's written as Bruce junior for some reason.

Also, unlike most of the batfam, he has(or had) strong ties to his civilian life, and had to find a way to balance them, something that is completely ignored in fanon when that was his appeal in the first fucking place. Instead, fanon warps his parents into these grotesquely neglectful charicatures to justify the truth of Red Robin when again, Red Robin was about grief through the lens of an unreliable narrator. Jack and Janet were just... parents? They were neglectful in the way that any teenage superhero's parents have to be so that they can be a superhero on the DL, and he loved them. Taking that away takes away the impact of their deaths on him, and strips away yet another element of his character. Also, I literally cannot overstate the impact that Steph had in Tim's life. Because ppl want to ship him with other male characters, their formative and thematically integral relationship gets tossed to the side along with all of the nuance that came with it.

Because I can't stop talking I also think that fanon Tim is also probably tied with Dick when it comes to suffering from the poor attempt at TMNTing of the robins- i.e. Dick is the face, Jason's the angry one, Tim's the smart one, and Damian's the fighty one while Steph&Duke don't exist because I guess there aren't any more one word traits to assign them. Tim is very smart, yes, but hes not the smartest(because obviously area of expertise is a factor) or the best detective of the Robins- and DEF not the smartest of the Batfam by any measure of intelligence- and it certainly isn't his defining feature like fandom wants ppl to think. He's got other things to him that are more interesting.

I just blacked out for 15 minutes, is this anything?

#tim drake #bitch i might wing #sorry this may be late I don't know when you sent this and I don't check my inbox nearly as much as I should #but this was rlly fun thank u for the ask!! 💕

[nocturnalazure]

Not-a-tutorial - Dialogues: Part II

Part 2 of the not-tutorial about how Noctie does dialogues!

Some of you know this already, but I do the shooting part first, then write the dialogues to go with the pictures that I got. It works best for me that way. I always always ask myself: what does the character want to convey here? What is the essential message? Answering that question helps me stripping out all the redundancies and unnecessary bits that would bog down my meaning. Also, I tend to find that short bits of dialogue going back and forth between characters make for a more realistic and dynamic conversation.

Talking about realism, I like showing small hesitations in a character's speech. We don't always speak in one breath. We pause, we stammer, we look for the right words,... So I choose carefully where to split my lines, in order to make them as meaningful as possible and to have the most impact on the reader (hopefully).

I use ellipsis (the three dots) to relay "visible silence". That is, when it is important to show that a character could talk but is very definitely not talking (either because they're holding back, or because they have too many thoughts at once, or the words don't come out, etc etc). I overuse those three dots, I just love meaningful silences.

I don't use any bubble at all for silences that are real silences (ie, the character is taken aback or is simply keeping quiet). It's more dramaaaaaatic that way!

Characters should ideally speak with different voices, but I know that's difficult to achieve. Besides some obvious extremes (I try not making my more cerebral characters speak the same way as the tougher, street-wise characters for example), I don't think I can get it right myself, mostly because English is not my native language and I don't master it well enough to be able to imitate a variety of accents and registers. So I try using other ways to individualize a character's way of talking, like speech mannerism or favorite expressions.

Erik's favorite swearword is very clearly "Goddammit". xD

Romeo uses Italian when he's frustrated (mostly interjections) or when he wants to make a point.

There are other easy ways to make a character's voice distinctive. Some will be quicker to crack a joke and others will have a stammer. Some will always be sulky, others will be particularly rude or polite. Their identity should somehow show through their way of speaking and addressing people.

Even if a graphic novel is very static, the way characters position themselves can say a lot about them too. The poses I select for each character can give an attentive reader some hints about their personality.

Again, I don't want to labor the point uselessly as everyone surely knows how to read a comic and I'm really not saying my way is the right way because it's not. I struggle a lot and I change my mind and try different things and there are a million things that I just don't do right. This speech bubble sort-of-guide is probably way too specific to be useful to anyone, and again, I don't believe I have enough expertise to pretend I know what I'm doing. I just really like the topic so consider it a ramble!

Thank you for reading this far! Hopefully that was at least interesting!

#ts3 #sims 3 #sims 3 story #sims 3 storytelling tips #random

[shiraglassman]

Hey, I know this is kind of a dumb question, but I came across a TikTok about a month ago suggesting that dragons (the western, fire breathing, princess snatching, treasure hoarding ones) were rooted in antisemitic in the same way something like goblins are. I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not, and it kind of sent me into a tailspin, since I’ve always loved dragons (I read the WoF series ONCE and wouldn’t shut up about it for 3 years), and I was worried that I would have to drop them entirely for fear of offending someone. I can definitely see the similarities between common antisemitic tropes and dragon tropes, but I’ve always heard that the origins of the western dragon were that it was just a scalier of the devil and not meant to represent any marginalized community. However, I am not Jewish in any way, and I’m aware it’s not my place to dictate what is and isn’t harmful, so I was curious as to what you thought. (Sorry about how long this is TuT)

I held on to this ask for a few weeks to try to make sure my response made sense, so here goes. Disclaimer that I'm just one Jewish woman who loves dragons, and I claim no expertise or position of authority. I can't guarantee that someone won't look at your special interests and judge you unfairly. I also can't guarantee that you'll be hyperaware enough and careful enough to catch dogwhistles if they're subtle, compared with ordinary fictional dragons. What I can guarantee is that your average Jewish person is not going to assume you are more unsafe to be around than other unknown gentiles just because you like dragons, but fandom spaces and Tumblr spaces sometimes represent a skewed or specific cross-section of the population and may react differently. I can't make any of those calls. I don't want to tell you to start tuning out marginalized people when we speak about our issues including bad representation, but I also don't think "every Western dragon" is a problem the same way the entire perception of Halloween witches is, for example. For "some reason" (antisemitism) we've decided that big hooked noses are a thing you strap to your face to fake being a witch, or the way witches look in clip art. This is an issue because it takes a simple, neutral feature that some of us have and exaggerates it to the point of looking nonhuman. "Ha ha," says the trope. "Wouldn't it be funny if this trait that these Others have was so different and so jarring in appearance that they looked as different as they truly are, from us, the In Group?"

If the same group of folks who had anxiety about us coexisting alongside them created the witch aesthetic as created the Western dragon lore, and indeed much of old-fashioned European fantasy, it's easy to see how their feelings about us an other marginalized groups (disabled people etc.) creep into the stories. HOWEVER, it's also incredibly easy for dragons to not be us. Or have anything to do with us. If you're nervous when writing your own stories that someone is going to mistake your greedy characters for Jewish-coded, try to establish that real (human or otherwise) Jewish characters coexist with the greedy dragon or whatever to show that you're not using the dragon as a subconscious Jewish reference. But if you're talking about just "can I continue to buy dragon merch from creators who draw cute art", the only thing I can tell you is that there's an intense diversity of opinion among the Jewish people and even though I'm saying it's fine and probably most people at my temple would say it's fine, I can't account for strangers on apps I don't even have. Personally, I think you're safe as long as you avoid dragon things that evoke the trope directly. And many MANY dragons don't even evoke the trope these days, because so many millennials and younger grew up adoring dragons so we launched media where dragons are good. And don't even always hoard wealth. Much of modern dragon media seems to ignore the greedy and/or hoarding tropes entirely or have replaced greed as a motivator for the collections with "this dragon has a special interest", which is cute and doesn't evoke antisemitic tropes at all. You'll probably be able to make good judgments about what does the trope and what doesn't, but for some additional help here is a post Meir and I did on @writingwithcolor, which is where we'd prefer these questions be directed (yes, I know we're closed currently but we're reopening soon.) P.S. If this was sent to my personal specifically to avoid the WWC ask box being closed, please don't — that's an amount of volunteer work I simply can't take on. But I also know that it's possible and likely that you didn't know about WWC at all, so now you do — feel free to peruse our vast archives of past posts. @im-tired1124

#jumblr #jewish #dragons #antisemitism #tropes #dog whistles #im-tired1124

[qqueenofhades]

Hi! Just wanted to say I found my way to your blog after a mutual recced one of your Old Guard fics and mentioned you were a medievalist (I LOVE medieval history, though I am simply an amateur nerd) and was extremely pleasantly surprised to see so many level-headed political takes on this blue hellsite. I'm sure some of your posts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular have attracted more than a few mouth breather asks, so I just wanted to say I really appreciate your thorough and nuanced breakdowns of not only the conflict, but American politics in general. I know it's not your academic area of expertise, but your perspective as a historian is incredibly insightful and has honestly even brought some comfort in These Trying Times. I like to go through your posts whenever I feel the 2024 election anxiety seizing hold.

Aha, thank you. I do my best. And while yes, I do periodically get deeply stupid asks/notes on some of my more controversial posts, I will say that I am at least old enough to not give a shit about what idiots on social media say, and I am nothing if not stubborn. So yes, I persist, and I am glad that plenty of people also seem to appreciate what I do and like to listen and/or be comforted by what I have to say. Win some lose some, etc.

As I have said, I am a historian, and while that doesn't mean I have the Greatest Takes Ever of All Time and nobody can question me, it does mean that I view things in a particular long, careful, and systematic way, taking into account multiple perspectives and facts and points of view, because that is what I have been trained to do. As far as the election goes: trust me, I am as terrified about it as everyone else, and I'm already having to carefully manage, restrict, and otherwise be mindful about how much content I am taking in and from what sources. It is only February and November is probably going to kill me. But we have to do our best to be both realistic and hopeful, so I do.

Once again, I am just a person on the Internet and I do not have some magical guarantee of being right. But I will say that my predictions and views do quite often correspond closely with actual reality, and that makes me decently confident that I do in fact understand the situation and am able to analyze/discuss it accurately. Which is certainly something that anyone can do, if they're patient; you don't need to be a historian for that. As I have said before, I am doomed on social media because I don't go in for short soundbites or pithy black and white statements. But it does show that I am able to think and speak in a hopefully more useful way than the usual garbage noise, I'm honored that people are often eager to come to me when they want some basic reassurance, and I do my best. So yes. Thanks. (And glad you enjoyed the fic!)

#cbk1000 #ask