OblivionBlade, Tumbl Dryer

* Is this really the content that makes everything she's done okay?

I'm an absolute shitter to my core, I know this. Though as much as I love treating her as the joke that she is, sometimes you do gotta be serious. I'd never be caught dead participating in this double think where Lily is both a threat to everyone and a self-important goober spinning her wheels, though a threat to a few she certainly is.

I'm about done pulling punches, so if you want to see me pop the lid off my cool, do please read past the cut.

Because for someone who strongly opposes colonization, it's strange how much admiration she seems to have for Canada while condemning the United States. The U.S. was itself a former colony, and Canada has its own long history of colonization, including many of the same atrocities against Indigenous peoples and minority groups. It's not as though Canada is uniquely innocent in that regard.

What really stands out to me is that she seems to treat Canada's continued relationship with the Crown and its treaty traditions as proof that it's fundamentally different from other settler-colonial states. But that feels like a very selective reading of history.

I never pegged CD as a patriot or nationalist, but this aspect of her writing definitely comes across that way. The contrast between her anti-colonial themes and her idealized portrayal of Canada feels weird.

Oh she's not a patriot or nationalist. She's a narcissist and Canada has the misfortune of being where she lives. In fact i have done enough homework to know that the treaty that ended World War 3 was signed in her hometown. For what reason?

Fuck idunno... Semi important nautical presence? That's like signing of a declaration of secession of Texas in Minneapolis, but sure fuck it why not?

Neither country is bloodless. For every Healthcare plus there is a cost of living minus... I won't drag on, because frankly it's not even an argument I wanna have... we all know deep down the reasons and there's no point in sugar coating it.

Lily likes to think she's objective, but she just likes Canada because she lives there and hates the US because her haters live here. Dignifying it more than that is overestimating her and her compacity to reason out her thoughts.

Hitting the nail on the head of why i never really grow bored of this. She does know better. She knows what good writing is in theory, but she can't clear the barrier of knowing to understanding. Like somebody that always hears you but at no point listens to a fuckin word.

Yet another thing in Into the Void has caused a thought to surface, an old problem of hers that just feels worse now that she controls the lore. Namely in that her main cast is so non-specific they can be swapped into another setting without a major rewrite.

To explain for the less media literate, worldbuilding and character building are concepts that often intersect, and often are at their best when they do. For most writers i feel like im getting those looks of "yeah, no fucking shit, stupid" but we have the misfortune of talking about a woman who thinks animation is unimportant to critiques of animated works so YOU JUST CAN'T BE SURE NO MORE...

For a series off the top that absolutely excels at this, good ol' MHA. It doesn't science too great, but it's logic is always on point. It nails a lot of big and small details that elevate it from being a generic copy of marvel/DC. From something as small as countering power incontinence with oven mitts for a sleepy uraraka, up to how bakugo embodies both the great and bad things about powerful and flashy quirks. On the positive side, he's unshakable. He can toss hands with the strongest the verse has to offer. He is as much a tactical genius as Izuku despite having a powerful quirk that CAN brute force most problems at no cost to himself. Though in return for all this he is absolutely as entitled and arrogant as you'd expect from a kid that had a better handle of how much of a god amongst men he was before he could write full sentences.

In sharp contrast.... we could make Into the Void into a cross- country RV trip and the MOST you'd need to rewrite is how they met Julie. For the extensive worldbuilding it is written like its happening like, today. Not one character is written like they are in this free love far flung apocalypse cubed, it honestly feels pretty modern with occasional reminders that space is, well, SPACE. You'd swear aside from when they are specifically discussing their norms, they'd be totally exempt from them. Everyone almost randomly unsyncs with the setting like trying to pick up a radio station from the bottom of a fallout bunker with a mostly dead walkman. "But blivion is first draft." I'll believe the second when I see it. Pokemadhouse had the same problem. G could be replaced with any mildly attractive psychic alien because she ain't a Gardevior. Not to mention the hundreds of Lore breaks so C!Lily can keep real Lily's "Le tragic past". But that's mean and frankly isn't the worst thing she did anyway. Even though I'm having trouble remembering Scars right now, I do remember Sai remarking that "these 80's teens talk like they're about to grab out their smartphones."

It hampers Lily's ability to really say anything about the worlds she had explored and/or built. The characters all feel replaceable, shit just a post ago I talked about how trading the cast of ItV out for MHA characters made Lily's chunky n' chunky dialogue BETTER. There might as well not even be a Kestri, Lev, and Julie. Just leslri, levly, lulie Orchard... lord knows I ain't getting a Lecture from Lev Martin, Ace Pilot of the Big Sister! I'm getting ranted at by a woman with her hair style slightly different and a nametag made with notebook paper and the nearest crayon... who's cycled through friends and lovers alike at a worrying rate...

Yeah i don't think I give a fuck what they have to say about relationships.

Now I love me a good fanfiction, but there tends to be a lurch when a fanfic writer writes something original for the first time. They are different beasts, you see, and are tamed in different ways.

Now it's bold of me to assume everybody reading has a firm grasp on the trials and tribulations of creative writing so I will do a lightning round of explaining the basics of both.

Fanfic is a double edged sword of creative writing as it's got wonderous upsides, but stifling downsides. Namely in that you kinda just get to dig right in as a writer. World? Built. Characters? Characterized. Power system? Online and ready. It allows you to skip the slog-!.... provided you walk between the lines. It's all pre-made, so there's a baseline you must follow, and you can only fly so high with it as it will always exist in the shadow of the sacred "Canon timeline". There's still more than enough design space that it's still functionally infinte, but is indeed working in a very big box.

Meanwhile original works are full fat, none of those beautiful timer savers are here. You have to make the characters, build the world, and establish the systems of power be them literal or metaphor. Worse yet you have to do it all in a way where it's not lil dots of meat surrounded by big ol' globs of fat. Though the design space is literally infinite, the only limit is you.

Into the Void do NOT make the jump gracefully. In fact it did it woefully poorly. The moment I realized it was reading that bit from chapter 16 about a woman that was only barely insulted twice talking about how hashtag blessed she is in this cruel universe, then on a whim I just did a mental find and replace with a popular tragic ship of togachoko and... it helped, make no mistake it was still awful, but it took the edge off of some entitled fuck telling me how happy she is if i run it back pretending its with someone like Himiko Toga who would almost need to affirm this sudden wash of happiness out loud as her past would make it feel way too good to be true. It clicked and now I can't unread it. During a second sweep I noticed how much I didn't question because I did my Into the Homework. Kestri goes through less in the actual work she does in the lore!

It is all of the "laziness" of fanfic, without benefiting from the pre-established scaffolding of pre-existing works. It's a pile of mush PRAYING that you went out of your way to track down all the lore from @ cd-call-offical-ramblechamber dot Tumblr dot com.

Boldly assuming we already care about Kestri and Lathe in the same way we care about two characters that we watched grow through a huge extended journey. To just keep running with the MHA ship, it really does help it feel like we aren't biting into a stick of sidewalk chalk with dialogue that fuckin twee if the character saying it went through some shit. And to be fair it's hard to top actually dying.

You can get away with a lot when the people you're writing for want this-

And instead got a comically large ladle of this-

The crux is that i read fusion, not fission. If it's fission the story survives as it is... it's still shit and your questions are very valid.

IF IT'S FUSION then it undermines the story in it's entirety. The infrastructure needed to limp a fusion reactor along SOLVES THE VERY ISSUE THE PAIR ARE FIXING. if said reactors can reasonably be replaced then the whole setting is 10,000,000,000% suffering because it just wants to.

Really don't matter how you slice the cake, it's a rotten cake. Though I think i can say with certainty that this is one of the greatest examples that while some of the greatest artistic pieces of all time were acts of spite, you do need more than spite.

It's one of those rare moments I feel kinda bad for her, because Into the Void isn't made for her fans, or even people that would like it, its made for me. It's made for Britt. It's made for all the other Lily crit blogs. It's made for Donald Fucking Trump! It's made for the fucking Kiwifarmers that basically just hate her for sport!... We don't want it. We never did. Likely never will. I personally am open to being surprised by her, but can not lie i hold bias regardless.

Certainly not helping the vendettas' is the uncurious nature of the CD-Call leads to holes. She includes a lot of hard numbers without doing much research, so there's a LOT of very obvious gaps in the math. That complete disregard for the psychological toll of extended enforced isolation. Thanks to the NPO chapter we learn that the current engines are fusion... WHICH IS SO MUCH HIGHER UP ON THE TECH TREE HYDROLYSIS IS SOMETHING YOU'D

GET BY DEFAULT!

Unironically ripping out a jet engine to slot in a fuckin wobbler engine. Full stop. Dueterium production means they have functionally infinite hydrogen to use as propulsion. Kestri is building a small scale fuel refinery when buying a couple of these lil fuckers would fix it all the same. (I know hydrogen storage is actual hard to do, but nothing close maintaining a full refinery for it.)

Alright now if youve been in the trenches like, no fucking shit Sherlock. Right? This would make the bakers dozen of instances where Lily has written relatives, blood or otherwise, as a couple of newlyweds... but fuck let's shake it up. I went out to play in traffic and had a very minor case of severe brain damage has happened upon me that cured my lily orchard derangement syndrome by just surgically removing all trace of her from my living brain.

Now that I've had my lobotomy I shall now read these 16 chapter of some shit called Into the Void from this person of whom my old self hated...-

Well that was a slog. Though between this and some supplemental materials also left open I am told that Kestri and Lev's relationship is normal. Like not to us but in this universe their relationship is pretty fuckin standard, expected even, barely worth notice.... Unfortunate problem in the writing.... uh.... EVERYBODY FUCKING NOTICES!

Every other chapter there is somebody (IN-UNIVERSE!!!) that MUST comment on how non-familial their relationship looks, in active and clear spite of the worldbuilding that says shit is perfectly normal between them. Up to and including mistaking Julie as their biological child! The leap in logic that two white parents spat out a black child, just so Lily can shout, "IT'S NOT INCEST!!!"

Starting to feel like I already need another lobotomy... not only was the story not terribly interesting, but now im suspicious of her having an incest fetish because the story itself can't stop itself! Frankly I don't know enough about Lily but to assume that she's either too nervous to own it, or is being cheeky as a secondary fetish in itself... but... there has to be a third option right... oh... i feel an old rage in my guts... ow....

Oh, now that i am miraculously un-braindamaged I know the third option, she's admitted to including things in her works to spite us, the lily-crit community. Unfortunately if you aren't in the fucking trenches you would NEVER KNOW THAT! So we end up looking really ashamed of the obvious incest, or are rubbing it condescendingly in the audience's face.

At the risk of teaching somebody how to crime, if you want to get away with something you aren't supposed to, a certain amount of confidence is required. If you're gonna shoplift you just gotta get it and walk out of there like you ain't just swiped some swag. If you ain't got the nerve, the suspicious behavior will be fairly obvious.

Kingdom Hearts isn’t Souls-Like in anyway, at least you from what I remember playing the first game on the PS2.

Why would Lorch even think of comparing them?

I've spoken at length about the sheer difference of the two, so i will posit my theory... I don't think Lily can appreciate there's more than one type of Power Fantasy...

Lily is a very much an "X is X" kinda gal. To the point even metaphors of X do not count because it isn't just X. So if this alone is our measuring stick then I can concede that Kindom Hearts is objectively the better power trip, if only by being infinitely more accessible than the soulsborne games.

Kingdom hearts has progression, sure. But its a nice balanced drip feed. You can't stumble into harder levels right away, you're always getting a steady and intuitive boost with every world cleared. In say, Elden Ring, there's no direction after getting your tarnished absolutely SHITFUCKED by Margit. And the second hardest area in the whole game is sitting off to the right. Any progress is progress you have to EARN. YOU must find the weapons and equipment best for your guy, and even then you'll never be strong enough to just go "light work" without an equivalent level of skill at the games mechanics. In the end you are winning because YOU, the player, are good enough to beat the odds. KH has named important character fighting odds HE is prepared for, even if you ain't.

Generative AIs are fine, so long as they are not used as cheap substitutes for human creativity & real artistry.

We should also be prepared for self awareness in AI and robotics (however far away it may be).

— What do you think?

Well, I see it on two fronts. A big one is that it can not be seperated from it's downsides, it's impact has breached into multiple markets and it's environmental impact is... DIRE... i won't bang on about water, because if you don't know, just look... i can't just describe it... though for an easy impact, most tech has bloated hard because of AI. My PC nearly quadrupled in value overnight, which is fantastic if I was ever to sell it, unfortunately tis not my end game.... so right now I just have the anxiety that what would have been a painful but doable 120 dollar fix is now just a sneeze under 500 fuckin all American freedom dollars. Lord for-fuckin-bid its the GPU or cpu.

Lest we also mention the sheer amount of raw data it MUST consume to be as little as okay at what you need it for...

Though lets just pack this all up and say we're in the golden future where Gen AI is clean, guilt free, and monetarily also free. You have the misfortune of talking to a hobby artist and writer. I am of the unavoidable Bias that doing less work doesn't sound like a reward. Not to mention that an AI is not a being of artistic intent, at least as we know them now. It's only ever going to give you EXACTLY what you ask for, via the path of least resistance, the only rhyme or reason is the presumed artistic intent of the 100s of images it smashed together. All I can see it as is a potential springboard on the HUMONGOUS "IF" it was both free and had no negative impacts.

One has to do with how worldbuilding is actually quite important to character building, leading into how Lily writes characters that feel like strangers in their own world.

The other is just straightforward dragging lily through the mud for the severe abuse of plausible deniability as she writes incest.

So what'll we write first?!?!

VOTE NOW!

it might also be a bit of a hold over from Doug walker, channel awesome style humour where the critics would just blame who ever made the work their criticising and not trying to exam its flaws on a deeper, more nuanced level, I.e. corporate meddling is to blame 90% of the time. 

Also I find it funny that her other reason is that "saying their fucking is the less interesting reason for these people to be so close" but has literally never actually explored what would makes these enmeshed relationships interesting because all the characters do is snuggle and never fight. Even when things pop up that should challenge these relationships or cause moments of friction nothing happens.

Her claim that making them bang would be less interesting, yet not actually exploring why that is just proves that it is actually supposed to be incest. Because she admits having the siblings do incest would make these characters make sense.

TBH I think her last reason for not committing to the incest is the real readon--she's just not into more sexual stories right now. Because if it was the haters, she drive them even more crazy by writing the incest and clearly it doesn't make the characters interesting like she claims. She's just not horny like she used to be and has pushed her brand into the wholesome category so even if she wanted to write incest or more sexy works, she can't without loosing what little audience she has left.

Funnily enough she does want people to think it's good.

Unfortunately subversion for the sake of it usually isn't that great, and here we are with Into the Void, it is infinitely less. Frankly it would be easy to justify in the setting, everything is artificial where they are forced to survive, it would take only a bit of worldbuilding to say everybody is real touchy feely as human contact is just about the only "natural" thing that's left... it's not great but it's leagues better than any excuse she got.

Lily just throws that whole element out and is just smashing dolls together again.

Oh so exactly what Lily says she wants but it doesn't count because there's no incestuous undertone she can pretend she isn't writing.

Won't lie I deadass forgot about that one. They do just treat Tai like a dress up doll and he's just fine with it because he turned out to be an "egg"... I feel that has notes of being not so kosher in the trans community, but I am not Trans nor do I feel i am versed enough as an ally to decide anything definitive about that.

Though abso-fucking-lutely what is the damn point when you aren't even going to humor the digimon??? You could make three OC's and lose

NOTHING

In that particular... fic... it's not even a fanfic, it's just being too lazy to design three characters. It's been a hot minute, but aren't Digimon suppose to reflect the digidestined? She's pulling a Niva again if that's true.

I feel another Call fails to read the wall brewing...