The Reading Hobbit

If you are giving someone wrong information in the hopes that they'll believe that it's true, then that's lying.

If you are giving someone wrong information under the assumption that they'll ultimately realise that it's false, and that they will find this funny, then that's joking.

If you are giving someone wrong information in the hopes that they'll believe that it's true and that their response will be funny, then that's a prank.

You're a social pack animal with enough awareness of yourself and enough theory of mind to understand that you're unwell and that the others around you don't want to see you unwell. But you've also got like 3 brain cells going on in there so the most logical solution to this problem is to hide in places where they won't see you, so you can feel bad without anyone else being aware of it, so nobody else will be upset by this.

This feels like an excellent idea even when you've been on the other side of it and you know how much you hate it when someone you love is struggling and won't let you help. But no matter how much the people who love you won't enjoy cleaning up your vomit from the middle of the living room, at the end of the day that's better for everyone involved than having to first spend 3 hours trying to find where the problem is, because something's wrong and you went out of your way to make sure it's hard to find.

It's hard to go to people you love for help when people who didn't deserve your love and trust have punished you for doing so. It's counterintuitive, it goes against what makes sense to you. Don't beat yourself up for doing what instinctively feels right.

The initial failure to be moderate comes the traditional received view, e.g. "the Vikings were all horrible barbarians who did nothing but raid and pillage and be evil". Then someone comes along and, rightly, tries to question this view. They say "hey, the Vikings were just people like you and me. Maybe they even did some things that are worth admiring, you know. Maybe we've been treating them unfairly." And this catches on, especially as the original power dynamics that motivated the received view start to fade (slander of Vikings has a lot less motivation when the Catholic church stops being so politically relevant). And people are often inclined to use these other, traditionally maligned societies as foils to critique their own society. And so it becomes widely accepted among the sort of people who consider themselves smart and thoughtful that the Vikings really weren't as bad as they've been made out to be; they've been unfairly maligned. They were just people, like you and me.

Except here comes the second failure to be moderate, when the view slowly morphs into "the Vikings were right about everything, Viking society was so much better than modern society" etc. And that's where you get these twitter leftists, who are somewhere down the second-failure-to-be-moderate telephone line.

Anyway, I'm responding to this post, and respond to many like it, in an attempt to preempt what I have often seen as an inchoate third failure to be moderate, a return to the received narrative that the Vikings just totally sucked, man. No, no! I'm not accusing OP of this specifically (I don't think they're guilty of it), but it is... in the air, around these parts.

(Tags from @tarantula-hawk-wasp :

Sun and mood

Me: Why

Same person: Because they are a bad person!

Me: But what if that character was allowed to become a better person so that they are no longer a bad person?

like, redeemed villains are generally friends with the heroes. they get to experience love and The Power of Friendship for the first time, if they haven’t already. they generally get to experience forgiveness. if their motives are based off of some kind of trauma or pain (like a lot of redeemed villains) then they will probably have that resolved and get some sense of closure or inner peace from whatever is hurting them.

so when they say that “this character doesn’t deserve a redemption arc” what they mean is “this character doesn’t deserve to be loved. they don’t deserve happiness, peace, or companionship”. the alternatives I have seen are:

“I hope that this character realizes how awful they are and they kill themselves”

“I hope this character is redeemed by a heroic sacrifice” (meaning they would be redeemed but wouldn’t be alive to experience the “reward” afterwards)

“I hope this character begs and pleads for forgiveness over and over again, but is never forgiven”

If redemption is unacceptable, if bad behavior can never be forgiven, what is the alternative?

1. COMMIT TO THE BIT

2. PARTAKE IN THE DIVINE ACT OF CREATION

1) Be funny/ continue the online joke: persona you are conveying ( Think Gorbachev)

2) Have sex/fuck someone ( It is specifying say straight sex but we can ignore that part on tumblr)

I know we don't vibe with Mary Sues, and I know we like watching characters fail...

But if your character is the world's best assassin, they shouldn't be botching nearly every single step of every single job just because the plot demands it. If your character is one of the greatest fighters to ever live, they can't badly lose every single fight the plot throws at them and then barely win the final confrontation. If your character is a competent military strategist, they need at least a few small successes during the course of the plot. If your character is an experienced leader, they can't be constantly making the kind of missteps that realistically would cause their subordinates to lose confidence in them.