#this went off topic

[duchessanon]

We stan Anne's fANNEdom 💖

We do

[katoska]

The last two episodes don’t work together

Ok, but if humans in the Good Place are capable of forgetting stuff - as Patty did - how can their existence there ever get boring? How are they ever “done”? How can fulfillment last forever? Also why the fuck would you kill yourself once you reached it?

Long rant ahead that got rather dark:

Sure, eventually you did everything and everyone you wanted to do (and who is into it), saw everything you wanted to see, learned everything you wanted to learn. But if your memory is limited, you should never run out of stimulating stuff to do, even if you’ve done it already. Plus, the context in which you do those things again will have changed after a million Bearimies, the people you do them with will have changed. As I mentioned in a previous post, there’s always something new to keep that feeling of quietude - or fulfillment, or “doneness” - at bay.

The problem in Patty had been “instant gratification gets boring and turns you dull and stupid” and also “humans don’t get enough agency over their existence in the afterlife”, and while the Last Door fixed the agency part (somewhat, if not as much as Team C’s self-advocacy, which, btw, why were they the only ones? None of those great physicians and philosophers ever thought to ask for a suicide pill after they arrived and saw those already zombiefied “older” residents?), it didn’t do anything to fix life being just too cozy. Like, fine, the option to end your existence should be there, otherwise the Good Place is just a really fancy enclosure. Although... it really still is that anyway if the Door is the only way out for anyone who is not Team Cockroach, and we’ve seen no evidence that the other humans get to visit other places. But the Door being there wouldn’t automatically lead to people finding new ways to have fun.  Maybe the Door introduced some FOMO at the thought of other people leaving and it inspired them to have fun together while they still could, and yet... in the last episode, it was like going through the Door was the ultimate goal, not just an option that needed to be there so people would feel less trapped. That’s bleak af.

“Mortality offers meaning to (the events of) our lives.”

Todd May is saying that the fact that our existence is finite is what makes every event of our lives precious, and I can’t really disagree. Nothing motivates me more than a deadline, after all. However, on Earth, that deadline is set for you; you don’t get to push it back indefinitely, which is what makes time so precious and why you should make the most of every moment, because you don’t know how long you’ve got. That’s not the case in the afterlife. At the same time, every single event in the humans’ lives/existence is also unique, and will eventually come to an end, only to live on in their memories. And human memory, as we see with Patty, is rubbish.

Our lives are made out of events (so May’s “the events of” is actually obsolete) the memories of which form our identity. As Chidi put it in Janets when he explained John Locke: Our “personal identity is based on having a continuous consciousness - memories. Memories are links in a chain that together form a single self.”

So, basically, everytime we forget an event in our life, we lose a little bit of our identity, our self. Bits of us are “dying” every day, and new bits are assimilated through us having new experiences. That means that the events are precious and meaningful in themselves - immortality or not -  because humans aren’t Janets and we will eventually lose our memories of those events, especially given infinite time to do so. We care about losing stuff. Which means that the need to hone our minds now and again should actually have been more of a feature in TGP rather than a bug. Humans don’t need to be rebooted to keep things fresh; our dumb brains delete stuff automatically which gives us motivation to preserve as much of it as possible through writing, art, architecture, pictures, and plain old revisiting. And then show others what we’ve made. And then, half an eternity later, randomly find our old works and be like I don’t remember this??? But it looks like I had fun, I should get into it again.

You can’t have both forgetfulness and “being 100% ready to end it because you are now complete”. I think Being Ready is just the feeling of getting that big rock up that mountain. It’s a good feeling. It makes you feel complete. It also will pass eventually. Eleanor was right to say that it can pass: It did for Tahani, it did for Jason for those 1000 Bearimies that he waited to give Janet his gift, though apparently it came back right afterwards and he left without thinking about it further. Chidi wasn’t truly content until he had Eleanor’s blessing to leave (otherwise he just would have), and he did not know that Jason spent 1000 Bearimies happily waiting for Janet to get back. Only Eleanor left as soon as that “ready” feeling hit her for the first time (well, probably. I like to think she stuck around for a bit to give Michael some lessons on passing as a semi-functional human, cause there’s that time-skip (indicated by change of clothes) between “You’re very welcome” and him and Janet at the portal, and dear god would Michael ever need those lessons...Also those two would throw themselves a goodbye party that would put Tahani’s to shame - and of course they’d invite her to it). Michael was ready to die until he was offered a life on Earth. Well, he wasn’t ready, or feeling fulfilled, but he also thought he’d run out of things to do until it turned out he hadn’t. I think all of them left too soon. And by “too soon” I mean they shouldn’t have left at all.

You can’t run out of rocks to push up that mountain (which’ll give you that “complete” feeling) if those rocks eventually roll down again as soon as you forget about them. And that’s fine; it might look futile and absurd because it won’t lead anywhere except up and down the mountain again and again forever - not everything can be about saving the universe, and even that huge rock mightn’t stay up - but that’s just what life is: Ups and downs, learning and forgetting and re-doing. If that can go on forever, and leads to moments of happiness, why would you end it? Are we so scared of watching things and relationships fade away - even though in the afterlife they can be renewed at any time - that we’d rather end it all in one go and on a high note, than put the work into rebuilding, or finding something new?

That “fulfilled” feeling lasting forever and inevitably leading to stagnation would mean that people’s lives are “for” something, that everyone has a pre-determined goal or purpose that they will reach and then they are done with their role and can fuck off for all the universe cares and I’m just like... no.

Fuck no.

Whatever happened to “There is no Answer (except for your bonds with other people, which you should not get to break just because you ran out of smart Questions to explore or books to read. Yes, I am angry about that)? I mean, I guess the Answer really was that it’s all a big, dumb food-processor and eventually, people are just done being processed, right?

If people have an assigned ultimate purpose, that’s Predeterminism; God (or something similar) has a Plan for you and there’s fuck all you can do to influence that. Everything is determined by fate. And I guess it works in-story (Out of story, it’s just called plotting and easter eggs.) what with the recurring Fibonacci sequence and “322″ and the convenient timing of Team C arriving in TGP to see everyone in there only-mostly-but-not-fully zombiefied so that Patty can still explain. It’s a neat, in-story explanation for dozens of little coincidences that ultimately lead the gang towards the Good Place and to the creation of that Door. It also explains where people’s little voices come from (and have always come from because time is J.Bearimy). But together with the “humans have no true agency and are being kept in enclosures” observation (which Jason hit on all the way back in S1 with his alien zoo theory), what the Great Plan ultimately was all about was... Freedom only in Death. It’s the PETA solution to animal cruelty. Humans were put in terrible cages and tortured, eventually a “Higher Being” argued that they could be trained to be worthy of being put in the nicer enclosures with lots of enrichment, and when that still turned out to be cruel - though it shouldn’t have been because the Boredom Premise was just dumb -  they were finally allowed die permanenty. And virtually everybody was satisfied with this, and no one questioned why humans can’t be on the same level as other afterlife denizens and be able to chose jobs and find a purpose. Except Tahani. You go, Tahani! I hope you’ll be an example to other humans who also want more from existence than eternal, passive bliss. Also, thanks for acting as a shoe-in so that Michael can get his old job back, should he chose to do that rather than suicide.

But Tahani choosing to work among eternal beings doesn’t disprove that TGP’s universe is deterministic, and that the ultimate answer is Death. She too might choose death in the end. After all, Michael was an eternal being with big ambitions, and even he wanted to die... until he was offered another rock in becoming human. That’s gonna set a precedent, too, for the demons. Mortality will eventually lead him back to that Door, but getting to walk through it shouldn’t be the Meaning of Life. That wasn’t its intended purpose, at least not as far as the gang was concerned. The door is there so you can decide, every day, not to go through it. Having the choice between Life and Death is important; doesn’t mean that both options are correct. But the finale doesn’t frame death as simply an option, let alone the wrong option; it frames it as inevitable once you’ve “earned it”. We see Eleanor help people not just because she cares about them, or because she wants an afterlife of fulfillment. She seeks fulfillment so she can die peacefully. To reiterate: Eleanor wanted to die even before she heard her bell ring. That’s called being suicidal.* That is also a feeling that will pass with some time and support. Except she hadn’t served her purpose yet (hadn’t gotten her affairs in order, so to speak, which again, you can always find new things if you choose to): Making sure that everyone goes through the process, first by getting Mindy to agree to go through it, then by getting Gen to make Michael human, which would set a precedent for other eternal beings so that Death could get them, too. Cause that’s what Death does.

Death doesn’t make life more meaningful, or less absurd; Death just ends it.

(Also, it just occured to me: Humans started out living mortal lives, die, “get a taste of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” via the new neighborhoods, and get eternal paradise as a reward at the end of it. Then in paradise, they are given the option of ending their eternal lives, like a reverse Tree of Life. I don’t know if the abrahamic religions should gain or lose a few percentage points for that. And not only do we have demons ascending to heaven and becoming angels, we also have humans going to Paradise to die. Everything’s upside down. If the biblical God’s Plan is all about giving people a chance at eternal life and happiness, guess what the Big Guy’s role is in TGP’s universe? Doesn’t look like the system was set up to keep people both alive and perfectly happy. Gotta be a little evil or unhappy, otherwise it’s off to the soul-shredder with you. Turns out Purgatory was the Best Place all along. At least the suffering is productive.)

*Mind you, it would still be called being suicidal even if Eleanor felt that she was perfectly happy and ready to end her existence. Cause no. Nobody who is perfectly happy wishes for death. That’s not natural, that’s some Horcrux-level shit that makes me think that there’s something calling people from behind that door.

[pinkisbitter]

I like getting asks that are nice n sweet but while I enjoy those asks, I have the complete inability to respond to compliments in an way that makes sense. My favorite asks are the ones that are just completely harrowing. Like ones that I have to step back and really think before I answer. If I ever got something like “do you think when you fuck the grim reaper he likes it when you yell ‘rim me deeper, grim reaper?” I don’t even know what I’d do. I’d just explode.

[lysical]

Dick leads many teams better than Batman & Superman: ignored. Dick takes down Spyral that knows superhero identities and Bruce couldn't even do it, without getting found out: Ignored. Dick takes down Court of Owls tor that Bruce couldnt, saves Damian & Bruce& Defeats bad guy targeting him: Ignored. Beats a group of bad guys using his smarts Ignored. Experiences emotional problems but tries to compartmentalize it during all of it. This isn't even old stuff.Why do people hate Dick being a badass?

I legitimately don’t know. I feel like maybe people have trouble having this whole group of characters with similar talents and leanings and so put them in boxes when they’re together. 

DC does this and I think Fandom often does as well because it makes characterizing them easier and makes them more distinct without much effort. It’s also bad characterization. 

The thing is, the Batfamily does not spend that much time together in comics aside from the crossovers which also suffer from this kind of mischaracterization. Fandom wants them to be together a lot, and that’s fine. That’s what Fandom is for, but in the source material they’re usually apart in their own books and teams. 

Dick spent years of Post-Crisis not even showing up in a single Batbook. He was away from the family in his solo or with the Titans the vast majority of the time. The batwriters weren’t writing the character. 

Same for many of the others. In the new 52 people often use the crossover Batbooks as their definitive batfamily characterization when those writers often treat them simplistically and aren’t their normal writers who give the characters more nuanced portrayals. 

On the other end of the spectrum, solo books build a character up and can sometimes make them look way more awesome in isolation from the rest of the DCU. This too can be taken to extreme with other characters handed idiot balls to sell it. 

There are positives and negatives to comics as a format and the shared universe the characters inhabit. Sometimes there are teambooks and batfamily crossovers which manage to develop all the characters well and keep them separate without boxes, and sometimes not. Some solo books are amazing at giving a character an interesting story and build them up away from the larger universe and characters but still ground them solidly in it. Sometimes not. 

But where Fandom gets some stuff? Literally no clue. 

[titch-the-eskibro-bandit]

If Esme spends $230 on a skirt why doesn’t she have a fancy hairstyle to match it.Her hairstyle is the I’m broke and I can’t afford fancy hair products so I’ll hide my hair in a braid look hoping no one notices aesthetic.You’d think Esme would have all fancy braids like fishtail but they aren’t tight or anything.

[pifflegram]

What are the best materials to make wedding clothes?

Oh goodness! There are so many! It honestly depends on the season, the location, and of course, the line of the dress. Silk is always a classic, of course. But it is expensive and if you know any clumsy brides (or grooms!) it doesn't wash well. Or at all. It's dry clean only! Please don't wash silk (unless you very much know what you are doing; I promise you do not)!! I'll cry!!!

[mercless]

1. Where were they born? What is the story behind their birth, if any?

Backstory

Talon was born in the heart of Noxus Prime. They remember nothing about their biological parents; who they were, or what they did. All that is definitely known was that they weren’t around to care for them long enough.Like many other urchin stories, perhaps their parents were drafted back into being soldiers, with no one else to care for the child. Perhaps there were just too many mouths to feed, and Talon was unlucky enough to be tasked with defending themselves.

Or perhaps Talon’s story began with two people hoping to create their own family and happy life with what little they had in the slums of Noxus. Maybe they loved their baby, and did what was necessary to make sure it was looked after. Maybe one chose to go back to the military after serving their mandatory time and send everything they earned back home. And maybe there was an accident; a mistake, that led to the other losing the one thing they held dearest to their heart.There might be a chance they are both still alive, never knowing what happened to their child, and only hearing about a new the Du Couteau protege in passing.

[matildathemusical]

Every child swing in Matilda has a bigger and smaller role. For example, the Bruce/Tommy swing's bigger role is Bruce, the Amanda/Lavender swing's bigger role is Lavender, and the Nigel/Eric swings bigger role is Nigel. Who is the bigger role for the Hortensia/Alice swing?

I’d say Hortensia is the bigger role as it has the speaking part. Honestly though I don’t think the intention with the swings though was to have a big and small role it just works out that way. The roles are paired together due to height so Nigel and Eric are supposed to be fairly small so they go together then Bruce and Tommy are the taller boys. Same goes with the girls Amanda has to be small for the throw and they list Lavender with a smaller height limit. So then the remaining two girl roles go together. 

These are the Australian height limits which are taller than broadway but they have the same ratio if that makes sense

Amanda 132cm – 135cm  (4′3″-4′5″)

Lavender 135cm – 140cm (4′5″-4′7″)

Alice Height 142cm -144cm (4′8″-4′9″)

Hortensia Height 142cm – 147cm (4′8″-4′10″)

Eric Height Up to 130cm (4′3″)

Bruce Height 142cm – 147cm (4′8″-4′10″)

Nigel Height 140cm – 145cm (4′7″-4′9″)

Tommy Height 147cm – 150cm (4′8″-4′11″)