Still Figuring It All Out

Because ao3’s tagging system explicitly allows romantic pairings in Gen fics as long as the relationship is not the focus of the fic.

(But real talk: this comes up a lot on Tumblr and on r/ao3 and while most people know the Gen fic rules, there’s always a portion of people who don’t and get extremely frustrated when they can’t find a fic devoid of romantic relationships. Which is valid! But definitely not a reason to blame authors or their fics.

What concerns me is the growing amount of people who acknowledge ao3’s correct tagging rules and then say “well I don’t like/believe in it” and proceed to ignore the rules and continue to be upset because they don’t want it to be a rule and they think they can apply their own “beliefs” to the system and others should too.

That’s not how rules work.

If you want to change ao3, join the OTW. Run for one of their elected seats. Petition for a rule change, etc. Help wrangle the “no relationships” tags and encourage use of one others might want too.

But stop treating every relationship like it’s icky and that others are morally inferior because they’re okay with the Gen rules. You don’t make the rules, and that’s a good thing!

Some new adorable sets I never seen before spotted today! (I have the popcorn set with the sheep, but the mouse in this one have a even cuter dress!!!)

And then generative ai was created.

And now I get it. I get why nobody on Star Trek spends all their free time in the holodeck. I get why all the crew are putting on stage plays, and holding music recitals, and building models, and playing poker. I get why everyone was so skeptical and mean to the Doctor on Voyager. I get why the ONE TIME we see someone obsessed with the holodeck it infringes on people’s likeness rights and permissions.

Because fundamentally at the end of the day we are human beings and we ENJOY working with our hands and making REAL human connections. A person who learns to play an instrument is always going to be viewed as an artist over someone who asks the computer to generate music for them.

Even as recent as Lower Decks they were making fun of the fact that the crew were putting on amateurish plays and holding music recitals. But after living with Ai for so long and seeing how detrimental it’s been to the world… I’d much rather watch my friends put on a stage play than “participate” in a holodeck movie.

What’s most amazing about this is that it was completely unintentional. I do not for one second think that the writers of the time in the 90’s were really thinking about the larger issues that generative ai and chatGTP would cause. How could they? Text to speech back then was still robotic as heck. More likely they wrote that stuff in because it was cheaper to film on sets the owned than try to build, film, or rent out different locations each week.

That’s the down to earth logistical real reason Data is reciting poems about his cat or Riker is in a play put on in ten forward. It’s just cheaper to do that than to build a whole new set or move production to a new location.

Yet at the end of the day, I think that unintentionally speaks to a very human need that ai is making more and more prevalent to us day in and day out.

With Star Trek, it's frequently about balance. The Doctor is for emergencies. And his program is still experimental. Being active all the time throws off that balance, and he requires time to adjust, and so does the crew. And Barclay is misusing the holodeck, to the point where there's an actual medical condition.

So basically, the tech only works when people respect the human element, in both creation and product, and utilize the holodeck in combination with other forms of creation and entertainment. And that's where modern "AI" comes in. Because tech bros and executives and purchased politicians don't give a flying fuck about humans. The holodecks aren't generative slop, but they *could have been*, and that's our tragedy.

Tell me you don't understand the source material without telling me you don't understand the source material

anon thinks that's good bc that was hella racist and reeks of post 9/11 stereotypes

Hi anon!

I could be wrong, but the sand benders didn’t really strike me as such. When I first watched ATLA, I was kind of excited at the prospect of having Arab representation (for once, even in a fictional world) but it seems like a couple of different things:

I think their clothes are inspired by the Tuareg people of North Africa

I believe the Si Wong Desert is based on the Gobi Desert in Mongolia and northern China

ATLA absolutely overlooks West Asia, so I assumed that they weren't related to the region

When talking about a people that live by/in a desert in the ATLA world, it makes sense to me that they'd bend the earth they had most comfort with. I've always been very fascinated by how versatile earth bending is and how different people from different climates would bend

To be honest, I think of Zaheer from TLOK more when I think of that kind of racism. Don't get me wrong, he is a great villain, and I still love that season more than anything. It's just, he's like, the only character I can think of to have an explicitly Arabic name, features of someone from the region, and is destructive and violent in pursuit of his cause, which is the way the West views Arabs and Muslims (which they usually think are the same thing)

What people like me dislike most is that Netflix's ATLA fundamentally misunderstands the characters, themes, and content of the original series, and the writing is awful. They have a great foundation and most of their casting is great, but the writing messes up what they could have. They get to scenes that are important without it making sense and they choose aspects of the original show to showcase 1 to 1 without having a good justification for it. The writers misunderstand subtlety and nuance, and they shoehorn in great moments that now feel unearned. They make unnecessary "edgy" moments I guess because live action is "adult"???

What we'd want is an adaptation like the LOTR movies or The Hunger Games. Not 1 to 1, and in fact very different from the originals. But they understand the source material and get to the important beats in ways that make sense for their medium without butchering the characters or themes of the original content. They understand and have the spirit of what the originals were.

canon event

“Lin…I ask for nothing more than to let me fight for you.”