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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Sweet Seals For You, Always
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@lacreatricefortune
Came back wrong this, came back monstrous that
What if they came back loving? What if they came back in love. What if the necromancy worked and you cheated death and it's everything you've ever wanted, but now they love you in a way they never did before and you cannot know if that is because they finally know the lengths you are willing to go for them, or because something in this deathless magic bound their soul to yours to guide them home and it left them no. choice.
The problem with "homophobia-free" AUs
I think a lot of straight people in the Heated Rivalry fandom need to learn the difference between "alternate universe where homophobia doesn't exist" and "alternate universe where straight people get to define what is and isn't homophobia."
Do you actually want to imagine a world where homophobia doesn't exist?
Or do you just want to imagine a world where gay people tell you what a great friend and ally you are, and reassure you that it was only their own paranoia and anxiety that prevented them from coming out to you sooner, and certainly not anything you said or did that made them unsure they could trust you, and those jokes you made were funny, actually, and not microaggessions at all!"
the discussion around ozempic frustrates me. ozempic in of itself isn't the issue here. the issue is that people in the medical field are allowing people to abuse a drug that's intended to treat type 2 diabetes for weight loss
idk just stop demonizing these medications. some people actually need them and they are actually very effective for helping with diabetes management. the fact that they are used outside of that context is not the fault of diabetics. not everyone on ozempic or mounjaro or any other diabetes medications that are used for off label purposes are doing it for said off label purposes. i am on mounjaro because my diabetes is very poorly maintained with pills alone. some people literally need these medications to avoid kidney failure or liver failure or any other complication associated with diabetes. the issue is fatphobia and the way doctors are willing to allow people to abuse these medications. stop demonizing necessary medications for diabetics. stop it
Plenty talking about Murderbot and Gurathin's weirdly charged relationship tension not enough people talking about Murderbot gently but firmly coaxing Mensa into carving a giant pussy into its back I've never seen a more vulva looking prosthetic wound in my life.
Murderbot + text posts [1/?]
Duuude don't question my version of events I'm such a reliable narrator. I'm literally the protagonist and the main character. You can literally read some of my internal thoughts, that clearly means you have complete access to an objective view of my thoughts and feelings and a correct impression of my characterization and the events unfolding around me. I'm not omitting any information from the audience. Nevermind that timeskip just now
"I hate how people make everything about shipping instead of doing serious literary analysis" says person who could have started an interesting literary analysis discussion of their own if only they'd stop bitching about shippers for 5 seconds.
When I was in The Untamed | 陈情令 fandom, I wrote several meta essays that had nothing to do with shipping, and somehow, despite the fact that The Untamed is literally a romance and virtually everyone in the fandom is a shipper of the central romantic pairing, my non-shipping meta posts got plenty of positive engagement!
It's amazing how willing shippers are to join you in a non-shipping related discussion as long as you don't start that discussion by shitting all over them!
underrated funny part of system collapse is murderbot repeatedly being like 'no one knows wtf three wants to do ever because three doesn't know how to want things yet' but most of three's narration in network effect was 'i want to rescue murderbot. i want to do a good job rescuing murderbot. i hope i get a good grade in rescuing murderbot. i want to rescue murderbot so bad that im going to attempt to talk a terrifying murderous spaceship out of its plan for a planetary bombardment' mb just consistently says the most blatantly wrong shit about everyone it's ever met lmao
#i don't think murderbot has considered what an immense leg up three has in terms of learning to individuate and execute its own desires #and the leg up is: IT KNOWS IT IS POSSIBLE #murderbot babe you were building a car by inventing the wheel #three has already seen a wheel #you are the wheel #it's a huge advantage to have met someone further down your own recovery process #because it's concrete proof that you can get there #and a great way to get some coping mechanisms without having to invent them from scratch
#also the presaux team was a little nice to murderbot one time and it shot itself in the chest to protect them #so yeah it makes sense to me that three met the original copy of the person who liberated it from a hellish existence and went #'yeah fuck it i'll get in an argument with an all powerful homicidal ai and then risk my life let's ball'
(via @words-writ-in-starlight)
Boldness is all.
(x)
Imagine being mid battle and the healer hits you with a healing spell for the first time and you feel your foreskin grow back
There is a species of butterfly that lives in the mountains.
When it hatches as a caterpillar, it lowers itself to the ground on a strand of silk, and then produces a chemical that smells like the larvae of ants. An ant eventually discovers it, lured by the scent, and brings it back to the anthill, where it is cared for by the colony until it pupates. After a few weeks, the adult butterfly crawls back up through the anthill, through the dirt and the winding tunnels, and out into the sunlight before it can finally open its wings.
Some say that the caterpillar “tricks” the ants into doing this. I don’t know if I agree – I think it’s too small a thing to accuse of guile, don’t you?
With this in mind: Once upon a time, there were seven dwarves.
They lived and worked in the mountains, mining for gold and jewels and precious things. And one night, after a long day’s labour, they heard a knocking at the great stone doors of their mountain.
Outside, shivering and small, they found a human child.
I’m sure you can guess most of what she told them. Stepmothers were involved – it’s not important. What’s important was that each of the dwarves felt a dire and pressing need to care for the child, and they took her into their home, fed her, clothed her, and gave her a warm bed to sleep in. And many seasons passed around that mountain, with the dwarves raising the child as one of their own, until one autumn’s day.
The girl laid, slender and still, in a coffin of spun glass. And some weeks later, one of the dwarves had the idea to call for a prince. This was of course the sensible thing to do, and the prince of a nearby kingdom who listened to the story thought an ensorcelled girl would be a grand thing to rescue.
Poor devils. It feels cruel to judge them. But there were so many questions they could’ve asked – what was this stepmother’s name? Was she real? Did she exist? Who had made the glass coffin? Surely one of them must’ve thought of the question. And why did it grow more opaque with every passing day?
Were they wrong to trust?
I guess it doesn’t matter now.
The moment the prince stepped into the subterranean chamber with the glass coffin, it shivered with a twinkling, plinking noise. Threads of glass exploded into glittering, razor-edged confetti.
A claw split the great glass cocoon.
The thing that spilled out of it, hulking and huge, knew in the fog of its mind, in a base animal sense that screamed, that it was in a room too small for it to fit. It wanted up. It wanted out.
In front of it was some twiggy little thing holding a sword.
It took its first breath.
The flames were the colour of cornflowers.
The dwarves fled. The thing followed close behind, up, up, up through the stone and the winding tunnels, not to chase, not to hunt, but to get up, to get out, out, out–
It struck the great stone doors at a run. They crumbled like gingerbread. And then there was sunlight, and the open sky…
And it could finally open its wings.
Convergent evolution is a hell of a thing.
The dragon, of course, lived happily ever after with its loot of gold and jewels from a hastily abandoned dwarf mine. Being much bigger than a caterpillar, we could accuse it of tricking the dwarves who were kind to it, had taken it in, had fed and clothed and warmed it.
It probably wouldn't mind.
YOOO!!!!!!!!! I love this so much. It's like a folktale wearing the skin of a fairytale, I am so obsessed
I am also deeply into monstrous princesses (as they should be) right now, so this just made my day.
HELLO EVERYBODY can we all agree to not go "noooo its okay murderbot you can use [whatever pronouns]!!" when inevitably something like that comes up. can we agree can we make a pact please. please. please. please.
this fandom has been SOOOO good about it/its pronouns and murderbot's personhood/not being HUMAN and not WANTING to be human thus far and i would REALLY really hate to see it backslide. as a fandom everyone has been so good about it/its pronouns and i am saying that as someone who USES it/its pronouns. please can we keep our heads here.
As someone who does not use it/its, these books seriously helped me adjust to the idea of using it/its for people, and it was a fantastic lesson. It's one of the reasons why I've been quite concerned about what impact the show will have on the fandom. (Haven't seen it, for the record, so I can't speak to that.)
Here's the thing. Over the course of reading the first couple of books I found myself wondering if Murderbot was going to shift to using they/them, because my initial thought was that it/its was objectifying it, and that transitioning to they/them would be a sign that it was adjusting to the idea that it was, in fact, a person. And then I realized: that was the fucking point. It was a person already. Changing its pronouns to they/them would be like changing itself to be more human--aka, the opposite of what it wants.
I'd encountered it/its as a neopronoun very occasionally before, so I knew that some folks did use it. But it wasn't until I sat down and read this that I really comprehended why it/its didn't have to be demeaning. The wild thing is that the books themselves don't even have to address it directly--no one ever tries to use other pronouns for Murderbot, or suggest it. Rather, it forces the audience to confront why it/its might feel wrong to them.
To me (others may read it differently, but this was my interpretation) this lines up with Murderbot wanting to be accepted for who it was, not changing to meet other's expectations. I come back to the way the series intentionally breaks the "robot wants to become human" trope, and how to me--and many others, and given Murderbot's autistic traits, likely intentionally so--this is an allegory for neurodivergence and queerness: we aren't like other people, and we don't want to be like other people, and it is bad for us to try, and most of all, we should not have to change ourselves to be accepted.
In-universe, there's a damn good chance humans use it/its too, and it's probably not unremarkable for Murderbot to use those pronouns. Out-of-universe, though, it forces us to reckon with a question. In the books, people are uncomfortable around Murderbot when it acts like a SecUnit, and it is a deliberate act of self-advocacy for Murderbot to assert its identity. We, as the audience, want to see those characters learn to be comfortable with Murderbot for who it is, and to deal with the discomfort in the meantime. So isn't it hypocritical at best for us, as the audience, to call it by other pronouns just because it/its seems wrong to us?
Anyway. We should always respect people's pronoun choices, no matter whether we understand or not. These books help hammer that point home in a relatable way, though, at least if you're willing to critically engage with them and question your perspective. So please please please please respect Murderbot's pronouns.
If other people question why it's wrong not to, please ask them why they won't use it/its. If they say "because then we're not treating Murderbot like a person," then it may be worth asking this: which is more disrespectful? Using pronouns you personally believe are objectifying for a person... or refusing to use the pronouns they identify by (thus misgendering them in the process)? (Not in a mean way, mind you. The point is to get them to self-reflect. Be kind and respectful when correcting people, because otherwise it creates a backlash effect. But do speak up.)
this is exactly the kind of analysis I love to see. I have had fellow trans people tell me to my face that they were uncomfortable with using it/it's for a person, so they would be referring to me with they/them because it "isn't dehumanizing." like they were doing me a FAVOR. I'm so glad that murderbot has been such a good medium for people to restructure their thoughts on pronouns and personhood, and I really hope it can stay that way.
ty for the addition!
"The word pandemonium was coined by John Milton as the name for the Parliament of Hell" is an all-timer etymology. Oh yeah did you hear that Mrs Higgins's dogs got loose at the village fête? It was like a vast golden edifice in which fallen angels debate their strategies for vengeance against god, yeah.
last meme post for a while <\3
+ bonus :')
Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!
But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.
The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.
So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.
The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.
Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"
The professor apparently was dumbfounded.
He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!
In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.
It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.
#this has wrapped back around to reaching someone who cares about security more than writing#like this kind of thing is EVERYWHERE#anyways @op drop the title
@demo-ness, here you go:
*taps mic* is this thing on?
MAY 2026 BABY!!!!
I need this show to get enough seasons to get us to Preservation because like. In the books, Mensah and Murderbot are already very intense about each other by then because they’ve been through a lot together and rescued each other. This Mensah and Murderbot are going to have that AND she’s been hands-deep in its spine, and it’s sang the Sanctuary Moon song to her. They’re going to be EVEN WEIRDER about each other and I need it.
And now Gurathin has had its WHOLE MEMORY in his head and made sure to bring its media along with it. Pin-Lee and Ratthi saw it literally about to be lowered into acid right in front of them. Future reunions are going to be so loaded and every single one of them is going to be feral about it. I need it. I need to download it directly into my brain like the premium quality entertainment it is
