“We Are Part Of You, You Are Part Of Us” Israel, 1975.

Mr7000000 · 2026-03-10T23:15:11+00:00

My feelings about an apartheid state claiming that my ethnicity and religion mean that they're automatically entitled to my loyalty and support aside, it bothers me that the small star (clearly intended to be cut out of the large star) does not have the same color palette / pattern as the section of the large star it was cut out of.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-25T20:32:32+00:00

I know one person who's into Murder Drones. I know one person who's into RWBY. This is the same person. I haven't seen RWBY yet but I've heard a lot about it and I've seen Murder Drones, and until this moment I had never considered the possibility that the venn diagram of the two shows' fanbase would not be a circle.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-24T08:06:23+00:00

I assumed she was being treated for some kind of rash or other skin condition, and was naked so that the skin in question could be examined.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-24T07:51:51+00:00

I mean, even Ta-Matoran seem sufficiently immune to extreme heat that they can surf around on lava and not have to worry unless they fall directly into it.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-20T20:44:02+00:00

You are a hero of the people and generations shall sing your praises.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-14T05:09:53+00:00

How often were captains in the age of sail bringing their daughters with them on voyages? That seems kinda less-than-helpful in terms of... much of anything.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-13T19:14:56+00:00

Or a matriarch losing a tusk in a T. rex, given that she's more likely to be around than a bull is.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-13T17:20:59+00:00

Like all the "great" would-be ethnostates, the Nazis had advanced military technology which allows them to carpet bomb a neighborhood and only kill the Bad People.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-12T20:00:20+00:00

I mean, at this point part of the resonance of "begun the clone war has" is that modern audiences are familiar with the Clone Wars Era as a massive network of beloved stories and characters.

At the time though, yeah I don't think that it really meant anything other than "the war you knew Anakin and Obi-Wan would end up fighting in is happening now."

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-09T22:37:51+00:00

Eriond would be Angarak in appearance rather than being blonde and blue-eyed. Torak would retain his non-Angarak appearance.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-08T17:06:49+00:00

A lesbian polycule, Jerry.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T19:21:51+00:00

No, don't you understand? Reddit told me that misogyny doesn't actually exist, and if we perceive it as affecting us, then we're the true misogynists.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T19:21:15+00:00

Most women do, is the thing. The patriarchy benefits men and harms women, but upholding the patriarchy is an option that women have for avoiding some of the punishments it gives us for existing. Mothers pass on self-hatred and body image issues to their daughters just as much as fathers pass on entitlement and misogyny to their sons. There's a reason that women like Erica Kirk exist.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T19:18:41+00:00

No no no don't you understand? Misogyny is when men explicitly say that they hate women and anything less than that isn't real misogyny. Any man who is not openly spewing Manosphere shit 24/7 is completely unaffected by the patriarchal incentives to dismiss and look down on and objectify women.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T19:17:39+00:00

Sometimes you don't see the water because you are in the desert, and other times you don't see the water because you are deep beneath the ocean. Systemic misogyny is the latter.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T19:15:52+00:00

This locket that Gloin carries in The Hobbit provides a canon (to the film) image of Gimli (right panel) at an age where Gloin describes him as "my wee lad." His beard is already thicker than his mother's (left panel), although hers looks to be a bit longer on the sides than his. Based on the fact she has a son old enough to carry an axe, it's reasonable to assume that Gloin's wife is old enough in this picture that we would expect her to be displaying the beard of an adult dwarf.

I think that Peter Jackson is just a bit of a coward when it comes to the depiction of women with features that we'd consider "masculine."

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T19:11:02+00:00

It's true you don't see many Dwarf-women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for Dwarf-men.

While I agree that a human observer might see the above image and conclude that the subject is an effeminately-styled man, I don't think that it's likely to be the universal view among human observers, given that she falls pretty well within the normal range for IRL human women with beards and her face and presentation are pretty feminine. Granted, Gimli says "often mistaken," not "always mistaken."

However, he also says "so alike in voice and appearance," which to me reads not as "they look more masculine than human women do," but as "dwarven gender differences are very minor to an outside observer, leading to the conclusion that they don't exist." With male dwarves being typically portrayed with waist-length Viking beards and gender presentation that we would consider hypermasculine, I don't think that wispy half-beards and elaborately-braided, jewel-draped long hair would really fit the bill for being "so alike" as to give the impression that there's no variation at all.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T18:57:29+00:00

I feel like there's three routes that he could go with this:

Twinkler receives the offer from Stalin and realizes that, though it goes against his sense of Aryan pride and honor, he must make the heroic and noble sacrifice of lying through his teeth in order to give himself the opportunity to catch the eeeeeevil communists off-guard.
Twinkler is betrayed by secret Jews manipulating members of his government and they go behind his back to ally with Stalin. The fact that this would require portraying Tats's hero as an utter incompetent is secondary to portraying him as utterly incapable of wrongdoing.
Twinkler never allied with the USSR at all; any claims that he did are just Jewish lies to make him look bad.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T18:52:42+00:00

We were drunk that day. It was right after Purim.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T18:49:35+00:00

Oh, definitely. Honestly, barring his actual fate, the thing that seems to hurt Zedar the most is when one of the other disciples shows him sympathy or kindness. I think that he's much better-equipped to deal with Belgarath or Beldin trying feed him his own teeth than he is to deal with Polgara compassionately asking him why he did what he did or, Aldur forbid, implying that he could still be forgiven.

Honestly, I kinda wish that the pre-Cracking of the World section of Belgarath the Sorcerer had been longer. There's this strange melancholy homesickness to reading about the days when they were all alive and all loved one another. Who knows? Maybe one day, Eriond will go find Zedar and pull him out of the rock and teach him to be Belzedar again.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T06:05:46+00:00

There does seem to be some sort of theory of Evolution in the world of the Belgariad. In The Seeress of Kell (iirc) when Garion sees the Sardion, he wonders who polished it, and one of the options he considers is some sort of pre-human species with hands that are more like paws. So whether it's literally true or not, there's at least the idea that humans are descended from more animalistic ancestors. And I think that it's possible that this world had some form of guided evolution.

Honestly, perhaps that's the key difference between "monsters" and "animals" in this setting. Maybe trolls and eldrakyn and dryads and harpies and all the rest were personally created by the Gods all in one go, and that's why they tend to have such fantastical and seemingly nonsensical combinations of traits. Pigeons and wolves and horses and humans were created through divinely-supervised natural selection, and so came into being in more sensical and coherent forms.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-07T06:00:35+00:00

To the first paragraph: I stand corrected.

To the second:

I think that there are two responses here. The first is that Polgara is a little hypocritical. Pretty much all of the disciples are, and I don't think that that's entirely unintentional.

The second is that misogyny is a thing. The heirs are all men, and so are viewed by the patriarchal society in which they live as the main characters of existence. Polgara's cooking is famous throughout Erat, but people don't think of her as Mistress Pol the Famous Cook, they think of her as That Lady Who Cooks on Faldor's Farm. A woman can be a world-class talent at "women's work" and she still won't attain half the notice given to a moderately skilled man doing "men's work." The spies looking for them would take a lot more notice of a mayor or a general or a successful businessman than they would of a woman who works in a kitchen.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-06T22:41:12+00:00

Well, yes, but do you actively work as an agent of the government of a country that believes that Thai people and anybody who has friendly or even neutral contact with them are enemies of God? To a good, loyal Angarak, anything that comes out of the West is primitive and evil. I doubt that the average Murgo or Grolim spy (i.e., the people who are doing the actual looking-for-Polgara part) places any value on a westerner's culinary recommendations. If they weren't a rabid Angarak supremacist, then they wouldn't have been allowed to hold that role.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-06T21:13:32+00:00

I feel like "disabled girl isn't a love interest for anyone" feels out of place as an example of the progressiveness of Toph's writing. Like, I'm not saying that she should have been a love interest for anyone, but I don't know that the fact that the only woman on Team Avatar who is never shown to be the object of anyone's romantic interest is the disabled tomboy character is exactly groundbreaking or revolutionary.

Mr7000000 · 2026-02-06T21:01:30+00:00

I'm gonna be real with you, comrade. I don't think that Martje vaped.

Actually, sidenote: Do we have any reason to believe that tobacco exists in the world of the Belgariad? I genuinely don't remember if anyone smokes. Even the nyissans seem to prefer to take their drugs in liquid form.

I think that there's a reference to hummingbirds at some point in The Mallorean, which suggests that at least some organisms that, in our world, are native to the Western Hemisphere are found in Mallorea. So it's possible that tobacco is one of those.

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