*1am on a worknight voice* why is the Among Us show good
*finished Among Us episode 1 voice* ........................why is it Good
INFINITY TRAIN CREATOR????
A M O G U S
Sweet Seals For You, Always

JBB: An Artblog!

shark vs the universe
sheepfilms
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
h
Monterey Bay Aquarium
hello vonnie

Janaina Medeiros
No title available
Misplaced Lens Cap
we're not kids anymore.

Andulka
occasionally subtle
almost home

Origami Around

izzy's playlists!
Claire Keane
🪼
Show & Tell
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@haelerin
*1am on a worknight voice* why is the Among Us show good
*finished Among Us episode 1 voice* ........................why is it Good
INFINITY TRAIN CREATOR????
A M O G U S
finding out the hard way that a really good movement speed does not translate to a really good swim speed :c
our boy is getting buntzed
tagging a fic has never stopped being the most difficult part of writing
Occasionally you do need to just let fantasy be fantasy. "Why are the mountains around Mordor in a square, mountain ranges don't work like that" well you see there's an evil god who lives there hope this helps
only 62 more frogs until we hit 8,000 species described. the moment we've all been waiting for
there are an average of about 150 new amphibian species described per year so I remain hopeful that 2026 will be the year of 8,000 frogs
I do love that somebody tagged tumblr's own frog scientist on this post. chop chop dr scherz, we've got 62 more frogs to discover and you're the only frog scientist any of us knows
GUYS amphibian species of the world is still at 7,994 species of frog BUT amphibiaweb is at 8,008 species of frog, and do you know who is a co-author on the 8,000th species of frog there???? TUMBLR'S OWN FROG SCIENTIST DR SCHERZ
"Sweeping Off the Male Gaze" by Japanese illustrator Yuko Shimizu.
rip hannibal you would have loved killing people who call themselves “ai artists”
✶ PRIDE MONTH ✶
Oh, this definitely belongs on Tumblr.
From the Nib, by Mattie Lubchansky
You mentioned on stream that you submitted some voice lines for Far Far West, do you know if any of your lines made it in?
I believe I provide all soundbites for the Cowgirl hat!
Princess Magnolia
Beelzebub's youngest daughter and ruler of the Sloth ring (it was overtaken during a Hell Civil War). Magnolia is the most popular of her sisters and beloved by demons of all backgrounds. Her addictive honey hair can make even the most miserable demon smile, though consuming too much can leave them in an irreversible zombified state. Unlike her sisters, Magnolia considers herself a "herbivore" refusing to eat fellow demons as she finds it barbaric.
She has no qualms with eating Digital or Plant based demons though...
[Tapas / Ko-fi / Patreon]
God fantasy HRT gets so much more complicated when you try to apply real biology to lizard people.
Is "Mary Sue" Still a Valid Criticism? (pt. 4)
pt. 1 | pt. 2 | pt. 3 | pt. 5 | pt. 6 | pt. 7
The backlash against calling characters "Mary Sue" is valid — the term is often sexist, racist, and simply unfounded. However. I do think that there's a baby in that bathwater, and that "this character is so perfect it becomes a major flaw in the story" can still be a meaningful criticism.
Argument 4: "Mary Sue" is still a valid criticism to the extent the "Mary Sue" character tends to start out good at everything... which can end up giving them nowhere to grow. And character growth is awesome. It makes for some of our all-time favorite heroes: Spike, Anya, Castiel, Zuko. Edmund Pevensie. Taylor Hebert. T-800. So on. Watching a character become talented or ethical or powerful makes for a great story. But if a character starts out talented/ethical/powerful, then the story often ends up in a trap of throwing ever-bigger Godzillas at a character we've already seen defeat Godzilla several times.
Effort and struggle tend to be what make a character interesting or relatable. It's the all-important difference between fearlessness (boring) and courage (relatable).
One example of how doing something badly often looks more impressive than doing it well: Captain America. He got widely derided as "useless" in Avengers (2012), so for Winter Solider (2014) the writers didn't make him more powerful... they added visible effort.
The moment of hesitation before Steve jumps, and the moment after he lands where he has to stop and go "ow" for a few seconds, do so much to sell this moment, vs. the unreal-looking way Steve does almost everything without effort in Avengers movies:
Example of this problem*: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Protagonist Ender has so many abilities so ridiculously beyond what real six-year-olds can do I can't list them all, but the point is that as of his first day of school, he's already curb-stomping kids twice his size and scoring better at training games than any other person ever measured. What problems Ender does have tend to come from being too good at things — hence John Sclazi among others deriding him as insufferably perfect.
Counter-example: Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Protagonist Jean Valjean is smart enough to invent a new type of fastener, strong enough to lift a carriage unassisted, moral enough that he's literally meant to be a Catholic saint... and the book gets away with it because when we meet him, he has none of that. He'll become the world's greatest dad, but in his first scene he gets in a shouting match with a small child over a single coin and only realizes too late what an ass he's being. He'll end up running an entire town and its wealthiest business, but first we get a long sequence of him unable to get even a chance to earn enough food to survive because of his criminal record. He can go a long, long way (1500 pages!) and the story can still feel coherent, because he starts out with so little.
Tl;dr: Mary Sue ≠ ultra-talented. BUT if a story has a character start out ultra-talented without showing us how they got there, the character tends to stagnate and the reader may lose interest.
*I constrain my examples to white male protagonists that someone else has called "Mary Sue" first, as part of my argument that it's not all sexism.
@ahavaas
#yeah ender lol#from what I remember card was trying to answer the question “can a good person commit genocide”#or rather he was arguing the answer to the question was yes#and could only do it with a mary sue protagonist#but yeah excellent points
Huh. Had not heard this before. Because like, I do think Ender's Game has some cool ideas around the theme of inherited conflict, AKA The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody. But I've always felt the so-called "moral dilemma" of the book falls far short of having any real dilemma to it, because ultimately Ender doesn't choose to commit genocide; he literally doesn't know genocide is the result of his actions.
Ender's Game goes to a lotttt of effort to assure us that Ender is innocent of everything because he never wants to hurt anyone and never intends to kill, only "win thoroughly." Ignore the fact that he killed two kids and then arguably committed genocide, he just needed to "win," so the story sets up ways for him to be innocent while simultaneously letting him kill. You have to judge him by his intents and desires, not the results of his actions, right?
Now remember that the author was a Christian fundamentalist right-wing piece of shit, and ask yourself why someone with those views would find that justification so important and compelling to argue for.
@geeko-sapiens #this analysis borrowed from an article I read once and can't remember#but yeah point is#ender's game has the same moral valence as the fantasies of a kid who wants to blow up the school he was bullied in#it's the fantasy of getting revenge and inflicting violence while remaining morally pure#and when you consider the author's politics. uhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Inch resting. If you ever find that article again, please send a link!
Not to defend orson scott card, but genocide is, like, the one thing you really can't blame ender for doing. He kills other kids in physical fights at least twice, he's ruthless, manipulative, and self centered, but he genuinely believes, when he does the actual genocide, that he is doing a training exercise, basically playing a glorified video game. When he finds out it was real, he is horrified to the point where he falls into a deep depression, and then the remainder of the series is split between horrific shit happening on earth and ender trying to atone for being tricked into wiping out an entire species.
Which is partially achieved by saving a single individual from that species, potentially delaying its extinction by a while and ensuring that when it does happen, the cause will be a genetic bottleneck leaving them massively inbred and vulnerable to disease. You may recognize this as a comically christian fundamentalist view of atonement.
Anyways, what happens with ender is definitely osc wanting to have his cake and eat it, too, but the genocide really can't be laid at ender's feet if you want to apply a consistent system of ethics. It's an atrocity, but it was not intentional (on his part) and he had been told repeatedly by people he'd been groomed and conditioned to believe that none of it was real. I think one of the other books says one of ender's friends figured it out, but he never told ender if he did.
Yes, I feel like that's what makes Ender in many ways the most Mary Sue Mary Sue I've ever encountered in a mainstream work of fiction: he's simultaneously all-powerful, and excused in-text for all excesses of that power using some combination of "he didn't mean to" and "but the greater good."
And that's also why I've always pushed back so hard against people bringing it up as an additional example of kids facing moral dilemmas in the style of Animorphs. He literally doesn't know his actions will result in death, ever, at any point in the first book. (How he can be a tactical genius and yet not know that about curb-stomping Bonzo as Bonzo's already lying wounded on the floor is... one of life's great mysteries.) The Animorphs are killing strangers so they won't kill the ones that they love, and then they kill their loved ones as well. And not because they were following orders from some adult.
Also, I'm eternally frustrated by Ender's Game because of the way the adults in the story, to a one, treat him as the specialest boy in the universe before he ever does anything special. I guess the handwave about [mumble mumble IQ test] is meant to explain that, but he doesn't do anything to single himself out for not being expelled for MURDERING A FELLOW STUDENT BEFORE HE EVEN GETS OFF THE BUS TO SPACE!SCHOOL. Much less being treated as extra-special by every other adult in his life, through elaborate reverse favoritism, until he gets handed responsibility for the entire military after a mere three years of training. Like a true Mary Sue, he black-holes the entire story around him into illogic with his gravitational pull.
Despite many, many people recommending it to me, I never read Ender's Game in my adolescence. I never picked it up until well into adulthood, when I got really bored working at a library one day. This was long after Orson Scott Card revealed himself to be horrible and the movie's release and everything, and I decided to see what all the fuss was about.
And after reading it, I was SO GLAD I procrastinated on this one, because young Griff would have loved it, but he would NOT have seen the flaws. No, the bullied young boy whose good grades kept his autism undiagnosed would have projected SO HARD onto Ender and wished that he, too, could kill his bullies with impunity because he was so smart.
But yeah, Ender was the archetype of all Mary Suedom. He's like the mitochondrial Eve of every anime starring a stunningly-bland Japanese everyman who gets hit by a truck and ends up in a Dragon-Quest-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off fantasy setting where he somehow manages to be better than everyone with minimal effort.
y'all don't make me get the pool noodle
just blanket statement to please read the pinned post and stop asking for a "I've never heard this but can name the series" button
I'm tired
My next-door neighbor for my entire childhood and adolescence took his own life when I was around 19. His wife was severely mentally ill, and the police discovered he'd locked her up in a room upstairs. Her hair was matted, and she was covered in fecal matter. I think she was strapped to a chair. She wasn't capable of speech.
More than a decade later, it's just now struck me that perhaps this event influenced how unimpressed I was with Jane Eyre.
-posts my tomodachi clips on TikTok because I wanna share them with people
-people confuse Lili with someone’s porn OC and get mad at me for making an OC based off of a “Gooner character”
-I clarify that Lili is my OC and I’ve had her for years
-comments get even more angry and insist she’s a rip off