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For Othala put me down for something from the Cecelyne wish granting tree most likely Verdant Emptiness Endowment.
I'm not familiar with the Exalted rules, could you meme this with time shenanigan bombs from Bakuda or similar effects from other parahumans or charms?
How long does the do what I ask or else effect last? Does Taylor only get one request per power granted or multiple?
Also does this effect herself? Since she granted herself a power does that mean if she wants to do something but doesn't for some reason will she give herself bad luck for disobeying herself?
Funny, Taylor could have poked herself with the equivalent of Exalt Lore to know how her powers work better, but she got knife fighting instead.
Just thought of another question, is there any reason Taylor can't 5 dot in everything someone who she either doesn't care or actively wants to strip of their potential?
Like say for example Emma, is there any reason Taylor couldn't turn Emma into a hyper omni-competent braindead slave doll?
How much EXP debt would it take to make Emma a less shitty friend?
Very fucking weird, author.You're not sure which is whiter, this classroom or the E88 bar/ready room. As in, genuinely not sure, you'd have to go back and count the Italians. No wonder they don't have any problems with ethnic gangs here: No demand for them.
There's nothing preventing it mechanically. But you might want to minionize Mannequin first, to build you a self-sustaining habitat module rated for 100+ years of continuous operation.
Can she use VEE to give Bitch an extra dot or two of Socialize to fulfill her soul price by letting her understand normal people?
It isnt "the hand of god reaching down to save hookwolfs life" bad, but it was still astonishingly lucky.I'm trying to figure out whether I should object to this statement. I mean, yes, I the author did deliberately arrange the order of events such that he would survive. Because if the transfer had been scheduled slightly earlier, Low Key wouldn't have been equipped to perform a battlefield amputation and his overconfidence would have gotten him killed. So he was saved by the plot ('got lucky', in-universe). But I feel that it's not exactly what 'plot armor' usually means.
I think this Taylor actually is racist now though? Earlier in the thread someone had mentioned how the join group -> adopt beliefs/behaviors pipeline is similar here to with the Undersiders in canon. I'm guessing this is meant to be a narrative element and will either be a source of conflict directly when it clashes with her old beliefs, or morphs into her new "I'm a god now" persona we have seen some bits of. I suppose the question is whether the story will become unreadable as a result of the MC becoming unlikeable and racist. It definitely loses a lot of the MC underdog charm from Worm, because nobody likes Nazis enough to care if they are unfavored in a fight.Okay, I'm usually on the author's side when it comes to questionably racist things, but that was a little too far for me. It pretty heavily implied he's wrong for not being racist. I would have really preferred if there was a line in there about how just because he's right doesn't mean he's not making stupid, counterproductive arguments, rather than just acting like he's flat out wrong.
Here's a secret about outcasts: Most were cast out because they're awful to be around. Not even other losers want to hang out with losers, and if they had alternatives none of them would. There is no fellowship of pariahs, they only stick together because they were thrown in the same pit.
Can't be racist if all races are equally mortal, and thus leagues beneath the notice of those blessed by [E SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN THE SUN TH]I think this Taylor actually is racist now though? Earlier in the thread someone had mentioned how the join group -> adopt beliefs/behaviors pipeline is similar here to with the Undersiders in canon. I'm guessing this is meant to be a narrative element and will either be a source of conflict directly when it clashes with her old beliefs, or morphs into her new "I'm a god now" persona we have seen some bits of. I suppose the question is whether the story will become unreadable as a result of the MC becoming unlikeable and racist. It definitely loses a lot of the MC underdog charm from Worm, because nobody likes Nazis enough to care if they are unfavored in a fight.
Aisha too. Aisha is in deep. And digging ever deeper.Brutal
Edit:
passislisk Didn't she already more or less adopt a "You're all equally worthless" mentality to people that are, well, useless to her.
So far only Lisa, (with potentially Rune, and Vista) managed to avoid the pump and dump scheme Taylor has been peddling.
You're a genious!Does buying him a prostitute count as getting his soul's price?
Jesus christ, man, is it too much to ask that an actual anti-racist character who's broken away from a racist upbringing would actually have well-thought-out points? Look some up online if you can't think of any.
I'm willing to tolerate a lot in the service of an interesting power exploration, but this story is making me feel increasingly dirty to read, and not in a remotely fun way. I think I'm done here.
Have you ever read Worm? Outside of Faultline's Crew the Neo-Nazis are the least objectionable faction.It is amazing seeing how much further this fic will sink in trying to portray nazis as the least objectionable faction.
Yes, I agree it is in fact plausible that Theo could have rejected his parents' racist beliefs and nonetheless never developed or encountered any good logical arguments against them. And there are surely plausible reasons in terms of his thought processes why he wouldn't have presented Taylor with justifications that make sense based on his personal experiences rather than the poorly-understood or poorly-thought-out logical arguments he was attempting to use.I don't think most people know enough about any topic to be able to debate well, even when they are correct. Theo not being a racist despite his parentage in no way has to mean he has deeply thought out well constructed arguements against nazi talking points. Personnaly knowing some people who have become less racist over time, its usually a result of interpersonal experiences, not logic or rationality.
So when is the manifesto coming out?Though to be fair, this is the first time you've heard anyone consecutively argue that race isn't a real thing because hereditary traits don't exist, and that all the really obvious hereditary traits that perfectly match up with classical notions of race are only skin deep and there aren't any that affect anyone's disposition or ability. Because..? He fails to specify how he came to that conclusion. Because the world would be really unfair otherwise, and the world couldn't possibly be unfair? Boy have you got news for him
Yeah, pretty much. They're either a racist or a closet racist.Yes, I agree it is in fact plausible that Theo could have rejected his parents' racist beliefs and nonetheless never developed or encountered any good logical arguments against them. And there are surely plausible reasons in terms of his thought processes why he wouldn't have presented Taylor with justifications that make sense based on his personal experiences rather than the poorly-understood or poorly-thought-out logical arguments he was attempting to use.
Or maybe he actually didn't even have good personal justifications and was just rejecting racism because he decided, atypically, to side with the norms of society over his own family without carefully considering the merits of those points. There are people in the world who do that, after all. It would just be too bad that the one person encountered in this story who turned against prior racist beliefs didn't really understand why that was the right thing to do. Such things happen.
There's all sorts of plausible justifications for any specific incident in this story in which violent Nazis are presented in a good light or their opponents are presented in a poor light. Those things do happen, after all. No one is entirely good or entirely bad, so it's possible we're just seeing incidents that highlight the bad parts of some people and the good parts of others.
There's an endless parade of such plausible justifications.
Yet, oddly, justifications at least as plausible for presenting the Nazis as bad and their opponents as good never seem to come into effect here, even when excellent opportunities for writing the story that way arise. The perspectives of innocent people harmed by racist actions aren't shown, and when those perspectives are referenced it isn't in a fashion that would be expected to draw much reader empathy. People fighting racism are shown to be incompetent, ineffectual, and prone to sweeping up innocents in their anti-racist campaign—a campaign whose basic justification is never really even shown or described.
Seriously. When Taylor warns black people away from Empire territory, it's treated as a joke. "Ha ha, aren't they so silly to think that as American citizens they have a right to go where they choose in public and patronize the stores there and maybe even get jobs without fear of being beaten up or murdered." How are those black people supposed to feel about this? Aisha and Brian are characters—how do they feel about this? Not how they feel about the fact that Taylor is a Nazi and hence "automatically" judged as bad—about the fact that the Nazis are bad because they do genuinely bad things that Aisha and Brian have personally suffered from, and they have good reason to judge Taylor poorly for aiding and associating with such people.
It's human nature for people to be affected by what they read, at at least a subtle level. Constantly presenting racist arguments which are superficially plausible and which come from characters shown in a positive light, and never presenting effective counters to those arguments, while also often presenting ineffective counters to those arguments coming from characters shown in a negative light, is naturally going to make readers feel more positive about racism. It takes effort on the part of the reader to counter this influence: to constantly remind yourself why these arguments and the people making them are wrong because the author isn't making it easy.
This is surely going to be especially true for readers who haven't encountered similar racist arguments in the past and might think, "you know, that seems pretty reasonable. Maybe there's a point to it." And that's a problem, because prevalence and acceptance of racism has very concrete and very significant bad consequences for individuals and society as a whole. I shouldn't need to belabor these.
I don't think it's too much to ask that a story not make the world a worse place for having been written and published.
The only reason I'm writing all this is because I really am disappointed. The author had some excellent ideas behind this story. It's had a lot of good points, and I've enjoyed reading those good points. But I've started skimming the latest chapters because the racism is just too much. And even skimming it has become unpleasant enough, lately, that I don't think I can stomach reading more.
I'd actually been looking forward for a long time to Taylor pulling the rug out from under the Empire: the moment when she lets them know they're horrible people, and she's been using them all along, and they fell for it. My thought was that as her deception kept building, and building, their ultimate comeuppance would be all the sweeter at the end. Anticipating that light at the end of the tunnel has kept me reading despite the increasingly uncomfortable parts.
I'm finally resigned to the understanding nothing like that is going to happen.