Being a notorious robotlover in the current state of "AI" is the worst. I love robots discovering how they process their feelings in fiction, but when a chatbot pretends it knows how to love it feels like an insult to the craft

The main problem I have with Persona 4 is that it's cowardly. It goes out of its way to present these ideas about young people struggling with ideas about identity, sexuality, gender, etc., with the dawning realization that embracing these ideas may subject them to a life lived in the margins of society. And at first, there's a moment where it seems like that life lived as your true self is preferable, even if it does marginalize you in the end. But it ALWAYS backtracks. Kanji and Naoto are the most relevant for this example, but all the social link characters are like that. They all have justifiable reasons for feeling ostracized from society, resentful if its expectations, but every last one of these characters' stories ends up with them deciding that they were wrong and/or mistaken, that society's expectations are reasonable, if not aspirational, and confirming to them is good actually. That your parents know what's best for you, so you should take up the family business instead of moving away to live your own life and see what lies beyond your small town. That you're not queer or gender non-conforming, you're just confused, or trying to be something you aren't to be accepted taken seriously by your peers(??????). That lashing out to a world actively hostile to who you really are is wrong, because that's *not* who you really are. Your TRUE self wants to be an amenable, agreeable, upstanding member of society.

So what makes a butcher knife more butch than other knives?

The knife itself isn't necessarily butch. It's named that because it's wielded by a butcher, who is more butch than the other food shop owners

the knife

so like. okay so like you have this online ecosystem where everyone's all fractured and algorithmically siloed into their little groups, right?? and the only contact they have with outsiders is through screenshots, meaning you're only ever seeing the stuff that's objectionable or funny enough to be screenshotted in the first place. and the people who rise to the rank of screenshot curator are the people who spend all day sniffing around the other camps for stuff to screenshot. so you have this epistemological chokepoint dictated by someone whose main hobby is sneaking around with a camera getting all up in someone else's business and making it into a public spectacle. and the easiest way to make it into a public spectacle is to make your audience scared and angry. and the easiest way to do that is to play on existing negative biases, like pushing an open door yknow?? so you have this dynamic that rewards prejudice and elevates it to a position of narrative authority. and the people who can do this the most effectively and consistently are the ones who have no qualms about stalking marginalised people and crafting narratives about how they're scary and evil. and you reeeaaally gotta question whether or not any of this is actually beneficial to anyone or if it's just doing to you what fox news did to your dad, yknow??

this fetish stuff is getting out of hand what the fuck is word play