#< i guess? i don't know what the best thing to tag this as is

[absolxguardian]

@egregiousderp #especially since you can find writings of early modern and medival european men writing about the pros of being friends with your wife#they have no concept of romance just friendship and carnal desire#if you actually like your wife shes your best friend#so its culture!#<-absolxguardian’s prev tags#I CAN COMMENT ON THIS ACTUALLY!#because marriage wasn’t so much about sexual desire as it was about the duty of procreation and lineage for a lot of nobler houses?#it’s more tied in with the idea of status or duty!#you see that especially well in some of the chivalry movements#wanting to have sex with someone was almost completely divorced from the idea of proper marriage#seducing a guy you like so he has to ‘do the right thing’ and make your child legitimate was a thing#we have a very different view of sex and marriage post-birth control pill is my theory at least#it’s still super odd as an ace person seeing these people who don’t even LIKE their spouses as people but are so horny for them they marry

You're exactly right. My tags were just about one aspect of this different system, not differentiating between friendship and feelings of emotional affection towards your spouse/sex partner (romance). This isn't even getting into marriage, which was a thing that could be separate from both sexual attraction and friendship/romance. The idea that the birth control pill caused a major sea change is commonly accepted historiography (as well as easier to use condoms and for a period of time before HIV emerged cures for all STDs). A lot of our contemporary sex negative ideas are out-dated good advice when sex could be very dangerous (of course these ideas have forgotten their purpose. They become self justifying with their own value judgements, instead of practical advice about pregnancy being dangerous and new people causing complications).

Another thing that has occured to me since writing those tags is the idea that some contemporary historians have, deeming very close friendships between 17th and 18th century as "romantic friendships" (and thus sexless). This is done in a very no-homoing way, but considering this a way to make their relationship not queer is asexual erasure. But on the other hand, these relationships weren't considered deviant or even all that close to sodomy in their own time periods. But if their culture can be seen as not differentiating between romance and friendship, then what?

I'd put my guess for the emergence of romance as a concept in Europe as with the movement- romanticism- it takes its name from. But I don't feel like I know enough to confidently present this as a thesis, and I haven't been able to find an actual acadmic paper saying the same thing. Potentially you could say that courtly love is the first instance of romance in Europe, but you could also classify it as being about sexual tension and unconsummated sexual relationships. They did consider what they did dancing around the line, in a time when you weren't required to like your spouse. (And this is just Europe, but I know very little about this kind of intellectual history elsewhere, since I can only read stuff that has been translated into English).

I'm currently in a philosphy of sex and love class, and after four weeks I have no more insight into what romantic love is. But most of the texts we've read have been about figuring out a definition for love in general. The only guy who put forth an idea about romance specifically, has a definition that is incompatible with polyamory. But I am writing this right before doing the readings for our upcoming week that is focused on polyamory, so maybe I'll have more to say in two hours.

[guy who is aromantic voice] sexual attraction just makes more sense than romantic attraction. like ok, you want to fuck someone. this is quantifiable. it is quite easy to grasp what "i want to fuck someone" looks like, even if you have no idea what it feels like. romantic attraction, though? this is a nebulous construct which seems to largely be "glorified friendship with sex" in the popular imagination. what even is the difference between friendship and romance? the line between friendship and sexual attraction, though both can coexist, is that when there's sexual attraction present, you want to fuck someone. the line between friendship and romantic attraction, so far as i can perceive it within a heteronormative, amatonormative framework, is that it is... friendship where you want to fuck someone. what?

[measureformeasure]

Elektra in Mycenae, Casey J. King

[sunshine-and-her-ikevil-stuff]

*thinking about the villains' tragic fates*

You know, their routes never really talk too much about their fates and how it effects them mentally. Or how the MC feels about it, and dealing with the fear and angst of it with the slight exception of William's route

*eyes widen*

... I think I know what the sequels are gonna be about

[marshmallowgoop]

And you never know... what could happen to one of us someday.

An edit I feel like I've wanted to make in some capacity ever since I first started editing. Song is "Mohan Kaitou" by NormCore, which you can listen to in full here! This video itself can also be viewed on YouTube, in 1080p and with soft subs that can be toggled on and off.

Many thanks to @blenderfullasarcasm for the English translation of the lyrics!

[supercantaloupe]

The Rent Post™

aka, a lengthy screed on how rent the musical goes about adapting la boheme, where it fails, and what can be done about it

so i’m admittedly a reformed Theater Kid™. and tbh i still very much am a Theater Person, even a Musical Theater Person, i’m just in my 20s now and my taste has shifted away from what’s mainstream on broadway right now and closer to the world of opera. but there absolutely was a time in my early teens when i was Really Into Rent, as many Theater Kids™ were…and there was also a time in my later teens when i thought about it and realized that rent was not only just not my thing, but that there were some significant Problems with it, as its own work and as an adaptation. now, having finally seen boheme for myself, i feel like i’m really in a place to piece together how the two works compare to one another, and why/how i think rent falls short of success (as a piece of theater anyway. obviously rent is not lacking in commercial and popular audience success, for better or worse).

i knew years ago that rent is a direct adaptation of la boheme, but wow, only after seeing the opera did i come to realize just how closely rent follows boheme: in plot beats, in character names, even borrowing a couple of lyrics and musical motifs here and there. 

but it also changes things from the original opera -- namely, it adds things -- and i think this is the first place where rent runs into trouble. now i am by no means such a purist that i think no work should ever be adapted unchanged (more on this later...what’s the point of adaptation if not to change things to make the work resonate with a new audience anyway?). however, any and every change made to an existing work in adaptation should be thoughtfully made and motivated, because every single change has an effect on the whole product in some way, and many small changes can add up to create a rather different final product than a creator might realize. 

(and this goes both ways, i think -- both in a work where a more flawed source material is adapted into something new and better, and when a superior original work is adapted into a worse new creation.)

definitely some of the changes made in rent while adapting la boheme are due to the change in medium. opera and musicals are both theater, sure, and more similar in many ways to each other than either is to straight play or film perhaps, but it’s still like a spanish speaker and an italian speaker trying to have a conversation with one another. the languages are similar and there might even be a bit of crossover in mutual intelligibility but they are still ultimately two different languages with different grammars and vocabulary. opera in general tends to have slower pacing than book musicals, fewer plot threads of equal importance. that rent is specifically a musical adaptation of la boheme, rather than a true rock opera, demonstrates this well. the mimi/rodolfo relationship is still front and center (americanized of course as mimi and roger), with marcello and musetta close behind (though expanded in rent as more of a love triangle among mark, maureen, and joanne, the latter being an invented character for the musical who i think embodies the original marcello as much as mark does). but rent adds a lot of stage time and focus to a new couple, collins and angel, who are directly lifted from colline and schaunard, who are essentially secondary comic relief characters, whereas collins/angel are arguably as important plot wise to mimi/roger and mark/maureen/joanne. 

(and i’m not gonna get into the level of #problematic there is to the depiction of maureen as an overly promiscuous bisexual or discuss why colline and schaunard can’t have been a gay couple the whole time or whatever because. wow i do not care. there are more important things to complain about here c’mon)

first big addition to rent that wasn’t original to boheme is that increased stage presence/focus for collins and angel. it's not inherently a bad addition, and for its time the open depiction of multiple queer romances onstage was still kind of groundbreaking. and yes, rent having a longer runtime than boheme should give it the opportunity to flesh this relationship out more as well as the other two to make sure they all have an equal chance to develop and end in a satisfying way. hell, they don’t even all have to be equal in stage presence/focus/importance to be a positive addition to the show (and how can it be when angel dies halfway through act ii? then again, the character dying doesn’t exactly mean the relationship loses its importance in the plot…) but despite the extra runtime and faster storytelling pace, rent doesn’t actually develop angel and collins all that much, especially not before angel dies. this isn’t an issue with colline and schaunard, of course, cause it’s obvious they’re not important characters in boheme. but collins and angel are arguably more important in rent than even mark/maureen/joanne. and angel dies halfway through act ii…meanwhile, mimi survives the end of rent, when she very pointedly does not in boheme.

and…oh, mimi. she is probably the biggest and most problematic adaptational change in rent as compared to la boheme. on the surface she (and roger/rodolfo) seems the least changed of all the opera’s characters, her name not even undergoing the same americanization treatment as the others. but there are just so many small details that add up and up until she’s a fundamentally different character in rent. i don’t even begrudge the change in occupation: her becoming a stripper/exotic dancer/possible sex worker(?) rather than a seamstress does bring with it some cultural baggage, but i am not personally interested in reading any morality into her choice of occupation, and i choose not to read her line of work as having any implications for her “innocence” or moral value as a character. nor will i read her addiction or disease as being moral qualities either. however: there is a big difference between tuberculosis in the 1840s and both AIDS and drug addiction in the 1980s. neither boheme’s mimi nor rent’s are morally responsible for their illnesses. but there is absolutely nothing mimi could do about her tuberculosis in boheme except die, because it was france in the 1840s and nobody knew what an antibiotic was. in new york in 1989, there were rehab clinics and there were medications for HIV. these things were expensive and hard to access, yes, but rent really goes out of its way to show us that mimi had the resources to access these things -- she is able to afford AZT in act i on her own (and the fact that she’s on AZT is used as shorthand for her HIV+ status, as opposed to other characters about whom we are told outright)...

… and her relationship with benny (the much-expanded counterpart to boheme’s benoit the landlord character) in act ii, who verbally offers to pay for her admittance to a rehab program.

yet the next time we see or hear anything of her, her loving mother is calling to ask where she is as she’s presumably gone missing…

…and then discover she has been living on the street, dying from exposure/disease/addiction. 

did she do this willingly? did benny refuse to continue supporting her? we don’t really get an answer to any of this; rent isn’t really concerned with why mimi is in the position she’s in, but is rather entirely preoccupied with staying true to boheme -- up until mimi’s death, anyway. because mimi doesn’t die in rent, she is saved, and says that angel told her to keep on living (as though it were a choice). why? we can only speculate. really, if any character embodies the same “dying tragically in a world too cruel for them to survive” theme as mimi in boheme does, it’s angel. and her death is honestly used as a tool throughout the rest of the show: a purpose for kindness, community, life.

is this a bad “bury your gays” kind of thing? i don’t really know, i’m inclined to believe not. but i do think angel’s death is more thematically akin to mimi’s death in boheme than the actual (near-)death of mimi in rent. 

and this is the biggest difference between rent and boheme: boheme is not about hope. boheme is a tragic romance about how important relationships are among people in disadvantaged communities/situations, but it does not say that love will transcend or materially improve those conditions. rent, by contrast, does. rent suggests that the love of partners and community (even if filled with complications and tensions) is lifesaving. 

(and i know rent’s stated thesis is “no day but today,” i.e. live and enjoy every day as though it could be your last, but i think thematically all the characters and their interactions overall suggest a theme of community just as if not more strongly, whereas “no day but today” is more limited to the HIV+ characters and has little to do with the mark/maureen/joanne subplot. mimi's outlook on "no day but today" changes when she chooses to stay alive on the urging of angel from the other side.) 

now i don’t think this is altogether a bad moral to have in your theater piece. especially in one of the first major pieces of theater centered on marginalized queer characters. i will not deny how important and cathartic it can be, both now and especially thirty years ago when rent premiered, to end on a hopeful note rather than a tragic one. but i have a couple of issues with how rent goes about making this its central theme. for one thing, mimi has frankly too many Things affecting her health in the end for her survival to be realistic, and absolutely nothing up to this point in the show has suggested a setting of magical realism or pseudofantasy; everything has been as grounded in real life as possible, until finale b, when mimi suddenly and near-inexplicably survives. it feels like it comes out of nowhere tonally and thus isn’t very satisfying an ending when put to scrutiny. for another, angel has already died, and angel is, compared to mimi, a much more beloved and uncomplicatedly positive force in their community and relationships. angel’s entire stage presence (while she’s alive and when her character is invoked or referenced after her death) is a positive one: caring for collins when he’s injured, providing food and funds to the group, placating arguments, etc.

and the fact that angel has no concerned parents leaving her voicemails, unlike mark, roger, and mimi, underscores that she has no one else to lean on for support except her community of bohemians. and we’re not given a reason to believe one way or the other about her home life or financial stability outside of today 4 u when she got a sudden windfall for killing a dog (whatever; schaunard did the same thing to the parrot in boheme). in contrast to mimi, roger, and especially mark, who are clearly shown to have family who care about them and want to support them, yet they choose to live in romanticized poverty anyway. mark even gets a good job in filming and still finds a way to complain about it.

really, except for angel (and arguably collins, too), it’s difficult to totally sympathize with the characters in rent and care fully about their plight because they’re just…not depicted as particularly likable people. maureen is an unfaithful and kind of manipulative partner, and her approach to “protest” is really just bad self-absorbed performance art. roger just kind of sucks at songwriting (how is your eyes the song that he’s spent the whole show writing? it’s the worst number in the musical lol), and he’s quick to anger…his decision to leave mimi makes even less sense here than rodolfo’s decision to leave her in boheme, where at least he did so out of genuine concern for her health (also why does he leave mark? rodolfo embraces marcello as a friend still after mimi leaves in boheme...act iii of boheme is the least closely adapted in rent by far.). wheras in rent roger seems to be both genuinely jealous of mimi interacting with other men and upset by her continued drug use. although this last one i don’t begrudge him for, since it’s made clear he’s a recovering addict himself…although it does make mimi’s relationship with him all the worse, considering that mimi’s take on the whole “no day but today” theme is to throw caution to the wind with her actions and not worry about the future at all, and her interacting with roger is directly tempting him back into addiction which he clearly does not want. (and roger’s rejection of her in another day is framed as him being in the wrong with mimi being backed up by the life support chorus…)

while mimi as we’ve seen is reckless and throws her life away even when people try to help her (very very different from boheme’s mimi, who makes no particularly reckless choices, and accepts help when it's offered). and mark is entitled and uses his film as an excuse to disengage with the real world, even exploit it (see: the way he films the life support meeting without permission, or the homeless woman, which is never really confronted elsewhere in the show…)

the inclusion of a homelessness subplot in rent is particularly strange to me. it shows up a lot, especially in act i: the threat of homelessness for the main characters should they not pay their rent or come to some kind of agreement with their landlord; the vague future threat of benny’s “cyberarts studio” getting built which is implied would evict those living in tents on the lot; mimi being found living on the street in the finale; and the chorus/ensemble who show up periodically, as above. homelessness is an ever present element of set dressing/conflict in rent but it’s never really addressed, no points are ever made about it, which is in my opinion kind of wild and very unsatisfying. the above scene especially, considering how direct of a callout it is towards the show’s own characters and writing, yet it is never addressed afterwards, and this conflict is never really resolved. 

one could take similar issue with the choice to swap tuberculosis in boheme with AIDS in rent. though in my opinion i think addiction is as much as if not more rent’s analogue to boheme’s TB, since that is a much more acutely seen disease for mimi and only mimi while there are multiple characters (main and chorus) living with HIV…then again, angel is the character who gets the real tragic death analogous to mimi’s in boheme, and angel dies of complications from AIDS, so i suppose it’s open to debate. regardless, there’s a significant contextual difference between TB in the 1840s and HIV and addiction in the 1980s: there was no system, political, social, or medical, that could truly heal someone of tuberculosis in boheme’s setting. but there very much was a medical and social system in place to help people with HIV and addiction in the 1980s; systems which were aggressively denied to those who were suffering by the political system. and for as much as the characters in rent like to sing about revolution, protest, and activism, not a single one actually challenges the powers that be or call out by name those responsible for the systematic denial of healthcare to the marginalized. activism and artistic revolution is hollow and meaningless in rent, they never name a real enemy, just a vague sense of “the man.” but it’s a story set in a real and still recent historical time period, the effects of which we still deal with today (and i’m sure even more acutely so back in 1996); it just feels disrespectful to me to use those crises as such important set dressing for your musical which positions itself as a “fuck the man” revolutionary kind of piece of theater and yet do or say absolutely nothing about the real world issues it is appropriating. for more information i highly recommend checking out lindsay ellis’ video on the topic. 

so is all this to say i think rent is an irredeemable, fundamentally broken work? actually, no; i think it has a decent foundation and some solid music. i understand the reasoning behind and appeal of updating an old work to a new time period/setting for a new audience, and i think trading 1840s paris for 1980s nyc is an interesting and workable substitution. but when i look at rent as it is now, i just do not see a finished product. 

and i think this is the most frustrating and disappointing thing about rent to me: rent is, quite literally, an unfinished show. its composer and librettist, jonathan larson, died suddenly the day of its first preview performance. and for so many developing (off-)broadway shows, previews are when the actual finished product is crafted, as the show is revised based on audience reactions. of course audience and critical reception to rent from the very beginning was positive, but i can’t help but speculate how much of that is influenced by the mere fact of its creator’s untimely death. and i wonder what changes larson would have made to his show if he had lived, and been able to hear the audience’s reactions, and revise the show accordingly. i wonder if he would have thought it worked. i wonder if he would have seen the same cracks that i see in it. i don’t think rent is inherently unsalvageable, but it is so far unsalvaged. 

and frankly i don’t know that it ever will be salvaged; not for many years, at least. not until copyright and licensing in musical theater changes, and not until broadway audiences get more comfortable with the idea of altering beloved and familiar classics (the 2019 revival of oklahoma! was, in my opinion, a work of genius, but i’m well aware my opinion is not universal, and especially during its national tour the show’s entire concept has been extremely controversial). do to rent what bartlett sher and aaron sorkin are doing to camelot right now: keep the heart and soul of the piece intact, but rewrite what doesn’t work. or do something even more drastic, cut subplots and change character traits, i don’t know. maybe mimi should die; maybe it really is important that she survive! maybe rent shouldn’t have been based on boheme at all; hell, what would rent look like if it was based on la traviata instead? (well the answer to this one is “a different show entirely,” most likely, but if you want to write a poignant and tragic love story based on a romantic opera and set in 1980s nyc featuring queer and/or HIV+ characters, well…it could work and i’ll leave it there.) maybe that’s going too far, i don’t know, but the point is, i want to see directors and writers have the freedom to try that stuff out. because i don’t think rent is unsalvageable; i think it’s unfinished. 

but rent is far too popular and beloved for anyone to dare touch its libretto with new ink. the memory of jonathan larson is held far too preciously for anyone to allow such debasement of his work. when searching online for libretti to reference when writing this essay, i found one transcribed script with this at its heading:

and i think that about sums it up for me. “may he be friggen worshiped!” him and all his creations, holy and untouchable.  it’d be tantamount to theater sacrilege at this point to try and change it. how dare you sully larson’s good name by thinking you could “fix” his masterpiece…the masterpiece no one wants to admit he never got to actually finish. well, i don’t know, maybe it’s me being jewish and sentimental here, but if i have enough respect for a piece of work i want to be able to engage with it and question it and interpret it as i think it best ought to be. (jonathan larson was also jewish. would he agree with me? i don’t know. but i think he’d want to see the best of his work, just like i do.) live theater is inherently participatory and dialectical. and it ought to be alive, not carved into stone. neither immovable nor under threat of utter annihilation should someone come too close with a chisel. rent has potential. la boheme is still as affecting today as it was a hundred thirty years ago (did you know rent premiered almost exactly a hundred years after la boheme?). rent could be the same. and it does have emotionality behind it as it is now, credit where credit’s due. but it could be more than just that. if we could just let someone finish the thing already, even if larson himself couldn’t.

[rayofmisfortune]

The DP graphic novel is in my hands...

JFNXNFNCC REEEEEEEEE CAN'T WAIT TO READ IT JUST EEEEEEE AAAAAAH THE ART AAAAA MY BELOVED AND DANNY AND EVERYTHING PPL SAY ABT IT BEING THE BEST GODDAMN THING DP SINCE SEASON 2 JFJFJFFJJ (yea sure I could've listened to a comic dub or read it online BUT SHHHHHHHHHH WE DON'T TALK ABOUT THAT AH) Saw ppl saying Glitch in Time fixes Phantom Planet??? I'm rambling oh lord BUT I'M JUST SO EXCITED TO READ THROUGH IT SND PERCIEVE THE GORGEOUS ART AND JUST AAAAAAAAAA

[the-wreck-of-1852]

it just hit me that i'm halfway through season 4 right now and i am terrified of the end...

[maddy-ferguson]

talking to new people again is making me realize that (this is gonna sound dramatic) i haven't lived in five years but what i have done is watch a lot of movies and read a bunch of books and believe it or not that actually makes me an interesting conversationalist in some ways (?)

[keeps-ache]

gonna keep it shmoovin man

[iamnathannah]

I guess I can say this finally...

Yes, my Glorbie NWSL soccer prompt (that I'll maybe post one day) does feature Sophia Bush-adjacent slander and Barbie is pretty much Ali Krieger because I can't deal with cheaters and Gloria is her salvation as the new owner, a Honduramerican Rebecca Welton (America looks hot in a suit skirted or panted, it's required).

[companion-showdown]

Option 1 was suggested by @intodarknes

Option 2 was suggested by anonymous

The generic line up will be changed to include companions who have been specifically requested (their may be other changes depending on the tournament, for example option 1 would be a whole new line up, or including robots who don't wear clothes wouldn't make sense in a tournament judging fashion)

Lucie Miller will replace Josie Day (requested by @thenugking)

Hex Schofield will replace Sabalom Glitz (requested by @thenugking)

Alison Cheney will replace Kate Stewart (requested by anonyomous)

If you want to suggest a companion you'd like to join the general line up or just the line up to a specific tournament, either leave it in the notes of this post (or any really, but for the purposes of me being able fo find it easily it'd be nice if you left it here), or send me an ask. This includes anyone who I've swapped out, who you think should stay. I'm especially interested in almost / could have been companions, theres so many I'm sure I'll miss your favourite whenever we eventually get round to that tournament

If you'd like to suggest a tournament then similarly

You can find all suggested tournaments, my ideas, and requested companions under the tag #future tournament ideas

[sherlock-is-ace]

.

[thegempage]

eeeuuuuggghhh i'm gonna bitch in the tags a bit bcus this isn't like. serious enough to put more effort into it than that but i also don't want it to sit in my brain.

[cryptojuice]

take this with a grain of extremely drunk but at this point I'm my journey? now? I'm like literally the idealest person in the world and I think everyone else has something wrong with them

[assmaster-8000]

Those were all hallucinations because if you're patient rook he'll be the best lover anyone could have he'd take you out to the sweetest dates they feel like you're living a fairy tale, as soon as 12 am hits on your anniversary he'll be awake, just to kiss your face and hold you tightly, it's important to him even if he knows you don't realize it's happening, and once you do wake up you wake up to the sweetest man to ever exist he won't leave your side at all in that day he couldn't bear to do so, that's why he makes sure to clear up everything in his schedule two weeks before. he'd want to travel the world by your side, take you to experiences he knows you'll never forget and cherish forever he wants you to be by his side at all times of his life he can't imagine how he'd be had you not stayed by his side despite his flaws

ur so sweet aster it'd almost be inconceivable if there were ever a situation else wise 😵

for realsies though i may be an easily irritated person, im very patient in dealing with people and emotionally tense situations so me and rook? we gang fr we tight like a booty hole in here 🤭 im a very heavy sleeper so unless rook shakes me by the neck to give me a kiss i would NAWT gaf 🔥🔥🔥

[bragganhyl]

I can't tell if my writing mojo is getting the hiccups again or I'm just paralyzed by nervousness over trying to write bee gee three stuff