coaltide | Morbane's coal

In quantum wankchanics, Morbane's coal is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, of quantum wankerposition. In the thought experiment, a hypothetical gift may be considered simultaneously both the fic of your dreams (TFOYD) and coal, while it is unread state, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

The Coaltide interpretation implies that, after a while, the gift is simultaneously TFOYD and coal. Yet, when a coalie clicks on their gift, the coalie sees the gift either TFOYD or coal, not both TFOYD and coal. This poses the question of when exactly quantum wankerposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other.

Madness Opens: Tuesday 26 December
Author Reveals: Monday 1 January

Yuletide Discord for Hippos & Exchanges After Dark Discords for Namespace ~~drama~~ 18+ discussion. Google Group for PHs.

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I kind of wonder if the author is younger, because this kind of joking is pretty consistent with how my younger cousins (middle/high school or young college) talk.

It's horrifying. But IDK, I think it's also the pretty predictable result of almost 20 years of school shootings.

Yeah. School Shootings and the everyday awareness of them are absolutely 100% normal and generally fair game for any kid who started school after 2000. They grew up on them.

Hell, we were joking about them in 2002. (Mostly because active shooter drills were so new that ours was badly designed and guaranteed to kill us all, because a known, inescapable, bottleneck is exactly the opposite of a good idea in this process)

We were joking about them in the late 90s even before Columbine, my high school had a rash of violent threats phoned in c. 1997 and by about the second one it was clear the response procedures were so shambolic there was no other valid way to deal with it.

My schools (rural, didn't react much to Columbine) were not taking it seriously in the early 00s and I, dead in the middle of the Millennial range, would be horrified to see it casually brought up, though we definitely joked about shootings in high school. But my younger cousins who are solidly out of the edgelord teen age range (so like, 20) wouldn't be horrified to see it casually brought up, because they grew up with that infrastructure well in place. It's not a Heathers-style joke anymore, it's significantly milder. Which is horrifying, obviously, but I would hesitate to judge the author because of this.

Still weird to randomly drop in a gift fic, apropos of nothing.

I think you're underestimating the degree to which school shootings have been quite literally normalized for Gen Z. My 20-year-old cousins would not find a school shooting joke out of place in an Addams Family context.

I'm also a zoomer and this is insane to me. In a gift for a stranger? Did we watch different movies or something?

We're talking about a franchise where the running gag is trying to murder a baby. There are a lot of murdered babies in the world right now, and it's fucked up.

You don't get to say "omg too far" for canons that are meant to be subversive shock humor anyway. A shooting joke is in line with the shit the kids pulled at the Summer Camp and fits the tone. If they actually had a shooting it would be a different thing, just like actually killing the baby would be a different thing.

If you're the recip, DNW jokes about violence and move on. If you aren't, leave these people alone and update your DNWs.

You're mischaracterizing me. I don't think it's omg too far or whatever, people can write whatever they want! But I think school shootings/Addams Family jokes is a wild comparison to be making, and the idea of surprise school shooting in a gift fic is absurd enough to merit discussion.

And calling the Addams Family shock humor is wild to me. Like calling Roadrunner cartoons shock humor because Wile E. Coyote blows himself up with dynamite.

SC

Anyway my real gripe with the fic is that they didn't even make it funny.

yeah I feel like everyone in this thread can agree that it's badfic (quality of writing) if nothing else.

Nope. I just read it, the tone and humor level and quality was decent, not superlative but readable and better than 3/4 of the perfectly adequate Yuletide gifts I've received over the years. It had a fully Addamsish-but-ott-nice tone that exactly suited it.

I thought it was fine.

I liked it.

From the very start of the comic strip they have been macabre, what in the world are you talking about?

I'd say they're more creepy and kooky. Mysterious and spooky, even.

"shock humor" and "macabre" are very different things.

Like I'm on the side of people who think it's an Addamsesque topic, but they wouldn't do it as shock humor??

Honestly you might be able to do it in an Addams Family way that didn't seem jarring even, like if I was writing Addamses in a modern US high school I'd probably want to at least mention it because it *would* come up, and "Pubert is formally reported as being at risk of causing a mass shooting and things spiral after he confesses to stabbing his uncle several times and putting arsenic in his mother's tea, the family end up accidentally thwarting an actual mass shooting via the power of love, acceptance and mass confusion" would be a perfectly valid comedy plot for 21st century Addamses. Still don't know that I'd dare do it for YT even with an explicit OK from the recip via the mods, but if it was done well I don't know that coal would have thought it was worth calling out.

But based on the excerpt downthread "done well" and "handling it in an appropriately Addams way" do not seem to be the case with this fic anyway so that's moot.

I'd reject that shit without a second thought.

Morbane's coal

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