Taliesin, Talking About Percy And Vex In Interviews: *laughing* Oh, Laura Just Decided We Were Going

I’m really into internet discourse but only pointless and stupid internet discourse like how many holes there are in a straw (it’s 2)

Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is a DnD expansion with canon gay art, singular they, and a whole section on consent and respect at the table which is like... absolutely choice.

THIS IS THE BEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN

One of my mutuals is filling my dash with Mythbusters posts and while I was ABSOLUTELY raised on those guys, I also love talking about Adam's current presence online. Because he's the only "celebrity" I trust. He's so open about his whole life's journey, who he has been in the past and mistakes he's made, how he grew up as the weird kid with undiagnosed ADHD. And you can really tell in the last couple years how he's accepted and embraced the way his own brain works. He supports his sons who want to go into art, and doesn't use their names publicly. He's been vocal about his support for the lgbt, trans, poly, heck even the furry communities (he praised furries as the one community who really knew how to pay their artists what they deserve). If you ever need to feel comforted about your place in the world as a nerd and as an artist I can't recommend enough to look up a playlist of his talks from the past decade.

you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it

example: you absolute coat hanger

tell me something nice

Sometimes I think about how and why some people had such a *bad* reaction to the end of Steven Universe, specifically in regards to the Diamonds living.

Even though they no longer are causing harm to others and are able to actually undo some of their previous harm by living, some folks reacted as though this ending was somehow morally suspect. Morally bankrupt, even.

And I think it might be because so many of us were raised on a very specific kind of kids media trope:

They all fall to their deaths.

Disney loves chucking their bad guys off cliffs. And it makes sense- in a moral framework where villains *must* be punished (regardless of whether their death will actually prevent further harm or not), but killing of any kind is morally bad for the hero, the narrative must find a way to kill the villain without the protagonists doing a murder.

It's a moral assumption that a person can *deserve* to die, that it is cosmically just for them to die, that them dying is evidence that the story itself is morally good and correct. Scar *deserves* to die, but it would be bad for Simba to kill him. So....cliff. (edit: yes, cliff then hyenas. But cliff first. Lol.)

Steven Universe, whatever else it's faults, took a step back and said "but if killing people is bad, then people dying is bad", and instead of dropping White Diamond off a cliff, asked "what would actual *restorative*, not punitive, justice look like? What would actual reparations mean here? If the goal is to heal, not just to punish, how do we handle those who have done harm?" And then did that.

Which I think is interesting, and that there was pushback against it is interesting.

It also reminds me of the folks who get very weird about Aang not killing Ozai at the end of Avatar. And like, Ozai still gets chucked in prison, so it doesn't even push back on our cultural ideas of punitive justice *that much.* and still, I've seen people get real mad that the child monk who is the last survivor of a genocide that wiped out his entire pacifist culture didn't do a murder.