Bla bla bla

just finished aono-kun volumes 10 and 11 last night. wanted to illustrate my experience of reading the whole series so far. take this as a recommendation!

not now mom i’m wasting my life on a website the entire internet believes to be dead

Like. Imagine if Eric Prince took all the top officers of Blackwater on an unspecified trip to Whitefish Montana and then every last one of them was dead within a week.

That is what the Namek arc looks like from the perspective of galactic history.

there's been a lot of obnoxious pop history trends in the last few years but the bizarre total sanitization of vikings/pirates has to be one of the worst. like sorry to the queer neopagan anarchy symbol in bio twitter user community but like. are you aware both vikings and pirates enthusiastically traded slaves

and to be clear i'm not calling people out for liking the aesthetic or being into historical fiction or whatever i'm specifically talking about the genre of post that's like "it's crazy how most people think vikings were violent raiders when they were actually antiracist feminist sheep herders living in free love communes and operating dog shelters"

I think this comes from an inability people have to, like, be moderate on things.

The initial failure to be moderate comes the traditional received view, e.g. "the Vikings were all horrible barbarians who did nothing but raid and pillage and be evil". Then someone comes along and, rightly, tries to question this view. They say "hey, the Vikings were just people like you and me. Maybe they even did some things that are worth admiring, you know. Maybe we've been treating them unfairly." And this catches on, especially as the original power dynamics that motivated the received view start to fade (slander of Vikings has a lot less motivation when the Catholic church stops being so politically relevant). And people are often inclined to use these other, traditionally maligned societies as foils to critique their own society. And so it becomes widely accepted among the sort of people who consider themselves smart and thoughtful that the Vikings really weren't as bad as they've been made out to be; they've been unfairly maligned. They were just people, like you and me.

Except here comes the second failure to be moderate, when the view slowly morphs into "the Vikings were right about everything, Viking society was so much better than modern society" etc. And that's where you get these twitter leftists, who are somewhere down the second-failure-to-be-moderate telephone line.

Anyway, I'm responding to this post, and respond to many like it, in an attempt to preempt what I have often seen as an inchoate third failure to be moderate, a return to the received narrative that the Vikings just totally sucked, man. No, no! I'm not accusing OP of this specifically (I don't think they're guilty of it), but it is... in the air, around these parts.

Moderation! Moderation! Nuance! Be careful lest you become what you sought to destroy!

(Tags from @tarantula-hawk-wasp :

#tbh this is the hardest part about teaching any type of history bc people want to either valorize or vilify and like no!! #seek truth not goodness in the past #no society is free of sin and no society is free of merit #but that shouldn't be your goal in learning about them - it should be understanding)

This is the problem with any quasi-historical TTRPG setting.

On the one hand, almost everywhere had slavery, rape, class issues to the point of "high-status person can just kill a low-status one without negative consequences," child abuse, torture, religious bigotry, breathtaking wealth inequality, and bizarre and sometimes harmful attempts at medical care.

On the other - none of those were on everyone's mind every day. Even with the issue of "history is written by the victors and the wealthy," we're pretty sure that even in impoverished, war-torn areas, a lot of people managed to have families and be more-or-less happy.

So if you're grabbing a historical setting for the purposes of art or games (make a movie, play pirates in a TTRPG, make a video game about vikings, etc.), you have to decide what to emphasize for the audience. Which parts to focus on as interesting and unique to this topic; which parts are culturally relevant; which parts to have in the background as This Is Just How Things Were; which parts to bring up as This Is Bad And We Are Glad Things Are Better Now.

Childhood mortality - death under 5 years old - was about 45% until the beginning of the 20th century, pretty much everywhere.

Everyone assumed about half of all children born were going to die before they were old enough to count to ten.

That's one of those background details that doesn't make it into historical-setting stories, because (1) it's depressing as hell and (2) it distracts from the actual story being told. It's true. It's just... not usually directly relevant, so we gloss over it, even in stories that involve romance and weddings and pregnant women.

And there are a thousand other details, other statistics, that are like that: death rates from dysentery in war, how rape was not a crime unless the status of a man was involved, how citizens had drastically different legal rights from non-citizens, to the point where non-citizens might not be considered human by the law at all, how children were property of their parents, how employers could and did kill people for failing to follow company rules.

You can't simultaneously do "History story about how brutal life was back then" and "rousing pirate adventure."

It is not "more true" to focus on the historical details of how life was, any more than it is "more true" to tell stories about the 90s that are nothing but showcases of the deaths of people who died from AIDS.

There were a lot of deaths from AIDS. It decimated the queer communities. But there were a lot of hopeful stories as well, and a lot of activism, and a lot of outreach and hey somewhere in there, everyone got computers and we had a whole internet to find people to connect with.

And that wasn't everything going on the 90s. In 1991, a swarm of police officers beat Rodney King because they thought they could get away with it. (They mostly did.) That same year, Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas but it wasn't enough to keep him from being appointed to SCOTUS. The war in Bosnia started in 1992 and claimed over 100,000 lives.

There is no one part of history, no one set of facts, that is "the real truth."

Any storyteller - movie-maker, author, game dev, artist, historian, etc. - needs to decide which aspects of the truth to include in their work. They can't show everything. They have to focus - and hope that the bits of background details they mention are enough to spark people's interest, enough to make people aware that no one story is complete outside of its context.

...That we are all incapable of knowing the full context of everything, so we have to choose which aspects of life we will honor, and which we will ignore, and which we will celebrate and try to build into our futures.

Meet the Robinsons art dump ❤️

A few of these I referenced vintage illustrations by Al Parker and Bob Peak!

while kissing my cat's little head: you're a problem *smooch* you're a terror *smooch* you're a menace to society *smooch smooch smooch*

The prince's weakness.

A continuation of hit-the-head-too-hard-and-turned-nice-Vegeta AU from

Part 1

Of course Piccolo has to suffer being everyone's green dad

Also a little bit of Vegebul because memory loss or not, Vegeta would always find Bulma attractive

And Goku having a heart attack due to the shock of Vegeta finally taking his hand willingly and on top of it, calling him Goku with a happy little smile

I'm probably having too much fun drawing Vegeta completely OOC..

Part 3

I just really really miss how Toriyama drew them sometimes

Does anybody else have suffer from "I stopped keeping up with this media ages ago but I have an extreme affection for its characters and concept. The writing just started to suck ass"

DBS. Such disappointment.

Ace of Her Heart, Chapter 6 is up!

I know, it been 9 months and I'm not sure how that happened. Hopefully you haven't forgotten what it is, but this is my and @froglady15's WWI romance starring Vegeta as a British pilot, and Bulma as a pacifist and feminist German engineer.

In this chapter, Bulma is leaving their clandestine first meeting, head and heart swirling, but heading back to real life and her 99 problems back in Stuttgart.

Imagine a bee rn in a hive muttering "the beekeeper is not real because he is not intervening or helping me at all with this disastrous relationship I have with another bee". now imagine that's you talking about the good lord. now imagine a dog with a propeller hat on

Filing this in my memory right next to this thread:

this is so on the nose

THERE’S A TERM FOR IT?!?!?

Atlantis: The Lost Empire concept art x