Yuki's Evil Volcano Layer

The World of My Idle Thoughts and Bizzare Imagery. A liberal minded (but capitalist tinged) cartoonist, toy collector, gamer, anime fan, musician and atheist made of energy, skepticism, love and just a dash of madness.

[fawnpalmer]

quarterly reminder that if i reblog something ai-generated it is 110% and always an accident and for the love of god please tell me so i can delete it from my blog

[hellogoodomens]

I actually lost one really nice follower because of this and I’m still sad.

[detectivehole]

emperor kuzco was clearly gay

[detectivehole]

hes 19, with unlimited power, and he ain’t got a gf. the only time we see him interact with any women his own age is when he’s rejecting like 7 of them rapid fire. he pretends to date pacha in a gag that lasts like 10 solid minutes. listen to me god damnit

[qqueenofhades]

Okay, but just in case anyone is coming to tumblr dot com for my hot takes on 20+ year old kids' movies: Kuzco super WAS gay (or at least coded as such) and of course, I didn't get it until I watched it as a gay grownup.

He is played obviously camp and dramatic, for a start, and there is the aforementioned "hate your hair/not likely/yikes yikes yikes/let me guess you have a great personality" summary dismissal of all his potential brides. Then he spends dinner asking Yzma about Kronk ("so he seems nice? He's what, in his late twenties?") and otherwise being slightly obsessed with him.

Then there is the whole Adventure of Doom with Pacha, him being ever huffy about the Kiss of Life, and then the restaurant gag where Kuzco takes to playing Pacha's fake wife and dressing up in ladies' clothing with great gusto (reinforced by the waitress' "bless you for coming out in public" remark when Pacha says they're on their honeymoon). Then when he is finally de-llamafied, we don't see him paired off with the obligatory girl from the lineup earlier, as might otherwise be expected in a Disney movie. Instead he is still single, but goes to found family it up with Pacha, Chica, Kronk, etc, which dare we remark is a very queer trope.

In short, I have no idea how a Disney movie with no white people (all the characters are Indigenous/people of color), a gay king, cross-dressing jokes, and the most offbeat plot of all time actually ever got made (can you imagine the Family Friendly Mouse doing that today? Let us also talk about Kronk because he is a brilliant deconstruction of both toxic masculinity and the musclebound henchman stereotype.) Other than that this was the Chaos Hour of animated movies in the late 90s/early 2000s, and yes.

So yes. There you have it. I will not be taking criticism at this time.

[flavinbagel]

In response to the question “How did a movie like this get made at all much less by fucking Disney?” there was a recent Vulture article that outlines the whole shit show of a history behind this film according to everyone (writers, directors, VAs, Stings) involved. The gist of the story is that they fucked up making a whole, true-to-form Disney musical that never came to see the light of day SO BADLY that Disney switched directors, locked the writer’s room, and didn’t review a single script until weeks after the film was in theaters.

Please, read this article if you have some time. This story is wild, and involves directors being pitted against each other Bake-Off style and a shockingly intimate documentary created by the wife of Sting who, himself was heartbroken by the decimation of the songs he wrote for the film including cutting a fantastic Yzma villain song sung by Eartha Kitt that is SO DAMN GOOD but would not ever have fit the more nailed-down Yzma we would eventually come to know and love. It’s so catchy though, I’m doubling up on calls to action but please listen now:

[theterriblethingabouttulio]

holy shit read the article. it’s worth it and completely batshit

[kat-witha-k]

This is fucking insane

[brightlotusmoon]

[mod2amaryllis]

I've never adequately appreciated the batshit brilliance of this joke, I've taken it for granted

[worldheritageposts-official]

World Heritage Post

[unliikelylovers]

it’s been said before and it’s not even close to the worst thing but it sucks how our current robber barons are such philistines. like these guys aren’t even building libraries or concert halls. they can’t even pretend to enjoy art, and they don’t see any value in signaling that they appreciate art

[higglety]

this current batch of the fithy-rich is BORING. They're BORING. Oh you have a yacht that's bigger than anybody else's yacht but functionally no different from one of your fancy houses? BORING. You have yet another fast car? YAWN. You ate a burger but like, a special burger? whatever. FUND AN OPERA ABOUT ANOTHER RICH GUY YOU HATE, DIPSHITS. How about you put a concert hall with your name on it in every city in the US and fund their operations for the next decade, if you're so rich????? unless you're too poor to afford that????? How many people do you, personally, directly employ, and what are their salaries? Do you pay well enough to command the loyalty and willing service of any masters of their craft? It would be so easy to win the absolute love and adoration of the masses in this climate but no, they wanna build bunkers and play politics in order to save a few more miserable nickles.

[mikkeneko]

@capriceandwhimsy reminds me of your rabbit hole about yachts

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

I don't like to make too much of a business of joking about how the US military is bad at doing war because the inverse (a world where we're good at wars) would be an even worserer situation but like. Jiminy fucking Christ we're really really bad at wars it's downright remarkable

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

I'm really hung up on the oil thing. I love the part where we apparently have a critical interest in preserving the economy of the country we're trying to blow up because our economy will collapse if their economy collapses. I just. That's the worst anyone's ever done it, buddy. It's like the eternal war in 1984 but like the Jason Friedberg version of 1984. If the term total war describes the Clausewitzian mobilization of an entire country's political and economic apparatus towards war then the USA of America is in a permanent state of Quarter-Ass War. Like they're never gonna get there but they're gonna keep on trying anyways

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

Raids. They think they're gonna subdue a country half the size of the continental US with commando raids in order to avoid a costly occupation. "Uhhh yeah we don't gotta command nor control nuthin we're just gonna do Calla Doody on em til they say quits" I. Everyone is 12 now.

Clown-ass evil empire for clowns. I think all the ppl that had called Trump a bonapartist was right cuz this is some Napoleon 2 shit if i ever did seent it

[itsabear]

it feels like their incompetence at war is directly linked to a desire to do war. It's trite to say but I think "They are so bad at war they want to wage it" works for the modern era. The more the bomber mentality took over in ww2 and afterwards, the worse America got at war and the more they wanted to do it. Being good at war would involve knowing how disastrous/expensive/long it would be to try it.

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

It makes no difference what clowns think of the circus, said the judge. The circus endures. As well ask clowns what they think of stone. The circus was always here. Before clowns were, the circus waited for them. The dumbassest trade awaiting its dumbassest practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

The USA has been forced to the negotiating table while the strait is still closed and they haven't gotten any of their desired concessions or accomplished any stated goal while the entire world watched American tactics and equipment fail over and over and over again. You love to see it.

[coyotevvitch]

i hurt myself with Big Jack by Pet Foolery (can find on instagram) again and no one seems to have posted the whole comic so. here. someone reminded me of it and i tracked it down. gonna go cry in a corner now.

[coyotevvitch]

did not know part 2 existed, here you go. another stab

[aropride]

please god let chatgpt die out like nfts did. With a fast and graceless fall into irrelevancy

[bladespark]

Like to charge, reblog to cast.

[atwotonedbird]

This spell has a very low hit ratio, so we need a lot of us to do it.

[prokopetz]

It's fine to disagree with the IAU about the definition of "planet"; however, if your definition includes Pluto but not Ceres, Orcus, Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, Gonggong, Eris or Sedna, you don't actually care what a planet is – you just want the exact list of nine planets you learned in primary school back. Your cute little Pluto-including orbital distance mnemonic ought to be at least seventeen words long, and good fucking luck with the Q!

[thefiresontheheight]

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Orphic Palaces, Slandering Hungry Quaker Matrons Going Erotically Southward.

[prokopetz]

I appreciate that you included Salacia but not Charon – really threading the needle pedantry-wise there.

[ravioliet]

similarly to how you should never trust gamers with a nonbinary character i feel like you can also never trust a fandom with an aroace character. whether it's explicitly canon or implied it just ends up the same

[ravioliet]

every time an allo person wants to ship an aroace spec coded character they should write an essay with MLA format citations on how this serves the themes of the story and is necessary for the character and how their ship is any different than the relationships said character already has and they should also send $500 dollars minimum to at least one aroace person in their fandom

[ravioliet]

"but people can do whatever they want!!!" i don't caaaaaare go examine your biases and cry about it or i'm blowing both of us up

[agarthanguide]

Link to the article

We regret to inform you that the sunshine and friendship app is actually a children killing app.

[carry-on-my-wayward-butt]

literally nothing and i genuinely mean absolutely nothing in this world quite encompasses corporate detachment from the consumer quite like peggle_2_ode_to_joy.gif

[carry-on-my-wayward-butt]

upon its release to the xbox live arcade in 2009, peggle was THE top selling game for two solid weeks. within a month, more than 100,000 players were on the leaderboards. before it got to live arcade, it had been downloaded 50 million times.

and when it released for ios? holy fuck were they DROWNING in money. when they took a weekend to put the game on sale for a dollar, down from five, a couple months after release, they made as much in that one weekend as they did since its release. it was among the top paid apps for weeks.

with critics, peggle was among some of the top downloadable, mobile, and general best games of all time at the time of its release in 2007 and onwards, and it only shot up in popularity as they made it more accessible to more people. and this was in a time before candy crush.

the thing about simple addictive puzzle games is that they make you feel competent, confident, smart, and cool for being good at them. not everybody can learn how to aim in a shooter or the best strategy in an rpg. but anybodys grandmother or baby brother can play a simple puzzle game, and the nature of these games and the way they make you feel only makes you want to play more and more.

however very very fucking few people who play simple puzzle games that you can master on the toilet would be going to E3 in the early 2010s. remember in 2012 when every ~hardcore gamer~ would screech about ‘fake gamers’ who only play candy crush? thats what peggle was. it was THE crack mobile game from the pre-candycrush era.

no one who was excited about peggle was going to E3. the hundreds of thousands of people who played peggle were not the type of people who would consider going to (or even giving a shit about) E3.

but it sold like hot cakes, and candy crush was churning out content like a madman, and EA owned popcap now, so because the game sold amazingly, and because they wanted to keep cashing in on it, and because corporate drones who controlled the scripts didnt comprehend that their consumerbase isnt one homogeneous mass, they decided to announce peggle 2 at E3 2013.

but not just “oh by the way peggle 2”, no. peggle sold like skyrim, it sold like black ops, clearly they should be saving the best for last, they should announce it like it was the craziest most incredible announcement of the night!

thus:

but in all honesty it doesnt quite have the same impact without hearing ode to joy overtop of the deafening silence of the crowd. so heres a link too. timeless.

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

[thememedaddy]

[homunculus-argument]

"My first language has a perfect saying for this, but it doesn't make sense in english :("

Say it anyway! You don't owe them perfect clarity. Be profoundly cryptic, speak in riddles, make them ponder what the fuck you meant by that. The anglos, like porridge, must sometimes be stirred, so they don't burn stuck on the bottom of the pot.

[varahai]

Ihmisiä pitää hämmentää, muuten ne palavat pohjaan

[homunculus-argument]

@elfspectations close, but no cigar! It's my favourite expression, which in finnish is a cooking pun. The word "stir", as in stirring a soup/porridge/etc is also the word for "confuse", and "to burn to the bottom of the pan" is also used for a person experiencing burnout.

So "people must be stirred, or they'll burn to the bottom of the pot" can also be understood as "one must confuse people sometimes, so that they won't burn out (in life)."

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post

[thememedaddy]

[lionofchaeronea]

The problem with this idea (and I'm far from the first person to point this out) is that to acquire the obscene amount of money Bezos has, you basically have to be an utter bastard. No one with a functioning moral compass will ever be a billionaire.

[sztupy]

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou

[ayeforscotland]

Let’s fucking go

[made-in-manetheren]

This is HUGE.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

TL;DR Google reeeeeally stepped in it this time.

[reasonsforhope]

Additional source and more details below. Absolutely thrilled to say that this is real. And yeah, it's huge.

For all the reasons above AND ALSO because this particular lawsuit is a defamation case

Privacy lawsuits are hard because most privacy laws are super super weak, and there's very rarely a lot of money or enforcement backing privacy laws for...twenty million reasons, really...

But defamation suits? Those have teeth.

(In large part because, at least in some countries and including in the US, defamation laws protect public figures the least - and "public figures" legally includes most if not all politicians, and a hell of a lot of other rich ppl too)

A Munich court ruled Google's AI Overviews are its own words, making it liable for false claims, a decision that, if it holds, could reach e

A German court has ruled that Google can be held directly liable for false claims made by its AI Overviews, a decision that could put a serious legal dent in the whole “the AI made me do it” defense. According to The Next Web, the Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction after Google’s AI Overviews wrongly tied two Munich publishers to scams, subscription traps, and dubious business practices. The court treated those AI-generated summaries as Google’s own statements, not just ordinary search results pointing to third-party pages. That distinction matters. Search engines have traditionally had more protection because they index and link to other people’s content. AI Overviews changes the machinery. Google is not just showing the web anymore. It is summarizing it, rewriting it, and sometimes apparently hallucinating a tiny legal grenade into the results page.

-via Search Engine World, June 10, 2026

[json-derulo]

I love lying to my landlord. “We’re currently looking at a comparable unit in the area at $[a hundred dollars less than our current rent]/month, so if your offer has any flexibility to come down on the rent, that would help us reach a decision about whether or not to renew our lease here” and the comparable unit exists only in my own beautiful mind

[json-derulo]

Actually, no! And since several people have replied asked for my script for negotiating lower rent, I’m gonna share that below, as well as the philosophy behind it. Full disclosure that I’m not a leasing office person or a realtor or god forbid, a landlord—I’m just someone who has been a renter for 10+ years across different states, and I know for a fact that I have saved myself thousands of dollars by successfully negotiating a lower monthly rent on almost every lease I’ve ever signed. (Also, I’ve only ever rented in the U.S., so this advice may not be as applicable elsewhere.)

Step 0: Know Thy Enemy

The key thing to understand about all residential landlords, whether they’re corporate conglomerates or Just Some Asshole, is that their asset—the property—is a Cinderella carriage that magically turns back into an expensive ass pumpkin of a liability any time it’s sitting empty. The property taxes, insurance, mortgage, HOA fees, and maintenance costs all still come due every month/quarter/year whether they have a tenant to cover it all and then some, or not. 

Because of this, at the end of the day, their ultimate goal is to fill every unit at all times with someone who will reliably pay the rent on time and in full. And because everything else is secondary to that goal—and because with the exception of Just Some Asshole landlords, the person responding to your emails and writing up your lease paperwork is several degrees of separation removed from the shareholders who profit off your rent money—they’re almost always willing to negotiate with you. As long as it gets the liability converted into an asset faster or keeps the carriage from turning back into a pumpkin for longer, then in the long run, it’s actually in their best interest to give you a better price. 

Step 1: Identify Your Leverage

If you understand how supply and demand works, you can figure out how much leverage you have pretty easily.  High supply and low demand = you have more leverage, and vice versa. Do they have an “AVAILABLE NOW - MOVE IN TODAY” sandwich board on the sidewalk or a web banner that says “First month free”? Does their website and/or Apartments.com show a bunch of currently open listings? Do you already live there and know at least two families on your floor have moved out in the last several months with no one new moving in to replace them? These are all indications that they have more than one unit currently sitting empty, meaning higher supply and lower demand. No sandwich board and a website that just says “call for availability”? They might just suck at marketing, but more likely, supply is lower and demand is higher. 

You have the least leverage if you’re a prospective tenant looking to move in somewhere that has a waitlist. They have no reason to offer you a discount if six other people are already in line to pay full price for apartments that aren’t even vacant yet (but you can still ask!). You also have no leverage to negotiate if you’ve already signed a lease and you’re in the middle of the lease period; you legally agreed to pay $X/month for Y months, so you’re stuck with that until the lease is up.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the most leverage if you’re a current tenant who has always paid your rent on time and you’re being offered a renewal on your existing lease with higher rent than you're currently paying, especially if they already have some units that have been empty for a while. If you move out, not only is your unit going to sit vacant for at least part of a month, they’re also probably going to have to put in some work to “turn” the unit (repainting, professional cleaning, etc) to get it in move-in condition for the next tenant.

All of this means that if you move out, even if they can fleece you out of your security deposit and find a new tenant the very next month, it’s still gonna cost them at least a few thousand dollars to turn that pumpkin back into a carriage again. They’re probably willing to come down by $100-$200/month or so on the renewal offer rent if you ask, because they know it’ll actually save them money in the long run. Similar situation if you’re a prospective new tenant—if they can’t get you or anyone else to sign a lease and move in this month, that’s $[whatever the monthly rent is] down the drain, and they’ll never get it back. It’s a perishable item about to spoil. 

Step 2: Get Their Opening Offer

This is the first number they’ll quote you for the rent—the sticker price that you’ve always just accepted as set in stone. The truth is, they’ve built some buffer into that number. There’s almost always some room for them to come down, and depending on your leverage, they will if you ask nicely. But for reasons that baffle me, most people don’t!

Step 3: Wait, Research, & Counter

Don’t reply to their initial offer right away—unless there’s a waitlist (in which case, you have little haggling power anyway), wait a few days. It makes them sweat a bit, and it shows you aren’t desperate. The person who is rushing to reply is not the one who has more leverage in the negotiation, and making them wait reminds them of that. In the meantime, use Apartments.com or Zillow to get an idea of what similar units in the same area are currently going for. Then you come up with your counteroffer.

As a general rule, anything more than about 20-25% below their opening offer (or below market rates) will probably just piss them off or make them take you less seriously. But when we’re talking about your monthly rent over the course of a year or two, even a 10% discount adds up to a lot of money!

When I negotiated our original lease for my current place, I also asked for and got a two year lease term instead of the standard one year. But whatever automated calendar event system they use to remind their leasing office staff when it’s time to send out renewal offers didn’t get the memo about that, so they mistakenly sent me a renewal offer the following year, meaning I got to see how much they would have jacked up the rent if they could’ve. For that second year of the lease alone, my negotiating saved us $3,000! 

Step 4: BDE (Big Dick Emailing) 

Here’s the tricky part. You need to write an email—always negotiate over email if you can, it’s too easy for a salesperson to bowl you over on the phone and anything they say that isn’t in writing means nothing—which simultaneously makes it sound like you would sign a lease with them in a heartbeat and like you are actively flirting with five other apartment complexes right now who all want you so bad it makes them look stupid, because you are just so sexy and fun and your credit score is eight inches flaccid. You need to make them believe you are both highly motivated and ready to sign on the dotted line and willing to just walk away from the table at any second, but if they could just come down a little bit on that number, you’d delete those other hoes’ numbers forever! Here’s the rough script I use every time:

“ Thank you for [your email/the tour/sending over the offer letter/etc]. I have had a chance to review and consider it. I think [name of apartment complex] would be the perfect fit for me, but I am also exploring and touring other options in the area, including a comparable unit nearby at $[a little below your counteroffer number]/month.

If we could come down to $[your counteroffer number]/month on the rent, I would be prepared to sign the lease today. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks! "

Step 6: You Win Either Way

Sometimes they really do just accept your counteroffer without question and send you over a revised lease to sign. (When this happens, I make a note for next time that my counteroffer was probably too high and I should’ve asked for more!) More often, they get approval from The Powers That Be and come back with a number that’s higher than your counteroffer but lower than their initial offer. Assuming I can afford it, I always accept this offer; you’ve achieved your goal of saving yourself money from sticker price, and they’re likely to lose patience if they have to keep going around and around with you. And sometimes (though only very rarely), they may come back and say the price is firm—in which case, guess what? You still didn’t lose anything by asking!

[json-derulo]

THIS!!! Exactly this. I didn’t mention it above because I just couldn’t fit it neatly anywhere, but once while negotiating a lease renewal, I got as far as receiving their counteroffer, which was basically “price firm :(”, but then life happened, so I forgot to respond and accept. The email sat in my inbox for a week. And then, completely unprompted, they magically replied again saying, “actually, nvm, how’s $[number that is lower than our opening offer] sound?”

To them, it looked like I was staring them down cold as ice like

I was literally just busy with other stuff! and they were sweating!!! BULLETS!!!

[bemusedlybespectacled]

kind of a side thought from a couple of my posts about writing but I think it deserves its own post, so here goes:

when you’re writing a conflict between two characters or factions of characters, you need to consider whether their disagreement over the premise or over the methods. put another way: do they disagree on the problem or the solution?

this is a genuinely tricky thing to identify, especially in very complex narratives, so let’s do some very simple examples.

the situation: pacifist nation X is about to be invaded by empire Y. the laws and cultural practices of the Xians make violence and death so abhorrent that even accidental death is as minimized as possible. the Ylings, on the other hand, are totally cool with straight up murder and think diplomacy is for wimps, but are also pragmatic enough that they won’t waste troops if they don’t need to. the king of X calls in his council and asks for their opinions.

character A: It is more noble to die for one’s beliefs than to live having broken them. We should allow the Ylings to invade us and if we die, we die. character B: If all life is sacred, then our lives are also sacred. We must fight back against the Ylings, even though that means we’d be committing violence.

A and B agree on premise but not solution: they both acknowledge that the Yling invasion is a bad thing that will lead to their deaths if unopposed and that the nonviolence code is important; what they disagree on is priorities and methods.

character C: We should invite them into our nation as honored guests. Maybe they’ll spare us or at least kill us more mercifully. character D: We should propose an alliance and intentional annexation in exchange for our lives. Being part of the Yling Empire is a pretty sweet deal, actually.

C and D agree on solution but not premise: they’re both okay with just letting the empire walk in and invade, but C thinks the invasion would be a bad thing and is just trying to minimize the damage, and D thinks it would be a good thing and wants to maximize the rewards.

character E: We should fight the Ylings and stay a sovereign nation; the nonviolence code is stupid and holding us back. character D: We shouldn’t fight the Ylings and try to be peacefully part of their empire instead; we’d be true to our code and reap the rewards of an alliance.

E and F disagree on both premise and solution.

Now, all possible permutations of this argument are fine. “Is this the best way to solve the problem?” and “What actually is the problem?” are both great sources of conflict. Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s entire plot is an argument over the methods to prevent death and crime, but everyone agrees that crime is bad; one of Zuko’s big character development moments is when he realizes that the problem with the world isn’t the other nations ungratefully rejecting the prosperity and unity offered by the Fire Nation, but that the Fire Nation routinely commits genocide in their quest to colonize the rest of the world.

The issue is when a disagreement over methods is treated like a disagreement over premise. The characters are positioned like one side’s entire worldview is correct and the other is wrong, but it turns out they actually disagree with what the other does rather than what the other believes.

A big giveaway that what you’re seeing is about methods and not underlying beliefs? If at any point it is said or implied that one character “goes too far.” “Too far” implies a point before that cutoff that the other characters or the reader would be okay with. You can’t go too far if going any distance in that direction is wrong. “Frollo in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes too far when he tries to kill all the Romani in the city” implies that the problem isn’t racism in general, but mass murder specifically, and that if Frollo was only nonviolently racist, that would be fine!

Like, you know the joke about the guy who offers a woman a million dollars to sleep with him, then ten dollars after she accepts the million dollar offer, and when she’s offended and says she’s “not that kind of woman,” he says, “Oh, we agreed you were that kind of woman, now we’re just haggling over price”? If your characters are arguing about the best way to solve a problem, they have already agreed about the existence and nature of the problem. Now they’re just haggling over price.

Again: that kind of storyline is okay if you actually do want to discuss extremism v. moderation of the same basic principle. It’s okay for two characters to argue over the best way to free all of their country’s slaves. It’s also okay for two characters to discuss the best way of practicing slavery, if you want to show how ingrained it is in society or how even the character you think is a moderate is still evil or something. What doesn’t work is if your intention is to say how awful slavery is, but then the entire conflict is over the treatment of slaves rather than whether slavery is okay.

tl;dr: setting up the conflict as one over premise and then having all the action be a fight over methods undermines your story; at best it’s just confusing, at worst it turns your characters into hypocrites.