robert wun | fall 2025
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@aseariel
robert wun | fall 2025

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YOU'RE A REGULAR WRITER! YOU CAN CRAFT A COMPLETE SENTENCE! YOU'RE A REGULAR WRITER! YOU USE THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF COMMAS! YOU'RE A REGULAR WRITER! YOUR PROSE IS GOOD AND RIGHT! YOU'RE A REGULAR WRITER! EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS YOUR VISION!
Hella bored what is your hottest take?
Media where it is made explicitly clear that the hero cannot and should not kill the villain, but then kills the villain off anyways for reasons beyond the heroās control in order to facilitate a happy ending, directly imply that death is a natural and deserved consequence of evil actions AND an acceptable resolution towards peace, which completely undermines the heroās arguments otherwise.
Having the hero say āmurder is wrong so I will not kill youā while the bad guy goes āyour compassion is meaningless, Iāve learned nothingā only for a building to fall on the bad guy and kill him is cop-out fantasy fulfillment for those of us who in theory condone capital punishment but cannot reconcile it with our own self-image of the compassionate pacifist, and broadly represents our frustration that there are, in fact, conflicts that cannot be resolved by āgoodā people
TL/DR: āHero too good the commit murder VS irredeemable bad guy who cannot be stopped until he is murderedā situations where the bad guy is taken out by a random deus ex machina are fucking boring UNLESSāļøas a poetic consequence of something either character themselves inadvertently put into motion
So. Moist von Lipwig, formerly Albert Spangler/various other aliases, never kills people so he canāt really be all that bad, lovable rogue, right?
Wrong.
In a surface kind of way, yes, but an essential part of the Lovable Rogue is in never having to face consequences, and Going Postal starts with Lipwig being hanged for his crimes of embezzling, forgery, theft, confidence trickstery and various others. And thatās only the beginning.
Let me preface this with the fact that I love Moist as a character, and boy am I aware that he goes through character development, but he is by no means a good person at the start of the book, or even necessarily by the end. Heās definitely still a criminal in both cases, by the end it just happens that Vetinari is holding onto his leash and that Moist has made a moral decision.
He feels completely justified in committing the crimes he does, because everyone is dishonest, right? AnywayĀ theyāre all trying to trick him! And he never faces any consequences, because heās always on the run to escape them, whether heās aware of it or not, and so he believe that there arenāt any consequences - because heās not there when they occur. After all, heās mostly fooling otherĀ crooks, so itās not like good and/or honest people ever feel the repercussions.
Except then he meets an angel. Or, as it turns out, several angels. While being possessed by the Letters/Spirit of the Post, he apparently says thatĀ āangel is just an old word for messenger,ā and I think I know Pratchett well enough by now so I can say that isnāt in there by coincidence. After all, the book is full of messengers and the delivery of messages (in the form of the old postmen, golems, various others) and many characters are referred to as being angels numerous times (notably Stanley, Vetinari and Adora Belle Dearheart) and enough parallels are drawn between Adora and the golems, particularly Anghammarad and Mr. Pump) that the two words should be taken to mean pretty much the same in thing the context.Ā
Vetinari remarks that you only ever get oneĀ angel, but maybe it arrives in a dozen or more people. Except these are far from being particularly nice ones - what they all do, in their own way, is to force Moist to recognize that all his actions have consequences. They very nearly march up in a line and say,Ā āLook, son, youāve messed up really bad, okay? I mean, just look at what youāve caused, LOOKĀ at it! What, you didnāt know it was there? Buddy, do you think that means it donāt exist?ā
āDo you understand what Iām saying?ā shouted Moist. āYou canāt just go around killing people!ā āWhy Not? You Do.ā The golem lowered his arm. āWhat?ā snapped Moist. āI do not! Who told you that?ā āI Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People,ā said the golem calmly. āI have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may beāā all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!ā āNo, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.ā
ā¦Holy shit, Pratchett is not messing around. Because yeah, the Lovable Rogue is a fun character to read about. But does that mean he isnāt immoral as hell? Nope.
All throughout the first half or so of the book, Moist is convinced that heās gonna turn around and trick everyone, up to and including Vetinari himself. He thinks pretty nasty and derogatory thoughts about the people around him such as Stanley, or Mr. Groat, or Mr. Pump, clearly blaming them for being stuck working for Vetinari when he thought his troubles would be over once he was hanged, even as he puts on his conman face and charms all of them (except Pump and probably Adora), because it benefits him and because he thinks heās smarter than them and because itās fun. But he never quite gets away with anything any more. He thinks heāll win against the Brotherhood of Postmen, but he gets pretty banged up doing it. He makes plans to have Mr. Pump killed smashed up* or use his day off to escape, but when he has the chance heās busy with Adora, along with the small matter of the Post Office being in cinders. Itās a clear contrast with how he later thinks about how he actually likes the printers working at Teemer & Spools, or the Smoking Gnu, simply because theyāre decent people good at their jobs.
*Because even though heās never killed anyone, he doesnāt think of golems as people.
Then along comes Adora, and it turns out he, personally, messed up her life by defrauding the bank she worked at, further adding to her familyās struggle when the Grand Trunk gets stolen and her brother is murdered. And when he challenges Reacher Gilt and the clacks companies, the Post Office gets burned down, the piles of letters destroyed, Mr. Groat is left seriously injured and the golem Anghammarad dead - itās otherĀ people who suffer, not him.
Hello, Moist. Meet Consequences. Theyāve been trying to catch up with you for a while.
I like to think Moistās internal narration gets less condescending* at that point, because there is definitely a difference between the Moist who went out to eat with Adora and the Moist who still tries to keep the Post Office running in a blackened, burnt shell of a building. When he meets Reacher Gilt for the first time at Le Foie Heureux, he realizes how much better Gilt is compared to him and wishes they werenāt pitted against each other, just so he could learn how to be an even better** conman from him, even while knowing Adora hates him enough to want to kill him and that Gilt pirated the Grand Trunk and is out to destroy the Post Office. But later he thinks to himself:
āIāll kill you, Mr. Gilt. Iāll kill you in our special way, the way of the weasel and cheat and liar. Iāll take away everything butĀ your life. Iāll take away your money, yourĀ reputationĀ and your friends. Iāll spin words around you until youāreĀ cocooned in them. Iāll leave you nothing, not even hope.ā
*Pun intended.
**Worse?
Talk about a sharp turnaround. And here Moist acknowledges the similarities between them, even though an easy-to-reach disclaimer could be included such asĀ ābut I never kill people.ā There has been an ongoing contrast between Havelock Vetinari, Moist von Lipwig, and Reacher Gilt throughout the book, particularly in Vetinariās and Giltās definition ofĀ āfreedomā. Gilt claims that property is the foundation of freedom, and Adora points out thatĀ āwhen [he] talks about freedom, he means his, not anyone elseās.ā Meanwhile, Vetinari:
āAnd no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.ā
And what Vetinari largely does is force consequences upon Moist, and later Gilt - forces them to live with freedom in its entirety, not just the bits they like. The easy answer may be to kill them, but that is not consequences as such, as much as a permanent end to them. And in doing this he forces Moist to face up to everything he has done and how it has hurt people. And being stuck between these two masterful conmen, Moist realizes how short the slippery slope may have been for him to turn into just yet another Gilt: A conman with style, but a bully and a murderer all the same. Which is why he essentially uses all his genius in that field to defeat Gilt, because thatās the only way he can be defeated, not because itās noble or heroic, but because heās stuck: Heās been forced to lookĀ at all the people heās defrauded and swindled, and now that he canāt look away he doesnāt want to see it happen to them again. He may be a bastard of a trickster, but he can chose to not be thatĀ bastard.
But Vetinari! You may ask. He manipulates and controls and has people killed all the time. Itās practically his job! Well, yeah. Heās incredibly good at it, heās LEAGUES ahead of both Moist and Gilt,Ā but the funny thing is that he does it entirely for the benefit of the city. He could be a one-man reign of terror over the entire continent, but as he confides in Unseen Academicals:
ā[ā¦] And thatās when I first learned about evil. It is built into the nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.ā
And just in case you think heās nothing but talk, remember that when his arrest was ordered in Jingo, he letĀ himself be arrested. Sure, in the end he got away with it, but he took the consequences. Just letting himself be arrested probably changed the poltical landscape of the Circle Sea and Uberwald permanently. Because without consequences, freedom is meaningless.
This is not only one of the best character analysis Iāve read in some time, it managed to include REALLY GOOD PUNS into it, as the source material often does.Ā
I wanna print this off and put it on my shelf, goddamn.
Discworld Heritage Post

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out of interest as a writer, could you give an example for:
UNLESSāļøas a poetic consequence of something either character themselves inadvertently put into motion
oooh, like
Syndrome in The Incredibles: He could have taken the L, but instead chose to kidnap the heroesā son, resulting in his cape sucking him into a jet engine, which calls back to Ednaās insistence on heroes not wearing capes for safety reasons- this death symbolically reinforces that Syndrome is not a hero (wears a cape where Edna wonāt let a hero do) and is instead obsessed with the APPEARANCE of being one (wearing a cape like a hero in a comic book).
He is not a hero, he is a villain who makes villainous choices to make himself look heroic, and he dooms himself on both counts. If he had any interest in actually BEING a hero- in ACTUALLY putting himself in danger- he would know how risky a cape IS (literally AND symbolically) and as such would not have had one to begin with.
In this case, the villain dying without being directly killed, is not a cop-out: itās poetic tragedy. The existence of the cape that kills him is a symptom of his fatal flaw- if it wasnāt there, he wouldnāt be doomed, but if it wasnāt there, it would be because he lacked the flaw that led him to his death. The caper represents the trappings of a heroic image without substance. Syndrome pursues the trappings while lacking the substance. The trappings then trap him.
Now if he had, say, just been hit by a car or something for comedic effect? In a way totally divorced from his choices and actions? Cop-out. Absurd. The message goes from āthe appearance of heroism is not the same as heroism- a real hero is a hero because of who they choose to be, not how they lookā to āchoices are meaningless and some people are just irredeemable assholes we shouldnāt give a shit about, the universe is random and at the same time judgemental of sin, bad things happen because you are a bad person and you cannot fight itā.
THAT is an EXCELLENT example of āhero canāt killā and āvillain canāt be stoppedā where āvillain dies anywaysā is justified, imo, because it MEANS something.
It was avoidable. The villain doomed himself. He didnāt just die because he had to, because there were no other ways to wrap the story up. He did it to himself. It could have happened today or in twenty years, but he made it happen, because the flaws that made him a villain are the same flaws that caused his death.
Just one fantastic example of the importance of the villainās takedown to the overall story
Among my most popular works last year was a series of comics I made after watching Sonic 3 where I was like āwhat if Shadow got a spinoff series where he and a grieving Stone were forced to live togetherā and then the bottom comic got 50k likes on twitter
I am actually Northern Irish but also actually Deaf so my accent is kind of (very) weird.
I understand that you were aiming for a morally grey protagonist, but in practice what you've ended up with is more of a moral beige.
@ancient-tree-with-deathwish replied:
how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?
Distinguishing features of moral beige:
The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.
The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.
The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.
The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them ā they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.
The protagonist always ends up doing the right thing (for some fuzzy value of "right"), but, like, they're really grumpy about it.
holy quaternity

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i am not a psychiatrist but i do find it really weird how autism checklists are so often focused on "outward" signs of autism rather than what is going on internally. i don't know how to explain it but "do you make eye contact with other people" feels like a much less relevant question than "how does it feel when you have to make eye contact with other people?"
while i'm here, the other one that always pisses me off is "do you interpret idioms literally, for example 'bull in a china shop'?"
well, no, obviously. i know what "bull in a china shop" means because that is a popular phrase with a clearly defined meaning. and if i hadn't heard it before, then i would still not interpret it literally, because it has the cadence of an idiom and i would probably be able to work out from context what it meant. what is the point of this question
third and final complaint: "are you good at noticing subtext?"
i feel like the problem with this question is best illustrated by a conversation i had with a friend a while back, where i said something like, "i feel very safe with you because you don't do subtle hints and you are always very straight-up with me about what you are thinking and feeling."
and he laid a hand on my shoulder and was like, look dude i'm gonna be straight up here. i am subtle with you constantly and you simply do not notice <3
@luckyybones hope you don't mind me screenshotting but you are actually so correct
every encounter with a snake i've had involved someone shouting "hey i found a snake" then everyone crowding around to look at the snake which is probably not the best thing to do when you see a snake. but who can resist the allure of going "ooh a snake"
"most snakes are harmless" i live in australia "you can tell op doesn't live in australia" no australians are still like this
Like snow by Wendell Berry
After a while, clinical depression just gets annoying, bro. It's like shooing away house flies, but the house flies want you to kill yourself
love how much of Aragornās initial interactions with the hobbits is just telling them not to say things
aragorn: could you stop casually invoking the dread name of the ancient and terrible evil that even now follows at our very heels for FIVE MINUTES
aragorn: hey I gotta take a breather can you take over the hobbit duties for a bit
gandalf: no worries got you covered
Aragornās given up
elrond: hey you canāt say that here
gandalf: you canāt tell me what to say, do I look like a hobbit to you
The film repositions this for comedy, but in Return of the King, thereās this scene:
Gandalf, outside the door: oh hang on, just a sec. for reasons I wonāt explain; this is about to get super geopolitical. Try not to spill too many beans in front of Denethor.
Pippin: Do I have that many of them?
Denethor: right, you ignorant child! Under my skilled interrogation I shall force you to spill the beans.
Pippin: I know three things about beans and will share them (under skilled interrogation, discourses for a full hour on beans, the preparation thereof, the cultivation thereof, and the Shireās various thoughts on beans in general)
Gandalf: (pretends to be annoyed) denethor if you wanted SENSIBLE discourse on geopolitical beans I am RIGHT HERE
Denethor, fascinated: no! I already know everything youāre about to say and Iām NOT accepting criticism at this time. And I genuinely have no idea what this guyās going to say next - do you have ANY idea how fun that is for me
Pippin: now the classic market share of baked beans inna tin belongs to Heinz, but I myself am a Branston man, because - referencing my previous statements - if you want beans, you do NOT need to faff about with a tin opener. The decision to retain the pop-top -
Gandalf: this is unbelievable. denethor, can we -
Denethor: BZT! ā let him cook
(Later)
Pippin: are you mad at me for talking about beans for an hour
Gandalf: it was, in a weird way, the best move on the chessboard, and so politically savvy that it furthered three of my agendas, and was also really funny to listen to. Denethor has the long sight; he is accustomed to reading the minds and hearts of men at a long distance, these long years. Actually, maybe this has jaded him as much as anything else. To meet a mind whose umwelt, whose very nature, he has not already fully plumbed is not just an act of political obfuscation on our part; for Denethor himself, could such fresh provocation burst his stagnant social bubble, and save him from being so terminally fucking online? Might we have uncovered the potential of a Theoden thematic parallel? Much to ponder. The only unfortunate bit was that you kept freezing up and looking guilty when Denethor asked you about containers
Pippin: you said not to spill any beans and I was worried heād trip me up
Gandalf: it is, as ever, like talking to a fucking genie with you people

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i need a girl with a short skirt and a loooooong halberd
court coat, metallic thread on wool, likely british c. 1775-89.