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#negative salt
powdermelonkeg · 10 months
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Google is getting progressively, frustratingly more useless.
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uncanny-tranny · 1 year
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One thing that pushed me to looking into fat liberation and whatnot was to see how fat people literally can't win.
A fat person could eat nothing but fruits and vegetables and drink water, and exercise every day, and there would still be people telling them that they need to "get healthy". A fat person can do whatever they could do do the "right" things for their bodies, and if they still live in a fat body, they are mistreated. The only way fat people can "win" in this scenario is if they stopped existing - which is impossible.
Fatness isn't a punishment for moral faliure. It's something that happens for many reasons.
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blue-likethebird · 6 months
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Reusing the memory system from botw for the tears of the dragon storyline in totk was such a terrible decision on so many different levels that it’s honestly kind of impressive.
While the botw memory system had flaws of its own, there was one small but significant thing that worked in its favour: botw’s memories were largely separate from the main plot in the past, and have absolutely no bearing on the story being told in the present. Aside from a few specific instances (ie the calamity striking, the ceremony, Link and Zelda becoming closer) the memories are all self-contained moments that emphasize character development over driving the story. Because there’s no major narrative throughline between them, it gives players more freedom to discover in any order regardless of how much they’ve progressed through the main quest without running the risk of stumbling across a memory that ruins something else later on in the game.
(This got long so the rest of my analysis is going under the cut.)
The biggest change between the memories from botw and the dragon’s tears from totk is definitely what kind of information these cutscenes relay to you as the player. Botw’s memories are primarily snapshots of small interpersonal moments that hold very little significance to the greater narrative taking place in the past. Totk’s memories are the greater narrative. With only one major exception -that I’ll touch on in a sec-, every cutscene in the dragon’s tears shows a crucial moment of story development with no time left to explore the characters driving that story forwards. There’s no organic moment revealing, say, a quirk of Rauru’s that Mineru finds annoying, or Sonia’s sense of humour, or any of our literal Main Villain Ganondorf’s motivations for going to war with Hyrule. If there’s any moments of character focus they only happen in ways that advance the plot (meaning the only real character focus is on the characters totk wants the entire universe to orbit around, namely Rauru and Zelda), and as such it’s harder to bring myself to care about what happens to anyone.
To illustrate the point I’m trying to make here, compare the memories of the champions Link regains during the divine beast quests to the conversations with the ancient sages at the end of each temple. The memories make passing mentions of the ongoing preparations for the calamity, but the real purpose of those scenes is to showcase who the champions were as people before their deaths and give us a reason to mourn them, even though we know at the start of our journey that they’re all long gone. In contrast, the conversations with the ancient sages are all about the events of the imprisoning war and their promise to Zelda that their descendants will come to Link’s aid in the future, very obviously copy pasted for each of the five times that cutscene is brought up (which is a particularly egregious moment of bad quest design but that’s a rant for another time) in such a way that none of the 5 incarnations of that cutscene reveal anything new about the ancient sages as characters, to the point where none of them even show their faces. I care about Daruk because the game shows me that he cares deeply about the wellbeing of his fellow champions and brings out the best in others. So why should I care about the nameless, faceless sage of water? What’s there to move me about their struggles if my only interactions with the sages are a series of exposition dumps? If the game can’t give me a reason to sincerely care about its main characters, the whole rest of the story is meaningless.
(As an aside, I get the feeling someone on the dev team caught on to the issue I’m describing here, because the tea party memory sticks out like a sore thumb from the rest of the dragon tear cutscenes. It’s such a jarring change of pace to have the otherwise plot-heavy dragon’s tears come screeching to a halt for a scene where Sonia sits down with Zelda to have a cute little tea party and talk about absolutely nothing of significance that the whole thing almost seems like it was hastily tacked on to the story later. Given that the next (chronological) memory sees Sonia fall victim to an unceremonious death by chiropractor, it feels like someone realized that Sonia really doesn’t do or say much in the scenes before she dies and threw together the tea party scene so players would have at least one moment to look back on fondly when she’s fridged. But I digress)
The story told in the dragon’s tears is a highly linear one. But the open-ended nature of botw’s memory system remains, meaning that these tears can be found and viewed in any order. At first this doesn’t seem so bad, since the first two tears you’re likely to find if you follow the game’s intended path are also the chronological first and second of the memories you can discover through these geoglyph tears. But after those first two, the game kinda gives up on guiding you towards these tears in a way that flows well with the story they wrote: the closest tear geographically to the two the game initially guides you towards correlates to one of the penultimate scenes of that entire storyline, while the next scene chronologically is found almost halfway across the map. As such, it’s all but guaranteed that you’ll spoil yourself in some way without using either a guide or the (somewhat unintuitive and never fully explained by the game) little map in the forgotten temple. Finding memories in order didn’t matter so much in botw because the scenes you could find still worked well as standalone scenes before you discovered every memory and pieced together the full picture, and the game is never trying to surprise me about the characters’ fates at the end of this storyline: hell the first memory you’re guided to shows the calamity striking. But in contrast, viewing a dragon’s tear at the wrong time can completely ruin the story they’re trying to tell in those cutscenes. During my playthrough, for example, the first tear I found after the game stopped guiding me to them showed Ganondorf removing Sonia’s stone from her dead body. At this point I had known Sonia existed for all of like an hour, so every subsequent appearance she made was ruined for me by the fact that I already knew she was nothing but cannon fodder to be killed off for the sake of another character’s pain (Rauru and Zelda a-fucking-gain). I expected to be pissed that it was so easy to spoil myself, or maybe sad in passing that a character with her potential was so underutilized, but instead I just felt… tired. I wasn’t even halfway to the first settlement and already I was completely numb to the story the game was trying to tell.
But the worst was yet to come. And oh boy was it ever a low point for storytelling in the Zelda series. Remember how I said up above that the memories in botw had no connection to the story in the present? Let’s just say the same cannot be said for the dragon’s tears.
It’s May 2023. I’ve just finished the sage of wind questline. I still have hope that the story the game is trying to tell will be good. Deciding that I’ll go to Goron city next, I head towards the Thyplo skyview tower to expand my map, catch a glimpse of a nearby geoglyph from the air, and glide over to check it out. This geoglyph shows me a memory that not only recaps the entire dragon tear storyline, but also ends on a bit of foreshadowing about Zelda’s fate that’s about as subtle as a brick to the fucking face. By exploring -the thing the game claims it prioritized above all else in the design of its world and quests- I’d once again been hit with spoilers for a major story detail.
My main objective in this game is to find Zelda. It’s the only driving factor behind my journey towards all these different regions. The current big mystery I’m supposed to solve is why Zelda’s causing so much hell for the people of Hyrule. I now knew exactly where she was and what the deal with her appearances in other parts of Hyrule was, and I’d found it completely by accident by doing something the game says over and over again that it wants me to do. Unlike with Sonia’s death, this time I was a mess of emotions. I was pissed the fuck off that this open-world game had punished me twice already for trying to explore. More than that, I was disappointed that a game I had been so excited to play, from a series I had so many fond memories of, had let me down like this. With every subsequent quest where the sages and I chased a Zelda I knew was fake to our next objective, and every NPC wondering where she was that I couldn’t tell the truth to, that disappointment grew. The entire rest of the main story was ruined for me before I had progressed past 1/4th of the regional quests and a third of the dragon’s tears. There was no more sense of anticipation or mystery. I finished the rest of the game with a bitter taste in my mouth and haven’t touched it again since.
Do I think this story could have been good? Honestly, I don’t know, and by now I don’t really care either (that’s a lie. I care so so much and that’s probably why I hate totk as much as I do). But it’s all irrelevant, because like Cinderella’s stepsister cutting off her own heel so she can cram her foot into a glass slipper that’s never going to fit, totk is sabotaged by the devs’ insistence that everything fit itself into a world they custom-made for botw. This isn’t a new formula that the series is following, it’s Nintendo slapping a new coat of paint on an existing skeleton, and I’m not optimistic to see what this particular approach has in store for the Zelda series. Especially not at the price they’re charging for it.
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libakarm · 7 months
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alwida10 · 6 months
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After the … horrible*cough* … most deep and tragic, but certainly not satisfying conclusion of the Loki series, I would like to randomly cite one of the writers of Thor (2011) with a random advise for aspiring and established script writers. 🙂
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That’s all. 🙂
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buggachat · 2 years
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I know I've said this and many variations countless times before, but just a reminder:
responding to fandom analysis posts of a show with "haha or it's just bad writing 🤣", "wow the writers must have written this by accident because they're bad 😛", or "wow one interesting thing managed to happen despite how bad the writing is 😆" is... grating.
I get it. You don't like the show, and no matter what happens in it, you'll never change your opinion of that. So why are you even interacting with analysis posts? What do you get out of it if you think literally everything in this show is written by accident? Why do you think the OPs of these posts want to hear about how much you don't care and don't want to even try to engage with it at all?
Make your own post. And tag it with the appropriate salt tags so I can blacklist.
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Huntl0w isn't good and that's why
A general compilation of all the problems that do not allow me to treat Huntl0w at least neutrally:
1. Distortion of characters. Do you remember Hunter from the beginning of season 2? And that's it, he is no longer with you. Now he is not a soldier who has been training all his life, he is a cute awkward blushing boy who can't do anything without his boss girlfriend. And do you remember Willow, a kind soul who uses her powers only against enemies? Forget, she'll drive a new acquaintance into the ground and won't let him go. They are trying to forcibly fit them into the girlboss x malewife dynamic, and for this they have to change their characters.
2. Lack of chemistry. The same problem as Lumity: all romantic interactions are embarrassments and red cheeks. But if the girls had a Grom dance and more time together, then Huntl0w has nothing.
3. Willow's attitude. She treats him the same way she treats all her other friends right up to the moment when he saved her with the help of the power of the Flapjack. I'm sure the writers didn't do it on purpose, but it turned out that way - Willow fell in love with Hunter only after he stopped being magically disabled. Or in gratitude for the rescue. One is no better than the other.
4. Hunter's awkwardness. The guy has known her for the fourth year, three of which they are clearly together, but still confused as the first time. He's obviously uncomfortable with her. But who is he comfortable with? With Luz and Gus! It is with Luz that he shares secrets, she understands him like no one else. With Gus, Hunter found the best common language, common interests, and in general they are on the same wavelength. Willow and Hunter don't have either. They were able to prescribe normal interaction with everyone except the love interest, and it's so fucked up.
5. The uselessness for the plot. They don't bring anything, even the very parallel with Caleb and Evelyn is ignored. It feels like they got together just to "pair every character" (except for Gus, of course, Gus is our black best friend, he doesn't deserve our attention).
6. Willow is Hunter's authority figure. There is nothing wrong with the fact that a girl can be a leader in a relationship. But when a guy just starts separating from his uncle, whom he considered an authority all his life, and immediately falls in love with a girl who commands him... This is a very bad parallel. Hunter just changed his boss. TOH is not so deep to develop this topic, and it don’t have enough time, so this is definitely a minus for them.
7. Lack of development. Yes, the series was cut. And now you say that this justifies everything. And I will say that it only makes it worse. Already knowing that the series would be shortened, Dana and co pushed a new love line, which "developed" behind the scenes, did nothing for the plot, but spoiled the characters' characters (as if Amity alone was not enough for us).
8. Hunter is the second Caleb. Yes, Hunter's arc has come to the same place where it began. This applies to a lesser extent to Huntlow, it is rather a sin of the plot itself, but in total with the rest of the problems it becomes no less infuriating.
In conclusion, I can say that this ship is definitely not problematic, it's just bad. No one is forbidden to love them, but they should understend why people may not like Huntl0w.
Maybe I'll write the same thing with Lumity, but I'm not sure.
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they-call-me-haiku · 7 months
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i hate the whole "the show was cancelled" excuse that toh fans constantly use to justify poor writing choices. i'm as upset as anyone that toh was cut short, but the show writers got an advantage that a lot of other shows didn't. they were allowed to actually end the show. look at infinity train, for example. it had more seasons planned but the execs decided to cancel it without even giving the creators time to write a proper ending.
so in that case, the writers of toh should consider themselves lucky and make do with what they have. of course, it's most ideal to have the freedom to write the entire show how you want. but when you can't do that but you're allowed to give the series a proper resolution, you have to pick and choose what plot points to focus on.
instead of focusing on the important arcs and plot points (belos's backstory, the collector's origin, hunter's arc, etc) the writers decided to add completely unnecessary ships and additions to further complicate the plot. i'll say it: huntlow was unnecessary, the whole hexside and kikimora thing in s3e2 was unnecessary, the collector's rushed redemption arc was unnecessary. in fact, some of these decisions actively affected the ongoing plot badly (huntlow ruining hunter's arc and bringing him back to square one).
in the end, you're left with more questions than answers. what's with the collector's sudden switch from evil and calculating to poor innocent uwu child? what actually happened in belos's past? how did hunter move on from his trauma without getting any closure and being paired with a person who acts a lot like his controlling uncle? why did amity forgive luz so quickly for lying to her after she asked her not to? what happened to all the witches and citizens of the demon realm who actually followed and worshipped belos?
so yeah, you really can't defend toh with this excuse. if i was making a show and was forced to cut it short, i'd be angry and upset, sure. but i'd try to make the best of it. i would focus on the main plot instead of going after side characters or ships that add nothing of importance to the plot. i still like this show a lot but i'm not going to blindly defend it. it has its flaws and they need to be critiqued.
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riacte · 2 months
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So like, are we gonna talk about how there is a problem in this fandom about some creators, mostly female ccs, being critized by fans whenever they "overshadow" the more famous hermits? No shade to any of the hermits, they are wonderful and i am sure this is the last thing they wanted to happen, but i am starting to notice a pattern. And it s always with the same excuses! "They did not play by the rules" "Someone else did the work for them" "It was boring and anticlimatic". And although I can think of some cases of this happening to male ccs (well, one case, and it was to a non-hermit), women have to deal with a looot of shit every time they score a victory, and it s terrible that this is just a routine at this point. And like where do the critics come from? Are these ccs supposed to lose in purpose and act as secondary characters to those who have more views or subs? I just don t understand
Oh yeah there's definitely a misogyny / popularity problem. It's always been around, got a bit better, and now post-Covid, it's getting worse.
Women can do everything and anything and they'll be criticised by some assholes. If False was proactive and killed every reaper who came near her? She would be "mean" and "a bully". If False kept her distance? She would be "barely online" and "not deserve a win". If False was on all the time, "the trappers wouldn't have time to lay traps". If False wasn't on because of work purposes (the meeting) or to EAT (because women are human beings who LIVE), "she wouldn't have a chance to die". I found it sad to see False explain herself and justify her jokes and actions. AND that is wholly dismissive of any irl things that may or may not have been going on.
Also... the popularity gap is getting worse. Some hermits have stagnating or even negative growth in terms of viewership and subs. It's unfortunate because everyone is free to watch who they want, work with who they want, everyone has limited time and attention span, so there's no real solution. Which is why I'm all for spreading propaganda. And I feel like my mains False and Ren are in the middle in terms of this— not the most popular, not the least either, so they kind of get left out when it comes to "underrated hermits" discussions. Idk. I know this has been a problem since the birth of Hermitblr and I know from the pov of a fan I do have it much, much better than some other fans who main other people. My main duo interact alllllllll the damn time. And I know I am guilty of sticking very closely to my main povs.
We have to drown out the trolls. Be vocal about what we love. I love seeing all the nice comments on vids. <3
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decayanddesign · 2 years
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So Marvel’s out here ripping off smaller artists now
https://twitter.com/midiankai/status/1580902267460366336
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They edited it just enough that it isn’t immediately obvious, especially to non-artists, so here’s some replies pointing out the proof:
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Honestly, I’m glad I stopped watching their shows and films months ago, becuase between this and how they treat their CGI artists, it’s pretty clear that they don’t value artists in any way, shape or form whatsoever. Incredibly disappointing.
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shadowslocked · 8 months
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The worst part about CC!Bad pulling away from the political lore is that he was genuinely so excited for it. Bad WANTED to start beef with Forever, he was practically kicking his feet and giggling about it last stream. He was teasing the chat about wanting angst, and the drama of miscommunications and not understanding each other, and in general was really looking forward to it
And now he's decided to drop this lore thread because of the fandom
It hasn't even been that long since his stream ended.
I hope he sleeps on it and reconsiders, at least decides to do a more lighthearted conflict with Q!Forever, maybe something more petty so he's not just completely abandoning his character's morals but man this just sucks
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powdermelonkeg · 8 months
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Something websites (*cough* Tumblr *cough*) need to learn is that what retains an audience isn't an abundance of new bells and whistles to play with, it's a coherent experience overall.
When someone joins a website, you don't need to grab their attention and hold it. They're already testing the waters. They've agreed to sign up. You've won on that front, and they're there for something specific you already have that they're hoping works well.
What drives them away is frustration.
Frustration, frustration, frustration.
Learning curves are going to be a part of any new website experience; they're something the user comes to terms with, in their own time. But broken or bad features are going to make them jump sites.
On top of that, constantly adding new features makes them feel like all the hard work they've put in to learning what you have isn't worth it; your website looks unstable and your staff looks incompetent, because it gives the impression that you don't know what you're doing.
You are floundering. It makes your new users nervous. It makes your old users hesitate to bring anyone else on board. And why should they? Why should they put effort into it if you're going to throw that effort away next Tuesday? Why get used to a UI that you're not going to bother to keep? Why customize anything if you're going to whittle that customization away?
Between that and the broken, unattended features of this site—the tag organization failing, the inability to look up posts word-for-word, the video player either refusing to play or yanking you to the top of the dashboard, images taking forever to load, advertisements blaring at full volume when you scroll past, you have your problem.
You have the reason why your numbers are failing.
It's not that you're not interesting enough.
It's not that you're too difficult to understand.
It's that you aren't improving what you have, yet you keep adding more half-broken things and unwanted copycat features to the pile.
It's that you're losing your identity in pursuit of a hypothetical perfect customer.
It's that you are actively telling your user base that you prefer those hypothetical customers over them. And your user base, your real people who make you happen, are smart enough to know where your priorities lie.
The bulk of this post talks about Tumblr, but other sites have gone the same way. Twitter is dead and its corpse is decaying in the street. Reddit has sabotaged any trust its users had in its management. If you'd like a really old example—I used to use Fanfiction Net. It's not the most intuitive website in the world, but it was the first one I called home.
I used it to host my works. The adware now on it makes it a hassle to navigate. The bots make comment sections and private messages a dread rather than a joy. So I moved on.
I also used to use it to collaborate on stories with my now-roommate. The message limit was 300 a day. When you're writing dialogue between characters, that's nothing.
So I moved on. We started messaging on Facebook. It was better, it didn't have a limit. But then I learned Discord existed, and I could edit messages, make dedicated channels, etc. So I moved on from Facebook to Discord. And Discord had a steep learning curve, especially if you're trying to make your own server rather than contribute to one. But, most importantly, the payoff was worth it.
If Discord changed its layout every other month while I was learning it, and broke how its reactions worked, and kept shifting what it meant to create a channel? If it opted me into servers I didn't sign up for, in hopes of engagement? If its text never formatted correctly, or its search function only went back a day or two?
I would have gone right back to Facebook. Even if it's a more basic experience, basic is always preferable to unstable.
Figure out what you want, websites.
Slow growth, or a gamble?
You're paying for your magic slot machine in users.
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lastoneout · 2 years
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reposting my own tweets here cuz I don't feel like retyping all of this
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greensaplinggrace · 3 months
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absolutely fascinated by people saying the darkling committed genocide. is this the result of them not reading the books or is this the result of stringent moral policing in fandom spaces defining how people interpret media online? or perhaps is this the result of said moral policing creating a feedback loop of misinformation for those that don't remember the books too well?
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thecruellestmonth · 1 month
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Jason is accused of forcing his ideology on Bruce, trying to ruin poor poor Bruce by forcing him to go against the core of who he is as a person.
Bruce gets to force his ideology on people who are so young and traumatized and otherwise vulnerable that they barely have a core of who they are. So they graft Bruce in as the core of who they are, and thank him for saving them and giving them purpose.
And that, my friends, is why the Batman Family is a cult.
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coffeebanana · 9 months
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istg half of the post-s5 finale fics i see have some sort of disclaimer in the tags or summary (or i even just saw one in the title!!) saying the fic was written because the show sucks or the finale sucked or they just hated everything about it
and it's frustrating because i probably would have enjoyed a lot of these fics! but now i'm not even going to touch them because i don't want to engage with people shitting on the show
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