passing the need for witness

It really doesn't require like a doctorate to understand the appeal of even the most filthy booktok fantasies. Idk why we're all pretending it's some kind of impenetrable enigma (this is sarcastic: I Know Why) that so many women wanna read about Men Who Are Dicks, Out Of Love

Like if you think about the experiences of heterosexual women for longer than like 20 seconds you can probably start to guess why "Oh he's a raging, violent douchebag, due to the singular passion he has for me" is such a common fantasy. This isn't rocket science

I'm not sure we need societal explanations for why Modern Romance Novels with Dark Edgy Love Interests are popular; there's a much simpler explaination of

1. Most everyone wants someone very interested in them and Hot. It's almost too common to state

2. Like explosions in movies or violent video games, some things are much more fun when the downside risk is null

3. Some people are subs

Some of it’s the fantasy of the person who does things to you without asking, but always does exactly what you want them to do, so you never have to communicate your desires.

... are people theorizing that men don't like Women Who are Dicks? Because I can tell you that this is absolutely not true, and if you have a gendered societal explanation, it seems like the existence of the opposite-gendered trope at least warrants a rethink of the forces at play.

Male romance fantasies absolutely include lots of the tsundere types, the stone cold bitch who melts with affection later on. This is an extremely common archetype. Tough exterior, hidden vulnerability? This is, if my understanding is correct, essentially what tsundere is, and this has a lot of appeal to men.

And the fantasy, if I can break my personal rule to not psychoanalyze tastes in media, is both one of overcoming a person's natural personality and issues (she loves me that much that her standoffish and bitchy persona melts away) and a fantasy of counter-signals to romantic attraction being false.

But I think this is just a general human thing, not something that we particularly need a gender studies debate to explain.

(I am willing to accept that women prefer this sort of dynamic more men, if someone has data to show that, but the data would have to be good data, and then we could start arguing gender role stuff after that. But I don't have the data handy, so must only make the point that this is both a male and female fantasy.)

Some day I'm going to run a trad fantasy dungeon crawler campaign where instead of unbroken ten-thousand-year dynasties, every time the player characters need to interact with the nobility, etc. I use a set of lookup tables to randomly generate the kingdom's current political situation. If the new results are irreconcilable with the old, there was a revolution while they were down in the dungeon and they didn't notice.

Fascinated by the idea that having a player character with a noble backstory accelerates the pace of political turmoil because each downtime counts as a separate instance of "interacting with nobility".

Historian: and then after thousands of years of relative stability, the Third Age finally came to a close, followed by the Age of We're Not Gonna Fucking Get Into This Bullshit.

dril and xkcd are at opposite ends of a spectrum slowly working to collaboratively post about every possible topic

xkcd-coded response:

dril-coded response:

from 1942 onwards there was also a steady drip of high placed officials shooting themselves in their offices, unable to reconcile the knowledge that the war wasn’t winnable with the need to pretend that it was.

Thank you. Yes this one.

i love this team so much. this dude ballerina twirled around the first defender who came at him and then hurdled backwards over the next one, an entire grown ass man, like it was nothing. like he's in a goddamn sports anime. unbelievable

can you imagine the kind of bonkers athleticism you have to display to get an entire sideline of professional athletes to react like this

spot the difference

I cant come to your birthday there's a big ass skullll flying araound

people always talk about evil clones like oooh a dark mirror oohh what if you saw what are cruel person you were/are capable of becoming. and well yes but what if you were the evil clone. what if you looked in the mirror and what you saw was so bright it blinded you. what if you had to know exactly how good you could have been.

The saga of Peanut the Squirrel

I know this against my will but the owner of peanut was repeatedly warned that he needed to give him up and could not have him without a license, and the reason peanut was euthanized was bc he bit the cop that came to get him and since the owner had never bothered to get him vaccinated for rabies they had to euthanize him (peanut) to test his brain for rabies. So actually this really is pretty much completely all on the owner.

Every cop should get bitten by a squirrel and contract rabies. You’re a shameful coward

I didn't think I had to clarify my point was that every pet should be vaccinated against rabies at a bare minimum, not that peanut deserved to die for the crime of biting a cop. The cop biting part was admirable.

"But how can you justify a player character with a (non-disinherited) noble background in a dungeon-crawling fantasy game" well, the most obvious approach is a fantasy setting whose nobility practices cognatic primogeniture where, instead of "first son inherits, second son goes into the military, third son becomes a priest", it's "first son inherits, second son goes into the military, third son becomes an adventurer". From the player's perspective, it handily explains why the title comes with little material support from the family; from the family's perspective, there's an unspoken understanding that most of the spare heirs will be eaten by a dragon (or whatever), thereby simplifying the inheritance situation, and the few survivors will become great assets.

(There is, of course, the possibility that a surviving third son, having grown powerful and understandably harbouring some slight resentment, may return, kill his elder brothers with dark magic, and take over the dynasty, but in practice this almost never happens.)

... couldn't Adventuring just be the fantasy equivalent of "Father send me to the War against the French to learn command and bravery". Except it's dungeons, magic and monsters.

Unfortunately not. One of the reasons it was traditional for the second son to go into the military is because it carried a warrior's prestige without being especially dangerous in practice; any noble family of means would be able to purchase them an officer's commission that would keep them off of the front lines, and you don't actually want the second son to be in constant mortal peril, because you need a backup heir in case the eldest son dies unexpectedly. Being an adventurer – at least as depicted in most fantasy dungeon-crawler settings – carries too much real danger to play that role.

the best fanfic is the one the author had fun writing actually.

the second best is the one the author used to work through some issues.

I am lowkey unfit for human interaction

"You know, I kinda like it": vampire equivalent of people eating food they're allergic to anyway

@veradragonjedi

I'll bet vampires have the spicy banana discussion sometimes too.

"It burns because you have an allergy! It's not supposed to damage your mouth!"

"I guess, but it's such an interesting experience. Maybe I'll have a little more."

laughed out loud

taking away a clowngirl's makeup telling her she doesn't have to be a clown she can just be a normal silly billy and correcting her any time she tries to juggle until she gets sadder and sadder and eventually stops talking altogether and just communicating via gestures and realizing with horror you've created a mimegirl

you get it

starting a collection. please add on