sweetheartsoldier
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37 posts
Latest Posts by sweetheartsoldier
You, a fanfiction author: “I don’t know if this fic is any good. Maybe I just won’t post it. Probably nobody would like it.”
Your top commenter, eyes enormous: “You hide the fic? You hide the fic in WIPs? Oh! Oh! Jail for author! Jail for author for one thousand years!”
I think a lot of what pro-AI people are really wanting is stuff that already exists but they don't know it's out there like
can't format a work email? templates
don't know how to write a resume? templates
writing a thank you card or a condolences card or a wedding invitation? templates templates templates
not sure how to format your citations in MLA or whatever format? citationmachine.net
summary of something you're reading for school/work? cliffsnotes.com
recipe based on ingredients in your fridge? whatsintherefrigerator.com
there's a million more like, guys, we don't need AI, we never needed generative AI
Now a new study looking at 400,000 youths from 88 countries around the world suggests such bans are making a difference in reducing youth violence. It marks the first systematic assessment of whether an association exists between a ban on corporal punishment and the frequency in which adolescents get into fights.
I actually feel terrible for the kids who’ve only seen the live action Lilo & Stitch. Imagine being a little kid identifying with Lilo and having the “happy ending” of this movie tell you that you are, actually, a burden. That being little and needing help and maybe being weird, being troubled, not knowing the right way to act, not fitting in and not understanding why you can’t be like everybody else is, actually, grounds for your family to abandon you during your time of need in favor of . . . going to school? That thing that can happen at any time? Yeah, that’s more urgent than being there for a grieving kid and making sure she spends her formative years living with someone who understands her, someone she already knows and trusts.
Not that anyone couldn’t figure out that ending the movie this way doesn’t make any sense, but I say this as someone who cut off my family and then went to college. I did that because the family was abusive, not because getting a degree is more important than a loving family. I actually feel uniquely qualified to say that a loving family is vastly more valuable than any kind of degree or career. The former wasn’t an option for me, though, so I set my aim in life lower and went for the education.
Nani, on the other hand, had both options. I won’t be the first person to point out that she very well could have waited to go to college until Lilo was older and more stable, or until she had the means to move both of them to the mainland and didn’t have to leave Lilo behind in order to go. It’s not bad to be a nontraditional student, far from it. I can’t fathom the motivation for giving this version of Nani a dream career that she never had in the original and then making that the most urgent and important thing in Nani’s life . . . in a movie ostensibly about the importance of family.
The infamous ending of the latest live action cash grab is a reflection of the lives, values, and choices of the kinds of people who make it in Hollywood and are in a position to shape such things
They have to write an ending like that and it has to be noble because that is the choice they all make in those kinds of circumstances
It’s an epic false dichotomy we’ve got in the US and the hope that we’ll escape it is what keeps me going.
Realizing that you can (should! must!) have compassion for everybody and you needn’t (shouldn’t! can’t!) pick and choose who to look out for based on what’s popular or who you personally like or any other qualification other than who happens to be existing in your sphere of influence and who needs your help can be a tough pill to swallow in today’s political scene. May God provide all of us with a big sip of water to get it down.
The thing about political polarization that really gets me is what do you mean I have to pick between caring about the unborn and the elderly, or minorities and the poor??? Sounds like a totally made-up rule to me. Skill issue. I CHOOSE ALL.
"If you’re going to care about the fall of the sparrow you can’t pick and choose who’s going to be the sparrow. It’s everybody, and you’re stuck with it." - Madeleine L'Engle
One thing that bothers me about the ending of the Lilo and Stitch remake (among the other things people have already rightfully complained about) is how it acts like Nani has to go to college NOW or she's lost her chance forever.
As someone who was raised by a young mother that didn't get to go to college, because she got 2 kids at 18-20, but then went to college in her early/mid 30s when me and my sister were old enough to be left home alone, it just feels really insulting.
It really adds to the harmful mindset that someone's life, especially that of women, is over if they haven't "got their life together" yet before the age of 25.
There would've been no harm in Nani delaying college for like 5-10 years, instead of abandoning her sister during the most vital years of her development only 2-3 months after already having lost her parents. Animated Nani would never.
The only fear death holds for me is that, even if I find myself in Heaven, I’ll have to explain to jirt that I posted LOTR fanfiction and edited his poetry to suit the plotline I had in mind. It could be worse, though: I could be Peter Jackson having to look Tolkien in his eyes and explain why Christopher Lee played Saruman.
Say it again for the people in the back: If you think your religion can change, you’re admitting you believe it’s made up. Or, at the very least, that its source was flawed.
Laws of secular governments are 1) made for specific times, places, and people, and 2) made by people, and as we all know from bitter experience, people often make mistakes. This is what makes man-made laws changeable, to correct and update them as needed. Having a system in place to continually test and revise such laws is good and necessary.
The external trappings of religion are somewhat like this. How should a monk dress? This varies by the order, and it’s a decision made by people; it can change. It’s not an immutable truth about reality. The moral law of the Church, on the other hand, consists of immutable truths about reality that are as real and unchangeable (if less easily observable) as the laws of physics.
If you saw God Himself descend from Heaven, with all His omniscience and omnibenevolence which makes it unthinkable for Him to make a mistake or act maliciously, and personally lay out a code of conduct meant for everybody’s use until the end of time, you would never dare change a single aspect of that code.
He did, and we don’t.
Now, if you don’t believe that God descended from Heaven, or that He’s omniscient, or that He’s omnibenevolent, or that He’s omnipotent, etc., then naturally you won’t believe in His promise of an institution founded by Him (Matthew 16:17-19), guided personally by Him (Luke 24:49, John 16:7-8, John 14:16-20, Matthew 28:19-20, Acts 1:8), and which cannot be defeated by any power of evil (Matthew 16:18). In that case, Christianity would be of human origin (or worse: founded by an imperfect and unreliable god) and we would be free to edit it as we pleased.
The whole Good News™️ shtick of Catholicism, though, is that although humanity is fallen and we cannot achieve perfection by our own merits, it’s not all on our shoulders and we have a God who can and did and does and will help us. One of the most notable ways He’s done this is by providing us with a Church to safeguard His teachings for us as a reliable reference point. Changing said teachings is more than inadvisable; it would be totally contrary to the God-given mission of the Church.
Alright, everyone, say it with me: The Catholic Church Has No Power Or Authority To Change Her Doctrines Or The Moral Law
Petition to start referring to Susan Pevensie's arc as "The Tragedy of Susan" rather than "The Problem of Susan." Her arc is not defined by the "problem" of growing up; it is the tragedy of forgetting she is a queen.
In Prince Caspian, we see the seeds of this. "It's no good behaving like kids now that we are back in Narnia," Peter tells her when she is afraid of entering the treasure chamber in the ruins of Cair Paravel. "You're a Queen here." Aslan does not chide her for being too grown-up to believe in him; he lends her his breath for bravery so that she can stop listening to her fears. Susan's "problem" in this book is in fact that she behaves more like a child than a queen.
In many ways, Susan's arc parallels Prince Rilian's in The Silver Chair. He is the Lost Prince; she becomes the Lost Queen. He is enchanted to forget who he really is. The Green Lady twists his birthright so that he is going to conquer his own land and rule as a usurper--the land where he is meant to be the rightful ruler! He unconsciously trades his role as the true prince for a false kingship (similar to Edmund trading his birthright as a true king of Narnia for the Witch's false promise to make him a prince ... hey, you'd almost think this was a theme or something).
Susan likewise trades her identity as queen for a false substitute in England, exchanging the substance for the shadow. She is a child pretending to be a grown-up, not actually being grown-up. Lewis never says there's anything inherently wrong with "lipstick and nylons and invitations," but they are merely the outward trappings of society. What makes a person a king or queen comes from inside. When Rilian returns to Narnia, he is instantly recognized as a prince, despite his lack of a crown or any of the other formal trappings of royalty. He is recognized because he is no longer hidden by the armor of the Green Lady--and so he looks like himself. In fact, he not only looks like himself, he looks like his father. (Which is also how Lord Bern recognizes Caspian in the Lone Islands, despite Caspian not having any outward proof of his kingship--Caspian looks and sounds like his father. Shasta is recognized as a prince because of his resemblance to his brother--oh hey, we've got another theme going.)
Susan has put on the armor of the world, and in doing so has lost herself as queen. That is what makes her arc a tragedy. But! There is always, always hope. Rilian is rescued. Shasta is restored to his true identity as Prince Cor. Edmund is redeemed. Aslan breathes on Susan. Caspian's kingship restores right order to the Lone Islands. No one is ever irredeemably lost.
Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia.
Even when they themselves have forgotten who they truly are.
When someone’s accent changes according to their mood
Forget pet peeves, what is one of your little loves?
I love in the summer when people drive with the windows down, and the music up, and they sing along really enthusiastically.
My latest hot take is that Warrior Cats and Yellowstone, while vastly different media with vastly different target audiences, appeal to their respective audiences for the exact same reasons. Similarities include:
- the beauty of nature is a major theme and the expansion of cityscape is treated in both with the exact same level of narrative grief
- gratuitous violence and dysfunction
- readers/viewers vicariously live a power fantasy
- territorial disputes of a kind that no one else in their respective worlds engages in
- characters who are undeniably badass but all their ambition stems from their intense self-loathing
- oaths of unbreakable loyalty
- constant existential doom
- strict hierarchy enforced by violence
- murder plots that go off without a hitch
- murder plots that absolutely do not go off without a hitch
- lies about who your family is
- adoptions, but they’re a really weird dynamic
- lots of doomed romantic relationships
- “their death was all your fault”
- jaded antiheroes who can’t actually believe in the future they’re striving toward and sabotage it every time they get close by aiming for something imperfect (the best they think they can get/deserve)
Rings of Power and orcs. I get wanting to show that villains can be redeemable, but that’s possible if and only if said villain wants and pursues redemption and recognizes where they’ve been wrong. LOTR and every related work prior to RoP consistently showed us orcs who firmly believed it was their right to torture and eat people. Saruman’s main obstacle in using them was that they couldn’t get along; they were killing each other for the opportunity to dismember and eat Merry and Pippin. There’s a lot of work to do before you can make people sympathize with orcs and RoP was not equipped to do even a fraction of that work.
Not to mention it didn’t need to be done. LOTR was already full of nuanced race relations, redeemable villains, and characters making themselves better or worse via their own free will. I would venture a guess that this is why Tolkien made the orcs so intensely reprehensible in the first place—in a world where Gollum, who attempts murder onscreen multiple times and explicitly states his desire to eat more than one of our beloved protagonists, is a sympathetic and redeemable character, you need a very concrete reason to see orcs as consistent, clear-cut villains. I would say we definitely have that. The orcs engage is gruesome violence and they like it that way; we never see an orc who wants to do things differently, therefore by their own choice, none of them have been redeemable.
Gollum is very nearly the same, except for a few moments where he shows disgust for what he’s become and a desire for something good and lovely, like sharing a meal with friends. It only takes a little bit to make him redeemable and it’s a clear picture of how real-life redemption can be accomplished from the measliest of starting points.
But you have to have that starting point, and I don’t think it’s unrealistic or in any way bad to have characters who don’t embrace that starting point, especially when there’s another character right next to them showing that their actions could have been forgiven if only they had any remorse.
the reason "robot racism" is often a really stupid metaphor is the same reason that like. discrimination against demons or vampires or whatever doesn't work, is because there's often a pretty justified reasons humans are scared of vampires or robots or whatever, in a way that doesn't apply to real life minorities, like a fantasy author will be like "the reason vampires are discriminated against is because most of them and kill and eat people for fun and pleasure, and so humans respond by trying to kill them, isn't that so sad" and like no that's a perfectly fine reason to not trust vampires i think.
Countless children’s media misled me with their emphasis on the dangers of quicksand, but VeggieTales was spot-on with their emphasis on the danger of the public veneration of material goods.
So, what’s The Scene for you, the one that just has to make it into the movie? For me, it’s hands-down the mute “Buddy?”
Need to have my heart shattered a second time by seeing Haymitch’s reaction to Ampert’s death on screen.
Because he knew almost as soon as he met Ampert that the kid had no chance. Ampert’s reaping was an execution order, even more than anyone else’s. From a purely practical perspective, Haymitch should have been closed-off toward him, should have resigned himself to Ampert’s inevitable death at the hands of the unstoppable Capitol and just looked out for himself. After all, Snow offered Haymitch a deal if only Haymitch would lay low and let the Capitol do as it pleased.
Instead, Haymitch promised to fight for Ampert, to protect him, to keep his death from being whatever torture Snow had in mind for him. He promised to do whatever could be done. Why? Not because it was easy (it obviously wouldn’t be) and not because it was even possible (how could it have been), but because it was right. Because Ampert was a kid caught up in other people’s problems and he didn’t deserve any of it. Anyone who could have stepped in was obligated to, even if it didn’t do any good. There was no saving him, but there was no justifiable option but to try anyway.
Haymitch was all-in with this impossible task. He understood the doomed necessity of protecting the kid marked for death, not because he could succeed but because he couldn’t not try. That’s why he fought for him even as he realized the mutts were only there for Ampert, that this was the brutal execution Snow had planned to make an example out of an innocent kid. That’s why he tried to save someone who couldn’t be saved. That’s why he tried to call out to bones that couldn’t hear.
TBOSAS showed us why Snow believes poor kids from 12 can be influential and SOTR showed us that he still lives in fear of that decades later. Snow was working double-time to make Haymitch look bad—and still couldn’t do it!
The recap cut out him holding Lou Lou while she died, trying to save Ampert (don’t even get me started on how it’s because of Haymitch that the last interaction Ampert ever had with another person was a gesture of affection and a compliment), working out how to call off the porcupine (only possible because the distorted crying sound reminded him of consoling his baby brother), trying with Maysilee to revive Hull, sharing the chocolate with Silka because she was crying, admitting to Maysilee that he didn’t want her to leave . . . and the few positive aspects they were forced to leave in (e.g. defending Maysilee, killing only in self-defense) were enough for 12 to welcome him home with open arms.
They held him back from going in the house to die with his family, Louella’s mom took him in and told him it wasn’t his fault, and his friends tried to stick by him until he literally beat them off.
I can only conclude Snow only hated him so much primarily because he knew Haymitch was loved and going to stay that way, whereas Snow had long since ruined his own life. He comes down on Haymitch like a ton of bricks because, from the moment he laid Louella’s body down in front of him, Snow’s known that Haymitch sees him for what he really is, sees the Hunger Games for what they really are, and he’s petrified that Haymitch might make other people see it, too.
We talk all the time about how alike Haymitch and Katniss are, but I think the differences showcased in SOTR are fascinating.
Katniss goes into her Games thinking that her mother and sister will die if she dies and can’t come back to take care of them. Haymitch goes into his Games knowing that his mother and brother will only survive if he dies.
Katniss, in the beginning, is genuinely out for herself, determined to live and go home again. She has to be persuaded to work with Peeta even temporarily, during training and interviews, and she tries so hard to convince herself she’s okay with him dying that she surprises herself by calling out his name the instant she finds out two of them can win. Even so, she’s initially conflicted when the rule change is revoked.
Haymitch, already expecting not to go home, is only pretending to be selfish and ends up doing a pretty poor job of even that. He works hard at keeping Lou Lou alive—feeding her, keeping her away from the poisonous fruit and water—and she only dies because she finds a danger he didn’t know about. He hugs Ampert back, risks his own life to distract the porcupine, finds and feeds Wellie, and absolutely honors his promise that all the Newcomers are safe with him, not just safe from him.
What they do have in common is this: they try so, so hard to do wrong things in the interest of doing something right in the long term, but they just aren’t able to pass up a chance to do right when they see one.
Haymitch is explicitly told that any act of rebellion, anything to draw attention to the humanity of the district kids and the cruelty of the Capitol, will be punished by a painful death. Still, he calls out the Gamemakers for prolonging Lou Lou’s suffering and refuses to hand over her body to them. Still, he sabotages the arena. Still, he uses what he thinks are his dying moments to set up one last explosive in the hopes it might make a difference.
Katniss promises Prim she’ll come home, but she still runs to Rue’s defense knowing full well that whoever’s there may very well just kill her, too. She still refuses to kill Peeta and resolves to die with him rather than let the Capitol use her as their weapon.
Snow says it’s better for Haymitch to die than to live long enough to have his heart broken by Lenore Dove. If he really thought Lenore Dove was going to betray Haymitch the way (he thinks) Lucy Gray did to him, he wouldn’t have needed to poison Lenore Dove. Just sayin 👀
One thing THG says over and over is that it’s not enough to hate being a victim of injustice and it’s counterproductive to hate the people carrying out injustice; you have to hate the injustice itself.
Snow hated being a victim, only his solution was to grab up all the power he could and then isolate himself so no one could ever take it away. It turned him into a petty maniac who spent his days strategically gifting bread and milk to creep out a kid who dared to point out Snow did something wrong. He wasn’t a victim when he’d grown up to be an old man beefing with teenagers, but a lifetime of lashing out in what he considered justified self-defense ensured that he lived a miserable life surrounded by people who feared him, hated him, and eventually succeeded in brutally killing him.
Gale goes wrong (this goes for Coin, too) when he gets sidetracked assigning blame and meting out punishment on the Capitol citizens, when the priority should have been preventing the injustice from happening again—to anyone, not just him and his inner circle.
OP is so right with the example of the prep team. Katniss hated the prep team at first, too, because they saw her as expendable and treated her like a project, like a toy to play with, rather than a person. But she saw in CF that they were having a change of heart, noticing that she was a person whose life held the same value theirs did, and although it too little and too late to save her from the arena, it was enough for her to forgive them. They’d stopped being a threat to her, so her hostility toward them evaporated. Gale didn’t take that step with her, but considered a change of heart unimportant and reconciliation impossible. And yeah, he’s confused as to why Katniss isn’t doing the same. He can’t wrap his head around a world in which districts and Capitol don’t fight, can’t erase the imaginary lines that have had them pitted against each other by the Capitol’s own design. He can ally with some other districts, but even that has limits. His callousness toward the people in the Nut is an eerie foreshadowing of the later consequences of his inability to step outside the Capitol vs District paradigm. He thinks success for the rebellion means subjugation of the Capitol by the districts, when success would really be unity of the Capitol and districts.
His insensitivity to civilians in the Capitol, people he perceives as implicitly less-than, leads him to kill Prim. Any discourse on whether or not Gale could have reasonably predicted that his bombs would put Prim in danger (with an eye toward absolving him somehow if he couldn’t) misses the point. Prim’s life was not worth more or less than any of the Capitol civilians’. Intentionally targeting them was wrong with or without Prim getting caught up in it. It’s also not insignificant that Prim was only killed because she was trying to help everyone, with no concern for where they came from.
Hating being a victim is easy and everyone does it. Wanting to turn the tables and take revenge is easy and everyone does it. What’s effective, but difficult, is to see that oppressors are actually not the root cause of oppression. The problem, the reason violence persists even as power changes hands, is our willingness to pretend that we get to decide who’s worth something and who isn’t. A person is a person is a person and if you don’t want to be a victim, you can’t let anyone be a victim.
i get why a lot of people don’t like reading mockingjay as much as the rest of the trilogy, but i think it’s actually so essential to understanding the central thesis of the entire hunger games series.
the whole point of the hunger games is this: all human life is valuable, and artificial divisions between people keep them weak. and the only way out is radical love.
and this is something that is literally echoed again and again in the books. take, for example, gale. why is gale such an interesting, complex, and yet reprehensible character? yes, it’s because at the end katniss cannot separate his bomb from prim’s death. but it’s deeper than that. why does gale build the bomb in the first place? it’s because gale doesn’t see every human life as valuable. gale is willing to kill people and to deny them their humanity simply because they are his “enemy.” so, there’s the obvious example of his willingness to blow up the nut with everyone inside and his disregard for the human casualty. and the people in the nut aren’t even from the captiol, he just wants to do it because the stereotype of that district is their allegiance to the capitol, and gale hates that.
but there’s another scene, also in mockingjay, that i think goes under-discussed which is his view of katniss’ prep team. when katniss finds her prep team literally imprisoned in 13, she’s horrified and upset by the conditions they are in. but gale isn’t. and he’s confused about why katniss would care for them! her response is to say that it’s because they cried when she went to the quarter quell. and gale is like, “sure, but they’re still from the captiol.” and this argument is so important. because katniss argues that the prep team deserves to be treated as human beings, and when he presses her on why, she basically says because they treated her as a human being. but gale can’t see that–all he can see is that they’re from the capitol, and he’s confused about why katniss should care.
and this is, so crucially, what katniss learns in the hunger games. she realizes that she doesn’t want to kill the other tributes just because they are from the other districts. she hates the fact that they have turned her against people who are, in their core, just like her. frightened children who have been manipulated to kill other children against their will, all selected based on their district, a social divide that has literally been invented and imposed on them.
and another just absolutely essential thing to understand here is that peeta knows this all along. we talk at length about how peeta’s defining trait is his kindness. but what’s so important about peeta’s kindness is how it transcends any boundaries of social class or social division.
when peeta gives katniss the bread, it’s important to note that just before he does that, we hear his mother talking about “seam brats pawing through her trash.” peeta’s mother buys into the social divides in district twelve–she views herself as better than someone from the seam simply because of her standing as a merchant, and reinforces these class divides by refusing to extend the simplest humanity to a child from the seam. she literally refuses to feed a starving child on the grounds of a social divide, within a world that already has divided them into districts. but peeta doesn’t see it like this. peeta refuses to deny katniss food just because she’s from the seam. peeta gives her kindness. peeta gives her humanity.
and he does the same thing in the games! his entire first interview, the dramatic king focuses, not on the games, but on his genuine love and adoration for another tribute. how radical! to refuse to subscribe to a system which asks him to hate her? to want to kill her? and to instead confess his love for her? sure, katniss ends up being the mockingjay. katniss might have held out the berries. but peeta in that moment is the one who sets the rebellion in motion. peeta is the one who refuses to engage in the senseless hatred of someone who “should” be his enemy. instead, he reaches out in love.
and it all culminates at the end of mockingjay, when katniss votes for the capitol hunger games to gain coin’s trust. and peeta is utterly horrified by this. because he can’t understand how she could have been through everything he has been through and not understand that continuing to senselessly kill human beings (children!!) for some kind of revenge just reinforces these binary modes of thinking. but the thing is–katniss DOES see that. and when coin proposes it, that’s when she knows she has to stop her. because coin, like gale, like peeta’s mother, and like so others many around her, is still buying into these divides. is still viewing the captiol as the enemy. is still viewing a human life as expendable.
and there’s a quote in mockingjay that i think lays this out pretty explicitly. katniss says, after she kills coin and is recovering, point blank: “they can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them.” she’s realized the crux of the entire hunger games–that manipulating us to hate and kill our fellow humans, that drawing up divisions between people because of where they live and what they produce, that believing that hating someone on the basis of any of these is justification for their death, is all a farce. it’s all a distraction. it’s all pretend. she says, in the same chapter: “no one benefits in a world where these things happen.” not the districts. not the capitol. not the victors. no one.
the entire arc of the hunger games is really just about katniss catching up to what peeta has known from the start. katniss overcoming all the manipulation from those around her, all the glitz and glamour, all the artificial social and class divides to see what peeta has seen clearly from the start: love.
As soon as I get a grave, the first thing I’m gonna do is start rolling in it.
Anyway, it’s not about the character being redeemable or irredeemable, it’s about whether the character takes the opportunities for redemption or passes them by.
There’s a time and a place for overthinking fiction, and if the time and place is here and now:
Do you find it endearing if the love interest is stupid or are you just afraid of other people’s free will?
