God's Favorite Mistake

HL2VRAI ACT 3: TAKE 2 !!!

Sorry to keep you waiting 🌻 its time to try again. last time our systems blew up in our face, this time, we're Stronger. better visuals, better performance, 6x better load times (no joke). Come 2 Ravenholm

we'll actually be live on Tuesday 30 mins early (7:30pm EST)! the actual LIVE show is starting at the same time as before, but we'll be going live early for the pre-show to make time to play the events of the first stream with some light editing before the rest of ACT 3 starts. it's not captioned like the final vid will be, but is cut up to be digested smoothly and has some small v/sfx additions. it's about 30 minutes long, hence the time change!

Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.

"People in the imperial core don't realize how much of the products in our lives are directly there because of colonialism. so they recreate that and then you have the weird implications of fantasy colonialism. You can say 'why does it matter for my fantasy Europe to have coffee' because you don't know why your real life Europe has coffee. And that these facts do actually have a death toll to them."

"The coffee example in particular its very interesting. Bc it'd be quite easy to justify having coffee in a fantasy story that's set in a tropical region. Or in a kingdom that trades with a tropical region or whatever. But then you realize that never happens because. sff writers NEVER set their stories in tropical weathers. I can count on one hand the fantasy worlds where there are prosperous kingdoms in tropical regions. And that opens the can of worms of: why is the default fantasy setting a temperate forest of pine and oak trees. Or a snowy mountainous landscape. While deserts and jungles are always dangerous exotic foreign lands."

My dad has 4 half siblings and two step siblings. They're all a decent bit younger than him. When I was a teenager, we went to a family reunion, and I realized something—my dad did not respect his siblings. He looked down on all of them. He saw them as fuck-ups and overgrown children. My dad had the American dream: well paying management job, suburban house, wife, and three kids. My aunt and uncles did not. Excluding my aunt, none of them were married or in serious relationships. They hadn't really settled into long term careers. Several of them were working the kind of jobs that get called "Unskilled labor." So he looked down on them because the youngest one was in his thirties (and several were much older), and yet none of them had "settled down" into what he saw as lifelong, permanent careers and relationships and lives. He was polite to their faces, sure, but I heard how he talked about them behind their backs, to my mother.

And then a few years ago, we visited his brothers again for Thanksgiving. And I realized something again--he respected them now. He saw them as equals. Why? Well. All of a sudden, every single one of them had serious, committed romantic partners. They didn't even need to still be with those partners—one of my uncle's fiance passed away from cancer before they could marry—just having had one showed that they matured into a real adult participating in society. In fact, at one point, my aunt was telling my mom about how one of my uncles was no longer living in an apartment she owned, but instead, after having a steady girlfriend for about a year, he moved in with her. And my mom literally said to my aunt, "wow. Look at that. He finally grew up."

One of the lines that frequently gets repeated about anti-aspec sentiment is "why would anyone hate asexuals/aromantics/etc? They aren't even doing anything." And that's exactly it. In the eyes of amatonormative culture, we aren't doing anything. Adults are supposed to do things. That's how you become a member of society.