One of my peeves is when people refuse to accept a fantastical element in a piece of fiction as a fantastical element, and instead try to reduce it to a real world thing that it only slightly resembles. As a person who writes fantastic fiction, part of the whole point of including fantastic elements is to imagine something that doesn’t exist, and to see some people ONLY consider those elements in terms of what does exist is annoying.
I mean, yes, fantastic things always have some grounding in reality, so the comparison is there, but when someone says “a werewolf is a 1:1 analogy for people with HIV” or something similar, it feels like a disservice is being done to both the werewolf and people with HIV. And I chose this example because it’s not just critics who do it – authors sometimes do it too, and as a fellow author of the fantastic it just perplexes me.
The elegance of a fantastic story element is that it’s not tied to reality, that it CAN’T be a 1:1 comparison. Fantastic story elements allow us to comment on a wide variety of topics while also speculating about things that don’t yet exist, all in one smooth package. Godzilla is more than an atom bomb, more than a typhoon, more than a wild animal, and reducing him and other fantastic creatons like him to simple 1:1 metaphors robs fantastic stories of their power.
When you learn that diamond companies (De Beers mostly) has been artificially inflating the price of diamonds for years, you really dont care if China screws them.
Also de Beers was founded by Cecil Rhodes who was a supporter of apartheid/imperialism/colonization
Just because the founder of a company was/is a scumbag, it doesn’t mean the entire company deserves to suffer. People deserve to work.
It’s not that I don’t feel for the poor individuals who are at risk of loosing their jobs, but that particular industry does need to die. If we could find a way to take all of those people and put them into developing new energy sources, the wolrld would probably be better off.
Everytime I see someone’s edgy theory about how capturing Pokémon is wrong, I remember that time in Sinnoh it was explicitly stated that Pokémon approach trainers specifically to engage in battle and how it’s implied multiple times throughout the series that Pokémon engage in battle and competitions for their own prestige and it’s just a symbiotic relationship that a respectful trainer gets a career for helping raise a powerful Pokémon while the Pokémon gets access to stronger opponents and more varied experiences than it ever would in its native habitat
Also in the first episode of the anime Ash asks why a wild pokemon is attacking Pikachu and his pokedex says that wild pokemon are often jealous of pokemon with trainers.
#keep your edgy shit away from my pokemon plz n thx
Pokemon are miniature blood knights who love beating the shit out of one another and dream of joining professional fighting squads that go around beating the shit out of one another and I think that’s amazing
It’s actually also officially stated that pokemon battle all the time against each other in the nature. Just think about it: it’s how they EVOLVE, that’s how they grow and mature, and you meet evolved and high-leveled pokemon in the wilds, meaning they did a lot of fighting. Also, a lot of people forget that the reason they have moves is because it’s how they harness their power in a relatively safe way. That’s why they need to learn things like “Cut”, “Surf” and “Fly”: they could do all those things naturally, but they need to learn how to cut things without gutting creatures around them, how to swim without drowning you in the process, how to fly without having you falling from dangerously high heights. They use moves precisley because that isn’t a brutal beat-down or a fight to the death, but a safe way of confrontation and personal growth. And it was also stated that captured pokemon are stronger and level up faster than wild ones, meaning that once they bond with a trainer the whole challenging other trainers is actually beneficial to them, not cruel.
OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I FORGOT ABOUT THAT. this makes much more sense now.
Honestly, this sounds like a more interesting angle to explore than the “Pokemon are just tools for human bloodsports”. What sort of implications would that raise?
Everybody just sort of forgot that, in terms of genre, Pokemon is a shonen fighting anime. The Pokemon themselves are all playing the Vegeta role–the defeated opponent who becomes a loyal ally.
This is making me more uncomfortable with later games having it socially acceptable to eat pokemon, and wanting gamefreak to bring back the idea there are normal animals on the main continents that was implied in Red and Blue.
Everytime I see someone’s edgy theory about how capturing Pokémon is wrong, I remember that time in Sinnoh it was explicitly stated that Pokémon approach trainers specifically to engage in battle and how it’s implied multiple times throughout the series that Pokémon engage in battle and competitions for their own prestige and it’s just a symbiotic relationship that a respectful trainer gets a career for helping raise a powerful Pokémon while the Pokémon gets access to stronger opponents and more varied experiences than it ever would in its native habitat
Also in the first episode of the anime Ash asks why a wild pokemon is attacking Pikachu and his pokedex says that wild pokemon are often jealous of pokemon with trainers.
#keep your edgy shit away from my pokemon plz n thx
Pokemon are miniature blood knights who love beating the shit out of one another and dream of joining professional fighting squads that go around beating the shit out of one another and I think that’s amazing
It’s actually also officially stated that pokemon battle all the time against each other in the nature. Just think about it: it’s how they EVOLVE, that’s how they grow and mature, and you meet evolved and high-leveled pokemon in the wilds, meaning they did a lot of fighting. Also, a lot of people forget that the reason they have moves is because it’s how they harness their power in a relatively safe way. That’s why they need to learn things like “Cut”, “Surf” and “Fly”: they could do all those things naturally, but they need to learn how to cut things without gutting creatures around them, how to swim without drowning you in the process, how to fly without having you falling from dangerously high heights. They use moves precisley because that isn’t a brutal beat-down or a fight to the death, but a safe way of confrontation and personal growth. And it was also stated that captured pokemon are stronger and level up faster than wild ones, meaning that once they bond with a trainer the whole challenging other trainers is actually beneficial to them, not cruel.
OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I FORGOT ABOUT THAT. this makes much more sense now.
Honestly, this sounds like a more interesting angle to explore than the “Pokemon are just tools for human bloodsports”. What sort of implications would that raise?
Everybody just sort of forgot that, in terms of genre, Pokemon is a shonen fighting anime. The Pokemon themselves are all playing the Vegeta role–the defeated opponent who becomes a loyal ally.
>Industrial waste pollutes water >Filter feeders process waste and store toxins in their bodies >People harvest shells for art >Artist suffers from exposure to toxic materials, suffers for years with debilitating mental and physical symptoms.
She will NEVER recover.
This is a spooky but important read for all of your natural artists out there!
also remember that regardless of the material’s inherent properties, inhaling any particulate matter (from sanding, grinding etc) is dangerous so it is important to work in a well ventilated area and/or use masks. goggles are also good cause you dont want to get any of this stuff in your eyes. and if you’re using chemicals (for patinas, stains, etc), adhesives, or heat be extra careful because of reactions and fumes!
>Industrial waste pollutes water >Filter feeders process waste and store toxins in their bodies >People harvest shells for art >Artist suffers from exposure to toxic materials, suffers for years with debilitating mental and physical symptoms.
She will NEVER recover.
People act like environmental pollution is always something happening “somewhere else” but we’re all breathing and eating and drinking it and it should really put some shit into perspective that just having a hobby around seashells turned this woman’s household dust into a death trap.
An in-depth study of an exceptional ichthyosaur fossil has added new
points of similarity between the marine reptiles of the past and the
cetaceans of our modern seas, including a fatty, insulating layer of
tissue called blubber.
open question: do people visualise octopuses with the big round part as the forehead or the snout? since i was a kid i saw it as the snoot and was kind of surprised by the way cartoons would represent it
An octopus does turn towards prey like this:
Which is like, the cool “Cthulhu” face I guess, and the mouth is under the tentacles if that’s what we want to think of as the “front” of an animal.
But it may walk around in whatever direction it feels like, and octopuses SWIM with the big sac facing forward:
So there isn’t so much a front and back the way we tend to think of it.
Personally though, I really do like to interpret them like they have a Moomin face.
Monsters and Stuff 