Tropunkal Flair

I looked up some of the artist's other builds and they're all just absolutely incredible

There's an interaction I had online a little while ago that I think about a lot. I shared (in a fairly "woke" space) that recent-ish meta study that showed that while we don't have a lot of actual usable data on the subject, everything we currently have on transfem athletes gives us no real reason to think they have an athletic advantage. and people were not happy with this. One person immediately went in talking about a time a professional men's soccer team beat a professional women's soccer team by a large margin. And this was generally accepted and supported; no one but me seemed able to notice how irrelevant that was. No one cared that in a conversation about transfems on estrogen they pulled out an isolated instance of cisgender men competing against cisgender women. No one cared that they ignored everything about the study I shared and instead just said "no amount of estrogen can account for that athletic difference" and backing that claim up with absolutely nothing. No one cared they said, and I quote, "[in high level athletics] trans women are a threat to cis women." They admitted to cherrypicking, saying that they could find as many examples of men beating women as they wanted. And this was considered (through the democracy of up/downvotes) to be better evidence and citation than the specific metanalysis I shared that covered 50+ studies.

How to "get it":

do you play/know limbus company

🐦‍⬛🌁

I recently described my second novel's (early) plot outline to a friend and without giving too much away, it's a horror-romance about a woman whose lover is slowly transformed into a dangerous monster due to forces outside of their control. She wrestles with her fear and love, how useful her monstrous lover is in their current survival situation, how dangerous her lover could become, and ultimately at the end of the story decides that monster or not, this is a person that she loves and who loves her back, and goes back to save them from a horrible death.

I'll add an obligatory addendum here which is that I don't think this is an issue with My Friend, who I love, but with the current Media Climate. Subtext is being scraped out of everything, readers and audiences aren't being asked to Think For Themselves or ask questions or mine meaning in the (mainstream!!!) art they're interacting with. I know from personal experience with pitching my first novel that publishers and agents are anxious when story elements are left deliberately ambiguous or without closure. Television shows and films are being written with dialogue that is overly literal, where characters say their thoughts and plans out loud to each other over and over again. Theatre revivals of old shows are having lines changed or added in to clarify what characters mean or how the audience should feel. It is not a flaw in the reader to internalise the structure of stories - that's how canons come to exist! It is, however, critical that storytellers resist this erosion of subtext and overly-precious need to police people's Interpretations of the work.