Hey, If You Have Half A Minute And Care About The LGTBQIA+ Community In The EU, I'd Suggest You Take

Out of Touch

AU where Sokka’s high-on-cactus-juice encounter with the giant mushroom takes a dark turn. (Also he has a gun)

based on this beautiful tumblr post

bonus:

we’reくコ:彡 entering squid territory

 くコ:彡                                                                       くコ:彡                              くコ:彡  くコ:彡                                                        くコ:彡                           くコ:彡 くコ:彡

reblog to bap prev with your paw

pro-AI in the sense of "they taught a bread scanning computer to recognize cancer cells" etc etc

against AI in the sense of "we stole artwork from hundreds to thousands of artists, didn't credit them and didn't financially compensate them"

did you know there's a day-by-day timeline of the plot in the dungeon meshi adventurer's bible and TODAY is when it all kicks off

happy falin gets eaten and the gang starts eatin' day :)

I’ll never understand why anthropomorphic animal cartoons like Robin Hood and Zootopia will go to the trouble of creating character designs that are meant to be understood as “attractive” or even “sexy” to the human audience but explicitly avoid showing interspecies romances between anthropomorphic animals. Why is THAT weird but, like, trying to make rabbits recognizably sexy-coded to humans isn’t?

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

idgaf if bethesda ever tells us concretely which country launched the first nuke, the only answer i will accept is the original one, the one that said "we wont tell you, because it doesnt matter. there is no moral highground in the story of the great war, and the end result for those alive today is all the same either way. those most responsible faced the fewest consequences, and no justice was served. there is no justifiable way to nuke anyone, no matter who struck first. everyone lost and thats the very nature of war and always has been. war is evil, and in that way, war never changes"

not broadcasting who was "really to blame" is purposeful, and any other answer would undercut fallout's core identity to me