Everybody In WH Is A Villain

You can trace an ideological lineage from Tezuka to Miyazaki, where both promote a kind of 'pacifism' which is at its core conservative and hostile to the idea of fighting against real evil. Thinking specifically of Tezuka's "Buddha" series here

My hot take is that I feel like “ghibli films are pro Japanese imperialism” is a lazy jab that grabs at a few soft spots in the oeuvre to make the cheapest most rhetorically damaging shot it can, and that an honest analysis would generally struggle to say even the most problematic of the movies like The Wind Rises come out of the wash with a positive opinion of imperial Japan. My hotter take is that if you rigorously pull at the threads where the nominally anti-war films thematically collapse, you’ll find the issue isn’t a support of Japanese Imperialism but a lack of a rigorous critique of industrial civilization.

Ofc Wikipedia is what it is but this line has a really important clue as to why it happened

So this suggests that the Aksumites were identifying themselves with the exonym of the land they conquered.

This claim is cited to the book Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa

so "ethiopia" as a term is originally greek, and i'm having a weird amount of trouble telling when the land now called ethiopia started calling itself that. from the discussion here and some wikipedia reading, the 13th century is the first recorded instance, but it's probably older than that. definitely *after* the 4th century, because the axumites and the ethiopians are distinct groups. its weird because ethiopia was originally the exonym, but then abyssinia became the preferred exonym, and at some point ethiopia became the endonym. which is kind of weird, i dont think it's that common that a distant exonym becomes your endonym

Twinned with "was it written on drugs" for how destructive and limited a way of interpreting weird stuff it is

But it's also a problem that it implies the sex aspect is inherently a bad motivation, or that such an aspect can't be scrambled together with other motivations to make something really powerful

idk it seems almost like...screening the writer for aberrant sexual interests has become a standard part of how people interpret fiction that is even a little edgy and it's not good? reading someone's work and being like "is this a sex thing? is it? is it???" before you feel you can speak on it is pretty limiting, and if you're actually taking the writer to task on social media about this it's just creepy or straight-up sexual harassment. let the writing speak for itself girl, you're not this person's therapist

The 'wishing star' one is such a good aesthetic in particular!

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All Intellectual Property is evil

thinking about the time my local garden centre put signs up that said "propagation piracy is a crime" and explained that "propagation piracy" is when you pick up a leaf or a twig that's fallen on the floor and take it home and grow a plant from it. I came home and mocked this because it's obviously extremely pathetic and stupid, and my ex got salty and said they were right and I was just like. you literally call yourself a communist and you are defending the right of corporations to protect their hypothetical future profits by classifying it as a crime to pick up a leaf

I haven;t seen the show so I dont have an opinion on the tierlist, but it looks aesthetic doesn't it?

I don't actually enjoy arguing, but seeing an opinion I really disagree with in text feels sort of overpowering and makes me want to carve out a space against it. Like in a response comment. Maybe it isnt such a good idea

Nightmarish

Wikipedia: Gheorghe Chițu

while the fact they advertized them as 'dire wolves' is inaccurate and misleading, it's not good that so many people are treating the new wolves as some kind of horrible thing due to the process by which they came into being.

I love genetically engineered species and I hope infinite numbers of them arise in the future

There is no purity in nature

people often talk about how AI makes small choices that a human would never make if they were drawing the image, but when I see Reach's art I feel as if this tendency has been harnessed to create an atmosphere of almost hallucinatory vividness. It's beyond what I've seen in most illustrator's stuff

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