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Felt like drawing some silly cats :)

book 4 ep 2 doodles

as much as i want heartfelt emotional stuff with toph and lin i also kinna wanna see some master shadebending

One of my coworkers was telling me that they had seen these really cute trilobite plushies at another gift shop and recommended them to the store manager at our museum, which lead to us scrolling through the manufacturer's website together on shift today and SHRIEKING with laughter at the exact same moment when we simultaneously noticed that they sell a giant $100 eurypterid body pillow

Now THIS is what I like to see!!

one lives on my lab couch and 10/10 can confirm best thing to spoon with

#they released these at a conference i was at in 2019#i was working a table right next to the pri#people went CRAZY#they sold out in 10 min#and all these grisled old phds were carrying around 5 foot long eurypterids the rest of the day (@barrysjumpsuit)

Hello thank you for the most critical supplemental information I’ve ever received on a post.

@linddzz

Hey, y'all remember this post? Well the institution that makes these delightful pillows and stuffed creatures is hurting right now. Unfortunately, a major set of donations never went through, and the institution has been working its butt off to keep running. The efforts of the staff are amazing, but unfortunately it's a very small nonprofit organization so it can only get so far on hard work and dedication.

In spite of all this! Through some amazing marketing and philanthropy work, you can help them out right now! You can make a difference! They managed to get a lovely donor to agree to a match challenge for up to $50,000!!! So if they raise $50,000 they'll actually get $100,000. The match challenge ends on December 31st 2023, and they're already at $26,4448.10 which means they're halfway there!! Please spread the word, if you can't donate then a reblog to someone who can will help.

If the link above doesn't work, you can find the donation page here:

Some rando: This character should not have the chance to become a better person

Me: Why

Same person: Because they are a bad person!

Me: But what if that character was allowed to become a better person so that they are no longer a bad person?

Same person: You’re an abuse apologist

I would love for every bad person to become a good person. I’d think most humans think that it’d be a cool and great thing if all bad people became good. 

A cool and great thing, which we can play pretend with in fiction, knowing it’s not realistic, just to feel a little better about the shitty real world we live in.

tbh, I think the problem is that people confuse “getting a redemption arc” with “being rewarded with what comes after a redemption arc”

like, redeemed villains are generally friends with the heroes. they get to experience love and The Power of Friendship for the first time, if they haven’t already. they generally get to experience forgiveness. if their motives are based off of some kind of trauma or pain (like a lot of redeemed villains) then they will probably have that resolved and get some sense of closure or inner peace from whatever is hurting them.

so when they say that “this character doesn’t deserve a redemption arc” what they mean is “this character doesn’t deserve to be loved. they don’t deserve happiness, peace, or companionship”. the alternatives I have seen are:

“I hope that this character realizes how awful they are and they kill themselves”

“I hope this character is redeemed by a heroic sacrifice” (meaning they would be redeemed but wouldn’t be alive to experience the “reward” afterwards)

“I hope this character begs and pleads for forgiveness over and over again, but is never forgiven”

it’s pretty disturbing tbh, to treat basic things that every human needs (like being loved) as a “reward” that you get for good behavior. or more accurately: never being bad in the first place. that once you fall from grace you’re damned for eternity.

I think this post exposes a really gross underbelly to purity culture bullshit that I don’t think I examined quite this way before.

If redemption is unacceptable, if bad behavior can never be forgiven, what is the alternative?

Because it sure seems like the alternative is “Indefinate suffering = justice.”

BINGO.

Yup. Because to a lot of people, justice=vengeance, and if you make a bad person suffer, that somehow is how the world ought to be, and the suffering is the point in and of itself, rather than as a means to an end of rehabilitation, correcting harm, or even just the last resort of neutralising someone’s capacity to do harm.

While it may be an understandable impulse to want people to suffer who have made you suffer, it isn’t contributing to improving anything, and in some cases, it’s counterproductive. This is one of those things where I think it actually does more harm to be this way about fiction than reality. Let’s look at the assumptions being made and the message being sent: a person who does bad things is an innately Bad Person and this means they will never change, and even if someone tries, not only will we not accept it as good enough, we will go out of our way to further punish them for it.

First, to the people who think like this, I ask this: who deserves redemption? Anyone who ‘deserves’ redemption doesn’t need it in the first place. It’s idiotic beyond belief to say anyone doesn’t ‘deserve’ redemption, because that’s literally what redemption is NOT about. What they mean, I suspect, is that this person has not shown enough remorse/made enough attempt at amends to be considered redeemed at this moment, which is not the same thing. But sure, let’s be generous and use that instead. Just because people can change doesn’t mean they will. Someone who does not make any attempt to correct wrongs or to do better in the future will never be redeemed until they choose to be. But it’s clear when you talk to people like this that this is an excuse. They say they aren’t opposed to redemption, they just don’t think the person has done enough, but when pressed, it’s apparent that there’s actually nothing they could do that would ever be considered enough.

The reality is that allowing people to change doesn’t feel nearly as good as the superiority and righteous anger we get by thinking of them as evil, and it is more satisfying to watch them suffer, even when their suffering helps no one, than it is to grant someone who is trying to change that grace. While I don’t believe anyone is ever obligated to forgive someone for a wrong that person has done to them, which is also not completely synonymous with considering them redeemed (and in the case of fiction, not least because you can’t ‘forgive’ a fictional character, since they did not harm you), this attitude annoys me greatly because it is sending the very loud and clear message that nothing you ever do will ever be good enough, so don’t bother. It would be far better to ignore it completely than to send this message, because now you are the one actively disincentivising people doing the difficult work of changing themselves and even being willing to try. You are making it more likely that they will continue to do harm because you’re telling them there’s no point changing. And this does not just affect the person you’re saying it about but everyone who hears that.

It is very depressing when you’re trying to sort yourself out and the thing you keep hearing over and over again is that people you relate to, people like you in some relevant way, never change and will never be accepted. What is the point? To live in guilt and shame and be rejected, or to say “fine, fuck you, then” and close your eyes to acknowledging that there’s anything to feel guilt and shame about? What choice do you think most people are going to take? On the other hand, when we celebrate redemption, we are sending the message “hey, we may oppose you now, but we genuinely want you to change, and we will accept you, and you don’t have to fear rejection and further shame from us if you try. The cognitive dissonance that drives change is very uncomfortable but we will help you if you are willing.” And that’s important. Because the only other way people will be willing to put themselves through that already-uncomfortable process knowing it will only get worse is if they have a huge amount of self-hatred, and desire for vengeance aside, that is a terrible foundation for real and lasting change, I promise you. It is not natural for people to want to accept that they’re terrible people and should feel bad, and anyone who isn’t deterred by that has other issues that will only make it harder in the long run. You have to feel a little bad, that’s remorse, but there is a difference between feeling bad because you understand that you did something wrong and feeling bad because you’re punished/other people hate you, which does not actually say anything about your level of remorse or understanding of your actions at all.

Accepting that you have done something wrong is very difficult. People don’t like to feel guilty. That’s why it so common for people to double down on their bad actions when confronted instead of just saying “oh, yeah. I guess it is bad. I’ll do better next time.” And the reality is that the more obstacles you put up, the more reasons you give a person to not see it as worth it, the less likely they will be to try. Why should they? Here, this kind of judgmental person will say “because it’s the right thing to do, obviously.” Except that isn’t true. It’s not obvious. It may be obvious to you, but that doesn’t mean it’s obvious to others, and even if they have some nagging doubts, it doesn’t mean that will be strong enough to get them to face the uncomfortable truth, not when it so much easier to make excuses or to simply deny that it’s wrong at all. Ideally, a person will spontaneously come to see the error of their ways and will resolve to be a better person even if no one ever accepts it and they’re universally reviled, because it’s the right thing to do. But here in the real world, that never happens. On the very rare occasion that someone is determined to change even if they’ll still always be hated by everyone, it still doesn’t happen magically. There is always some reason that makes people change their views/minds, and this is still another point where self-righteous people insist it doesn’t count. Oh, this person spent their whole life trying to make amends? No, it doesn’t count, they only did it because their wife left them over it, or it affected them/someone close to them personally, or they were going to get in trouble for it, etc., so it doesn’t really count. That’s complete bullshit. Their reasons for change, the impetus for that change, those things are irrelevant. Yeah, maybe they did only see that it was bad when it hit close to home. That doesn’t make it self-serving. That means they finally got the perspective/empathy they needed to open their eyes. That’s a good thing. I get that you’re pissed off about all the other times you feel they ought to have already had that perspective/empathy, but it’s always better late than never, and it goes right back to the first point: if they had had that perspective all along, and had never done bad things, they wouldn’t need redemption in the first place. It ends up coming across as nothing but bitterness and a loud declaration of “well I knew better all along! I’m a much better person than they are!” which is just pointless jerking off. You didn’t have the factors in your life that led them to that and you didn’t have to put in the effort to overcome that, good for you I guess?

It is not an automatic thing. Even if you recognise and want to change, you still have to do the work to change. Some things take more work and more time than others. Some things can be directly fixed and some things cannot. No amount of remorse is going to bring back someone you killed, for instance, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still good to have remorse and to do what you can to fix what you can and to make a different choice the next time you are in that situation. Redemption is about more than just amends; just like you wouldn’t consider someone ‘redeemed’ who kept beating people up without remorse as long as they always got them medical care afterwards, or a serial thief who replaced stolen items but kept stealing anyway, or a child who says sorry for being mean but keeps bullying others, the fact that some wrongs can’t ever be undone does not mean a person can’t still be redeemed.

Sometimes you take steps forwards and steps backwards and it’s an ongoing thing. Sometimes people get out and go back in. Redemption is also not the same as saying that the person now no longer has to face natural and legal consequences, or that people hurt by them have to welcome them with open arms. But what’s for sure is that if you do not allow people a way out, they will never get out. It’s as simple as that. Not everyone will choose to take that way out, but if you are actively blocking it, you are also not innocent. It’s a very selfish thing, in fact, to prefer protecting your own righteous outrage over doing what you can to reduce the amount of harm that is happening. It is a matter of smug/naive idealism — a person should change, because I think they should — versus practical realism — it benefits everyone if this person changes, and therefore I will not stand in the way of them making a sincere attempt, no matter how I feel emotionally about them.

So something that does need to be clarified here is that it is not just the “no redemption arc for you” crowd that mistakes a redemption or atonement arc with the positive consequences that often accompany it. There are all lot of people who claim, and probably legitimately think, they advocate a redemption arc for a given character, who, when you actually get down to what they’re proposing, are arguing that the character in question deserves forgiveness and friendship from the heroes of the piece of media, their victims, the narrative, and the audience, to be recognized as having been already redeemed.

Dig around in any fandom and you are going to find plenty of people talking about how x character deserves a redemption arc because they had a terrible childhood, or because their victims are just really mean for not forgiving them, or because y character really needs to redeem them/heal them with the power of love, and none of this has anything to do with the hard work that character might have do to become a better person and begin to make amends. And it’s usually pretty transparent that a lot of these people actually don’t mean that this character deserves a redemption arc, they mean that they just want the narrative and other characters, and the audience to stop treating this character like a villain already.

What really brought this home to me was the fact that when I wrote out a meta of what a good and emotionally honest redemption arc for a certain character in my fandom would look like, I got reams of hate sent to me, about how I was an abuse apologist, and delusional, and unable to tell reality from fiction… you get the idea. Really nasty stuff, all from people who were angry that I talked about the hard work the character needed to do to change, instead of how everybody just needed to forgive them, and/or apologize, because it was all really their fault, not the character supposedly getting a redemption, arc.

I like to call this the easy absolution model, and the real world applications of this model are just as ugly as the real world consequences of the “no forgiveness for you, how dare you even try to become a better person?” that is its flip side. One of the things that you see a lot in communities that are operating on this easy absolution paradigm is that it’s easy absolution for some, forced forgiveness from others. The powerful get the easy absolution, and their victims are forced to forgive them, or else they are now considered the one who is bad, and being mean and cruel, and how dare they not forgive? This is unfortunately, very common, and very toxic and damaging.

I guess my argument here boils down to the fact that both these particular versions of pro-and anti redemption are two sides of a very toxic coin, and if you want to talk about how people can change, and we have to allow room for that both in narrative and in society, you are going to have to reckon with the fact that it’s not just the “no redemption ever” crowd with a terrible framework for what redemption means, that there are plenty of people who appear to be on your side, who are operating on an almost identical framework as the “no redemption” crowd, and you have to watch out for their toxic nonsense too.

@giftober 2023 | DAY 19: GREEN

Girl I do no know how to explain that the vast majority of adults used to be children.

heads up everyone this is now the only character you can sexualize

this reddit thread of living your silliest life is so so good

This has been a PSA.

I’m trying not to reblog posts on this blog but I feel that this is important to post here.

on a related note:

And for the people asking “Well if you don’t support it irl then why would you like it in fiction?!” Because when it’s happening irl real people are suffering and dying and that’s horrible and I’d never want that. But when it’s fiction, when no real people are being hurt or killed, it’s interesting to explore the experience, the effects it may have, and to an extent experience the emotions involved without actually having to experience the horrible thing. You explore scary, dangerous things from a safe distance.

There is a forbidden type of magic out there. It isn’t forbidden because it’s inherently evil, or forces you to lose your humanity, or requires human sacrifices - it’s just forbidden because it’s annoying as heck to fight against.

“Ma’am, I really must insist that you pay for the room and board I’ve been giving you! It’s been a week!”

“Fine, fine,” I grumble. “I have a few options for payment: I could give you paper money, cheap gaudy jewelry, chocolate coins, spiders, some pretty seashells-”

“Spiders????” he repeats, baffled.

“Spiders it is, then,” I agree equitably, and with a wave of my hand the bed I’ve been sleeping in for the last week turns into a writhing mass of various spiders.

Worth it.

—

“Stop right there! You’re under arrest for fraud, destruction of property, and-!”

I yawn. “Didn’t ask, don’t care.” A few gestures, and the guards’ swords are all transmuted into spiders, and then they’re too busy to worry about little ol’ me.

—

“You have insulted my honor and humiliated me in front of my children! I demand satisfaction! I demand a wizard’s duel!”

Shrugging, I say, “Sure, okay, whatever. Right here and now okay?”

The pompous wizard-noble blinks. “I- you don’t want to prepare? Get your wizard’s staff or anything?”

“Nah, I’m pretty good with somatic gestures.”

“Well, if you’re sure… here and now then! Have at you!” He slams his staff down on the ground dramatically, a small shockwave of fire radiating out from the impact.

So of course, I turn his staff into spiders.

“AHHHH WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK”

“So if you’re too busy screaming to cast spells, does that mean I win?”

“AUGH ONE OF THEM BIT ME”

“I’m taking that as a yes.”

—

After that, they start coming at me in waves, with cheap wands and staves and swords and bows bought in bulk, hoping to exhaust my magical reserves so they can get close enough to put a magic inhibitor on me.

They did not expect my reserves to be as vast as they were, not did they expect me to be able to transmute the inhibitors themselves into spiders.

“Didn’t you take Magic Basics in wizard college?” I yell at the panicking mages. “Inhibitors aren’t immune to magic until the moment they activate! Serious weak point in the design, tell your magitechnicians to fix that!”

—

So of course they try assassins next.

Poison fails, because I transmute any food and drink I get into spiders and then transmute them back. Pretty easy way to get rid of poison.

So then they try knives in dark alleys. The knives bruise through my full-body spider-silk outfit, but do not penetrate, and they only get one shot before they have bigger problems.

Next is killing me in my sleep. None live to report back that the human-shaped lump under the blankets is actually a mass of highly venomous spiders.

The kingdom throws everything it has at me, and I continue to walk away, heralded by the chittering of spiders and the screams of everyone else.

—

Finally, I stand before the king himself in his overly opulent throne room, and by now he is a broken shell of a man in the face of my unorthodox tactics.

Good.

“What do you want?” he practically sobs. “You’ve singlehandedly redirected the entire crown’s budget for the next three years into replacing every weapon you’ve turned into spiders. Much more and we’ll be invaded by our neighbors! We wouldn’t be able to resist being annexed! So what can I give you to make you stop doing this?!”

I pause and pretend to consider, tapping a finger against my chin thoughtfully. “You know, you sent my brother off to war a few years back. That conflict with the Yughs up north, I believe. He didn’t want to go, so your guards forced him at spearpoint. I haven’t seen him since.”

He seizes on that, as I expected. “Yes, yes, I’ll have him returned right away! Tell me his name and I’ll honorably release him from duty and have him escorted safely home!”

“Oh?” I raise one sardonic eyebrow. “Are you able to bring back the dead now, oh wise and glorious king?”

He pales, and it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve seen in years.

“You have nothing I want,” I growl, letting the anger slip through for the first time in years. “You cannot bring him back, you cannot make up for my loss with all the riches in your kingdom. The only thing I want is to take everything from you, the way you did to me. Your kingdom will bleed out of resources, one of the neighboring countries you’ve been trying to conquer for decades now will take advantage and annex this place, and you will either be executed or forced to work for a living for the first time in your life.”

I glare at him, and he refuses to meet my eyes. “You will lose everything you ever cared about in your life. One spider at a time.”

I transmute his throne and crown into spiders (non-deadly; he doesn’t get to escape my wrath that easily), then turn and walk away, ignoring his screams and sobs.

—

And that’s why, when the Yughs finally annexed the kingdom I grew up in, they preemptively made Transarachnomancy a forbidden magical art. Not sure how they intend to enforce that, mind, but I’m not looking to challenge that. I’ve gotten what I wanted; if some other aspiring mage wants to try and follow in my footsteps, that’s not my problem.

Besides, in terms of magical skill, I’ve always been an outlier anyway. Most mages would be lucky to turn just one knife into a spider at a time; I can turn ten thousand with a few gestures. I doubt anyone will outdo my legacy.

But hey, if you want to try and surpass Georgia of the Spiders? Feel free. I’ll welcome the competition.

IM

Amazing A+ no notes

Can we consider how many people Toph caused internal bleeding and broken bones?

oh honey they are fully dead

oh so they’re just saying the quiet part out loud? Good to know they’re just out and open now

That’s not the quiet part.

There’s something else, something they might not even be fully aware of themselves. The real quiet part is that if it was *their* child or *their* ectopic pregnancy they’d pull out all the stops to save their life or get their grandchild aborted. Planned Parenthood sees reactionaries and regressives all the time, and they are every bit the nightmare patients you’d imagine them to be. But the one thing all those patients have in common is that *their* abortion is *justified*, and the next week they’ll be outside the clinic again, rejoining the protestors for “killing their baby”.

It’d be one thing to have ghoulish principles, but the far-right have none at all.

When I was younger and had more time to waste on the internet, and spent a lot of time in various online forums getting into arguments -- on purpose -- I made up a game I called Six Degrees of Slut.

The game (which is a variation on the well known Six Degrees of Bacon) was very simple. In any discussion of abortion, see whether you could get the other side to articulate, within six back-and-forth exchanges, some variation of The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. Regardless of where their argument started, the goal of the game was to get them to admit that.

I never once lost a game of Six Degrees of Slut. On a few occasions the match was inconclusive - the other person left off arguing before we reached round six - but I never lost; I never once reached six rounds of debate with a prolifer without them expressing some variation on this sentiment. But what was really remarkable to me was, a lot of times, that there was no effort involved at all -- they would blurt it out themselves, with effectively no provocation.

Scratch a prolifer, and you'll find right under the surface the conviction that The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. I have never once yet found an exception. Sometimes you don't even have to scratch.

What appeals to me about whump: an incomplete list

Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival 

please elaborate

Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.

one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today. 

This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.

You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.

There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.

Dystopia needs clarity of purpose, it needs to have beef with a particular social problem and go for the throat all the fucking way, or it’s just sparkling YA adventure with a bunch of jarringly genre-inappropriate tropes shoehorned in. You cannot write dystopian fiction that isn’t sincere and have it still be dystopian fiction.