art and stuff and things

hi tumblr, i accidentally forgot you exist, how have things been in the last couple years

so there's this thing that has always bugged me in fantasy stories with any form of good magic and bad magic, where they would play up the temptations and the immense power that the "dark side" offered... and then as a result failed to properly justify why the fuck the bad guys lost anyway. the usual way to get out of this nicely is to have the bad guys destroy each other/themselves; this is... fine. worse is when the good guys win for no discernible reason at all, or when they just... care bear the bad guys. like, heart-emote at a villain so much he turns on the other villains and dies in a redemption arc. (yes a lot of this is complaining about star wars, but only because that's what i'm watching. it's not unique to star wars in any way) anyway. today, after watching a youtube video that has fuck-all to do with fiction or literary villains (it was about a group of ppl whose worldview seems... extremely self-defeating, let's say), i realized finally how this problem can be resolved in a way that is satisfactory, at least to me. cuz you see, i'm kind of an asshole; a nasty little gremlin who will often succumb to satisfyingly mean impulses and highly uncharitable thoughts about others; for the purpose of this post, my thinking is like what villains are like. meanwhile, the people in the video i watched were of the "genuinely caring" type. maybe they also have the nasty reflexes, but i think they also have an AT LEAST equally strong "there for the grace of god go i" reflex even for the worst ppl, where they try to understand how one could become a self-hating little waste dump of a person. for the purpose of this post, this is the hero side thinking. so anyway, i realized if the video had been made by a spiteful gremlin like me, it'd be 90% dunking and maybe 10% trying to figure ppl out, which probably wouldn't've reached any deeper than "lol self-hating bigots". but because it was made by less vindictive people, it instead produced some fascinating insights into how certain beliefs and behaviors can arise. which *ALSO* means it offered some starting points on how to prevent people from becoming like that, how to try to get people out of it once they're down that path, and how to combat some of it. y'all. the good guys are better people-understanders. maybe even than the bad guys they're trying to understand. not only does this provide a much more substantial foundation for any care-bearing of villains into having a redemption arc, it also means they should be able to outmaneuver the bad guys by finding their psychological sore spots. (ok this was probably entirely too much text for what just amounts to me circuitously arriving at a “kenland contains the seeds of its own destruction” way of defeating overpowered villains, but fuck it, at least i figured it out to my satisfaction, lol.)

🤔🤔 if i wrote "eyes the color of a glacial lake", would anyone know that that means...? 🤔🤔