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Omi no Kami posted:Holy poo poo the latest Threads of Destiny chapter. Yeah, that's...that's sure a thing. Was definitely not expecting the problem with the various Sun/jungle theories to be that they were wildly underestimating how hosed up the situation is. Given how hosed CRX got from brief accidental exposure to a White's full power, pretty sure this is RIP Sun Liling, whatever's left after they literally tear out all of her blood probably ain't gonna resemble her much anymore.
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Jul 13, 2020 05:00
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Omi no Kami posted:What I don't get is, what's the point? The Sun family's leadership is pretty much all thralled/brain-zapped by the jungle already, what does it gain by yoinking sun liling in particular? Given how much of a problem that poo poo is, I'm pretty sure it didn't really need more firepower or influence. My interpretation from the chapter is that it's basically realpolitik - The Sun's major issue/gripe is that the ancient clans basically practice MAD amongst themselves due to their Sublime Ancestors, so when the Bai start doing poo poo like "actively poisoning every member of the Sun they can get their hands on", no one can/wants to call them on it. They had plans in work to counter this, but the Empress doesn't seem to be interested in continuing her predecessor's work centralizing power in the government/sects, and the Cai/Bai alliance indicates the non-Sublime Ancestor clans also aren't interested in helping counteract them, so Grandpa Sun basically views his only option as "officially make the jungle our Sublime Ancestor so people will stop starting poo poo with us". And unfortunately that means Sun Liling has to get "adopted" (read: forcibly turned spiritblood so the jungle is now literally her/her descendant's ancestor and will continue to protect them going forward).
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Jul 13, 2020 05:56
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today in Threads of Destiny: how to ruin basically everyone's plans for everything in one fell speech. boy when Cai Shenhua said she was going to burn off some good will she was not kidding.
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Dec 1, 2021 04:59
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Ytlaya posted:Yeah, the main point is that Green/Bronze (the third level of soul/body) takes dramatically longer than the previous two levels. IIRC the previous two just had vague "early/middle/late" stages instead of the well defined 8 stages that Green/Bronze have. IIRC Gu Yanmei (Xiulan's older sister) is the first ranked disciple and a fourth realm; Zhou's niece is also fourth realm but I don't recall if she's technically a disciple or just military and stays in the area due to it being on the border etc. There's definitely been a lot played up about how dangerous breakthroughs get at that point - see the last SV update's example of what happens when you fail - so it's likely a long way off even if Ling Qi could attempt it sooner. (Meta-wise: if she reaches fourth realm before a certain age she gets another automatic noble title, and there's zero chance Yrsillar is going to let all the build-up to fief management get thrown away like that).
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May 21, 2022 00:11
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Wittgen posted:Super Supportive updated, and it continues to own bones. Joe rules. he is the physical embodiment of the happily vindictive apathy of a college professor denied tenure, and it's amazing. the story has spent a lot of time setting up the subtext of how the Artorans take advantage of their colonies and are not nearly as benign or caring as they make themselves appear, and then Joe shows up and it's "oh, you sleep with one senator's wife and now everyone suddenly cares about all this "warcrime" nonsense, anyway you want some bioweapons? got a bunch left over I'm not really doing anything with." bit sad to see it fully switching to weekly so there can be Patreon advance chapters, but can't fault them, they definitely deserve to get a paycheck for this.
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Apr 6, 2023 02:24
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Ytlaya posted:I feel like there's also some weirdness going on with the way Avowed are empowered that ties into the Chaos/demons/word-chain stuff (which likely all connect to the same metaphysics of the setting). There must be some reason that they don't seem to empower members of their own species in the same way they do vassal states. My impression is that it ties in to the significant information divide that they explicitly maintain, and how that ties in the concept of "equivalent" exchange. If they were to hand someone like Joe these powers, he already knows what they can do and what they're worth, and would only agree if he knows he can handle the cost he'd have to pay. But you hand it to humanity who have no concept of it's true worth, and suddenly they've agreed to a massive amount of metaphysical debt the Artorans can quietly call on to do ???. Possibly multiple times - Joe implies they already gave us plans for flying cars (possibly written out on a single grain of rice that someone then ate), so at some point they could just give them to us again for a second hit. The ability of Chainers to somehow get more out of Wordchains than they put in probably ties into this as well - possibly the "resource" the Artorans are interested in is mostly just a sheer number of warm bodies to distribute their own consequences among.
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Apr 6, 2023 19:27
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Einander posted:There's going to be some reason for him to eat it, because of how weird that intrusive thought was and the big focus on food in the chapter. I look forward to learning how eating bits of people is part of Alden's path to power. Personal assumption given what's been presented: the lesson from Joe we saw explicitly focused on ignoring parts to perceive the whole: picking up the puzzle as one object instead of separate pieces, how many objects is "a pair", etc. And the gremlin voice is confirming it views the piece of bone as "Stuart" and supports his magic in counting it/him as still "entrusted". My guess is we're heading towards a voodoo doll situation with Alden being able to remotely preserve/"shield" people via holding on to pieces of them.
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May 19, 2023 18:04
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Ytlaya posted:SS 49: I'm not sure he can advance the planet's understanding. The Triangle of Absolute Secrecy won't let him tell anyone anything that might even tangentially reveal Lesson One, or give them guidance in a way that's based on information from Lesson One, and I feel like basically anything he could specifically teach regarding magic/authority/chaos is very arguably going to lead back to that if you follow it (IIRC, when they were walking to the teleporter afterwards Alden couldn't even talk about it with Joe because potentially someone might be hiding in a bush listening, so odds are his mental gremlin is going to be very letter of the law on that when it becomes relevant). So I do anticipate Alden will go back to Earth, and at best find he's only able to really talk with Gorgon about it (since Gorgon already knows and is demonstrably incapable of revealing it), giving a whole bunch of drama on that end. And yeah, the moon's already got enough of a body count, Kibby better make it out fine (I am also willing to accept "fine but Gorgon ritual has unforeseen consequences" if the story does go with that as the plan). The implication of "Hannah never returned because she decayed into a chaos demon" is dark enough as it is.
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May 29, 2023 08:26
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Patrick Spens posted:And speaking being cynical about Artoria. Why in the world did Body Drainer happen? What loving committee when, "Yeah we want an Avowed that can magically cannibalize people." Like the whole give teenagers superpowers at random thing is pretty fuckin irresponsible, but what exactly was the preferred use case for that particular spell? What wizard is looking to summon Super Dracula? and what do they want to do with him? Personal assumption given it was a U-class is an ill-planned experiment in trying to replicate Gorgon's ability to consume authority (given Alden's later comments that that must have been what he was actually draining) [patreon]: possibly as a way of reducing the burden on Knights as intermediate step before going to tree-assisted suicide.
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Jul 20, 2023 05:15
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Jazerus posted:i'm curious to know who folks in this thread are suspecting as the murderer. my bets are either doctor friend, because i think it was a mass murderer due to some kind of objection to corporate medical ethics in texas that led it to serial kill other doctors, or the AI somehow reviving one of its zombie brained colonists on the sly and using it to kill renn and destroy part of captain kinoshita's journals to conceal its full capabilities from the crew the latter is basically my assumption, AFAIK there's no indication that the AI stopped being able to revive people on its own after it woke Aspen, it just didn't have a reason to, and we know there's surviving members of the first crew still in hibernation who would need very little prompting or catch-up to start murdering people to protect the project.
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Jul 26, 2023 02:48
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blastron posted:ttou 83 I think that the most likely scenario is that it’s one of the existing crew, although not necessarily the convict crew, and the key thing that we’re going to need to find out before we can conclude who the murderer is will be the motive. To clarify the earlier post since this was what I was trying to get at, I agree that the AI absolutely isn't puppeteering anyone; however the crew has made a dangerous assumption that anyone who was aware of the project would be part of the second crew to observe it in progress (aside from the dead engineer who made the modifications and may or may not have sabotaged the engine) and so are all now dead, when that's not at all guaranteed. The AI has demonstrably been willing to kill what it perceives as threats to its growth - waking other members of the project seems within what's been established for it. It's possible it may not have even had to: all of the people woken in the second batch were chosen based on the likelihood of being in the "civilian" group with no awareness of the killcode stuff, there's not actually a reason that group (drawn entirely from the safe central rings) couldn't include project members intended to work on whatever the actual end goal once they got to the colony was. on the recent chapter 83 I do note the comment on the blood stain showing someone gripped the top of the partition comes after a chapter where we pointedly comment on how everyone tends to always follow the same path through the rings even if there's nothing stopping you from going to the other sides instead - would not be surprised if that stain isn't an indication of height but that our killer is abusing the nature of the ship to do some creative pathing around people.
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Jul 26, 2023 07:15
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Nitrousoxide posted:Not a very satisfying conclusion to the murder mystery IMHO to be fair, "confess to a crime I didn't commit so I'll be executed instead of a more useful crew member" is entirely within the Friend's mindset and honestly not that far from actions it's already taken. Fully expect this to be a fakeout (and if not, then yeah, kinda a waste of a murder mystery set-up).
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Aug 5, 2023 00:22
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for what it's worth, on Patreon the chapter is also on track for getting twice as many comments as any other chapter so far it's really just "hey do you enjoy: speculation" the chapter, so the volume of black bars is perhaps not surprising to add discussion of the RR chapter, i'm really not sure what to make of Natalie - earlier chapters noted how boosting Appeal can actually alter your personality to be more friendlier/outgoing, so the implication that she may have shoved an entire S-rank's worth of points into Appeal and Appeal alone is worrying, to say nothing of her apparently approaching "magically causes people to question their sexuality" levels if Alden's reaction is assumed to be common. I trust Sleyca wouldn't carry this into some of the more terrifying/uncomfortable directions it could go (ego death, etc.) but it does make me a bit hesitant about her as a character. like (regretfully going back into spoilers, Pat 67) the joke about Alden confusedly telling people about all the gum he got offered is funny in the moment when it's revealed he's unknowingly talking about people hitting on him - but in retrospect the part where like 30 people at the party were bluntly trying to invite the catering staff back to their room to eat appetizers and chill is kinda real hosed up, and someone who put all their points into "cooking" and "being attractive" is depressingly likely to have similar experiences without the benefit of Alden's unawareness.
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Aug 17, 2023 18:24
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Wittgen posted:The desire to be right can be stronger than the desire for happiness. The musicians at the funeral were stated to be high school freshman and university freshman, and Lute was specifically noted to be a very young appearing teen, so the timeline for him to be a second year art high school student someone knows on campus works out. He also shared Keiko's annoyance at the family for viewing Chainer as an end rather than a means (complaining they'd probably be happy if he lost the ability to play music), so he'd probably be living on campus even if he didn't have to. But mostly it'd just be hilarious for him to reject Max because he doesn't want to be on edge all the time and then end up rooming with a Velra.
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Aug 26, 2023 17:24
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One thing mentioned in Sleyca's comment which I found surprising is that there were apparently people who messaged her to say they were dropping the story during the intake sparring events because even that was too much combat for their tastes. Which is weird since that section seemed one step removed from your average sports story in terms of the actual amounts of "conflict" involved imo. I guess it shows there's a potential market for someone to do the same thing but just purely slice-of-life? So like, the spin-off story that's just Natalie's life as a cooking/romance manga protagonist. ...Yeah, I'd read it.
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Oct 10, 2023 19:17
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my read of the implications is that there are Artonans who are basically the equivalent of flagellant monks that voluntarily endure the negative half of wordchains for chainers/Knights/etc, partly for religious reasons and partly to just enable them to cast more/more powerful wordchains (since all the blowback is being borne by other people - Stuart seems to imply there are some can only be cast safely if the negative half is borne by (split among?) other people). The "feast" is presumably this opportunity to chain as much as you want without fear, and "I want to feed myself" that Lute was trying to learn is assumedly the language to tell these people you want to suffer the negative half yourself? People wanting you to chain more solely so there's more negative halves for them to suffer through (because suffering more makes it more moral, of course) sounds both totally where that would go and also a horrific thing to have to regularly deal with. In terms of plot significance, Stuart outright says they're a recognized group by the Senate and that he'd be a bit of a hypocrite trying to play down their efforts - presumably Knights/wizards who practice chaining regularly would tend to attract these people and a non-zero number of the Art'hs would have them included among their support staff, and any of the chainers/Velras being summoned are probably going into a situation where some of them are waiting (because if they're summoning a chainer it's to perform chains). And on the gripping hand, it's the sort of thing that would easily play into the story's themes regarding the perpetuation of imbalanced power structures. I think this is going to end up being one of the larger plot threads we pick up on in the Artonan parts of the story.
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Nov 7, 2023 07:07
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SS 108: hahahahaha holy poo poo, that is definitely a way for a plan to go wrong
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Nov 22, 2023 19:06
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Wittgen posted:The closing line to Kon is just true. Telling someone the truth of how they treated you is hardly lashing out. agreed on this. Lute makes a point of noting that Kon was a very underlined name in his book at that time, because he was very clearly trying to make up for things with Lute, but he still clearly didn't get why everything had happened that way and so was just defaulting to being "nice" in a way that didn't actually reflect the underlying issue of never really considering Lute his "peer" in any way (note that right before that scene Kon storms through the front door to go speak with people, and then apparently actively has remind himself to go back and hold the door open for Lute - a mark in his favor, obviously, but still something that reflects how he historically was never really "aware" of Lute in the same way as other students.) Haoyu outright admits to behaving similarly - he stated he knew Lute was deeply hurt at the time, but did nothing because he didn't have any idea what he could do, and when the stuff with the dice came out he joined with Kon in going after Declan because that was an easy way of proving himself "nice" by going after the bully, even though even then he knew that wouldn't really solve anything, because school/society had really only prepped him for doing the former and the actual problem was something he had no tools to deal with. A large part of Super Supportive, imo, is exploring how these sorts of biases and inequalities occur less through active evil and more through people failing to think through potential negative consequences and letting things proceed without any protections in place, which inevitably results in each and every one of those negative consequences occurring despite no one ostensibly "wanting" them to (eg the early section where Joe discusses the System as a three-billion-person group project that no one is actually happy with). In that sense, I think the large size of the recent patreon chapters are a point in their favor, as we get a real sense for how the System has so thoroughly warped Anesidoran (and to some extent global) society around itself that Lute has spent his entire life constantly running into reminders of how Avowed status is an assumed default, how the obsession with the (theoretically) standardized rank system leads to people viewing it as some sort of objective measure of their value as a human being, how his schoolmates/family are correspondingly raised to only think about things relating to their future ranking within the system (and consequently, to not think about anything that isn't related to that system, like Lute, human literature, empathy, etc.). Lute's moment of pity for his classmate is because he recognizes that she legitimately views her future C-rank as some sort of denigration of who she is as a person, that she must have failed somehow to not have been born into a Nettle Soup posted:As somebody not on Patreon, is everything ok author-wise? the non-spoiler version is that we're in the middle of another extended character section like the Boe one before, and like the Boe one before there's a pretty regular back and forth between comments from people who want to get back to what Alden was doing previously and author's notes from Sleyca reaffirming that this is how she wants to pace the story. Personal take is that there's definitely parts a different author could have cut out to shorten the section by 1-2 chapters, but those sorts of internal dialogues are what Sleyca clearly enjoys writing so I don't think this story was ever going to spend less time on it than this.
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Dec 11, 2023 23:33
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SS 114: Holy christ, Aulia's a loving monster.
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Dec 14, 2023 01:03
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yeah, spoilers tags probably aren't needed for freely available chapters outside of like the immediate post-release period.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:37
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gonadic io posted:It's also very much a typical colonial tactic to elevate a small group of the colonised and let them keep the rest of the people in line. one of the things I really like about the story is how there keep being clear indications of how totally the Artonans warp the societies they encounter around them, and how often it goes completely uncommented on because our viewpoint characters are children being raised in that society who don't really have any framework to even start questioning it. just this absolute saturation of the idea that people only have value in so far as the Artonans have ascribed a sufficiently high number to them. like it bears pointing out that the secret fact that child Lute held onto, that was taught to him by the private music tutor hired by the richest most-self important family in the world, that he used as a shield against feeling inadequate against his future-superhero-classmates, essentially boils down to "the Artorans have other lists they rank people's existence on." that's what he was taught, what he's uncritically reciting to the class. that he should feel confidence in his self-worth because he can be useful to the Artorans in other ways instead. it's stuff like that, even more than the very obvious things like "Paragon doesn't consider human culture worth learning about", that to me show how messed up the situation is (and that Joe is 100% right about it being inevitable that this is going to fall apart dramatically). Foxfire_ posted:Parts of this seem adjacent to story setting conceits that don't actually make sense, but you shouldn't think about because they're necessary for the plot: the former I think is sort of hand-waved as "countries in 1969 panicked and came to a mutual agreement to put everyone where they could be easily killed en masse without really realizing the implications", which eh, but the latter is something that's been brought up multiple times by people in the story as being kind of confusing and not at all matching their understanding of what the System is doing, so I'm pretty sure that's an intentional plot hook for later.
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Jan 25, 2024 00:53
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Wittgen posted:SupSup141: Well, poo poo is certainly starting to turn worse. Superhuman riots sound like a bad time. I'd theorized back when we were getting whatever minor details on Manon's actual work was that smuggling of magical artifacts might have been her actual job there, on the grounds of being able to identify "neutral" items that people wouldn't miss if they suddenly went missing from the university - I'm not sure if this serves as a sign against that theory given the Submerger/Sinker Sender is apparently more important than was thought, but I suppose it's possible the university also didn't realize how old it was? Personally very curious regarding the thought processes behind some of the actions we're seeing there. The System is ostensibly just going through the preliminary steps of planetary evacuation per Zeridee, but if that's the case why would it remove Emilija's timer entirely? If it's not actually evacuating anyone, and there's no larger problem, why would it be cutting people off like that? Is the evacuation capacity so low that even the planning step involves telling large swathes of people they're expendable? I feel like this is going to result in some very widespread political changes and/or revolts against the Artonans regardless of whether things get worse from here or not.
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Mar 21, 2024 17:43
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LLSix posted:SupSup 148: The situation as I read it is that they aren't just random scared people, they're long-term Avowed who were involved in the construction of the bunker, are aware enough of disaster responses to be discussing the Sway relay being used, and so reasonably have enough awareness to know how thorough a death sentence being abandoned to demons/chaos would be (at least from what we can get through the translation). Even so, most of the group is willing to let the Rabbits go (under the thought of it not being worth saving them, but still), it's just the door guard who has the bright idea of taking them as human shields, which seems to prompt another round of loud arguments. A group like that having one person desperate/violent enough to make suggestions the others don't agree with doesn't seem unreasonable to me. (Considering some of the language used, them being on-island members of the non-SAL group previously mentioned wouldn't be impossible either, in which case "being more willing to use force" is sort of the only characterization we have for them.)
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Apr 16, 2024 18:27
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Nitrousoxide posted:Supsup 148: shout-out to the immensely hosed-up moment of the healer just straight up looking at Connie and saying "your nephew picked wrong, you're not worth saving." Can't imagine where some of the Avowed get these ideas from!
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Apr 16, 2024 19:07
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