ZAMBETTA

People used to comment on web comics.

People used to comment on fanfiction.

People used to comment on fanart.

People used to comment on OCs.

I hate "content" culture.

I hate "consuming content" and scrolling immediately to the next thing.

People used to be excited about the art that other people created.

People used to want to share that excitement with creators.

I hate this future.

Once someone tagged art that I made with "woah" and I think about it at least once a week. Someone else said "oh neat" once. Someone else WROTE A WHOLE DAMN POEM IN THE COMMENTS. Anyways even just one word can change how someone sees their art. You don't even have to think about it too hard. You could put a keyboard smash and I'd probably cry from joy.

I'm also trying hard to interact more, I understand that it's hard to break away from opening your phone and being in Content Consumption Mode.

My favorite quote ever

It's the way that, even with age appropriate casts, writers and directors continue to make characters more mature/strip them of whatever child-like personality traits they truly possess in favor of turning children into what is a caricature of an adult...they're meant to be 12. They were cast as a 12 year old. Let them be 12, let them be silly, let them make mistakes because they're not adults--that's the point. They're supposed to feel enormous pressure and loss and it's supposed to be uncomfortable to watch because it IS a completely vile situation. 12 year olds shouldn't constantly be in life and death situations, they shouldn't be ventuing across the country on their own, they shouldn't have adult-like pressure on them, but they DO, and the fact that they're 12 and ACT like they're 12 is important because it emphasize how wrong the situation is, it emphasize how gross the gods' ways are, it emphasize how right luke is in his line of thought even if he may have gone about it wrong.

i still don’t like the change of them going past the solstice deadline (especially since the “war” did feel imminent at all, just an unnecessary change overall).

however… That said. poseidon stopping zeus’ bolt with his bare hands and then surrendering, all for percy…. insanity. Feeling completely bonkers about it actually, someone sedate me

that scene in tlo where thalia tells percy he can't start feeling sorry for luke bc luke made his choices. and thalia reveals that the reason they couldn't make it to camp in time for all of them to make it to camp was bc luke kept picking fights. and annabeth never saw this as wrong bc luke was her hero. so thalia had to pick up the pieces. and percy thinking both that luke was put in a cruel position and that luke was putting others in a cruel position. and percy is the only character who understood both sides of luke bc annabeth sees only the best of him and thalia sees only the worst. and that's why percy is the prophecy kid and the one who gives luke the knife. bc annabeth had spent the entire series essentially giving luke the knife when he didn't deserve it. and thalia was never going to give luke the knife. but percy is the only one who can see exactly when luke deserves the knife.

honestly I'm cool with the show amping up the derision towards the gods, but still, I can't help but wonder why exactly we're speed running the entirety of annabeth's disillusionment of the gods and her mommy issues over the entire series in the very first season...

actually I do want to talk about Sally Jackson a tad more because one criticism I've been hearing about her book counterpart more recently is "book Sally is one-dimensional: the perfect mother with no flaws" and that just has me biting my cheek because one part of her book counterpart that I always thought was ripe with discussion and didn't make it to the show is that Sally states that it was selfish of her to keep Percy close. It's one of the last things she says to him before she's "killed" by the minotaur.

And there's so much that we don't know about Sally because we view her from Percy's eyes. From his perspective we know that she's exceedingly kind, she never raises her voice to him or even Gabe, and she endured a horrible and abusive relationship to protect her son from monsters (of a different kind).

But there are things we can piece together from the text: Sally has known about CHB for a long time, apparently since before Percy was even born because Poseidon told her he wanted to send Percy there; she was told that it was a mistake for her to keep Percy close - who told her that, we're not sure, she only uses the phrase they; she's been in contact with Grover through out the school year; she knows that she can't cross the camp boundary line, which means either Grover or someone else (Chiron? Poseidon?) told her that, and that she understood that there was place that Percy would be safe from monsters.

And all of these little details are so interesting because it does make you wonder just how much she did or didn't know. Was her self assessment right? Was it selfish of her to keep Percy close?

On one hand, she kept him close because she loved him, alongside the fear that if she sent him to camp, she would be saying goodbye for good -- so is it even fair to call the act of keeping him close selfish? Or perhaps, much like Chiron, she assumed keeping Percy in the dark would be safer?

But on the other hand, Percy had been attracting monsters all his childhood, she understood camp was a safe place from monsters, and she had apparently been told explicitly that it was a mistake for her to keep him close.

And then adding in the factors of: Percy is her only family in the entire world, she's been suffering with Gabe for years, sacrificing so much in order to keep Percy safe when he's at home... but even that has a touch of sad irony because when we meet Percy in tlt, its at point when he's not really home at all -- he's been regularly sent off to boarding schools, so much so that he's internalized it as his own short-coming.

And all of this isn't to say "Omg Sally is actually horrible" or to assert definitely that she is selfish... but more to speak to the fact that in the books, she's not an all-perfect 2-dimensional mother. And her self-assessment of selfishness is something that is really interesting to explore and debate given the implications of what she apparently did (or did not) know about the godly world. I feel there's even an argument to be made that Sally being "selfish" could be a reflection of Percy's fatal flaw.

"feminist" greek myth retellings love to talk about how the "poets," by which i assume we are meant to understand ancient male storytellers (who are positioned as the only perspective in ancient stories), always get things wrong and never talk about women. this troubles me because (1) they did. (2) they did, and those stories and their complexity are often overlooked. (3) merely sneering at certain depictions of mythological and ancient women or pointing out that men should not be the sole storytellers of women's experiences does not mean that you are writing about women's experiences, doing a good job, or even saying something interesting or useful. which is a shame, because there is certainly more to say, if one could get past one's feeling of inherent superiority toward old stories and the things they might be saying.

AI defenders will make it seem as if art is this gatekept pastime that only the most elite can partake in and they’re making it possible for the “normies” to create meanwhile one of the most memorable pieces of recent art I’ve ever seen is “My son’s drawing of safe”

That's the beauty of manmade art, no? Even when it was drawn by a small child who could barely write their name, the amount of heart poured into it would always make it emotionally superior to AI-generated images.

okay here's the post that will get me crucified but I think Disney girl bossed Sally a little too hard and I'm terrified they're going to do the same thing with Annabeth

no cause like, the way they've turned gabe into this pathetic excuse of a man really got on my nerves. He's silly, almost idiotic in the show. I'm not saying that Sally should be mistreated but enduring what happened out of love for percy and how she breaks free from that abusive situation are intrinsically linked to gabe being this RAT

can't believe they'll do that to Sally and I hope I'm wrong and he'll eventually be what he's in the books (?) sounds unlikely though

annabeth and percy are so funny because they tiptoe around each other and their feelings for four years and then they start dating and just, like, go full-send

Did you miss the portion of ttc where Percy says he's going to ask Annabeth out and then Athena tells him that she doesn't approve so instead Percy asks Annabeth to dance????

did you miss the portion where he doesn't actually say that, he just thinks that "there was a lot I'd wanted to say to Annabeth" ....also crazy it's almost like him asking her doesn't mean she would've said yes....it's almost like they had so many opportunities to date if they wanted to from ttc to tlo and yet they don't until after the battle....it's almost like annabeth literally says "come back alive, then we'll see"...it's almost like nearly every time percy tries to bring up the topic of them annabeth changes the subject for the rest of the series until after the battle. crazy. wild. it's almost like the issue is greater than "people competing for their attention"

You know the biggest loss of the decline of physical media and the rise of streaming? DVD special features.

I love you DVD commentaries I love you making-of documentaries I love you behind the scenes footage I love you bloopers I love you deleted scenes I love you silly little videos of the cast dicking around 💖

the equivalent exchange of your favorite childhood book series (his dark materials and percy jackson) getting the adaptations they finally deserve but the price is that one character must be played by lin-manuel miranda

hoo’s most severe crime was reducing annabeth to an emotionless freak when the trajectory of the past series was dependent on annabeth’s emotions at any given moment