A Thoughtless Twenty Something

Remember the sixpencee child slave thing? What happened there, exactly? Was the kid freed? No? They were just run off the website? OK so what good exactly did that do?

Remember the bone stealing witch? What exactly did that witchhunt accomplish? The person got arrested, oh that's great, the american justice system surely rectified the situation

And again, those are instances where the accusations were true and involved real substantive harm to another person. We used to joke on here how callout posts were shit like "receipts below: [several paragraphs of petty fandom drama] [three paragraphs of petty interpersonal drama involving cheating on partners or stealing food out of the fridge or something] [fabricated evidence that the person is responsible for the murder of JonBenét Ramsey]"

And that was back in the 2010s. The meta has changed. Callouts used to be a tool people used to point out actual harm a person had done, rarely, and more commonly were used as a means of bullying somebody over petty drama. Nowadays they're used to manufacture outrage and harassment against marginalized populations. They are a weapon bigots use to turn us against each other. A few manufactured accusations here, some out of context or clipped screenshots there, and people who should be standing in solidarity with each other against white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, are instead devouring each other.

It's sinister as shit, dude, and people will still share these accusations without a second thought. So, why? What is the point? What's the best case scenario here? Raising "awareness?" what the fuck is that supposed to accomplish? Will we get the oh-so-trustworthy authorities involved? Are we hoping for an arrest? A conviction? Throwing a queer or poc person in prison so they can be abused and assaulted and humiliated behind bars? Is that who we are?

Callouts and the like don't serve any real good in the world. At a macro scale they divide us when we should be standing together, and at a micro scale they result in deeply traumatic never-ending harassment and threats and doxxing and worse to a person who almost definitely does not deserve it. And again, for what? A sense of "justice?" this is not justice. This is retribution. It is punishment.

You wanna write create some fantasy creatures but don’t know where to start? Go check out some videos The Weird Creatures Earth has Had.

Want some inspiration for your Super Evil Villain’s Villanous Deeds?

Or maybe you want some weird locations to kick start your Fantasy World Terraforming?

Or maybe you need knowledge of bunches of historical places and cities and cultures?

But maybe you’re basing fantasy on the modern world?

Okay but lets say you want to start from the same inspiration as GRRM? (and part two!)

That’s just the stuff I could quickly grab. Things I’m subscribed to, that I know offhand. There is So. Much. Stuff. Online.

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS

I have a friend who works in education and he told me about how he was working with a small group of HS students to develop a new school sports chant. This was a very daunting task for the group, in large part because many had learning disabilities related to reading and writing, so coming up with a catchy, hard-hitting, probably rhyming, poetry-esque piece of collaborative writing felt like something outside of their skill range. But it wasn't! I knew that, he knew that, and he worked damn hard to convince the kids of that too. Even if the end result was terrible (by someone else's standards), we knew they had it in them to complete the piece and feel super proud of their creation.

Fast-forward a few days and he reports back that yes they have a chant now... but it's 99% AI. It was made by Chat-GPT. Once the kids realized they could just ask the bot to do the hard thing for them - and do it "better" than they (supposedly) ever could - that's the only route they were willing to take. It was either use Chat-GPT or don't do it at all. And I was just so devastated to hear this because Jesus Christ, struggling is important. Of course most 14-18 year olds aren't going to see the merit of that, let alone understand why that process (attempting something new and challenging) is more valuable than the end result (a "good" chant), but as adults we all have a responsibility to coach them through that messy process. Except that's become damn near impossible with an Instantly Do The Thing app in everyone's pocket. Yes, AI is fucking awful because of plagiarism and misinformation and the environmental impact, but it's also keeping people - particularly young people - from developing perseverance. It's not just important that you learn to write your own stuff because of intellectual agency, but because writing is hard and it's crucial that you learn how to persevere through doing hard things.

Write a shitty poem. Write an essay where half the textual 'evidence' doesn't track. Write an awkward as fuck email with an equally embarrassing typo. Every time you do you're not just developing that particular skill, you're also learning that you did something badly and the world didn't end. You can get through things! You can get through challenging things! Not everything in life has to be perfect but you know what? You'll only improve at the challenging stuff if you do a whole lot of it badly first. The ability to say, "I didn't think I could do that but I did it anyway. It's not great, but I did it," is SO IMPORTANT for developing confidence across the board, not just in these specific tasks.

So here are some answers to the most asked questions I've seen lately, if anyone would like them.

Peace ✌️

I do believe that both Fredrick and Asuka deeply cared about Aria (and I’d wager that she cared about them a lot as well). However, a part of her story is about how the men in her life refuse to respect her choices (especially Asuka, but his Achilles savior complex is a paragraph for another day) and how that leads to their collective downfalls, but it especially hurts her.

I just wish that was elaborated on more. Assuming she wasn’t just in cryosleep the entire time, I’d kill for a short story that explored what happened with her from the end of Begin to the Black Sunrise.

One of the messages that I feel you’re supposed to get from lots of her scenes is about living for the present, but there’s also a hint of “respecting other people’s choices for themselves” in their too. I might be reading too much into things, but I think people don’t pay attention to that enough, so I hope your post reaches more of them.

No, I think you're right about the recurring message with Aria's themes being personal autonomy. A lot of her dialog supports that, especially during the scene where she argues with Frederick after he learns about her terminal TP infection diagnosis:

Like you said, this world is where I belong. I'm the hero of my own story, so you're not allowed to tell me what to do.

And this longer line in particular:

..I don't have any family, and I was always kind of a bookworm. It's not like I enjoyed studying, I was just desperate not to be left behind... I thought that if I kept to myself and didn't trust anyone, then I couldn't ever be hurt. But that made my world cold, small, and dark. I never felt alive there... I didn't even have any friends until I went to college. Can you believe that? But them I met you, and [Asuka]... I even fell in love! For the first time in my life, I found something I wanted to care about. I was happy...

This line feels extremely important. She was entirely alone until she met Fred and Asuka, and when she did, she finally found herself and what she wanted to do and what she wanted to be. Aria realized that she didn't need to be alone and she didn't need to be a people pleaser either ("It's not like I enjoyed studying, I was just desperate not to be left behind."). She discovered that she was capable of making her own choices.

For the most part, it seems like Fred and Asuka both supported her until near the end when they both tried to tell her what to do in order to protect their own feelings ("Don't be so selfish. Try and listen to someone else, for once." -- Aria to Fred) instead of respect what she felt was right for herself. Frederick wanted her to go into cryostasis until a cure was found for her disease and Asuka straight up forced her too, and then later forced her to blow up Japan (which is incredibly complex and I'm just going to gloss over that because that's a huge other thing). She didn't want any of that; she wanted to die as she was BECAUSE it was her choice to do so. She knew what was going to happen and she wanted to live her last days as much as she could surrounded by the people she loved until it ended.

In a lot of ways I think her story mirrors Sol's, but there are things about her story that they haven't revealed yet. It's possible Asuka simply convinced her to give cryostasis a chance and that she wasn't forced into it. With how adamant she was against it in her argument with Fred though I'm not very sure....

I want to know so badly how much she knew about the Gear cell research being diverted into WMDs and how that weighed on her. Did she know that Asuka was going to betray Frederick later? I wonder if maybe she agreed to the cryostasis and later being turned into a Gear herself (she was in control as Justice before the Black Sunrise broke her mind—did she accept the Scales of Juno to keep it out of the wrong hands?) in order to stay close to the research project and try her best to keep the damage under control. I think that's ultimately why Asuka betrayed Fred, so he could stay close to the Gear project in order to keep things from getting way worse than they ended up. The Black Sunrise saved all of humanity, after all. At the cost of Aria.

let me explain. slander is part of the fgc. pushing an agenda with to defend your main is part of the fgc. my main is lowtier and honest and your main is hightier and no skill. to the common player a character’s lore is nothing but tidbits of information that can be used for slander. so we’re incentivized to pick up the most out of context and unflattering lore to make your look bad.

it gave us these mainstains such as:

“ky fucked a 3 year old”

“sol gorilla”

“baiken players play one handed”

“johnny chaser” etc etc. these aren’t the worse of it

they’ve no interest in examining their mains as characters within the story which is fine. they’re playing the game.

the problem arises when players that do care about the lore and sees their mains as characters within a story take this slander sincerely. taking the agenda as law. or worse, take it as an accurate reflection of the character. so now the character is completely mischaracterizated by the fandom and the agenda has won because we love repeating the same 3 jokes.

it is pathetically easy to spread misinfo about guilty gear characters. lorewise and gameplay because everyone just believes everything. at least with gameplay info you know you’re being fucked with.

what i mean to say is, when unika drops prepare yourselves for the inevitable, “unika chaser,” and “racist future trunks,” and “may cuck chair” strays if she is cracked. or worse even more bridget slander relating to the ambiguity of unika’s age. because the last 12 years and counting of “ky fucked a 3 year old” jokes were hilarious.

tldr: the fgc is painfully unfunny

This is the most I’ve dared venture into this community and from what I hear the tumblr side is the least extreme.

it's weird when you actually think about it for two seconds because they're both very immature, just in their own respective ways

it gives the vibes that they're treating her like that because "she's mature for her age" but i think it's misogyny too

Most of the lore we have with Aria is her either playfully picking on him, arguing with him, or turning him down. But nearly all of it is through flashback sequences via Sol, so it's tinted by that perspective and it's possible he's only focusing on the negative parts or things that he wished had gone differently. We know that she turned down his marriage proposal and he got turned into a Gear before they had a chance to talk things through or whatever, but it seems like Aria knew by then that she was either not going to live much longer or that the Gear cell project was being redirected towards military uses and that the world was going to get worse soon, so that doesn't tell us much.

On the other hand, we can probably assume that they slept together at least once because Dizzy is only a half-Gear. When Frederick finally finds out that Aria is terminally ill, she's worried about him being alone after she dies and asks him to promise her that he won't be. Which feels like she's begging him to not put a hold on his life because she won't be there anymore. During that argument she says this to him though: "Don't be so selfish. Try and listen to someone else, for once."

What I’m really saying is thus:

Everyone….we don’t have to fight…please, take my hand….let’s all walk into the suspiciously sapphic flag-colored sunset…together.