Not Just a She-Ra Blog!

A random Internets person (If you *are* looking for my She-Ra stuff, it's over at ericas-spop-blog)

[ericamzdm]

I know it's already been discussed to death, but -

No, I'm sorry, gaslighting isn't a fancy word for lying, or being mean, or not agreeing, or telling you things you don't want to hear.

Gaslighting is the usurpation of the target's authority over their internal and external experiences.

It is saying that the victim does not know their own mind and cannot make their own decisions.

[ruabvbj]

[prokopetz]

Fact: Apart from pure recognition factor, one of the major reasons your fanart gets more eyes on it than our OCs is because people are perverts for narrative context, and your OCs don't have any.

Corollary: You don't actually need to write a whole-ass graphic novel to achieve that narrative context. You do need to know what your OCs' story is, but once you do, you can literally just draw contexless snapshots from that story that raise more questions than they answer and people will fill in the blanks.

[cafeleningrad]

Artist Yudori musing on queer expression and queerness in fiction, diverging by cultural perception. [originally posted on instagram]

[depsidase]

[bisexual-engineer-girl]

probablemente no causa gonorrea. no podemos saber 100%

[lastoneout]

It really is dissapointing how many women these days hear "it's okay to be critical of men as a class and the ways in which society prioritizes them" and go "okay so that means I dont have treat any men including and especially marginalized ones and children like human beings" like bestie. Where the fuck did we lose you.

[incognitopolls]

Answer based only on the physical home you live in, not the people you live with (or don't live with), except insofar as they have to do with the structure, e.g. hearing other people through thin walls.

Think about the home you live in. Are you happy with the physical structure/place?

Yes, I love it

I mostly like it

No strong feelings either way

I mostly dislike it

No, I hate it

It's complicated/other

Voting ended onJul 4, 2025

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[prokopetz]

If we're being 100% honest with ourselves as game designers, we've gotta admit that this notion that "story focus" means making the GM do all the work is not a bugbear that's unique to the Dungeons & Dragons fandom. Think of how many self-identified "story focused" indie RPGs you've bumped into that have a great deal to say leading up to the point of rolling the dice, but once the dice have actually been rolled and the time has come to interpret what those results mean, those same rules that were so keen on procedural rigour just moments ago simply shrug and go "I dunno, have the GM make something up?"

[prokopetz]

(It's especially stark when a game clearly thinks it's pushing back against the GM-as-the-narrative's-babysitter ethos, but its design tells a different story. "The GM is a fellow player and should be treated as such" my guy, rules are toys. They're made of procedures rather than plastic, but they're toys all the same. How are you gonna insist that the GM be treated as a fellow player, then turn around and tell them they're not allowed to have any toys to play with?)

[jennamoran]

Now I want to see someone do it the other way around where a game is completely freeform and/or GM-driven until the dice hit the table, accidentally or otherwise (maybe you have to slowly stack them in play or tossing them from hand to hand or whatever, so it's not totally freeform), at which point everyone at the table reads in chorus or otherwise enacts the relevant table entry. Entries could be * magic 8-ball stuff like "but it was not to be," "alas that the worm of wickedness grows in every heart," "we would come to regret that once-perfect-seeming day," ... huh, interesting, it's harder to make positive ones work, because negating what just happened inherits its information density but confirming it only adds whatever information the confirmation brings? I guess you could try a set of swerves like "but, what was that appearing to the west?" "there is something that is red." "the scene dissolves in flowers," ... OH! You could have a list of illustrious daemons who bring certain influences to things, I guess that's just the standard tarot-based resolution just with daemons though.

* bits of setting information from a large table like "one must always remember that the wombat is a collector of the human teeth," "below the world, the specters still remain,"or whatnot.

* encouragement to pretend that playing an RPG is like gathering as a bunch of mysterious robed figures to worship the ineffable, like "together we contemplate the shared imaginary space," "we are the storytellers. The world is our story," "this too is in the nature of the game," "and then and then and then and then:"

* the game playing a game with you "oh my look at the time. Oh my look at the time. Oh my look at the time," "and yet this too was someone's fetish," "and we did not touch the dice again," "was it murder, or simply ... the roleplaying of death?," "alas it seems the game has only just begun," "please let me go I am trapped in the chorus of your voices," and so forth.

* party game stuff

[prokopetz]

I'm reminded of Itras By, a Norwegian surrealist RPG whose conflict resolution mechanics involve a custom deck of cards with outcomes including:

The power of love triumphs.

You prove to have something useful in your pocket.

Rewind time by a few seconds; whatever just happened to prompt you to draw this card, the exact opposite happens instead.

Reality splits, and each other player narrates a different possible outcome, which you experience; when normality reasserts itself, you decide which one "really" happened.

Flash forward to your character giving a press conference interview about what happened next, with the other players acting as reporters; when the interview is over, resume where you left off.

It's mostly your observation that it's harder to make positive outcomes bring anything new to the table that twigged my memory, because some of these put fun twists on the "yes, and" outcome by throwing in potentially awkward stipulations. "You succeed" is prosaic, but "you triumph through the power of love" or "something you happen to have in your pocket wins the day" may require some explaining!

[lesbinewren]

crazy how every time a female character gets cliche misogynistic writing we have to explain to people again that fictional characters are not real and do not choose things for themselves.

[lesbinewren]

it’s really this at the end of the day tbh

[lobotomycas]

*pounds a monster at 9pm* why can't I ever sleep at night

[lobotomycas]

WAIT.I MEANT. THE DRINK LIKE I.M

[lyonnerileyauthor]

what a post to post on the monsterfucker website. pure gold

[tobiasdrake]

Something I'm fond of saying is "The villain drives the plot but the hero sets the tone." Something that's very important about this is that the resolution to the conflicts presented need to match the hero's tone. If your story doesn't believe problems can be solved the way the hero wants to solve them... why is this the hero?

If you want your problems to be solved with brutal catharsis, then your hero should be someone who believes in brutal catharsis.

If you want your problems to be solved with forgiveness and reconciliation, then your hero should be someone who believes in forgiveness and reconciliation.

They don't have to begin there. This can be something they come around to over the course of the story, as they grow and change per their character arc. But by the time of their ultimate encounter with the villain, their values should be the values that drive the story forward.

There's this thing in D&D that some DMs do. Where, when you roll enough damage to deplete the monster's hit points, they'll turn to you and say, "That's a kill. Describe for the group how you take the monster down." And you're allowed to come up with some cool maneuver or something that your character did in order to deliver the finishing blow.

The hero's ultimate triumph over the villain is a lot like this. More than any other part of the story, this moment is their apotheosis. It should be a celebration of everything they are and everything they stand for.

You have defeated the villain; Now describe for the group what form that victory takes.

[jester-nonconforming]

People still tend to lump JK Rowling in with the category of ~problematic artists~ and I need everyone to understand that is not the problem with her. She is not comparable to anyone who wrote a piece of fiction you hate, or someone who made rude comments in 2015 and has since learned better.

She is far more like Elon Musk. She is a radicalized person with an extreme amount of social and financial power, and for YEARS she has been using that power to try to influence her government into hurting vulnerable people, on purpose. And she has succeeded. THAT is the problem with her, and THAT is why spending money on her books is so dangerous, not because her books aged badly.

Critiquing her work is fine, of course (I personally was never a fan so I really don’t care) but you NEED to understand that fiction is not the main issue here. And I truly think acting like she’s the same as the rest of any giant list of ~problematic creators of the week~ waters down how dangerous she is.

[decadent-trans-girl]

[despazito]

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I was going to say it's amazing this manages to annihilate both roko's basilisk and pascal's wager in one fell swoop, but on second thought, that's just because roko's basilisk is literally just pascal's wager reskinned for tech guys.

[ot3]

to be honest there has never been a fictional character i’ve actually wanted to date. like. i want them to date each other. i don’t want myself as a person to be involved in this scenario whatsoever. what would i add to this narratively? what’s my thematic purpose in the narrative? immersion breaking. 

[prokopetz]

Some have characterised it as a poor business decision when George Lucas started handing out copies of the West End Games Star Wars tabletop RPG to authors of licensed Star Wars media because he didn't feel like writing the setting bible they kept asking for, then proceeded to simply rubber stamp every supplement West End Games put out with minimal review because he couldn't be bothered to read them, thereby creating a situation where, between 1987 and 1998, the canon of the largest transmedia franchise on the planet was essentially being dictated by an unsupervised pack of tabletop RPG nerds from Pennsylvania, but to this I counter: it was also extremely funny.

[duckbunny]

remember kids, the moral of "Irish and Italians weren't even considered White yet!" isn't "because in those times people were so ignorant they didn't think the Irish were white". the moral is "because white is an unreal category created to justify slavery and ongoing hoarding of power and wealth". It's not that you know better about Italians. It's that the boundaries of the higher caste have changed.

[rigsbywi]

UPDATE: Rigsby WI chapter 4 page 144

(sorry I’ve forgotten to post here for like 4 months)