(no subject)

I played the demo for In Blood, and I feel like doing some theorizing. Four "love" interests. Four corners of the alignment chart. I bet we have some character theming going on.

So the horn dude is Wild. He pretty much has to be. He wants sex and alcohol and doesn't want rules.

Everyone you talk to about the spider lady says not to trust her, because she's cruel and manipulative and doesn't care about others. Sounds like Selfish.

The dragon's description on the download page talks about dragon hoards and you as part of the hoard. What if that's Tame? He has rules for what things should be like, and places where things should go, and he can't stand when you move out of the place he's put you in.

That leaves the sorcerer as Selfless, and there are multiple directions that could go. For everyone else, you play into their bad traits, so maybe he reverses the dynamic by enabling your bad traits?

(no subject)

The thing about AO3 discourse is that AO3 isn't meant to be THE archive. It's the archive that doesn't purge stuff, and it exists separately from archives that do purge stuff. Those archives can have a separate value. So when you argue that AO3 should purge stuff, you're not just arguing about AO3 itself. You're arguing about whether it's wrong for there to exist any site at all that has AO3's goals.

(no subject)

When I complain about how bad writing is still bad because it's on purpose, I usually mention Redshirts. But the worst case I've seen is Open City by Teju Cole.

Open City is a book about an incredibly irritating man walking around the city and thinking about the people he meets. He has vaguely liberal intuitions about all kinds of problems he sees that need to be solved, but takes no action to solve them. He thinks for a while about whatever tragedy and then moves on to the next one.

It took me about a hundred and fifty pages to realize this guy was intentionally being mocked. He's built a mental picture of himself as a good, caring person, and he's impervious to the reality that he doesn't give a shit about helping anyone. When he turns out to be a rapist, it's not even that surprising, because of course someone like this could do something terrible and then model himself as the kind of person who couldn't have done that and would never do that.

But he's not just a bad person, he's an incredibly boring one. I don't want to spend time inside the head of someone so uninvolved and tedious, regardless of the author's reasons for why he's that way.