Dread Birate Roberts🏴‍☠️ @dreadbirate - Tumblr Blog

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I know they are in different canons written decades apart so are probably not even meant to be continuous, but having read the Thrawn 2017 trilogy first, now that I’m reading Heir to the Empire it’s interesting to consider the path that must have taken him from who he is in the imperial trilogy to who he is in the Thrawn trilogy.

In the Imperial Trilogy, Thrawn is fundamentally optimistic, he aims to avoid brutality when he can instead gain a more complete victory. He aims to foster talent to improve the Imperial military, consulting with his underlings and taking their opinions seriously. He has people he cares about, even if he uses them as pawns for his games at achieving what he thinks is the greater good.

In Heir to the Empire, Thrawn is very different. The Empire is a corpse, though Thrawn denies it. He failed to realise that the empire was not a state, it was, in reality, nothing but the great cushion of evil built to protect Palpatine, and with him gone Thrawn keeps the dregs alive through sheer force of will. He’s lost faith in the officers and underlings around him, and in this time of desperation he has decided that there is no room for imperfection, and acts accordingly, acting with brutality in the face of minor failures from his staff. He doesn’t consult or consider, because he no longer trusts anything but his own personal genius.

I think these are distinctions that make sense when you consider his life’s path. Thrawn was always a fascist, who believed in might makes right and authoritarian/totalitarian rule, he always beleived the ends justified the means, he always had an ego and a vindictive streak (look at his campaign against nightswan), but all of these have been amplified and made sharper by years of failure and the slow realization that the empire which he staked his dignity and the future of his people on was a bad idea.

Now, I’ve only read half of heir to the empire so far (I don’t mind spoilers too much), so idk how much his backstory will be different between the trilogies, I’m mainly commenting on the differences in characterization and how those can be explained when patching the two.

#mitth'raw'nuruodo #grand admiral thrawn #thrawn trilogy #heir to the empire #thrawn 2017 #star wars #the joke explanation for why he’s like that now is ofc that it’s because he misses his boyfriend

gondorrevealparty

Polycules should be able to trade people like sports teams do

gondorrevealparty

Listen -- you're a good defender and your pussy is fantastic, but that's not what our team needs right now. We're trading you to Greater Boston in exchange for someone who has a car.

targetedknowledge

0v9

deeply unserious animal

inwardhardar

That thing is straight-up a BUG

derinthescarletpescatarian

Why do you have this thing

runawaymarbles

The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.

Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.

zz9pzza

Op's tags

#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op

runawaymarbles

The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.

kyraneko

This post feels like watching an iceberg go by in clear water. The amount of stuff going on beneath the surface of AO3 just astonishes.

jeffsatyr

(ID in alt)

elodieunderglass

Approximately one THOUSAND felonies

ashlgcostumes

I pull up my slide show. The first slide says “I do not want to financially support the Church of the Latter Day Saints in any way”. There are murmurs of agreement and approval from the room

Next slide. “Brandon Sanderson is a member of the LDS”. The muttering has changed tone

“It’s not a very big amount of money though.” Someone in the audience pipes up. “His cut is only a small fraction of the cost of the book, and then-“ my next slide shows an income breakdown, it is titled ‘a small fraction of $10,000,000 is still a big number’

I’m sweating. The following slides explain tithing rules. The vibe of the room has shifted. I start to doubt I’m getting out of here alive

fuckblast

derinthescarletpescatarian

#huh#i wonder how much of his success is due to the support of the mormon church#that's the sort of grassroots i fluence they'd be able to pull off#or just church leaders 'asking' people to buy his books till he becomes a bestseller#and well once you do that a few times money prints itself a bit

Actually this is a big part of why you see so many successful mormon authors! Not necessarily people being deliberately pressured to buy the books, I've never heard of that happening, but there's a big writing culture and it's generally easier for mormons to get published in the first place because of their accessible English university classes and their internal book distribution network giving many authors a leg up. It's worth noting that while I'm unaware of any deliberate attempts to game bestseller lists like these tags imply, simply being mormon authors helps sell books to other mormons, because mormons tend to be very wary about reading inappropriate content. A mormon picking out a book for themselves, or especially picking out a book for their children, will likely favour a book available through their mormon bookstore or a book written by a mormon in a bookshop, because they know that the material in the book will be appropriate and morally acceptable. (That or Disney, which is al,so apparently very popular among mormons.) Since mormons tend to have a strong reading and writing culture, this captive audience certainly isn't nothing.

baraphalloplastyclinic

I actually do think we should discourage women from becoming housewives. Do not become financially dependent on a man. That's how a lot of women ended up dead over the years. A man gets violent suddenly and you have to choose between homelessness or potentially dying at his hand because you have an enormous gap in your resume and no degrees or certifications or anything that will help you pursue a career that will allow you to be financially independent. He owns your bank account. His name is probably the one on the car. Try and leave and he can report it stolen. Where will you go then?

Don't become a housewife.

strangeboneyuriwoman

My favorite thing about the “Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!” tagline is that every part of it is technically wrong. Only one of the two main lesbians is a necromancer, the gothic palace is not haunted, and they are on Earth for 90% of the book.

dreadbirate

Also, while the *vibes* of the castle are certainly gothic, im fairly certain it does not in fact have gothic architechture

#the locked tomb #gideon the ninth

catgirl-kaiju

i find it very very telling that people immediately started going kiwifarms on gooseworx right after the final episode of tadc dropped on yt and the reveal that fan favorite character Jax has been a closeted trans woman this whole time, radically recontextualizing everything about her and her actions. everyone in the fandom has been completely fine with other queer representation in the show, even Zooble who is also trans representation, but i guess a complicated and flawed transfem is just a bridge too far.

i don't care about old social media posts that have coincidentally and mysteriously "resurfaced" following the outrage of transmisogynist fans. you clearly missed the part of this where Jax is reflective of Goose's past behavior of using edgy and harmful humor to play the bad guy and push people away in order to cover up the fact that she is a trans woman. you missed the part where Gooseworx has explicitly grown past that kind of behavior and Jax is an exercise in extending empathy to a past version of herself who was trying everything in her power to be uworthy of love and care. you fundamentally do not understand the art you are a fan of.

Gooseworx's ban by @staff is transparently due to harassment by transmisogynists attempting to turn her into a "controversial figure" for "ruining" their favorite edgy jokey rabbit "man" by revealing she's been an edgy jokey rabbit woman this whole time. i will block anyone attempting to justify this ban. i do not want those who would enable such an obvious transmisogynistic witch hunt to interact with me or my content. fuck off.

doubleca5t

I'm not necessarily rooting for the US in the world cup but I do think it would be funny if they made a deep run if only because I feel like, for countries that are actually good at international football, "You lost to the USAmericans" would make for god tier trash talk

doubleca5t

Imagine you're from a country where this sport is like a national civic religion and you lose to a bunch of dork ass losers who call it soccer. There's no coming back from that

doubleca5t

I thought the USMNT making a deep run and embarrassing some European teams in the process would be the funniest outcome for them in the World Cup but Trump using FIFA's limitless appetite for corruption to get a red card overturned for their game against Belgium only for them to completely embarrass themselves, play way worse than usual and lose by 3 goals is SO much funnier holy shit that's incredible

doubleca5t

The other day my wife told me about this influencer who said she needed to go on ozempic so she could go from 130 lbs down to 115 and I really cannot stress the degree to which we have so COMPLETELY lost the plot with this glp1 shit. Like not only are people are going on this shit for purely cosmetic purposes, the cosmetic purposes are delusional. This is the kind of mindset that gives people eating disorders but now because you can get a prescription instead of having to starve yourself or enduce vomiting a big swath of the general public seems eager to go along with it. Body Positivity did not go fucking far enough because I am being so real when I say that fatphobia is more of a public health crisis than obesity has ever been

doubleca5t

People making a choice feminism argument for Ariana Grande looking skeletal have me feeling like this

mlarayoukai

happy mothers day to her

junkyarded

so many people post like they are from the dimension of No Misogyny because the misogyny all around them just registers to them as fine and normal

junkyarded

we are all posting from the dimension of No Misandry because we live on the planet earth

vee-dmsr

am1vf

Not leaving this in the tags

sexualencountersatwalmart

Stephen King released a novel last year with just a straight up uncomplicated uncritical rendition of the plural tranny psycho killer antagonist and in the afterword was like "i wanted to do something like Psycho :)"

these things have not been reckoned with

sexualencountersatwalmart

this isn't directly related to the ongoing discussion of this trope in horror and the transmisogynistic legacy of seminal horror films like Psycho, but i think it's worth talking about as a larger illustration of the narrative roles afforded to transfeminized characters:

there is exactly one other explicitly transfeminized character in this series by King (the Bill Hodges/Holly Gibney series of detective novels). she appears in the climax of End of Watch (2016) as one victim in a montage of victims coerced into suicide by the antagonist. she is described very clearly as a trans girl, but is directly referred to by the text as a gay boy. i won't go into detail, but her on-page suicide (unlike the others in the montage) is a dark comedy beat, played for laughs

sexualencountersatwalmart

yes! nail on the head right here. like yes, it's worth it to be like "fuck stephen king" and criticize the particulars of his transmisogynistic writing, but the broader point is that this is what transfemininity looks like in pop culture and it's what it looks like right now!

this isn't history or a settled issue, it's our current reality

iphigenesis

in a way john watson is a fantasy (what if you had this brilliant enigmatic friend and what if he liked you in particular and what if he offered you the excitement of youth and adventures and a way out of boring society life and all without having to actually give up your status as a gentleman so you could have the best of both worlds) and in a way sherlock holmes is a fantasy (what if someone never got tired of you despite your various strange habits and mood swings and instead of simply tolerating you they genuinely liked you and what if you didn’t have to live alone forever and what if you never had to give up doing the things you love) and of course there’s the most fantastical part of it all (what if you could afford london housing prices)