Wizard: If we stop the ambush, the Myriad will definitely figure out who the informant is.
Cleric: But if we don’t, all those people are gonna die.
Rogue: Better them than the one person who’s actually helping us!
Wizard: Wait a minute. [DM], did you give us a f*cking Trolley Problem?!
DM: …Not on purpose.
A bird explaining to a hedgehog crossing so it doesn’t die.
!!! ok but that’s legitimately what it’s doing!! That’s a corvid right there (looks like a hooded crow, to be precise), which means it’s intelligent enough to recognize, a) cars are dangerous and streets should be treated with a certain degree of caution, b) this car’s slowing down for them–cars do that sometimes–which means they’re not in imminent danger, so it doesn’t have to fly away just yet, c) that hedgehog’s still gonna get killed if it doesn’t MOVE, FAST (cars can change speed very quickly and the hedgehog’s still in the way), and almost certainly also d) if the bird does nothing it gets a free lunch.
Y’all, Y’ALL. This bird is consciously deciding to put itself in danger in order to save the life of a very stupid creature. A creature which, if the bird did nothing, could be free food.
i can’t - look if you follow me you know I have a thing for corvids, but this is - like!!! People are always saying “ah yes they have sub-human intelligence and don’t consider anything that isn’t immediately necessary for their own survival/pleasure,” but! Whether or not it can do philosophy, this crow is clearly demonstrating compassion. Even if it’s just the kind of compassion a toddler shows to a snail, a social creature that instinctively recognizes the potential for emotion in other beings, that’s still huge and cool and important and corvids!!! are! neat!!!
Sometimes I wonder if people are more willing to recognize pit bull aggression as abuse than chihuahuas aggression because chihuahuas are “girly dogs”. People tend to have a much easier time hating “girly” things.
After meeting a lot of other chihuahua owners my experience is that they’re like less independent terriers. They should be treated accordingly.
this image actually makes complete sense & that is a fucking trip & a half.
You can take it back even further to the Archudke’s assassin just bumping into him deciding to get a sandwich. One man’s need for lunch 100 years ago gave rise to tentacle porn half the world away. What a world.
Is anybody going to explain?
No? Okay.
1. Archduke Ferndinand is murdered, causing World War 1.
2. The Allies win WW1, imposing the Treaty of Versailles on Germany.
3. This causes tension between Germany and the rest of Europe, something Adolf Hitler takes advantage of and begins WW2.
4. Japan joins the axis in WW2 in order to expand their empire.
5. The Axis is defeated, and Japan comes under US occupation.
6. American soldiers bring comic books, cartoons, and other American mediums to Japan which stay behind even after the occupation is over.
7. Post-WW2 Japan imposes strict censorship laws that include the banning of most conventional porn.
8. Japanese citizens retaliate by drawing comics with women having sex with vaguely penis-shaped objects like tentacles to exploit loopholes in the law.
9. It establishes itself as a fetish even after the laws are relaxed, and so Hentai was born.
Butterfly effect
obviously we know in our hearts that Jabba the Hutt is not a dragon. that’s ridiculous.
But Is Jabba A Dragon Though?
he has the body plan of a lindworm. I suppose you could argue that he is too thick to be considered “serpentine”, but he is longer than he is wide, and not entirely unlike an especially chunky gaboon viper. his upright posture distracts from the fact that he’s built like an abbreviated mole lizard, which are lindworms.
and then of course he acts like a dragon. I don’t know if Star Wars uses gold or something else but whatever it is I’m sure he hordes it. eats people sometimes. disturbing taste for princesses. knights come to kick his ass.
Is Jabba A Dragon?
Jabba the Hut isn’t a dragon. He doesn’t fly. He’s more like a slug.
Ah, but he uses a hoversled, which is much like flying:
And not all creatures under the broad category of “dragon” fly. Lindworms don’t fly, neither do wyrms, drakes, sea serpents, or hydras. Lungs/Chinese dragons can fly but they don’t use wings to do it. Jabba should not be disqualified as a dragon simply because he uses repulsor technology to achieve airborne locomotion.
Jabba is unlike a slug in so many ways. He has jointed limbs, a hard internal skeleton, a skull with fixed spherical eyeballs, and no sensory tentacles or pneumostome. He is capable of facultative parthenogenesis--like komodo dragons and other squamates--continuously growing larger and living for hundreds of years hoarding wealth and power and preying on princesses. His resemblance to a slug is superficial, though we may describe him as such in an insulting fashion... like how a dragon may be called a “worm”.
Also he can and does eat people.
Jabba the Hutt is a dragon and I have convinced myself of this.
No he aint bro hes a fuckin alien. dragons have to originate from the planet earth hes from a galaxy far far away.
The dragons from both The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey and The Pit Dragon Trilogy by Jane Yolen are aliens from extraterrestrial planets called Pern and Austar IV, respectively.
Jabba the Hutt is a dragon.
I think you will find that Hutts lack a backbone, commonly known as a spine, which, for the most part, dragons have either litterially or figuratively.
Jabba’s motions, limbs, and posture are clearly dependent upon the use of a hard interior support system. Lacking an exoskeleton and being unable to simply squelch out of Leia’s chokehold suggests he is not simply moving around via the hydrolics of a muscular hydrostat. Besides, there’s this art from the making of The Phantom Menace:
ship this is getting dangerously close to morphological taxonomy
do you want a plucked chicken swung at you? because this is how you get a plucked chicken swung at you.
“Dragon” is like “worm”, in my opinion. It’s not a taxonomy because the variety of creatures referred to as “worms” don’t even belong to related phylums. A horsehair worm and a nightcrawler are not related but they share an innate “worminess”. A velvet worm has many legs and is still counted as a worm-thing. Like I’ve said before, “worm” isn’t a taxonomy; it’s a lifestyle.
Dragons are the same way. It’s an umbrella term, and while some irritating pedants insist that only a four-legged creature with words god can be considered a dragon, they only say that to make sure everyone in the room knows that they know what a wyvern is. Wyverns and lindworms and amphitheres are obviously all under the dragon umbrella.
If these things are dragons, then “dragon” is as fluid a category as “worm”:
Jabba has more stereotypical “dragon traits” than some dragons do. He doesn’t hit every point, but a dragon is a worm is a dragon is a worm.
My general position is that the use of the word "dragon" to encompass all these disparate creatures is a bad thing and a relic of eurocentric colonialism. A Chinese Long is not the same thing as an English Dragon, nor is a wyvern or an amphithere, and calling them "dragons" belies the cultural differences in which these disparate creatures arose.
In terms of narrative purpose and lifestyle, Janba fills the role that a Dragon does in many stories, however. I would argue Jabba is a dragon in the same sense that a Tsuchigumo is.
I think enforcing a strict cultural differentiation would eliminate most dragons from fiction. Fiction, which supplies most modern dragons, does not stick to a strict historical consistency in dragon-depiction, either visually or behaviorally.
Take, for example, the dragons from The Last Airbender. They’re clearly dragons, as they breathe fire and have wings, but they’re also more like elemental spirits that visually and behaviorally resemble lungs more than they resemble, say, Smaug. Do their similarities to lungs disqualify them from dragonhood?
Also, it’s not like the medieval Welsh concept of a “dragon” evolved in a vacuum. There are mythical creatures from around the world that bear strong resemblances to That Specific Creature Which We Are Apparently Now Inisisting Is The Only True Dragon. Welsh and British folklore was surely being influenced by mythology from disparate cultures.
I am firmly against declaring wyverns “not dragons” because even in British cultural history, the distinction only arose out of the technicalities of heraldry, not folklore or even art.
Would it, though?
In cases of fiction in which the dragons are real living creatures, they are what the world says they are. The dragons in A:tLA are called “dragons” and therefore that’s what they are.
At the same time, Godzilla is decidedly not a dragon, despite having some traits in common with them, because he is not considered a dragon in-universe, and those similarities are not so stark as to force the comparison.
I feel like if we’re willing to recognize the differences between unicorns and qilins, or between fae and yokai, we should be able to recognize the differences between dragons, lungs, and aphitheres, even when fictional depictions may draw from multiple sources.
Well, by the logic of “if they’re not specifically called ‘dragons’ in the source media then they aren’t dragons”, Night of the Living Dead and The Walking Dead feature no zombies.
Haku from Spirited Away is a river spirit who takes the form of a long wingless serpentine flying creature that is a river spirit, but as he is Japanese rather than Chinese, he cannot be a lung despite every similarity. I don’t remember if the English translation uses the word “dragon” onscreen, but his theme song is called The Dragon Boy. Is he or is he not a dragon? If so, why can wingless quadrupedal serpentine river spirits be counted as dragons, but lungs cannot?
The word “dragon” comes from Greek drakôn. The mythological drakôn were sometimes just big snakes, and sometimes many-headed monsters:
Are Greek dragons not dragons, then, even if they’re the origin of the word and much of the concept used in British tradition?
Sometimes family is you and the 998 other spirits you share a mansion with and that's okay
So there’s this huge dudebro in my class, who, yesterday, sat next to me. And I’m sitting there sweating because like… I’m wearing my shirt with the lesbian flag on it, and he’s the most popular jock in school, and always has this look on his face that say ‘I can and will kill you’. He looks me up and down, stares at me for a minute and then goes, “So. Girls in skirts and long socks, am I right?”
To which I nodded solemnly, both out of agreement, surprise and also a healthy amount of awkward fear. He nodded and went, “You get it.”
I said, “Yep.” He fistbumped me, and on went our lives.
Oh! I forgot to mention! I saw him at lunch the same day, and he ran up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, pointed at this super sweet girl who comes to GSA and asked if she’s gay. I told him he should ask her because that’s not my place and he said he would.
I thought that would be the end of it.
Except ten minutes later he came back and told me he found out (she’s bi) and that both of us have a shot. I said “You more than me.” because he’s attractive and popular.
But this wholesome dumbass looked really confused and asked, “Because I’m tall?’
So this isn’t lesbian/jock solidarity but I thought you guys would want to know-
My math teacher was trying to fix the rolling whiteboard and he just offhand said “This would be easier with a wrench”
And deadass, dudebro said “Hang on” and then proceeded to pull a fucking wrench out of his backpack
Update- after school today he saw me in the library and he didn’t say anything? He just pointed at the book he was holding and I gave him a thumbs up because it’s a pretty good book, and he went “Yes!” Really quiet and pumped his fist and then left
Okay so today he asked me if I know how to help people having a panic attack and I was like yeah? And he smiled at me and then went “cool I think I’m having one”
And I was like what the fuck Colin we’re in the middle of Tech class sit down and we went out in the hall and sat there for a while and he told me about the test he’s stressed about so we kind of went over his study guide and when he was feeling better he kind of like… smacked his head against mine gently? And I helped him up even though he’s almost a foot taller than me and yeah
Today at lunch we walked to the football field and laid in the grass and I told him thank you for being my friend (because I don’t have that many) and fistbumped me and said, “You always looked so nice and chill, how could I not want to be your friend?”
And honestly y’all, I would’ve started crying if he hadn’t sneezed and accidentally smacked me
we really devolved as a society when we stopped using fully painted pictures on romance novels and started using cheap photoshop instead
case in point
this is a Hell of a downgrade
worst crime capitalism ever committed was eliminating Horny Oil Painter as a viable career option.
man we’ve been doing funerals all wrong over here
My friends, weeping at my funeral as they shove 5s and 10s between the biggest titties they’ve ever seen: it’s what he would’ve wanted
i just want to say this is 1) excellent and 2) not uncommon…i work at a vet clinic and some of the names are so fuckin weird but i love it???? clients will be like “we call her stevie. it’s short for death metal steve” or “this is turkey but his LEGAL name is scarecrow jones” thank u
For a good time, go through the notes on this post.
Trying to stay focused until Friday…
mood
This is the most real example of how it feels. This. This is exactly how it feels.
Defend yourself using your natural strength, use anything sharp, or sturdy enough to swing. Get creative with your implement, but stay reasonable, and look for anything that can further enhance you innate vigor.
i ate an edible and saw cats 2019 and let me tell you i was NOT ready for the main cats name to be my name too and when one of those fuckers onscreen said my name i JUMPED
cats on a 50 ft tall screen: “VICTORIA!”
me, white-knuckle gripping my bfs forearm: “we have to go right now immediately or i am GOING to die.”
Not gonna lie, I read the first post and my immediate thought was “who named their kid Old Deuteronomy?”
the terrible power of “dont stop believing” is you dont even have to listen to it for it to get stuck in your head, just hearing the name is enough
Thinking about how often romance/the love of a woman is used as a shortcut to redeem evil male characters rather than writing a believable redemption arc where the character actually makes amends for what he has done
I’m putting this here as a fucking reminder to myself
yikes, yeah, me too re my ex.
