Left my old account during the Great Porn Ban Exodus five years ago. Back because Twitter shredded my mental health into so much string cheese and now some dumb billionaire is burning it to the ground. Profile pic is of my FFXIV OC. You WILL get tired of me talking about her.
please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.
you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.
first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.
now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:
in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.
and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.
and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.
it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:
• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.
• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.
• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.
• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.
• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.
• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.
and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.
what i'm asking:
if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.
if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.
india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.
If The Characters From My WIP Were In Obsession (2026)
Tyler adjusted his cufflinks, tightened his tie, and turned to Bear. In the other room, they could faintly hear Nikki banging on the walls, pleading with her "boyfriend" to let her out.
Tyler was not having a good day. Not nearly as bad as his boss, mind, and certainly nowhere near as bad as the people in this latest case. But still, he's had better evenings. A woman was dead, another was brainwashed, and there sat the culprit, in the chair Tyler had tied him to, mere moments before. He was a sniveling wreck beforehand, but now he was a sniveling wreck who had also soiled himself. Understandable, given how this conversation was likely to end for the both of them.
But first, some answers...
Tyler contemplated the tiny stick in his hand that had caused so much trouble. "One Wish Willow". Break the stick, and you get one wish, whatever you want. "Amaze your friends," said a quote in the corner of the box. Tyler almost scoffed. He remembered when his boss gave him the debriefing on the item. The first words out of Tyler's mouth were "how the fuck did you let this slip by you???"
The old man was typically not one to let shit like this just end up on store shelves, no matter how remote. That kind of oversight, especially for items this powerful, were like holes in the side of a ship. Doesn't matter how big or small, it's always a problem. Naturally, Tyler and his team were dispatched to cover the whole thing up.
He looked back up at Bear, who hadn't said a word since he was tied down. His eyes just stayed locked on Tyler the whole time, silently pouring tears like a slightly open faucet. Another bang on the door. Nikki barely sounded human now. The doors in this house were cheap, and even if they weren't (and even if they didn't have several pieces of furniture acting as barricades), the spell cast on the poor girl clearly didn't make allowances for her own self-preservation. "Are you going to kill me...?" Bear finally asked. His voice warbled like a steel cable at high altitudes during a storm.
"Why would you do this?" Tyler asked.
"I-I didn't know it would actually happen!" he shouted. "I just wanted her to like me, that's all! And now she's being, well, this, and then Sarah and..."
Tyler replied with a simple "Mhm."
"But like, well, I mean, everything was fine at first."
Tyler looked around the broken, tattered remains of the house. There was a stain on the rug near the door that smelled faintly of piss. "Fine, huh?"
"Look, I got tricked, okay! By that, that thing! Why would someone make that?! It's not my fault - NONE of this is my fault!"
Tyler's eye twitched. But he swallowed it for now. Full story first. "Okay. Is the original personality still in there? Has she tried to reach out to you at all?"
"Well, I...I mean..."
"Sir." Tyler pulled back on his suit jacket, revealing his gun. "It is time to be honest."
Bear jumped in the chair as high as the restraints would let him, and Tyler picked up a fresh new scent of piss. Ah, what a sanitary life I lead. Thank god Simon isn't here.
"Okay!" said Bear. "Okay, okay okay, just put that away, okay!? There was this, this one time. She was asleep, but like, she also wasn't, you know?"
"What did she say?"
"She..." Bear muttered the rest. Tyler growled, and began to draw the gun. "She asked me to kill her! I-I thought, maybe it was another freak out, so-"
"Another?"
"It happens sometimes, but she always apologizes afterward."
A crash. Tyler's eyes darted to the door. Nikki's hand, broken, purple, and dripping with blood, had punched through the door, and was now scrambling to move aside the furniture barricade. "She's gonna get through, we need to get out of here!!!" Bear shouted. He thrashed and yanked at his restraints.
Tyler went to a pocket in his suit jacket and pulled out a dart gun. He shot a dart into the thrashing arm coming from the hole, and moments later, it fell slack. Nikki was asleep. Tyler holstered the dart gun. "Anyway."
"Why the fuck didn't you do that before?!" Bear asked.
"I didn't know if putting her to sleep would just make something worse come out. Turns out, all that happens is the poor girl begs for death. I can't imagine why. But back to our little tête-à-tête, when was the first freakout."
Bear took several deep breaths as the adrenaline subsided, and he answered. "It wasn't long after I made the wish. A day or so. We were actually about to, ya know..."
Tyler felt his blood go hot with rage. While he kept the full fury of it below the well-trained facade of his profession, he did allow a dangerous narrowing of the eyes. "And did you?" His hand went back to the gun. Time to be honest.
"Well, yeah?" Bear replied. He phrased it as a question, without a hint of shame. He likely didn't understand why Tyler was reaching for the gun at all.
Tyler's hand was tightening around the handle, when his phone went off. It was Simon. He answered. "Hey," said his best friend on the other end. "I found the magic shop, and I've confiscated all the willows they had. Amazing what a forged FBI badge lets you do."
Tyler kept his eyes on Bear. "Whatcha got?"
"Clark and I ran some tests on them. This isn't a curse; it isn't even a genie scenario. The wishes are 100% clean. It's exactly as it says on the box."
"So it's all on the guy doing the wishing," Tyler finished.
"Indeed. You have one with you, yes? Another wish should undo this whole thing."
Tyler looked down at the willow. The words the wishes are 100% clean echoed in his mind. No catch. No monkey's paw. But first thing's first. "What'd happen should something...befall the wisher?"
"Classic Galatea paradox," said Simon. "The spell is directly tied to him and Nikki, removing one undoes the whole thing. But I mean, you have a willow, so it's unnecessary. Look, Tyler, I'm five minutes out, just don't do anythin-"
"Simon," said Tyler. He wasn't looking at Bear anymore. He wasn't looking at anything anymore. He was staring a million miles away. "Don't worry about it."
Their organization doesn't like its members to have any ties to the normal world. Makes things complicated. So when you join, The Old Man scrubs every trace of you from the normal world. Social security number, internet presence, public records, everything. But that's an expensive endeavor, and the agent is made to pay it all off. This debt must be cleared before an agent is allowed to leave. Simon and Clark never liked this job, and Tyler had resolved himself to free them, whatever the cost. Whatever the cost.
He hung up the phone. He looked back down at Bear, and pulled out the willow. "yes, thank you," said Bear. "Just make the wish and make this all go away, okay?"
Tyler almost chuckled. "I wish that Simon Duling and Clark Alba were free of their debts." he broke the willow as Bear screamed at him to stop. Tyler closed his eyes and let out a breath. Basking in the satisfaction of helping his friends.
"Why would you do that?! Why?!"
"Your confusion at someone thinking of others before himself is... unsurprising. But don't worry, I'm gonna fix all this."
He drew his gun. Bear screamed. He shot him in the mouth. The bullet tore through the back of his mouth and impacted the wall behind him. Bear and the chair he was tied to fell back from the impact. He choked and gurgled for a few moments, just enough to know he was going to die, that hell was coming next, before he finally went still.
Tyler turned back to the door, to the hole that Nikki's beaten-up arm was hanging from. He pulled his phone back out and hit 4 on the speed dial. "Hey Scarlet," he said. "Need a clean up and a mind wipe at my location. I also...need you to set someone up in a new town, make a recent murder record go away, the usual jacket. Yeah, yeah, I know, put it on my debt. Yes, I know it's getting high. Simon and Clark? Don't worry about them. I took care of it." He hung up the phone before she could question him further. He put his hands in his pockets and walked out the door.
Simon and Clark were 5 minutes out, no use trying to escape them. He'd get to have one last talk with his best friends. They'd no doubt have questions, they'd no doubt have some stuff they wanna yell. But they'd also probably wanna know why he didn't wish himself free along with them.
Tyler wondered to himself if he had the stones to respond to that question with the truth. That, despite everything, he fucking loved this job.
"Can such-and-such a person ever be redeemed?" I don't believe there is or could be or needs to be such a thing as redemption because I am not a Catholic, therefore the question is vacuous and incoherent. Next question.
What about redeemed like a voucher? Can you turn in Jim Kirk at the customer service counter for 40% off your purchase? Does Galadriel get you in store credit? Can you go to the bar and exchange Twilight Sparkle for a shitty beer?
I think the reason that the first wave of woke in the 2010s produced such a backlash and, ultimately, failed, was that it didn't really have any goals. So often you would see posts that start with "we need to talk about-" or "we need to reconcile with the fact that-" or "why is no one talking about-" but never WHY we need to do those things. What the ultimate goal is, how it would ultimately be useful to do so. This is compounded by the fact that such discussions ARE often a bedrock of media discourse, but since this site has always been dominated by the young, they think they're the first people to ever, for example, look at the twist in Psycho and go "hey that's a bit problematic"
As long as queer discourse around the horror genre has existed, there have been discussions about the twist in Psycho. But if you're an introverted teenager living in Bumfuck, Arkansas, you don't really know that lol
And again, there's never a stated goal with these modern takes on these old discussions. Never what reconciling the transphobia in Psycho would look like in a material sense. That's where the backlash in the mid to late 2010s came from - folks saw the whole thing as guilt tripping for its own sake. The political goal being the act of disapproval in itself. Not saying it's right, of course, or that what came of that backlash was anything good, simply that it is the consequence.
I was there, on this site in 2012. I saw the whole thing. We didn't have a plan. But in our defense, we didn't even know we were at war.
you can tell TMNT 2012 was made by actual New Yorkers because they looked at The Rat King and went "Oh, this is the scariest motherfucker who has ever walked the earth"
What kills me about Arkham Knight is just how much of a match made in hell Scarecrow and Arkham Knight were. Batman SHOULD have died at so many points in this game but fortunately he was up against two villains who just couldn't help but sabotage each other at every turn.
Jason puts it best what the problem was: Scarecrow wanted Batman to suffer, to fall, to be destroyed completely. He saw batman as a symbol to break
Jason just wanted him to fuckin die. He knew that if you gave batman that kinda wiggle room, he'd make you regret it.
On paper, bruce should've died, but the knight and scarecrow were too ideologically opposed to work together effectively
I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
Someone at an old job asked why I wanted to write up the meeting minutes for our team and I said 'i wanna control the narrative' and they were like 'what' and I pointed out that no one was gonna remember what we said in six months and so my interpretation of the meeting would dictate the assumed reality of what happened
"none of you ever send corrections when I offer the draft so y'all have consented to my version"
"we don't read that shit"
"you must trust me implicitly to create our shared reality that's so sweet"
That's how several coworkers decided I was a supervillain and how I learned several coworkers didn't understand record keeping as like a CONCEPT
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