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HobbitSpaceCase on ao3. They/them.

[spacecasehobbit]

Sometimes, moral complexity means this: If hurting people is bad when it happens for reasons I don't personally identify with, then hurting people is also bad when it happens for reasons I do personally identify with, too.

[spacecasehobbit]

Sometimes, it's not the morals which are so complex.

It's the feelings that sticking to those moral principles invokes.

[spacecasehobbit]

Sometimes, moral complexity means this: If hurting people is bad when it happens for reasons I don't personally identify with, then hurting people is also bad when it happens for reasons I do personally identify with, too.

[spacecasehobbit]

Sometimes, it's not the morals which are so complex.

It's the feelings that sticking to those moral principles invokes.

[spacecasehobbit]

Sometimes, moral complexity means this: If hurting people is bad when it happens for reasons I don't personally identify with, then hurting people is also bad when it happens for reasons I do personally identify with, too.

[chainofclovers]

Put in the tags the completely finished (whether cancelled or wrapped up on its own terms) TV series that has YOUR perfect ending, however you define that

Please don’t include huge spoilers for the specifics of the endings, and it would also make me happy if people don’t use this to talk about the shows whose endings they hated

[chainofclovers]

Put in the tags the completely finished (whether cancelled or wrapped up on its own terms) TV series that has YOUR perfect ending, however you define that

Please don’t include huge spoilers for the specifics of the endings, and it would also make me happy if people don’t use this to talk about the shows whose endings they hated

[spacecasehobbit]

If ever you find yourself waiting for an author to spell out a character's humanity in excruciating detail before you believe it exists, then the problem is you, not the story.

You've gotta at least try to suspend your disbelief in the first place, before you can claim it was the author who broke that suspension.

[spacecasehobbit]

Sometimes it's okay not to try to get into all the things that your friends love, because then you can just keep being happy for them when you see them loving The Thing, instead of getting bogged down in angst that you don't love the thing too.

[spacecasehobbit]

Every time I rewatch Saltburn, I am reminded of how well EF understands shitty rich people.

All of the Cattons are awful, but they're also rich and pretty and flying high on the myth of their own Specialness, to the degree that they get so much of the audience believing in that myth alongside them.

Felix isn't kind. He's a shallow, narcissistic, possessive user just like his mom. He expects the world to revolve around him; when it doesn't, he simply cuts out whatever part of his world displeased him. The most frightening thing Felix can encounter is a loss of complete control over the people around him - exempting his parents, who are where his wealth and power stem from and thus are the sole parts of his world who are allowed any measure of control over him.

Venetia isn't insightful. She's a mess. She's nasty, jealous, and just as shallow as the rest of her family. She covers up her own insecurity with reflexive cruelty towards anyone who reminds her that she will always come second to Felix in the heirarchy of her family's mythologized Importance, but she can't break away from the very family that destroys her because she sees her place in that family as also the only source of Importance she does have - lesser though it may be when compared to Golden Boy Felix. Even in her final conversation with Oliver, however, he sees her more than she sees him. Her rant is a scattershot mess of mutually contradictory insults - he's harmless, he's got nothing to do with their family, he's obsessed, he's a moth batting at the windows who can't get in, but he's also the creep lingering in the corners, the hungry beast who ate Felix up and licked the plate clean, the reason she's laughing and the freak she can't stand - and he lets her talk herself out, and then he kisses her - because he's the freak who got under her skin, the freak who saw her freak and made her come like no boy ever has in her life, the freak who loved and hated her brother as obsessively as she did, the freak who's wearing Felix's cologne and his bathrobe and whose kiss she's still desperate to have.

Oliver saw them in ways they couldn't bear to be seen - as shallow, as selfish, as flawed, as people who could be used back when they used him - and it scared the hell out of them. But they were too high on the myth of their own untouchability that they couldn't let themselves be as scared as they should have been.

Felix still drank from the bottle Oliver handed him even right after admitting Oliver made his blood run cold with fear. Venetia lounged in that tub and let Oliver prowl around her like a hungry panther while she called him a moth. And the only family member who didn't believe that Felix and Venentia killed themselves - one ostensibly a victim of a drug and alcohol OD, one ostensibly a victim of her mental health issues - was Farleigh. Farleigh, who was thrown under the bus of his family's blatant racism right after all his boasting about how Saltburn was his house where he belonged.

And all of this is all the more impressive when considering that EF didn't even set out to write Saltburn as class commentary. She just wanted to write something fun and ridiculous about boys.

[spacecasehobbit]

Cats are just the autistics of the animal world.

No eye contact, don't overwhelm them with too much loud sensory input, and let them do their thing when they wanna... and they will love you so hard. They will be the silliest, cuddliest lil' affection monsters, absolutely on a par with dogs at their most doggiest affectionate selves.

Just because cats don't always show affection the same as dogs doesn't mean they aren't exactly as capable of bonding real hard with their humans as dogs for the same slightest amount of affection given in terms they understand, first.

It's just that those terms they understand, first, are slightly different terms than dogs.

And I only understood this, as a dog person first and foremost, after owning my first cat, because I'd always heard from cat people how unaffectionate cats were.

[spacecasehobbit]

You know, in order for a person to figure out how to best minimize harm from their choices in complex, messy situations...

That person has to know what choices cause harm in the first place, and have an idea how much harm is caused by each of the choices in question.

Knowing what causes harm is kind of a critical foundation for mitigating harm.

This is why so many kids' stories, for example, start off by explaining 'harmful' vs. 'not harmful' choices at a more black & white level than is typically expected from adult media. Teaching kids the basics before they encounter the more complicated stuff (in media or in real life) is called, "Good Education Practice." For most things, in fact.

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

i NEED people to realise foreshadowing is. in fact. a literary device. and not a Bad Thing. the audience picking up on your hints is a Good Thing. because. it makes the story and it’s conclusion make sense. and some people will not see those but enjoy seeing them on a second read through. red herrings are one thing but if your novel consists of nothing but red herrings it’s not a coherent story it’s just a collection of paragraphs that don’t actually plausibly link to one another. you're not fighting with the audience you don’t look clever you look like you don’t know how basic fiction works. be vulnerable for once in your goddamn life and don't treat writing like a game to be won where the audience losing is a good thing.

[ineffectualdemon]

Getting to the end of a story and going "THE CLUES WERE THERE THE WHOLE TIME!" is always joyous for me whether or not I picked up on the clues leading up

If I saw the clues and caught the hints then yes! I am clever and me and the author/creator/artist etc were in on it together the whole time!

If I didn't notice the clues or got fooled but can clearly see them in hindsight then "Ha! You won this time storyteller! I am delighted by this game we play!' and then I enjoy putting the pieces together afterwards and enjoying how clever it was. I feel like the creator respects me as an audience

If there is a "twist" that comes with 0 clues or foreshadowing at all I'm annoyed. I'm pissed off. I feel like I'm being condescended to and patronised. It's not clever or interesting and makes me annoyed I ended up caring about characters and plot points that ended up meaningless.

Because it's not that these stories don't have foreshadowing or plot clues. They just abandon it for a "surprising twist"

A story that pays off the clues is letting me into the fun and makes a participant in the story

A story that just gives me a "shock" but no pay off is telling me not to engage or get attached or care. So why would I watch?

[spacecasehobbit]

Maybe some of y'all think of high fantasy as childish or black & white or whatever because you stopped reading any of it past childhood.

Or never read it in the first place, but rather formed all your opinions of it from tumblr edgelords.

Either way, some of you keep using that word, 'nuance,' and I do not think it means what you think it means.

[spacecasehobbit]

In general, if you want to engage genuine emotion in storytelling, less is more.

However, sometimes a spoonful of Grimdark can help the real darkness go down in a more delightful way.

[spacecasehobbit]

The trolley problem can, from a certain perspective, be summed up by the question, "Which do you think is worse: failing to save five people, or choosing to kill one person who would have otherwise lived?"

[spacecasehobbit]

I've always kind of wondered how many people would change their answer to the trolley problem if it was framed not as, "What would you, the trolley operater, do in [classic trolley problem]?"

But rather as, "What would you advise the trolley operater to do, if you were the single person tied to the alternate track?"

And then ask what choice they would make if they were operating the trolley, instead.

How many of us still support a utilitarian moral judgement, when we are the one pitched as the necessary sacrifice for someone else's greater good?

And how many people would not support their own sacrifice for that greater good, but would choose to sacrifice another person for the good of the many when they're the one making the choice of who else pays the price?

[shinypenguinpizza]

So, tumblr is joining in on the age verification thing.

I hate it. And you should, too.

Remember when they changed how notes work? Remember when they added tumblr live?

We, the users, made them get rid of it. Can we PLEASE make some noise once more, for our own sakes and privacy.

[spacecasehobbit]

If tumblr demands age verification, I am leaving. Tumblr can suck my dick about it. What tumblr can't do is get its sticky fucking fingers on my personal legal id information and/or credit card data as uploaded voluntarily by me for the sake of some bullshit, purity culture (aka conservative fear-mongering masquerading as 'concern' for the exact vulnerable individuals they love to exploit) driven call for 'age verification.'

The moment tumblr demands that I upload some legal id and/or credit card info to see more posts? Is the moment I log off for good.

[sztupy]

[nadoripeter]

Ez megoldódott.