it’s understandable that guys kept falling in love with gerard because he has a sweet face and big eyes and he’s so earnest about stuff that even though he’s sometimes kind of a loser it just contributes to making him irresistible but i think guys kept falling in love with mikey because he was like doing blood magic on them or something
gerard voice yeah i don’t know why everyone follows me around so much haha maybe i just tell good jokes or something. meanwhile mikey in the next room is in the middle of casting his third spell of eternal sexual obsession of the week on one of another band’s sound techs for no reason other than the love of the sport
mikey has a secret room in his house that he doesn’t let his kids go into and it’s covered wall to wall in shelves full of love spell jars that are all meticulously labelled like “KNIGHT” “WENTZ” “SAPORTA” etc etc all ordered alphabetically and he goes in to dust them off every few weeks and sometimes one falls off the shelf and breaks and some guy that teched for hawthorne heights during the summer of 2005 wakes up in his bed in miami with no memory of the past seventeen years
The Companion That Logs On When Everyone Else Logs Off
Insomniacs, night-shift workers, and anyone whose body has drifted out of sync with the rest of the world share a quiet truth: the loneliest hours are the ones when nobody is awake to share them. Friends are asleep, the phone is silent, and the night stretches long. It is this overlooked audience that platforms like SweetDream seem, almost by accident, to serve best.
Visit sweetdream.ai at three in the morning and the experience is no different than at noon. The AI companion you have built, down to its looks, voice, personality and small idiosyncrasies, is simply there, and the chat picks up your context as if no time had passed. Voice messages and real-time phone calls that sound convincingly human fill the silence, while the AI-generated photos and videos give the whole thing a presence that text alone never manages.
What separates SweetDream from the wider field is the combination: realistic conversation that actually remembers you, polished media, optional video and live cam sessions with select characters, and privacy that holds without exception. For the people whose nights run opposite the world, an AI girlfriend who keeps the same odd hours is not a gimmick. It is, on the long nights, genuinely good company.
Viktor and Jayce both need to take some non-STEM classes
I'm joking but also a little not-joking that this is in fact, a theme in the show.
In Season 1.08, Ambessa meets Jayce for the first time after he's become a councilor. One of the first questions she asks him is, "Do they teach military history at your Academy, Mr. Talis?"
Jayce takes this as a set up for an insult against him. He's rattled by the bathhouse and braced for a fight. He's so riled, in fact, that he completely misses what Ambessa is probing him for there.
Ambessa wasn't setting him up to make him feel small, like Jayce feared, she wanted to know if he had a military history background or even the beginnings of the skills needed as an engineer to understand or counter some of the political manipulations she's about to pull on him.
Jayce answers: I'm not sure.
Not only has Jayce never taken a military class, he as a scientist doesn't even know if his school offers it.
That made him easy pickings for Ambessa. She wouldn't even need to be subtle, she could use the most basic tricks in the book against a proud young man with only a scientific background and know he wouldn't even begin to have the tools to pick up let alone counter what she's doing to him.
And then we get to Viktor in S2. Now, I think "How much of Cult Leader Viktor is even Viktor?" is a fair question. But the whole Machine Herald ethos he seems to be working towards in his inner monologue in 2.06 is yet another example of "Won't someone PLEASE make these boys take some sort of liberal arts class? An ethics course? SOMETHING?"
Viktor is working his way (Hexcore influence or no) to the conclusion that many frustrated young activists have hit upon when their activism doesn't work.
He tried to help people. But people didn't want to be helped or didn't cooperate with the way he wanted to help them.
His conclusion? Clearly it's the people who are wrong. It's the people who need to be changed.
To quote Pratchett, "“People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.”
And of course, once you start to see people as the problem, that people need to be fundamentally changed, added, or subtracted from, when you treat people as things, that is when the real evil begins.
You have to accept people as they are and work within those bounds, because otherwise you have to change people and that pretty much always leads to the sort of atrocities that the Machine Herald seems gearing up to do. Namely, add and subtract away the people, or the characteristics of people, that don't fit his vision for the world.
And all I can think is: won't Piltover Academy please for the love of god make your tech bros take some goddamn history and philosophy classes please??
So, wild enough, I think this meta was confirmed in the finale?
Jayce and Viktor are both smart but they're not wise.
Much of the Arcane finale episodes was a deep dive into what Jayce and Viktor needed to learn.
Jayce got an absolutely brutal graduation from the school of hard knocks.
While he's trapped in that pit, you can see him reviewing all the events that brought him there and while doing so, he makes some important conclusions:
He's been manipulated by the Medardas in order to gain access to his and Viktor's research, as well as to further Hextech. While Jayce still cares about Mel as a person after this, he calls her out and effectively breaks up with her and I would say this soul searching where he gained a lot of wisdom and did a ton of self-reflection was part of that. It led him to the conclusion that he can't trust her and he was deeply hurt by her manipulations, though of course he still cares for her as a person and wishes her well in life.
Meanwhile, Viktor the disappointed activist got a lesson from his future self.
He was directly shown the ultimate results of his philosophically simplistic worldview. An older, wiser Viktor showed him that the Machine Herald would make a desert and call it a peace.
So I was kind of joking by saying that Jayce and Viktor's arcs were an indictment of a STEM educations failures to expand their students' worldviews with things like 1) an understanding of rhetoric and manipulation (Jayce) and 2) philosophy and ethics enough to understand when their simplistic solution to the world's ills would lead to horrors. But I think in the process of analyzing these, I may have accidentally hit on two of the flaws the show specifically set out to address in them, which is their lack of wisdom and experience despite their very high intelligence.
Akira but it's Monika from DDLC Akira breaks the fourth wall au. Inspired from a twitter thread that believe it or not started as a discussion of why Sae Niijima should be taller and older.
