[sigmaleph]

the weird thing about people's opinions on ai is not exactly the moral panics. they're stupid, but unsurprising. it's the 'ai is useless/fundamentally uninteresting' ones that make me feel like we spent the last decade living in separate universes.

[madtomedgar]

Getting looked in the eye and told not to act like a servant because they are peers and praised in a way that actually highlights his skills and might net him real respect and getting touched in normal ways like he's not dirty and like. Cared about and even sought after by a stranger who is top of the field because they think he a) has feelings that matter and b) is a worthwhile person and then having to leave and go back to THAT.

[cryen]

this is also sooo similar to how he welcomes Su She to the banquet years later.....

[cryen]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV), 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Meng Yao | Jin Guangyao/Su She | Su Minshan, Lan Huan | Lan Xichen/Meng Yao | Jin Guangyao Characters: Lan Huan | Lan Xichen, Meng Yao | Jin Guangyao, Su She | Su Minshan Additional Tags: Angst, Necromancy, Incomplete - beginning only, everyone is deranged about JGY Summary:

Pain.

It sliced through Su She's consciousness like a blade, dragging his awareness back unwillingly from the endless, formless void.

He gasped. The sound of it was foreign in his ears. For a moment, he could not understand why he was breathing at all - the dead did not need to breathe. Yet here he was, kneeling awake on a cold floor, eyes wide and panicked as his chest heaved, his sweating palms pressed against polished stone.

Lan Xichen performs the Soul Sacrifice ritual to bring Su She back to life.

[olderthannetfic]

welp! I can’t believe it happened, but apparently, ao3 did a mass deletion of a ship tag. Idk if it’s the supposed 1 person, but seeing how the community is reacting, it’s looking like more than 1 author got their fics deleted with no warning. I’m so disappointed it happened in ao3 and I’m just waiting for response about it because the jump of fic numbers was too extreme to not be noticed. 8k to 5k man. Ship war might be a reason for it, but again, I’m just waiting to see if my support ticket gets response. Also has this happened before? Like on ao3 in particular?

--

What ship tag?

AO3 periodically puts its foot down with serial offenders who refuse to stop using AO3 to funnel people to their kofis, and non-fanwork spam gets deleted. It's unlikely that they just deleted a bunch of fanworks for no reason though.

ETA: Oh for fuck sake. Is this fucking Genshin wank?

Stop spamming the archive just so your shitty ship can "win" some war.

And/or stop believing the people who cry that PAC came after them ~out of nowhere~ when they know perfectly well what they did.

Because people still think that worthless methodology on the Top 100 Ships means something, some fuckface posted three thousand spam works just to force their ship on there. No, not the AI fics of the show for toddlers. Machine translated repeat upload drabbles for one of the ten kajillion Genshin ships. Then they orphaned half of them or made them anon or something to try to pretend that the lurkers support them in e-mail other authors posted this flood too.

Now that AO3 has gotten around to deleting their spam, they're apparently wailing about it somewhere on social media and trying to paint AO3 as censors. This is resulting in a flood of lackeys whining to AO3 about how Concerned™ they are.

You're a sucker, anon.

Either that, or you're trying to use my tumblr to spread panic.

You can tell AO3 doesn't actually believe in deletions because Genshin Impact fandom hasn't been booted off the archive for being fucking annoying.

[olderthannetfic]

Someone's reblog reminded me of this whole thing.

So...

Who's trying to game the stats this year? Any hilarious bullshit going on this time?

[cryen]

Someone made another list which also includes archive-locked fics: link

Notably, 9000 Jily works were excluded from that list for stats manipulation:

[transcription: “It’s been brought to my attention that the James Potter/Lily Evans numbers have been artificially inflated by one person who churns out thousands of ‘fanart’ in order to boost the numbers. I know it happens in other fandoms too, last year apparently it was a problem in the Genshin Impact fandom, but the James/Lily case is so glaring that I’ve decided to subtract that AO3 user’s works, 9040 of them, from the total.”]

9000+ pieces of spammy fanart! What's interesting is that those 9000+ works are apparently genuine human-made slop.

[good-fwiend-in-wome]

i think it's worth remembering this xkcd from 2013 that's still equally true

[thatswhatsushesaid]

You know damn well jgy would want to see rhaenyra on the iron throne, especially her bastard children. like bro he'd be rooting for her so bad.

i dunno if he’d be rooting for her exactly, but i think the salient point for him would be that her birthright was stolen from her. that is one of the key reasons jgy expends so much effort to claw his way into the lanling jin, and imo he would automatically be sympathetic to rhaenyra’s claim because of that shared experience.

mind you i don’t think that is at all the same as liking her or having anything else in common with her, because their backgrounds could not be more different. but he’s doesn’t have to like her to recognize that she’s been wronged.

[cryen]

Ohh, that's an interesting interpretation because I have the opposite read actually! Aegon is the firstborn son, and by the laws and customs of Westeros, he ought to be the heir. Daughters aren't supposed to inherit before sons. But because Viserys didn't favour Aegon's mother as much he favoured his first wife, he made Rhaenyra his heir instead. So I think JGY would sympathise with Alicent and Aegon more.

[scratch-meowt]

my hottest take

[keeper-of-the-flames]

Counter point, those machines can make me a peach sprite.

[pusheenthenerdcat]

guys did you know the tech in that nefangled machine revolutionized preemie healthcare

[maimonideznuts]

[pusheenthenerdcat]

yeah the guy who invented them made incredibly precise infusion pumps (as opposed to gravity fed ivs) which not only meant they could give medications to teeny tiny babies safely, it's also used for insulin pumps and portable dialysis machines. the key element is that it's a peristaltic pump so the liquid stays in sterile tubing for safety

(unholy drink cloaca uses it to dispense precise amounts of flavored sugar syrup)

[mothnem]

Super interesting but I have to reblog a post about unholy drink cloaca.

[jiangfamilytherapist]

I honestly find Su She so interesting. In the early years he’s a fuck-up but only insofar as he’s… just kinda average, but surrounded by a bunch of people so exceptional that he can’t help but bring down the curve.

I don’t just mean that in terms of his skills, either – regardless of which version of the mdzs story you consume (book, manhua, donghua, untamed) the actions that disgust the people around him are normal human responses under duress. Losing his sword to the waterborn abyss? Skill issue mixed with a snap decision. Trying to give up Mianmian to Wang Lingjiao? Terror will make you do awful things for survival. Ditto on giving up the location of his sect brothers to the Wens in CQL. We all like to think we would be brave and do the right thing in a life-or-death scenario, but the data is clear that only a few of us would actually run into a burning building or tackle an armed shooter. Su She’s actions aren’t praiseworthy, but we aren’t being honest with ourselves if we say they aren’t understandable.

Add to that the hero worship he holds for Hanguang-jun at that young age, and the sting of rejection combined with a deep-seated sense of inadequacy make his later resentment a natural evolution.

The thing is, despite the fact that he becomes the leader of a Lan-esque sect, Su Minshan at no point shows signs of wanting to be Hanguang-jun… not in his Lan Sect days and not in his Su Sect days. He wants to emulate his heroes, sure, but insofar as doing so makes him useful to them. “I just wanted to help.” The Su Clan forms and emulates the Lans because a) having a devoted subordinate running a clan that isn’t under obvious Jin control is useful to Jin Guangyao; and b) Su She isn’t some prodigy and Lan techniques are what he knows. Being taken for a bunch of copycats means being underestimated and that is useful, but I don’t think it’s the point. Lan cultivation is what he knows and so he’ll use that for his new master, Jin Guangyao.

I think this tends to get lost in the admitted pettiness of his targeting of Jin Zixun (which I think a lot of characters at least fantasize about doing even if they’d never follow through) but most of his other later actions are not undertaken against people he feels have wronged him, but for Jin Guangyao’s ambitions. And he really puts his life on the line to do all this. Su Minshan grows into a man with the bravery he admires in others after he finds a master who appreciates him. Su She might not fulfill his expected duty to die honorably for the Lans at the tender age of whatever, but as an adult he sure as hell finds it in him to die for Jin Guangyao. To Jin Guangyao, Su She is a tool, but also a confidante, and that seems to suit Su She just fine. He is happy to die for that.

Su She may not be the most skilled or the most morally upright, but I genuinely think the Lans lost out for not recognizing what they had in him. The propensity for that sort of loyalty is no small thing. It’s just that, as a group of fresh and untested teenagers were suddenly faced with the realities of war, Su She was the one who was not yet ready.

[aemondtargaryensource]

AEMOND TARGARYEN (1x08 - Lord of the Tides)

[brotherconstant]

ALICENT HIGHTOWER & AEMOND TARGARYEN

#i-got-it-from-my-mama

[lucemond]

Ewan Mitchell as Aemond Targaryen 

House of the Dragon, 1.08 “The Lord of the Tides”

[nyxqueen97]

daeron and helaena better go visit the injured after the coronation attack or something cause im still confused on why they’re so beloved by the ppl in the books other than like nice vagueness

[cryen]

I think generally the Greens were pretty well-liked, they effectively ran the realm for years while Viserys rotted.

We also got a hint of it when Rhaenys was stomping the peasants with her dragon, and Otto was the only one who actually cared about the smallfolk and wanted to open the doors so they could escape. 

[winterswake]

mommy’s little war criminal 💚

[dimpledlianfang]

Always thinking about how adorable they are.

[autumnslantern]

su she was right tbh

Su She had points! Actually for all I use "second flautist" as shorthand for CQL simplifying things, how the show treats Su She is a really fascinating adaptational choice that makes things more complicated than CQL is generally given credit for. If they just wanted to take responsibility from Wei Wuxian, the simplest move would just be to keep Su She's backstory from the novel and just dump extra crimes on him. They could have even easily made him worse, show him sneering and rude and arrogant back in his Lan disciple days, but they actually go out of their way to do the opposite! Lan disciple Su She is a very earnest Good Boy who appears to be a personal assistant to the main Lan family and wants SO badly to be helpful. He thinks Xichen has been working too hard, please zongzhu let me take some tasks from you to ease your burden! And then that Good Boy is left outside to die with all the other outer disciples and no one comes to help them, and we're left on a lingering shot of Su She as the lone survivor amidst the corpses of all his peers. It's a sympathetic, tragic backstory that makes his beef with LWJ and the Lan in general much more valid, and it 100% did not have to be in there! Su She's deal had to do with classism in the book too but it's even more integral to CQL!Su She and the show again goes out of its way here to make that point. His little speech in Guanyin Temple is expanded and directed at the gentry in general, and while he's extra bitter about the Lan, it's with good reason. And because CQL does not believe in subtlety, we keep cutting to Jin Guangyao's face as Su She talks:

"All of you praise yourselves as decent clans and noble gentry. But you’re just counting on your fortunate birth and powerful family. How could you look down on us? Aren’t we outside disciples also human?”

"If I had the ability to protect myself, would I be threatened by others? Would I have been swept out of the Lan like a pile of leaves?"

"It's as if I'm inferior to others since birth."

-Episode 48

The show gives Su She more crimes, but it's hard to say that it's only making him more straightforwardly a villain when he also has these extremely correct lines. JGY is moved a little closer to supervillain status in the show, but we still get that closeup of his face as he watches Su She in tears over being considered inferior because of his birth. The show really wants you to sympathize with him! It wants you to feel JGY's grief over his death! It makes you consider the arrogance of the Lan! It also kind of accidentally implies that Su She is the most powerful demonic cultivator? My preference will always be for Wei Wuxian losing control without outside interference because it's just better thematically, but if they really had to take some of the blame from WWX, this is a really interesting and compelling way to try to push things a little back towards the grey morality zone.

[saltwaterembolism]

his swagless near-constant cringefailure and untenably repulsive personality have bewitched me body and soul

[cryen]

- Mobei-Jun

[evilhasnever]

you know that literal manhua page where nmj kicks down the door? yeah