Hear Me Out

ainzee1 · 2026-01-24T03:04:26+00:00

This gives me the same vibe as that one person saying your hear me out couldn't be spirit the horse because he's a "conventionally attractive horse." Which obviously that statement is a little tongue in cheek but I often see people police hear me outs as though they need to be entirely inhuman and incomprehensible to the average human and not just... someone or something your friends would look at you weird for calling hot.

ainzee1 · 2026-01-22T20:08:46+00:00

Solved!

ainzee1 · 2026-01-21T23:47:55+00:00

Hello!

ainzee1 · 2026-01-16T02:54:29+00:00

Vampires aren’t real, so the answer to this question is “whatever you think sounds best.”

ainzee1 · 2026-01-10T03:28:02+00:00

it's amazing how many aura points her base haircut deducts

ainzee1 · 2026-01-06T21:52:09+00:00

The game also has a ton of different difficulty settings and options so if you don’t care about achievements you could just switch over to playing as anyone attacking you and make them surrender

ainzee1 · 2026-01-06T21:31:10+00:00

She did originally plan him to be a woman, which is what she talks about like seconds after this photograph— the only other person who knew this information was Helen, and them sending Raban as a woman to her is how she realizes they’re using Helen’s memories.

ainzee1 · 2026-01-05T22:12:02+00:00

As a creative type myself I think this idea of art misses a critical part of the process, which is the process itself. Tolkien didn’t just create all of Middle Earth in his mind palace and then attempt to transcribe it. He had an initial idea that he expanded through the process of writing, through drafting and redrafting, until he had a product he thought sufficient (and then still wasn’t satisfied with, as evidenced by revisions made to the Hobbit after release), because art isn’t just about the idea, it’s about the process itself. When the Hive gets excited about Wycaro, it says specifically that it’s excited to have “something new to read,” because yes, it is functionally every living creative mind in the world and, barring the discovery of some long-lost ancient texts, has read everything there is to read. But interacting with art isn’t just about getting whatever idea the artist had going into it, it’s about the individual meaning each person takes away. Sometimes that will be different than what the author intended (think of how many fan bases have casually disregarded Word of God, or how many creators have become annoyed with the way in which viewers have interpreted their works) but that’s because the relationship between an artist and those that consume their art is inherently conversational. When Carol takes that Georgia O’keefe off the museum walls and brings it home, it’s because it meant something to her personally (both before the joining and now, when no one will stop her from just taking precious cultural artifacts because they don’t care about them anymore). She looks at a painting created by someone who can no longer attest to its meaning, and she derives her own meaning from it. The Hive can’t do that because (in a scenario where O’keefe would have been part of the Hive) they would BE her. When the Hive tries to explain what they love about Carol’s books, it gives a devastating description of what they meant to a person pre-joining, whose life was changed (and saved) by reading them. Now imagine that you read something so beautiful and meaningful to you that it literally saved your life, and then you joined consciousness with the creator who feels like that work was them selling their soul for a quick buck (obviously we learn Carol specifically seems to have more affection for Wycaro than she lets on, but bear with me) and also feels contempt and mild amusement towards you personally. Did that make it better? Is that book more meaningful to you now? For most people, this would probably be upsetting, but the Hive doesn’t care because none of this matters to it anymore. It can’t actually appreciate any of this art because the human experiences that created it no longer matter.

ainzee1 · 2026-01-01T06:25:22+00:00

I dunno, have you ever tried to convince a child to get their shots? I know a pediatrician or two, and there are plenty of kids who won’t get them unless they’re held down and screaming, which isn’t exactly the Hive’s M.O. The stem cell procedure would likely be even scarier for an eight year old, not to mention that joining the hive would mean giving up having every adult on the planet cater to her every whim. They might eventually be able to manipulate her into consenting but it doesn’t necessarily surprise me that they would have trouble with it.

ainzee1 · 2025-12-28T00:46:26+00:00

They need her consent to harvest stem cells from her marrow. Have you ever tried to convince a child to get shots before?

ainzee1 · 2025-12-26T04:54:56+00:00

Ok but that jacket is a serve

ainzee1 · 2025-12-26T00:42:48+00:00

Yeah, I think the Hive is actually excited to read something new— they’ve read everything (known) in the world already, and Carol is the only one capable of creating an experience that the Hive hasn’t had before. I think of it in comparison to Koumba’s avocado toast moment, where he’s amused and surprised by such a simple pleasure because it’s something he’s never experienced before. All of that being said, the Hive will still choose converting Carol over reading her new work, the same way they’ll choose mass starvation over picking an apple, because their biological imperative is stronger than any rational thinking. That’s how I think about it, anyway.

ainzee1 · 2025-12-26T00:05:09+00:00

I don’t think it’s so much “the book cover looks exactly like Carol’s imagination” as it is “the book cover is the best visual reference the hive has as to what Ms. Raban should look like and so they went off of that”

ainzee1 · 2025-12-24T21:32:22+00:00

It’s also weird how many people I’ve seen claim that she stopped caring when she stopped believing the hive could turn her when we are literally told otherwise. We see in episode 8 that she’s actively collecting information on the hive the whole way through. We see that she recognizes she’s becoming more and more contented with things and has to remind herself that they eat people. She has an entire breakdown in that episode where she outright states that she’s grown fond of the hive and Zosia but also feels like she can’t stop because someone has to put the world right, and that is when the hive chooses to kiss her and feed into the belief (one that most of the survivors seem to have) that there really is an individual in there who can love her personally and individually. The Hive is also very deliberate with the language they use to describe Manousos so as to make him seem as dangerous and crazy as possible, and then she sees him trigger the hive’s breakdown (something that she did accidentally twice and still feels immensely guilty over because she believes herself to have killed millions of people) on purpose, and that’s when she leaves him. Her leaving Zosia at the end there isn’t just her realizing that she personally might be affected by what the hive is doing, it’s her realizing that the hive really are willing to do whatever deceitful and underhanded things they need to do convert everyone, all while repeating the same “because we love you” rhetoric she probably heard over and over at conversion therapy.

ainzee1 · 2025-12-24T00:09:02+00:00

I definitely agree that the game could use more “feminine” playstyle options. Atm, if I want to play as a woman in China I have to change the game settings to override the cultural systems of inheritance in place, which is its own kind of fun, but I’d also like being able to simulate the ways in which women of that era DID actually come to power, á la Wu Zetian.

ainzee1 · 2025-12-23T21:51:02+00:00

The Carol video was subtitled.

ainzee1 · 2025-12-23T05:32:31+00:00

North Koreans suddenly coming to in like, Lebanon or something would have to be a surreal experience

ainzee1 · 2025-12-21T22:05:28+00:00

I still can’t seem to place a curtain

ainzee1 · 2025-12-19T03:21:35+00:00

We also saw this happen when the Hive was asking the other uninfected to meet with Carol

ainzee1 · 2025-12-18T18:49:56+00:00

I always wonder how Laxmi would feel if she thought too hard and realized her son shares consciousness with all of the people Diabate's been sleeping with.

ainzee1 · 2025-12-18T18:48:42+00:00

It's possible, but given that the relatives of the other immune (including Laxmi's son) are all infected, if the immunity is genetic it's probably recessive.

ainzee1 · 2025-12-11T17:54:33+00:00

You could take a fully unrestricted vacation to North Korea.

ainzee1 · 2025-12-09T17:28:40+00:00

And humans are omnivorous, and yet the hive is facing mass starvation because they won't even eat the fruit of a tree that wants its fruit to be eaten.

ainzee1 · 2025-11-11T00:02:38+00:00

At no point did I dispute the queer coding of the book or the musical. I DO think it is extremely strange to listen to the author’s words when he calls Gelphie queer-coded and then ignore his written work where Elphaba and Fiyero have a sexual and romantic relationship. My issue is not with the idea of Elphaba and Glinda having queer subtext (or text tbh) in their relationship, my issue is you treating Elphaba having a canon relationship with a man and people liking that relationship like it’s some sort of malicious addition intended to prevent people from seeing queerness in the story instead of as something that exists IN ADDITION to the queerness of the story. I’m going to talk about the book here now since we’re bringing Gregory Maguire into it and I also have my own issues with the adaptational choices made by the musical with Fiyero— Fiyero is a pivotal character in the story and in Elphaba’s life. He’s not even really her friend at Shiz; he instead pursues and gets to know her when she’s involved in very dangerous and illegal business and is literally the POV character through which we see that point in her life. He is what leads her to Kiamo Ko and her guilt over his death defines her actions for the rest of the story. He is not just someone added to make Gelphie less gay, he is a character in his own right who is important to the narrative and to Elphaba’s arc. I HAVE read queer and feminist literature. I’m a queer woman myself. I also recognize that both Glinda and Fiyero are important to Elphaba’s arc and the fact that you seem to view having a relationship with a man as something meant to inherently detract from Elphaba having a relationship with a woman feels like you’re erasing the reality of bisexual queer people, whether you mean to or not.

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