KingOfTheBailey
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User ID: 1089
KingOfTheBailey
23hr ago
That's because I was trying to describe how the other characters have been reimagined in some vignettes as the chuds have played with the supporting cast. I'm sorry if I was unclear.
Harry Potter and the R63'd Malfoy
Dræcina Malfoid and Male Romantic Fantasies
I want to talk about the other major AI-driven development that burst onto the internet this week. RW Twitter has been having a tremendous time rewriting Harry Potter with a Rule63'd Tsundere Draco Malfoy, who eventually falls for Harry despite family upbringing, pureblood prejudice, etc. This intersects with the CW in several ways so I'm going to have to put it here, but despite that I think it's all been a tremendous amount of fun.
Some examples: Harry loses a bet and has to ask Malfoid to the Yule Ball, AI video version of various Malfoid images/writing.
I'm going to speculate on why I think this has caught fire now, but the thing I think most interesting is how pretty much all the Malfoid stuff I've seen is actually quite wholesome and earnest, and that it's a really interesting data point in the endless discussions around sex, dating, and love we have around here. The next few paragraphs are context for people who might've missed it; skim or skip them if you like.
This doesn't feel like it should be new. Harry Potter was one of the biggest fanfiction communities back in the day, and that community has already gone through and shipped pretty much everyone with everyone else, and I'm certain any given character in the books has been sex-swapped at least once. But this time we get a very right-wing chud take on the Wizarding World: 'our wholesome, blessed "Malfoid" vs. their godless, degenerate Fem!Draco' (as in that meme with the two kingdoms).
So why now? I didn't see the inciting event, but I think the ground has been fertile for something like this to crystallize out of the Harry Potter universe for a few reasons. Harry Potter seems like cultural ground ripe for squatting or recapture: through the 2010s and early 2020s it was so thoroughly associated with a certain type of NPR-liberal-quirk-chungus lefty, to the point that "READ ANOTHER BOOK" was a common RW dunk whenever political/cultural events were compared to Literally Wizard Hitler. Rowling herself was very much in lockstep with her progressive readership on pretty much every issue, but broke ranks with them on transgender issues, leaving the average progressive more than a bit unsure what to do with their fondly re-re-re-read collection of HP novels and their Gryffyndor scarves. The result, I think, is that it's something like an abandoned fort in the culture war - nominally held by the left but not strongly, because of the uncomfortable association with Rowling. On top of that, Harry Potter was one of the last big cultural forces that reached nearly everyone - the title reveal of one of the later books was a story worth printing in a newspaper on its own and bookshops had massive queues on release day. On top of that, the story and world don't hang together if you look at all closely, so it's a tempting target for fanfiction writers to reach into and change or fix. On top of that, there's the absurd casting for the new series featuring (to use the the most prominent example) Paapa Essiedu as a very urban-looking Professor Snape that makes it ripe for mockery from the right.
The result has been a lot of chaotic glee that Harry Potter is up for recapture and reinterpretation. Cedric Diggory becomes Chudrick Diggory, whose absurd musculature would require him to walk sideways through doors and transfigure his shirts on and off each day; Luna Lovegood seems like she'd cheerfully mention crime statistics without caring who was in earshot; and Snape seems to be either played straight in the Alan Rickman style or used as a vehicle to mock woke casting or urban norms and behavior. The chuds are rediscovering fanfiction from first principles, using it to poke sticks in eyes or roll back some of the idiocy of the past few years, and they're doing a lot of it with AI.
The online right's willingness to use AI to make media seems to me like it's going to become an increasingly valuable strategic asset that the left is not going to be as able to pick up (because anti-AI/anti-datacenter viewpoints are now part of the standard lefty package). Even before AI, memes have had very short lifecycles, and so having an AI-literate bunch of memers messing around means they are able to reinterpret and exploit memes much better while they're relevant. A competent right would be able to use these skills to improve general messaging and react better to moves in the wider zeitgeist - I think we saw a bit of this with the "Amelia" character in the UK, where a purple-haired radical in an anti-extremist "game" was discovered by the right repurposed into a waifu and used to drive some of the early Restore Britain messaging from outside the party.
"Malfoid" is also an interesting name for the character. "Foid" seems to have lost a lot of the hateful connotations that the original incel use carried, and gets a bit of use as an ironic term of affection similar to some of the wifejak memes from a couple of years ago. But "Malfoid" is not that at all. The name is a funny pun whose time has come, but her character is proud, competent, well-bred, told to consider half-bloods like Harry beneath her, but unable to completely extinguish her growing feelings for Harry as he grows in courage, skill, and daring into the hero of the series. It is the re-emergence of a romantic fantasy for men that we haven't seen for a long time: a woman who falls for a man just the way he is, because he's grown so much that she can't help it.
So, with all that context aside, let's talk about male romantic fantasies. It is extremely interesting to me that there seems to be very little goonbait in the Malfoid stuff I've seen, but a lot of the writing has hit a nerve for romantically starved men in the current sexual climate. @kenzietuff on X, in the credits for an AIgen animation of Harry and Malfoid dancing at the Yule Ball, gives special thanks "to all chuds with sensitive hearts who still believe in love, despite it all". There's a sincerity in the writing that's very endearing, and the almost complete absence of smut contrasts it to the femgooner booktok slop that's been doing the rounds online (we've discussed e.g. Morning Glory Milking Farm in these threads before). @TheBrandonMorse on X put it very well, so I'll just quote his tweet verbatim:
I think the Malfoid trend is insanely fascinating because it's a commentary about men today.
Malfoid was brought up from birth to hate everything about Harry, but despite everything in her corner of society pushing her to despise him and see Harry as a foe, she can't help but love him because he represents something her side of the wizarding world could never show her; honest love and a relationship not based on how useful someone is - which was one of the core themes of the books anyway.
For men, Malfoid represents pure love - something modern men yearn for - because she had to overcome her own prejudices to let herself love him, and that's a love a man can trust. She fought for him while he fought the world that tried to enslave her emotionally and even physically. It's an incredible love story based on collective fan fiction by MEN that went viral because men are just thirsty for honest, trustworthy love.
It's actually kind of heartbreaking when you think about it.
Another X commenter (@Kit_Shicker) also deserves to have insight recognized:
I think this Malfoid fanfic is working with adult men so well precisely because it isn't porn brained slop. That crap is everywhere and is cheap and hollow.
Malfoid is an independent person with many valid, in-universe reasons to dislike and be a foil to Potter, and she's an immensely effective foil. She is actually a unique, deep, intelligent, principled, capable character who is a genuine challenge to contend with.
That formidability is not something she is putting down when she falls for him (in most permutations of the fan fiction floating around), to become some mere appendage on his life. They just finally come together into mutual formidability together against the evil and struggles of the universe.
And she doesn't fall for him (in most permutations) because he's perfect the way he is, but because he rises to meet challenges that are beyond him. Because he is loyal and chooses to do the right thing, even when it costs him dearly.
Harry gets a girl who is a force of nature herself, and he only gets her because of the good man he continually grows to be.
This certainly resonated with me and reminded me of my lonely years trying to find someone to love. An old reddit post I revisit now and then sums it up thus: "A man wants to be loved for who he is, not for what he does in order to be loved. [...] When he can finally let go of the crank he continually turns day after day in order to earn love and, even if only for a moment, it turns by itself to nourish him in return, that is when he will know he is loved." Malfoid is exactly this, but without the unhealthy "someone should love me the way I am, so I should never have to change", because that last part is replaced by Harry's growth. His growth earns the love because it's not done to earn the love. I've always hated the "men only want one thing and it's disgusting" accusations and I think they actually wouldn't truly hit a large proportion of actual men, but the number of cads and lotharios who seduce and disappoint many women through their interactions skew those perceptions. Sure, male sexuality also involves getting one's own rocks off from time to time, but for a man like me there's a big spot in my heart for some good honest love, and it's really interesting and gratifying to see that spontaneously re-emerge in the online cauldron.
If you want MOAR:
KingOfTheBailey
5d ago
I will however deduct points for, after having written "if you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy", deciding that the response to men-who-really-really-wish-they-were-women in the community was not a gentle-but-firm "I'm sorry, but you just aren't. That's not how this works."
KingOfTheBailey
6d ago
DHH has been controversial for a pretty long time now. See, for example, Martin Fowler's 2009 essay on the "Program like a Pr0n Star presentation, which was not given by DHH but his name is dragged into it as a Leader Who Should Be Responsible For Influencing The Community During This Difficult Time. He's talked about paying the wokes to leave 37signals, and called it "the best money we ever spent on anything related to culture". He's also been writing much more openly about his Noticing even before The Camp of the Saints, calling the renaming of git's default master branch to main an "exploit of good faith", asserting the necessity of deporting the gypsy population in Copenhagen, claiming that more and more people have had enough of "this [woke] nonsense", and that the ethnic makeup of London's population is cause for concern.
I agree that battle lines are moving and new ones are being added to the left/right standard package of beliefs. It looks like Ruby has well-and-truly passed the "exciting" phase of the language lifecycle. What's left are companies just trying to get things done and not as much new work in the language. Coinbase - another business that started with a Rails monolith - published its Coinbase is a mission focused company post back in 2020, and DHH talks about Tobi-from-Shopify helping out during 37signals's purge. (Shopify also runs on ruby and has invested a lot into that ecosystem.) The people who hype your language but work the backchannels if they catch you without a rainbow flag pin seem to have moved onto Rust and (more recently) Nix.
The more obvious MIC and MIC-adjacent companies from tech-right boogeymen like Anduril and Palantir and such have long been excommunicated from the "standard" (read: hard-left) online spaces. I don't know which new image is going to stick as Ruby's online reputation: a tool for "normal" companies just doing normal company things (37signals, Hey, Shopify, Stripe) or the language that "all those people" use.
AI has definitely added as the new thing you "should" hate if you're on the left, largely displacing blockchain because nobody can afford GPUs anymore. While I really don't think it's fair that any company can scrape the internet and launder everyone's collective work back to us at pay-per-token rates, I think splitting on political lines is going to prove a strategic error in the medium term. Linus has been pretty clear that LLMs and their output are OK in the kernel community. It seems like people who can steer the newer models to keep producing working and maintainable code are going to be so much more productive, and we could well see a world where all the left-leaning people self-select out of the projects people actually use.
KingOfTheBailey
12d ago
I assume it's inevitable. In case you're interested, "embiggen" and "cromulent" are both fake words invented by The Simpsons. But the terms you're flagging are existing terms from the sorts of papers that fed into the intellectual groundwater of upstream communities in the 2000s-2010s IMHO, rather than "extremely online" or "rationalist(-adjacent/-descendant)" or "online right" shibboleths/inventions.
KingOfTheBailey
13d ago
Not all of the modern embiggenings of the lexicon are bad.
KingOfTheBailey
13d ago
Haven't watched Slow Horses, but if you like this sort of stuff, I'd check out The Sandbaggers.
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
I only remember "Obama's deportations" used as a rhetorical weapon against Trump supporters, like a "we could've done it our way" once the conversation shifted back to "yes we're doing deportations". I think it turned out they were mostly border turn-backs, but I don't remember for certain.
Given that "abolish ICE" is a common slogan, providing services to ICE is seen as a boycott-worthy offense, sanctuary cities exist, and amnesty for illegal immigrants has happened in several European countries (most recently Spain), I think that the idea that a sovereign nation gets to enforce its national borders is still a controversial one in contemporary discourse.
KingOfTheBailey
15d ago
You might be thinking of a tweet downstream of Geek Social Fallacies.
KingOfTheBailey
24d ago
One of the arguments the older safteyist rhetoric used to make the point that "reinforcing certain behaviors doesn't get you the outcomes you want" was "animals were selected to like sex because sex leads to reproduction and evolution 'wants' animals to reproduce. But then humans went and invented contraceptives and abortion so they could have all the sex they were evolved to want, without any of the inconveniences of pregnancy and children".
KingOfTheBailey
25d ago
Would you mind going into more detail on the return to Christianity? Not necessarily "how the arc of your life changed" (though if that's not too private, by all means), but more what got you to step back through the door? It seems all so strange in the particular to me that I find it unbelievable. Why Jesus at all? Why was he born there? Why the crucifixion? I don't expect a theologian's answers, but I'm trying to give the flavor of why it seems so strange in time and place and detail to me.
KingOfTheBailey
25d ago
Or if you lived through the pandemic years.
KingOfTheBailey
26d ago
Ah, I see the problem. Thanks.
KingOfTheBailey
26d ago
I am now curious why you favor the fourth form over the second.
KingOfTheBailey
27d ago
You're welcome. How do you decide when it's acceptable for your personal style to deviate from normal formatting conventions? I remember deciding at a fairly young age that many punctuation rules around quotation marks were indefensible, but especially the rule about placing the period inside closing quote.
KingOfTheBailey
27d ago
Speaking of hyphens, using a hyphen to join an adverb to an adjective ("professionally-edited") is incorrect. See e.g., Chicago Manual of Style 5.93 ("A two-word phrasal adjective that begins with an adverb ending in -ly is not hyphenated").
KingOfTheBailey
27d ago
Doomish doesn't sound specific enough ("doomer" was one of the early "-oomer" memes). I am sympathetic to Yud's arguments and think Yuddites is very apt.
KingOfTheBailey
27d ago
It took me until Charlie Hebdo, and the response to it, to understand this.
KingOfTheBailey
28d ago
There is a news article I've never been able to find again, published on 9/12 or 9/23, about how we mustn't give up the rights and freedoms that make America special when responding to this threat. It's such a shame to look back on it and think we almost did it, almost held fast to our principles in response to an attack unlike anything the world had seen. And then instead, once the shock wore off, we had the PATRIOT Act and all that followed.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
Well I was referring to assaults which wouldn't have happened had the victim been normal.
Yes. That is called a hate crime.
This argument proves too much. Crazy people fighting on the street are assaults which wouldn't have happened had the victim been normal (to the extent you can identify one).
To the extent that sexuality and "gender identity" are malleable within individuals (and despite "born this way" rhetoric used to justify gay marriage, there seems to be at least some amount of this, particularly in women), queer advocacy can be considered as harming the people who would otherwise have had functional lives. For a concrete example, you could consider the promiscuity of gay culture, which allowed AIDS to devastate gay communities so badly that it was designated GRIDS, for gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome, when it was first detected. A more recent example might be the amount of unnecessary suffering Monkeypox caused. For trans, the social contagions seem even stronger and the harms more stark (due to hormonal/surgical intervention and the reduction of one's dating pool to epsilon). People on Discord posting under queer identities have me aware of what they called a "queer gap", where all the time spent "figuring yourself out" means that queer people hit social/romantic/life milestones later than straight people. This, too, is a harm. Are the benefits of the promised self-understanding and self-actualization worth it?
I saw a tweet once about the Millennial experience being something like "get told none of the rules apply, and that you get to reimagine new ones, only to reconstruct all of Grandma's wisdom from first principles in your 30's and scramble to apply them before it's too late". Defaults matter and are mostly good for most people. It seems to me that a lot of advocacy speaks as if the defaults work for maybe 5% of the population when it's rhetorically something more like 95%.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
Only that they've been on the "edgy Newgrounds Humor" thing for years. Racist Mario was uploaded to YouTube 12 years ago and TRANSformers 10 years ago. The new Space King is up to 7.4M views and their board game's Kickstarter is at 3.7M on a 50k target. Chud money has been looking for something to fund for a long time, and they'd be mad not to ride that train as far as it takes them.
And for all the in-universe "NO GIRLS ALLOWED" stuff, Tom & Don seem like decent mellow spergs when they appear as themselves.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
Not on short timescales. This is the sort of thing you need thick community bonds to make work. If one were interested in conserving society, I'd first look at getting people out of rentals and into real homes so they put down roots. That means stabilizing house prices, ensuring proper order, addressing illegal immigration so the demand side brings houses back into affordability, etc.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
I can understand why western justice systems consider insanity as a defense against a finding of guilt, but the incentives seem to align better if it's considered an aggravating factor in sentencing.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
Praise be to SPACE KING! Episode 5 is out.
Yes, that is true. My point is that the ability to ideate on the setting is being accelerated by AI. Both that it lets people make new media but also that it's probably more impactful to certain viewers when you can also present images, videos, and comic versions of the writing at nearly the same pace. I remember reading warnings against asking ChatGPT to generate an image of potential kids from one's photos because you while you know how reproduction works from biology class, you still might not be ready for what you see when you see it presented in an image with your face.
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