Mjollydragon - Insert Witty Comment Here

Today in math class:

[Image description: a picture of a blackboard with math written on it. Below the math is the phrase “Pf: I’m too lazy,” followed by a box that signifies the ending of a proof.]

re: self-inserts

I summon the demon Campbell Mark Swan. I wrote the words along the perimeter of an almost closed circle, drawn on a blank page of a notebook laying on my floor. I knew it wouldn’t actually work, but I still felt an excited anticipation as I closed the circle.

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Yes, you would be right about that.

shocking

I’m fairly certain that Bernie has never tried to kill Hillary. Then again, my Latin teacher said that our only primary source for Cateline’s actions is Cicero’s speeches, which are not exactly going to be the most trustworthy in this scenario.

au where the Romans make political memes

“I'm always shocked at the number of fantasy genre readers who can suspend disbelief more easily for dragons than bisexuals. Especially considering that almost no bisexuals breathe fire. Like, hardly any. Less than half, certainly.” -Rich Burlew, after a fan complained that the inclusion of a bisexual character in his webcomic violated their suspension of disbelief.

why would a fantasy world with dragons and orcs and liches not have gay marriage, i dont fucking understand these nerds who strive to cling to the shittier aspects of reality in fantasy

(Also, for the record, if you ever have to choose between killing me or letting literal trillions of people die, you should kill me! Not that people expressing more-or-less this view particularly helped, but.)

This is by no means an original take, and I probably did not spend as much time as I should have editing the writing into being a coherent take, but:

In an awful lot of movies, Steve Rogers would have been right.

(Or, well, treated-as-right by the narrative, at least; in some of those movies many, many people would have died for his idealism, but this wouldn’t have been treated as wrong.)

When faced with this sort of explicit trolley problem, there are two main messages in pop culture: either you should never pull the level (you might kill a named character) or you should find a way to save everyone. For instance, take The Last Jedi: the narrative treats it as correct that Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing his life, not because his plan wouldn’t have worked, but more-or-less because we don’t trade lives. (Other examples: every fucking YA novel ever. ‘You can choose between your significant other... or saving the world.’ ‘Bye, world.’)

(She is absolutely trading lives, just not in the direction that, you know, saves people.)

(This is not to say that characters never trade off lives! The really obvious example here is that most movies are totally fine with killing the villain to protect innocents, although I’m pretty sure the message is generally closer to “the lives of villains don’t matter” than “pull the lever.” Characters will also sometimes do things like choose which of multiple locations to go to, which is generally understood in their narratives to be trading off lives at least a little. But when there’s this sort of explicit setup, the correct answer as portrayed in the narrative is almost never “pull the lever.”)

Now, I actually can think of counterexamples -- Wrath of Khan is very clear that you should pull the lever, for instance, and since I brought up The Last Jedi earlier I might as well mention Holdo’s choice at the end. But in said counterexamples, the person making the choice is almost always choosing to kill themself, not another person, and they usually would have died anyway.

But when characters are faced with the explicit choice of killing someone, maybe multiple someones, or letting far more people die, the treated-as-correct choice is almost never to kill them. 

And I’m glad that we have a movie where that’s not the case.

Do you ever think about how, in ATLA, Iroh was still actively leading the siege at Ba Sing Se ~5 years before the show started?

In school we had to read Romeo and Juliet. Now, I’m not sure if you know this, but it has a man and a woman in a relationship. Like, if you want to read that sort of thing, it’s fine with me, but I frankly thing it’s outrageous to indoctrinate our children into thinking that sort of lifestyle is normal. This was a PUBLIC school too. Is that what you want your tax dollars to pay for?

omfg so today I saw a man and a woman holding hands in public, i mean i don’t have anything against heterosexuality but don’t flaunt it in front of me, think of the kids omfg