#I literally have not posted my art in years and I have a visceral emotional reaction when anyone says they like something about my drawings

[alllgator-blood]

Another detail I really like was how shamura got a heart for each sibling, and in the second to last kallamar, leshy, and heket has a heart for them. And in the last you think there's no heart, but then you see there are 2 small hearts on narinder feet

Narinder is totally the kind of mfer to get really close to showing genuine remorse for his actions + grief for what he lost, but hides it as best he can so he doesn't seem weak (despite the signs being visible). Shamura is the type of mfer that loves something they lost so much that it distracts them from the few people that still love them to hell and back. I am the type of mfer to draw this sequel for you that COMPLETELY ruins the vibe of the last comic:

[sabertoothwalrus]

OK PREFACING WITH IM SORRY IF I ALREADY SENT THIS EXACT ASK BUT MY WIFI KILLED ITSSLF AS I SENT IT SO IDK IF IT ACTUALLY WENT THROUGH. but in case it didn’t . i know youve gotten this countless times in the past because i blog stalked just in case youve mentioned something similar before but i need to know if you have any specific inspirations when you draw exaggerated expressions specifically like these two images of marcille. ive actually cried laughing over this comic and being able to communicate this type of visceral emotion is such an insane skill and ive followed your art for probably close to a decade through various fandoms so watching you develop this style has been fucking awesome and epic. like i cannot articulate how funny these are to me i just need you to understand i look at this comic to inspire me to draw now. the closest comparison i can draw to the feelings they evoke are like those mspaint reaction images and also mspaint tails i included for reference even though you probably know exactly what im talking about anyways but its actually so much harder to do that intentionally when you study art. also i lied you literally don’t even need to answer this i just had to let you know how obsessed i am over your silly comics and now ive written out a whole ass discussion post about it. im sorry if this is weird at all i think my daily prescribed amphetamines r wearing off and i know this is such a dumb specific thing to fixate on and im so sorry if its not something you want to hear about your art. ive just always seen that as an artist this type of expressive stupid silly style is something that comes after a significant amount of time and practice and study and style development despite being “simple” in theory. its just so cool to have worked with your own style so much that youre able to go “off model” from it and still maintain consistency with the rest of the piece. i said it already and im sorry this is actually rendundant now but the ability to communicate such raw emotion somehow decreases from at its height when someone is a beginner artist learning how to proportion and keep a steady line and what looks “normal” but somehow it all comes full circle because taking all that experience and using it to almost return to where you started but in a fully informed and intentional way so you can make choices to draw characters like this when the situation calls for it is just dhcidogakgoshfhw. i think i need to cut myself off or im going to talk in circles im sorry tumblr user sabertoothwalrus i just am fascinated by your style and progress and the years you’ve dedicated to art can be seen in so many places but this is just one that stands out to me specifically.

MMMMM what a fun question!!!

I'm not gonna lie, I think it's just Letting A Drawing Be Bad. I definitely think the people that struggle with this the most are people who have genuinely very pretty art styles, to the point of being kind of perfectionist about it. and to Draw Funny often means Drawing Fast and Weird. Pretty is kind of the antithesis of funny (unless being pretty is the punchline). do drawings that make yourself laugh. tracing/lining funny sketches almost always makes them less funny.

one of my favorite types of humor is when it skews more deadpan, actually. This is one of the reasons I love Adventure Time. minimal expressions and flat line delivery + absurd context is a really good combo. the key to comedy has more to do with contrast! if your drawings are allllll crazy ren & stimpy all the time, they're not funny anymore cause it's just "normal". if it's all subdued UNTIL it's extreme, and vice versa, then it's funny. The reason this comic is so funny is because of the complete lack of any expression. I feel like the one you sent of Marcille shouting "WHAT" is funnier when you know how much she tries to be dainty and feminine and delicate, how much she values her appearance, and how averse she is to "gross" or "weird" things.

something I find really annoying (and this is with comics/animation in general, not the expressions themselves) is when the joke goes on for too long. Like you'll have the joke, then the punchline, and THEN the characters reacting to the punchline??? Like the author didn't trust that their audience would find the joke funny, so they basically drew in a laugh track. But, this is distinct from a character's reaction being the punchline (like how the examples you gave from my Marcille comic are). MY POINT IS sometimes expressions aren't as funny on their own as you think, and context can affect how you feel about it!

as far as inspirations go!

my own face! even if I don't have a mirror, I like making the expressions myself so I can "feel" where the points of tension on my face are, and it gives me a sense of what to exaggerate.

my brother's art, believe it or not! we've been trying to make each other laugh with our drawings since we were kids, and he's really good at it.

ATLA has some great expressions

OK KO has been a reallyyyy good source for me lately. That show is so tailored to my sense of humor and the expressions and line deliveries feel exactly like the kinds of things I'd come up with. The tone, timing, and art style are all really close to the tv show pitch I'm working on, so when I feel like I've "strayed" too much from it (like after drawing a bunch of dungeon meshi, and my art feels tighter and... idk "manga-ier"?) I like to go and watch a couple episodes of OK KO to loosen back up

A lot of things like OG Spongebob, Calvin & Hobbes, the Simpsons, Chowder, etc etc

memes in general. if it makes you laugh, keep it in mind

and lastly, I wouldn't say I ever try to mimic funny expressions I see. Like if I watch a show for inspo, I'm not pausing it to copy specific drawings, I'm just trying to notice patterns and pay attention to what about it I find funny.

talking about being funny is really bizarre and I dunno if it makes it lose some of the magic. Ultimately it's something you can't think about too much, and just gotta go with your gut.

[milk-ly]

Happy (late) YTTD anniversary!!! (Sorry I was scared to post this😭) have art and a literal 1 year old animation I never finished because I was scared to 👍

I genuinely adore this game with all my heart and soul, it holds a very special place in my heart.

This is the game that made me feel the most visceral emotion from a piece of media ever.

I’ve been in the fandom for 3+ years and no matter how many times I’ve re-experienced the game or even the fancontent, I still can feel the devastating sadness and beautiful emotional moments. Just looking at Sou is enough to make me happy or emotionally devastated.

Tldr; I absolutely adore Your Turn to Die, go play it

[crooked-wasteland]

Silent Hill Symbolism: Mannequins

"The Mannequin is a manifestation of James’ natural urges and inclinations, as frustrated by his wife’s ailment."

-MySilentHill Wordpress blog

Silent Hill 2 is a 23 year old game at the time of the remake being released, introducing a whole new demographic to the game while fundamentally changing the perception and reception of the story overall with its updated graphics. Simply from a technological perspective, much of the game’s design qualities of the monsters in specific were lost in translation. There simply wasn’t the physical capability of rendering the images for the game to faithfully capture the nuanced concepts that were initially in the drafting stages of the designs. Additionally, there was a much different perspective to these games in 2001 than one would expect from our modern day. Internet was far more limited and the types of people online were generally more homogenous. More likely to be white and middle class males between the ages of 14 and 50, the conversations around the symbolism of the game were often very literal and biased to this demographic. And while this quote is taken from a blog post written in 2012, it still adheres to the overarching beliefs of the original analysis simply due to the fact that the world was not nearly as widely accessible even 10 years ago.

All this to say how much I personally despise these grossly superficial takes that will undoubtedly make their rounds again as people insist to strip art from its soul. I seek to temper the inclination to ridicule these theories by acknowledging that, as someone who never had the opportunity to play the original game and the limitations of the era in came out in, both in regards to technology and the communities who would have been in discussion over these ideas, my interpretations will outrightly throw away practically all of this. I will refer back to it as a template to found my differing opinions, but in no way is it a consideration in my interpretation.

(It also helps that the key argument for their symbolism being sexual was debunked by the lead designer.)

Having not completely spoiled myself for this game, I don’t have a template on how Mannequins behaved in the original, but the remake has emphasized different qualities among the basic enemies in the game. While the Lying Figures are viscerally disturbing in how they sound and jerk and crawl around, they are also brutish. They respond to base stimuli like sounds and light, things that could be very overstimulating to a person, especially someone who is already very sick. They are pitiful in their animalistic ways; unreasoning and reactionary. The same cannot be said for the Mannequins.

The first moment they are introduced, the Mannequins are characterized as sneaky. They purposefully skitter away and hide, they seek to blend in with the environment and jump out to catch James off guard. Their attacks are calculated and they can intelligently dodge. They are far removed from the interpretation of “innocent” or “helpless”.

The Mannequins are then a complex metaphor for resentment in relationships and how such resentment makes it appealing to hollow out the other person. They are less real and it’s a justification for treating them less kindly. James is hardly an abusive partner, his love for Mary evident in how quickly he flees from the reality of his actions, as well as his need to find her despite knowing she’s dead. He loved Mary his wife, but that was the Mary from three years ago. There is no black and white delineation between James’ Mary and the Mary he finds in Silent Hill, but she exists as a dynamic scale, which he desperately needs to project the aspects of her that caused him pain into the monsters of Silent Hill. The monsters he faces are not Mary as she was, but the convoluted kaleidoscope of her through his own perceptions. James’ emotions, desires, and personal needs color the way he viewed Mary and how he seeks to preserve “his Mary” as something separate from the reality of what they became.

Additionally, I argue their symbolism is far less to do with the anatomy of their design and more the material of it. They are mannequins, by definition, fake human. They are fake women whose physical forms are used to invoke the idea of femininity, but not its literal manifestation. There is nothing sexual about the mannequins, but rather the embodiment of female rage. Their entire concept is that of objectification without depth, and that is precisely what the original interpretations of the monsters lent itself into. Men analyzing women for what they value in women and not as human is precisely the trap the Mannequin’s employ. The removal of their upper halves removes their humanity, reinforcing their feminine identity above that of “personhood”. Not as a sexuality, but as the so called “fairer sex”, juxtaposed with the conniving and plotting alongside their intelligent and relentless aggression challenges any literal interpretation.

These are monsters reflecting what is monstrous about humans.

The Mannequins are effigies of femininity to embody and endure James’ resentment.

[obsessivelollipoplalala]

From personal experience as someone heavily involved in musical theatre, most people who say they hate musicals either can’t fathom people finding joy in singing and dancing, they think the costumes/makeup are cringe, or they heard one (1) Gilbert and Sullivan musical as a child and decided that ALL musicals are exactly like that. Plus we live in a world that majorly discredits performing arts and a lot of people simply don’t see the value in theatre and musicals and refuse to let themselves be shown otherwise. I’ve spent 20 years surrounded by people who literally cannot and refuse to understand the amount of work, time, effort, and love that goes into bringing a musical to life, because it’s just a bunch of weirdos prancing around in frilly dresses singing opera, right?

I appreciate your insight, thank you. You said people think makeup and costumes are cringe, and now that I think about it, I genuinely think the mindsets behind cringe culture play a big role in people hating musicals. I’m not saying that’s the case for everyone, but cringe culture pretty much always boils down to mocking earnest human expressions of emotion, and what’s more earnest than telling a story through music? What’s more earnest than people putting passion and hard work into singing songs to share the emotions in a story with an audience? Few things are. Even if a musical is lighthearted like Avenue Q or The Book of Mormon, it still takes a hell of a lot of passion for everyone to work together to successfully put on those shows, dance that choreography, and convey those lyrics to the audience. Some people have such a visceral reaction to earnest emotion, to people being sincere and unashamed of it, which is why detached irony is the default of tumblr and you have posts on here by grown ass adults mocking theater kids. It’s people who can’t fathom that someone would go on stage, start singing, and expect people to listen and take them seriously.

It reminds me of the idiot parents who laughed during my school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof when the Russian police came in to destroy the Jewish wedding, because people started flipping tables on stage and lulz how could they be expected to take that seriously?? 🤪 Actually, you know, this reminds me of when I was a young kid. Guess what? I didn’t like musicals before age 10! Why? Because I was an edgelord little shit who wanted to be seen as Cool, and being above it all was Cool, and the people singing all the songs on the TV screen were very earnest, which wasn’t Cool to my little smooth brain, so I thought it was all dumb and boring. But I grew up lol

You’re right that a lot of society discredits the performing arts, too, deeming them essentially a cringeworthy waste of time when you should have a “real” job instead. I guess it’s like the musical equivalent of people who see no value in English degrees and analyzing text because, “It’s stupid, there’s no symbolism, maybe the author just made the curtains blue because they like blue! It’s stupid and cringe to write essays on books!” That mindset translates into, “Why are they singing so much?? It’s stupid, why can’t they just tell the story without the stupid songs?! Why are they dancing??” And I do think there’s a tendency for people to hear one musical, dislike that particular show, and think all musicals are like that. I hate Grease; imagine if that was the first show I listened to and I never watched another musical again

[yellobb]

Yellobb’s Year In Review

I definitely stole the idea to make this shortened and not as ugly, so thank you Em and Raen for that 😆

I posted 1,900 times in 2022

That's 749 more posts than 2021!

126 posts created (7%)

1,774 posts reblogged (93%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@microglia

@icaruspendragon

@dizzying-sights

@literallyheretorotaway

@jasonfunderberkerthefrogexists

I tagged 1,305 of my posts in 2022

Only 31% of my posts had no tags

#the simon snow series - 339 posts

#simon snow - 286 posts

#baz pitch - 245 posts

#toh - 213 posts

#snowbaz - 205 posts

#the owl house - 203 posts

#m rambles - 103 posts

#toh spoilers - 94 posts

#hunter toh - 73 posts

#current events - 72 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#i didn’t make either simon or baz a vscode user in my fic because you only find vscode after you’ve healed internally and they haven’t lmao

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

My Simon Snow birthday art, where I screwed up and gave the last Simon a random age instead of looking up how old he really is

118 notes - Posted June 22, 2022

#4

That post about how 40k words is classified as a novel got me thinking: how many people in the Simon Snow fandom have written not only a novel, but a longer novel than the source material?

Please note that, while I could probably get the data for what authors have written more than one/all of the books composite, this is mainly focused on the lengths of individual works. I used the Carry On fandom tag on AO3 for searching, since the Simon Snow and related fandoms tag has one fic that would place, and it’s a Fangirl fic, not a Simon Snow fic and AO3 is where most of the fics seem to be posted anyway.

This post is too long and I tagged too many people, so shortening it for y’all

180 notes - Posted November 22, 2022

#3

Based on this reel I saw the other day that immediately screamed Simon and Baz

(Click for quality)

209 notes - Posted June 3, 2022

#2

Thinking about how viscerally affected I was watching Kate in Don’t Look Up. How she is the only one who shows the very human reaction of being furious that people are making light of this thing that will be everyone’s doom at the beginning, but is essentially written off as being too emotional and “crazy”. How throughout the entire film this brilliant astronomer who LITERALLY DISCOVERED THE FUCKING COMET is discredited and ostracized for being just a tiny bit upset about everything and made out to be an idiot that no one should listen to. How she chooses to grit her teeth and bare it, but it blows up in her face because she still isn’t acknowledged. How she continues to try with all her might to save everyone until there’s no other way, but she still fails because there’s just too many forces working against her. How even when she doesn’t give a shit anymore because she’s just so tired of being pushed down she still cares so much, she just has to come to terms with the fact that she tried, and maybe that wasn’t enough, but that’s all she could do.

431 notes - Posted January 7, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Eldest AFAB sibling, queer, neurodivergent, former gifted kid, perfectionist culture is curling up in a ball and sobbing at all three of the Madrigal siblings’ solos

436 notes - Posted January 28, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[soul-sparx]

Coming Clean

CW for mentions of noncon, dubcon, drawn CP, and pedophilia.

[TRANSCRIPT]

I've been dishonest with those I love. What I'm about to say will hurt them, for some--maybe even most--it will drive a wedge between us that might never be removable. But I need to be honest, with myself and with those I care about. It's only fair that my friends know who it is that they're really talking to.  I'm not asking anyone to agree with anything I say here, all I ask is to be heard out. If you disagree by the end, I respect it. If you hate me by the end, I still respect it. It would hurt, but I would rather let my friends free than hold them hostage in a painful or dishonest relationship just to avoid great but ultimately brief pain.

If you've been in Cici's 18+  channels in the past few days (or weeks, I don't know when I'm posting this), you'll know I'm currently trying to fight porn addiction. That's not the whole story. I may or may not be addicted to porn writ large, I honestly don't know. To be frank, I'm fairly comfortable with that side of myself. I don't think there's anything wrong with being a generally horny person and consuming a lot of porn. What I'm really trying to fight, the thing that is actually making me hate myself, is  a reliance on and addiction to lolicon and shotacon. I want to make it clear, that I don't *enjoy* those things--I think it's disgusting, and all it can lead to, regardless of the author's/artist's intent, is a glorification of pedophilia--however the years I spent as a kid and teen thinking it was okay has led to it becoming an everpresent problem for me, even as I do everything I can think of to avoid it.

I start with that not to garner sympathy, but to properly explain why I've been so fucked up recently, as well as to demonstrate some of my feelings. Namely, I *do* believe everything I've said about fiction affecting reality. I do believe that it does, I do believe that to affect reality-- to send a message, to convey an emotion, to display onesself to the world-- that is the entire *point* of fiction, and I do believe that it can be used for insidious and malicious things, whether the author/artist intends it to or not, and I believe that anyone who tries to say any different is either misinformed or has ulterior motives. I'm not blind to the effects that stories and art have. I'm not stupid or malicious.

With all of that said, I don't believe "problematic" kinks are inherently evil. I feel that they are okay to have, and I know that, for some people, they are outright necessary. There are limits to what is permissible, of course, as there are to all things, but that's just the issue. Those limits are different from person to person, and the solution isn't simply to ban it all, and treat anyone who has those kinks as a freak or a monster. I'll use the example of a non/dubcon kink, since that's what's most relevant to me personally. Having this kink, fantasizing about it, it doesn't mean I literally want to rape, or be raped. It's, in my mind, an artistic equivalent to BDSM. For me it's about control-- I often feel lacking in it, and so it's useful for me to fantasize about either taking it or completely giving it up. It doesn't mean I condone it, or want to do it, but it's like the catharsis you feel during a slasher movie. You wouldn't actually want to see a bunch of teenagers slaughtered for being kind of annoying, but it's engaging to watch in a visceral kind of way. Others have different reasons for being into noncon art, it can represent many things or just be sexually gratifying. I don't know other peoples' stories, and so long as they aren't hurting themselves or anyone else I'm not going to begrudge them for getting through the day. The same goes for almost any kink in that vein.

I'm not going to say it's without problems. There is truly heinous art out there that can truly, only be used to bring pain to the world. The insistence some people have on putting their potentially-triggering kinks into main tags with no warning is, frankly, disgusting. You can't say "don't like, don't look" and then not give people the tools to avoid you, just as you cant run outside flailing your dick around and shouting "it's your fault if you see this!!", but the absolutist all-or-nothing approach that people on both sides of the argument have is ultimately damaging *to* both sides. Ultimately, my thoughts are that fiction does affect reality, but they must be understood as distinct. Fiction is a simulacrum, not a chronicling. Its purpose is to convey, not to historicize. It can be used for insidious or malicious purposes, but so can anything so it must be confronted on its own terms-- a gun is meant to kill, a hammer merely can, they cannot be treated the same.

To my next point, I feel like ages in fiction are taken far too seriously a lot of the time. To convey what I mean, I want to compare two characters who are, in their fiction, roughly the same age, but who I have entirely different feelings on in this regard. Ciel from Mega Man Zero, and Filia from Skullgirls.

Ciel's entire character arc revolves around her age. She is, at the beginning of the series, 14 years old. She's barely a teenager, and yet she's the one leading the resistance. A child forced into a position that even most adults wouldn't be able to handle. Throughout the series, the only way she can make any progress for the resistance is with the help of Zero, who has been alive for centuries longer than anyone else on Earth, and while she comes into her own as a leader across the ~2 years that the games take place over, she still holds onto some of her more childish feelings by the end. The catharsis at the end of her arc isn't a coming of age, it's a return to innocence. Though much work still remains to be done after Zero's grand sacrifice, she no longer has to shoulder the burden alone and is able to be a kid again in the interim. Literally, thematically, and narratively, she is a child, and as such porn of her is *definitely* something to avoid.

Filia's age, on the other hand, is irrelevant to her character. Her story is about uncovering her lost memories, while also rekindling a friendship with someone who she had, at one point in that lost past, hurt. She is slightly more naive than some of the other characters, but no moreso than the 18-year-old Cerebella, or the 20-year-old Ms. Fortune. She is just as mature and adult as any other character on the roster and would read exactly the same if she was made 18 or 19-- compare her to Umbrella or Peacock, who *are* children, and *are* actively childish in nature, and are thus not sexualized. Even Marie, a character with a maid theme-- a classic of oversexualization as maids are constantly sexualized-- is a child, and is treated properly as one. Do I malign the choice to make Filia 16 arbitrarily? Absolutely. The only reason that choice was made was because schoolgirl superhero is a common trope in anime. It has no bearing on her story or characterization and is ultimately just a marking on the wiki page that many people probably don't even know about. Do I blame anyone who is made uncomfortable by her portrayal? Of course not. Despite how unimportant her age is to her character, it is still there, it is still a choice that was made, and if and when that makes people uncomfortable it is entirely understandable. Do I begrudge anyone who does draw her in sexual situations, even knowing that fact about her? No. She is a sexualized, fanservicey character in a sexualized, fanservicey game, full of sexuality and fanservice.

Obviously these are two extreme examples, and not every situation is going to be so direct. I'm not saying it can't be uncomfortable, and I'm definitely not saying it's beyond criticism, just... don't let it get to you too much, you know? These aren't real people who are actually this age, they're created simulations of humanity, who had numbers applied to them, at times for good reason and at times arbitrarily. Block it, avoid it, but I'm not going to get mad at people for thinking the intentionally sexualized character is sexy--I'll criticize the creators for drawing her that way and then making that choice so flippantly.

Finally, I have very little issue with aging characters up. Obviously if all you're doing is making them taller and giving them bigger boobs and making them hornier, and changing nothing else about them then that's stupid. I'm not going to mince words, that's just a lame excuse to beat it to a child character. But if you make the effort to actually consider how the character might change and evolve then I don't have any issues. That's a creative endeavor, even if your main intention with that version is sexual, you've still actually gone through the effort of essentially creating an adult character. Bringing back my Ciel vs. Filia example from before is actually relevant because I have specific examples to point to. I won't say any names, because one is an artist who I hate and deserves no publicity, and another is one I genuinely enjoy and I don't want to bring any heat to.

In my addiction, I will admit I have sought out art of Ciel, and in that there is one particular artist I've come across who draws an "aged up" version of her. This "aged up" version of Ciel is everything I mentioned as stupid and wrong. She's, like, six inches taller, has big breasts, and is completely sex-obsessed. It's disgusting. That's not aging her up, it's turning a child into a sex doll. I'm not going to defend it for a second.

Another artist draws an aged up version of Filia, a version of her created, yes, partially to draw in pin-ups and other lewd artworks, but done so with clear love and attention to the character and world. He envisions a version of Filia well after the Skullgirl is defeated and the Skullheart destroyed. She has put on some weight in her 20s, as she no longer has a reason to fight, but she's happy. Most of his art, while much of it is suggestive by its nature as pinups, is focused on her just... living her new life, being comfortable, fleshing out this version of her. He's clearly put thought into the story that took place to get her to where she is, rather than just saying "all characters are 18+" and calling it a day.

That's the end of my spiel. This isn't even fully exhaustive, but it's at least enough to tell you who I am. I'm open to changing my mind on anything-- change is reality and reality is change-- but I can't try to force it anymore. It's too much for me to carry anymore. I'm not going to argue with anyone, I don't. Have the energy. If I ever bring any of this up again, I will properly mark and tag it so it can be avoided, and I'll clarify things as best I can if asked, but I'm not trying to make anyone agree with me. I know some, if not all of my friends will find this all extremely objectionable, and I don't blame them. I just hope we can still be friends despite our differences. And if we can't, then I'll respect that too. I don't want to lose anyone, but I don't want to be a burden or a source of pain. If anyone sees this and decides to cut contact with me, I will respect it. Even if you don't actively block me, I will not contact you unless you contact me first. I'm sorry to have been so dishonest for so long, I'm sorry to the people that this will hurt, but I can't keep letting this kill me slowly every day. Thank you for your time, and if you have to leave, then thank you for being my friend for how long it did last.

[thoughtsofaburntoutstudent]

i dont think i posted this so, here’s some poetry i performed at my college’s poetry night:

What you say - E.W.M

You say, “there is selfishness in everything”, that it is simply nature to hoard.

To incarcerate the visceral? It is to incarnate love.

The world is built on transactions, on emotional tokens deemed favors.

“It’s about what you’re able to offer others”, you say.

I disagree, “It’s about accepting the bother, not withholding behaviors”.

A million ways to express what I mean, but none to conciliate the absurd and the literal.

an ontological endorphin, the copernican principle, frames a constant window through which we experience reality.

Does identity have id?

Does identification supersede sensation?

Is the world, “…that prison cell which Pascal says the world is, from which daily the inmates are led forth to die”?

Frankly, who cares?

Often it is necessary to come to terms with the divorce of ideals, that which Camus terms, “the absurd”.

With the fact that you can never truly “touch” anything, by the literal sense of the word.

With death.

But never shall i subscribe to the popular nihilist notion of anthropomorphizing the universe, claiming it cold and distant.

For when I look at the graffiti left on the tomb of Ramses V, when it was merely a couple hundred years old, and it says, “I do not understand the hieroglyphics”,

or when I think about the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina, and how one of the earliest forms of art taught to children is no different,

or when I pick up a stinkbug off my ceiling, or a yellow-jacket off a window,

just to take it outside

how can i possibly say the universe is unfeeling?

I search, and I do not find him at any altar, because it is a cruel and unjust thing, to believe in God.

To pray for forgiveness, to pray the drowning of tomorrow feels like the gentle stroking of fur.

[thexfridax]

Wynonna Earp Boss Hopes Syfy Finale Made You Feel 'All the Things' — Plus, Scoop on One Happy Wedding Accident

By Matt Webb Mitovich, tvline.com / April 9 2021, 8:02 PM PDT

The following contains spoilers from the Syfy finale of Wynonna Earp.

After four years of protecting Purgatory with her Peacemaker, Wynonna Earp got to quite literally ride off into the sunset. And she did so while straddling a motorcycle, with Doc Holliday seated behind her.

Mind you, the two almost didn’t wind up together. Following the simply beautiful “WayHaught” wedding, Doc (played by Tim Rozon) was determined to put Purgatory in Charlene’s rear view mirror and get to living life as “just a man,” and Wynonna (Melanie Scrofano) felt compelled to stay put as Purgatory’s protector. But with an empowering nudge from li’l sis Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley), Wynonna caught up to her man and professed her love, after which they decided to travel light, for the first time in a long time, and pay their daughter Alice a visit in MIracles, Montana.

TVLine spoke with series creator Emily Andras about crafting this very fine finale, at least one “happy accident” that wound up stirring many emotions, and more.

TVLINE | The finale has just aired…. What emotions do you hope the fans are feeling at this moment?

Just head-to-toe body warmth, and love, and affection, and wistfulness…. And a little bit of bittersweetness. I feel like joy has to be paired with nostalgia, so I hope they’re feeling all the things. But hopefully not hungover!

TVLINE | At what point over the years did you ever envision Wynonna and Doc riding off into the sunset?

Ahhh! I almost never even let myself envision it, you know? It’s so funny — when you start doing a show, you have all sorts of ideas about what pairings are going to rise to the top, who’s going to end up with whom, and one of the joys of Earp is that so many different things have happened. But those two characters have certainly earned the chance to try to be happy, whatever that means to them. I never knew that I would be allowed to end such a romantic pairing with the woman driving the motorcycle and the guy on the back.

TVLINE | I’m watching that final sequence and it almost feels alien, seeing the two of them head off into what I think of as “the real world.” But I also found that viscerally exciting, to see so much ahead for them.

That’s so lovely, thank you for saying that. I feel like having the world ahead of them and being such an unusual couple, I would love to see what happens next for them. I’m sure there will be lots of crazy sex and crazy arguments and crazy laughter. So, godspeed! Godspeed.

TVLINE | When throwing a season-ending wedding, what is Emily Andras’ marching order? “Above all else, this wedding has to be…”?

It has to honor to all of the characters — and by that, I mean it has to try to find a moment for every special pairing on the show, not just WayHaught. I think it’s important to pay due respect to how far Waverly and Doc have come; she never gave up on him, she always saw a better man in him — and now he gets to be the best man! Nedley (Greg Lawson) and Nicole’s (Kat Barrell) relationship, that paternal/daughter bond is so special, so honoring that was very important.

And at the end of the day, I still think the real love affair of the show is the Earp sisters, so I ended to make sure that that was honored. I really love the parallel with the pilot, where Wynonna came into town against her will and was so hungry to leave but was forced to stay. And now you have Waverly secure enough in how their relationship has evolved, that she knows Wynonna deserves to leave again — because she’ll come back.

More than anything, it was about giving every character a moment of happiness. Even Jeremy (Varun Saranga) becoming deputy chief of Black Badge and maybe finding a new date…. It was all about finding everyone a moment of potential joy, after they’ve gone through so much after four seasons.

TVLINE | Talk about the decision to have empty guest chairs laid out with the names of those who are no longer with us or didn’t make it to the wedding.

That was such a happy accident. We were on-set, it was very much in the middle of the pandemic, and we knew we were going to have a limited number of people for the wedding. But then we put out chairs so you could understand where the aisle was, and they looked really empty. So my incredible director, Paolo Barzman, who also did the pilot, and my art director Trevor Smith, pitched this idea to me. I had sort of joked about, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you had the ghosts of characters past?” In the moment, they said, “What if we hung names on the chairs?” and it was just one of those goosebump moments, like, “That’s brilliant.” So then we have people writing up these cards, rushing them out, and it’s honestly one of my favorite things. Whenever I see that Dolls chair, I just can’t help but feel things.

TVLINE | But Mercedes (Dani Kind), to be clear, is still with us.

She’s just out, like, being her best vampire self. She’s out being an amazing vampire, yeah. I still have that spinoff if you want to help me sell that!

TVLINE | If anything caught me a bit off-guard, it was us getting a song from Rachel (played by Martina Ortiz-Luis).

The thing about Martina is that she is a phenomenal singer. She is the anthem singer for the Toronto Maple Leafs — so she’s quite a star here! — and she was on Pilipinas Got Talent back in the day…. It seemed like a waste to not have someone with such an exceptional voice perform! And what better song to lay over the necessary wedding montage than a WayHaught classic (Fleurie’s “Wildwood”), the song that was playing the first time WayHaught kissed. It’s a bit of an Easter egg for those hardcore WayHaughters!

TVLINE | I don’t think anyone would have ever felt like a “Dark Angel Waverly” detour was missing, if you hadn’t spent time on it the episode prior. Why did you feel it was important to go there during one of the final hours?

The truth of it is that honestly we’ve been balancing the spectre of whether we were going to have a Season 5 or not. When we started breaking Season 4 two years ago, we were looking down the barrel of about 24 episodes, so [when you get half that] you’re like, “What are we going to keep, and what are we going to pitch overboard? What can we live without learning about?” I would argue that this idea of Waverly having a darkness inside of her did have to be highlighted after four seasons. I completely agree that in a perfect world I could have done eight episodes of Dark Angel Waverly, exploring that and seeing it come to pass. But if we ever get more story, I don’t know if Waverly has complete control over that part of herself. I dont think it’s “gone.” If Nicole puts mayo instead of mustard on her sandwich, who knows what’s going to sprout out!

TVLINE | I mean, if only to see what other outfits Dark Waverly has.

As long as she keeps her thigh holster, she’s ready to go.

TVLINE | Looking back at these last few episodes, what are you most proud of?

‘m so proud of this cast. It’s so boring, but God, just to see them grow and thrive and shine…. performing comedy and emotion, seeing their commitment to the show, and the feelings…. It’s just been such a joy to see such an amazing group of people get their due. They really are that wonderful, off-screen as well.

I’m also pretty happy — in this day and age, and despite all the fights the show has been through — that if this is the end, I feel like that’s a pretty nice finale, a pretty good topper on the cake. I feel like the fans will feel like they went on a journey, and they left the characters in an interesting, good place. And look, that’s really rare in TV, to end your story the way you want. How can I be anything but grateful, at the end of the day?

TVLINE | When I was writing my tweet the other morning, I wanted to call it a “very fine finale,” but I worried you’d think I was saying it was only “fine.” But it was a very fine finale!

No, you have to keep me hungry! You get to challenge me, Matt. Listen, I just didn’t want to risk…. I’m the queen of 75 cliffhangers, but I feel like the fans have worked so hard for us, for so many years, that it was more important that they got closure, just in case. But there’s always another demon, there’s always another thing to trigger Dark Angel Waverly. There’s always more story, but at least you have this, no matter what.

TVLINE | And if some network or streamer does ride to the rescue, would there be something that brings Wynonna and Doc back to Purgatory? Or might a Season 5 be without the two of them?

Look, the show is called Wynonna Earp, so you need Wynonna Earp. She’s still the champion, she’s still got the magic gun and the best hair on the show — sorry, everyone else!

There are a couple of unresolved issues. We still have Eve, who we kicked out the the Garden very early in the season, and who can kind of shapeshift; she could take on the appearance of any one of our characters! That would certainly throw a wrench in the works in Purgatory. There are a million different reasons to bring Wynonna back, to help out her sister.

TVLINE | And lastly, was there anything you had to cut or just didn’t have room for, or any returning cast you couldn’t fit in?

Oh, tons. But look, you kind of hit the nail on the head earlier. I’m always striving to be better, and some stuff at the end felt a little rushed, with Dark Angel Waverly. I think if it hadn’t been a pandemic, there would have been more people at that wedding. I would have loved four more episodes to round the bend there. But look, that’s Wynonna Earp, man — perfectly imperfect! So that’s what we did, and what a ride it’s been. The ride of a lifetime for me.

[drivingsideways]

2020 Creator Wrap: Favourite Works

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 (or so) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. Tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

Thanks for tagging me, @rain-hat !

I had a productive year, writing-wise! AO3 informs me that I posted a ginormous amount of words, which still surprises me, and also, at this point of the year seems like a fever dream that happened to someone else.

👀  👀 👀 👀

.................??

I guess there are worse ways to have spent this year of our lord 2020, right?

First off, let me fully credit my cheerleaders/handholders @thefeastandthefast and @rain-hat, without whom I probably wouldn’t have written most of this! 

Picking 4 of my faves: 

1) I wrote 43k plus words in  three weeks of sleep-deprived, rage-fueled creativity, as I tried to fix the trashfire that was the historical c-drama “Serenade of Peaceful Joy” in my series “ A Pair of Swallows”. I can honestly say that though I count it among my best work, I never want to go through the emotional turmoil that became this series ever again. Anyways, out of the 11 episode-coda format instalments of this series, my favourite is Legacy. I got a visceral pleasure out of giving my heroine the revenge she was robbed of in canon, and as a plus, I wrote it in a manner that the self-righteous, endlessly pontificating “hero” of the series literally could not speak through the entire story. God, I still get the goosebumps when I recall how I wrote this fic, and the relief-crying that I did after. 

2) Inventing Love is the second part of a three-parter series that @rain-hat and I co-wrote for the k-drama The King: Eternal Monarch (TKEM).  This was probably the most emotion I invested in a fic after the SoPJ stories; I was terrified that readers would hate it, because it doesn’t have a conventional “happy ending”(and also featured a threesome!) This is also the fic that surprised me the most, as I was writing it, because honest-to-god, I didn’t know what I was writing- I was just feeling a lot- until I finished it, and went, oh. 

3) Tell Me The Truth (About Love) This is another TKEM fic and probably the hardest I had to work this year? It kept ballooning in size and scope as I went along and what was supposed to be 20-25k eventually ended up at a 75k epic that took a month of writing for hours almost every single day. It was a humbling experience because I just felt so out of my depth as a writer, all my limitations and ignorance seemed to be constantly playing on a 200inch full HD screen in my head as I was writing it. On the other hand, writing it was also an immense joy, because I got to write a story about second chances and truth and friendship, and those are all Good Things. 

4) Destiny’s Child  Another TKEM fic, god, KES did a number on me, didn’t she? But this was the most straight out fun I had while writing this year, and that’s why it’s on this list. Again, I sort of speed wrote it, because I was going through withdrawal symptoms after finishing the  first draft of Tell Me The Truth About Love, and I wanted to write something silly and  light hearted! It’s not entirely that, but hey, I got to write Gon having his first pot brownie and dancing to BlackPink, and I think that was a very worthy contribution to the fandom.

Tagging the wonderful creators who make my life brighter,  @michyeosseo, @thefeastandthefast,  @sidewaystime​, @no-gorms​

[caramujotan]

disco elysium text-form #thots:

i finished my first run last friday because i went stupid and played the game for nearly 24h straight. i could literally not drop it. i called it a 10/10 when i was about 2h away from finishing it, finished it and kept that score. it’s a real good game and you can stop here with my endorsement but if you want some more in-depth spoiler-free thoughts on it you can read the rest of this post. it’s big.

due to the content of the game, i talk about mental health topics, suicide, drug use and - obviously - cops 🐷

in a way calling this by numbers feels reductive (scalding hot review take, i know). a 10/10 score doesn’t reflect the awe i felt when gilding through the end-game. it doesn’t say a thing about how viscerally my body reacted to a few pixels and lines of text. it can’t tell you that i spent 2h in bed trying to sleep but couldn’t keep my brain off of it and got up at 8AM to finish it; or how much i’ve been replaying the game in my head, curious about how certain quests or events would have gone if i’d tried a different approach or character build.

i have this funky little medical condition that goes with my autism that makes it difficult for me to identify and process most emotions that i feel. but i can tell you how my body reacted. this game went into my gut. it felt like a leaded fist burrowed through my throat into the pit of my stomach and shredded my insides. it got me fucked up, is what i’m saying.

obviously i can’t go into what caused me to react like that without spoiling the shit out of this game, and since i wish i could gently lobotomize myself in order to experience it again for the first time, i heavily recommend you go through it knowing as little as possible. what i can do, however, is talk about the technical elements of it.

the art is beautiful. the art direction is top-notch and it was definitely of the things that drew me to this game first. the oil painting aesthetic is sublime - gritty and ethereal in equal parts whenever each purpose is called for. finding out that the art team was spearheaded by painting majors from russian fine-art schools made perfect sense - it shows, and the game made peak use of it. the philosophy behind their visual approach is woven into the fabric of the game itself - it’s a perfect compliment to the writing and storytelling, and i’d struggle to imagine this game without it. it permeates and elevates every environment, every interaction, every character build choice - from the character portraits, to the UI, to certain skills and game events. real art cop hours all my homies kin the art cop.

the music by british sea power is subsided and haunting and gives the game that british/european post-industrial melancholic flavor. i’m no music critic sadly. it fits the mood and it stands out beautifully in a few key scenes, but that’s as much as i can say.

the biggest turn off for me was in the voice acting. if you’re interested in playing this game i’m going to assume with 75% certainty you’re in your early 20s to 30s and are politically located to the left side of liberal at a minimum - so i’ll just come out and say it plainly: every second NPC (especially in the late game) is voiced by a leftist podcaster. i’m sure this is a plus for some, and it’s not the kind of thing you’d immediately notice anyway unless you’re a quote unquote dirtbag leftist with terminal irony poisoning twitter brainrot. most of them do competent work, but the sound mixing and general performance is weaker in comparison to the NPCs voiced by actual voice actors. 

it’s not that bad, but it’s there - and the fact that this is probably my biggest complaint about the game should say enough of my opinion on it. either way i was cringing with recognition every time it happened and it took me out on more than one occasion because i kept hearing felix chapotraphouse in one of the game’s big tense climatic scenes.

‘but caramujo!’ you say ‘this doesn’t tell me what this game is about’. hold on, i’m about to blow the ‘i can’t do literary analysis unless things are explained to me in clear cut absolute terms’ gang out of a career and spell the themes of this game out for you in detail:

it’s about loss, and renewal - both personal and interpersonal. it’s about rising from the ruins of something that’s been in motion long before you were even thought of, having little power over it, and soldiering on. it’s about heartbreak and the end of a relationship and how that can warp your mind and infect everything around you. and you won’t get better right away - the end game doesn’t wrap everything up with a little bow and lets you cause systematic upheaval. you can’t revolutionize your way out of this one. shit will, for the time being, continue to suck. 

it’s about waking up in a body that’s fucked up with a heart that aches in a world that’s been torn apart - and still making the decision to try to make it better - because you’re alive, and your heart beats, and there’s other beings in the world that are tethered to you and we all owe it to ourselves to make it better. communism hasn’t worked, baby - but so hasn’t love - and we’re not gonna give up on that. that’s what it’s all about.

it should be pretty clear right now that i did my first run as a bisexual/questioning communist feminist hobo who kinned karl marx. but i can assure you there’s other ways to play this game, and there’s more to it than that because of it. 

the quests (both side quests and a main story) are varied and had me laughing and dropping into existential despair on different occasions. other than trying to be the biggest communism builder, this game is also about:

- having a heart attack because a chair is too uncomfortable, but it’s OK because your buddy cop holds you in his arms like in the buddy cop movies. 

- doing copious amounts of drugs and turning on, tuning in and dropping out, maaaaan. 

- going on an x-files monster of the week episode to track down a curse that’s dooming the local businesses.

- shilling for the free market to come fix it all with its beatific invisible hand while standing in a town so fucked over by economic embargoes and poverty that the local union leader is a corrupt toad with a plan to revitalize the region by gathering the work force into a nationalized worker owned drug enterprise of the legal and illegal varieties - and it still comes off as one of the more levelheaded economic decisions one could make in that situation. 

- trying not to fucking kill yourself even though you have to live with that thought every single day. 

- winning the trust of a 12 year old crackhead with a deadbeat dad by becoming a positive masculine role model. 

- turning into a fascist you so can get buffs from drinking alcohol, and therefore becoming a raging alcoholic and having to walk up to important story events carrying half a liquor store in your inventory so you don’t have a mental breakdown or kill yourself from lack of morale whenever someone calls you out on your ethnonationalist bullshit.

it’s also - and i cannot stress this enough - about making sure you can find a tape to sing karaoke and make kim kitsuragi smile. it slaps. it’s real good writing.

i don’t know what else can say. pretty sure the game is on sale on steam now. anyway please play this absolute masterpiece and stan studio za/um for clear skin. ACAB.

[davidmann95]

Superman’s 10 Best of the ‘10s

Good Miracle Monday, folks! The first third Monday of May of a new decade for that matter, and while that means that today in the DC Universe Superman just revealed his secret identity to the world on the latest anniversary of that time he defeated the devil, in ours it puts a capstone on a solid 10 years of his adventures now in the rear view mirror, ripe for reevaluation. And given there’s a nice solid ‘10′ right there I’ll go ahead with the obvious and list my own top ten for Superman comics of the past decade, with links in the titles to those I’ve spoken on in depth before - maybe you’ll find something you overlooked, or at least be reminded of good times.

A plethora of honorable mentions: I’m disqualifying team-ups or analogue character stories, but no list of the great Superman material of the last decade would be complete without bringing up Cave Carson Has A Cybernetic Eye #7, Avengers 34.1, Irredeemable, Sideways Annual #1, Supreme: Blue Rose, Justice League: Sixth Dimension, usage of him in Wonder Twins, (somewhat in spite of itself) Superior, from all I’ve heard New Super-Man, DCeased #5, and Batman: Super Friends. And while they couldn’t quite squeeze in, all due praise to the largely entertaining Superman: Unchained, the decades’ great Luthor epic in Superman: The Black Ring, a brilliant accompaniment to Scott Snyder’s work with Lex in Lex Luthor: Year of the Villain, the bonkers joy of the Superman/Luthor feature in Walmart’s Crisis On Infinite Earths tie-in comics, Geoff Johns and John Romita’s last-minute win in their Superman run with their final story 24 Hours, Tom Taylor’s quiet criticism of the very premise he was working with on Injustice and bitter reflection on the changing tides for the character in The Man of Yesterday, the decades’ most consistent Superman ongoing in Bryan Miller and company’s Smallville Season 11, and Superman: American Alien, which probably would have made the top ten but has been dropped like a hot potato by one and all for Reasons. In addition are several stories from Adventures of Superman, a book with enough winners to merit a class of its own: Rob Williams and Chris Weston’s thoughtful Savior, Kyle Killen and Pia Guerra’s haunting The Way These Things Begin, Marc Guggenheim and Joe Bennett’s heart-wrenching Tears For Krypton, Christos Gage and Eduardo Francisco’s melancholy Flowers For Bizarro, Josh Elder and Victor Ibanez’s deeply sappy but deeply effective Dear Superman, Ron Marz and Doc Shaner’s crowdpleasing Only Child, and Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine DeLandro’s super-sweet Mystery Box.

10. Greg Pak/Aaron Kuder’s Action Comics

Oh, what might’ve been. In spite of an all-timer creative team I can’t justify listing this run any higher given how profoundly and comprehensively compromised it is, from the status quo it was working with to the litany of ill-conceived crossovers to regular filler artists to its ignominious non-ending. But with the most visceral, dynamic, and truly humane take on Clark Kent perhaps of all time that still lives up to all Superman entails, and an indisputably iconic instant-classic moment to its name, I can’t justify excluding it either.

9. Action Comics #1000

Arguably the climax to the decade for the character as his original title became the first superhero comic to reach a 1000th issue. While any anthology of this sort is a crapshoot by nature, everyone involved here seemed to understand the enormity of the occasion and stepped up as best they could; while the lack of a Lois Lane story is indefensible, some are inevitably bland, and one or two are more than a bit bizarre, by and large this was a thoroughly charming tribute to the character and his history with a handful of legitimate all-timer short stories.

8. Faster Than A Bullet

Much as Adventures of Superman was rightfully considered an oasis amidst the New 52′s worst excesses post-Morrison and in part pre-Pak, few stories from it seem well-remembered now, and even at the time this third issue inexplicably seemed to draw little attention. Regardless, Matt Kindt and Stephen Segovia’s depiction of an hour in the life of Superman as he saves four planets first thing in the morning without anyone noticing - while clumsy in its efforts at paralleling the main events with a literal subplot of a conversation between Lois and Lex - is one of the best takes I can recall on the scope on which he operates, and ultimately the purpose of Clark Kent.

7. Man and Superman

Seemingly geared on every front against me, built as it was on several ideas of how to handle Superman’s origin I legitimately hate, and by a writer whose work over the years has rarely been to my liking, Marv Wolfman and Claudio Castellini’s Man and Superman somehow came out of nowhere to be one of my favorite takes on Clark Kent’s early days. With a Metropolis and characters within it that feel not only alive but lived-in, it’s shocking that a story written and drawn over ten years before it was actually published prefigured so many future approaches to its subject, and felt so of-the-moment in its depiction of a 20-something scrambling to figure out how to squeeze into his niche in the world when it actually reached stores.

6. Brian Bendis’s run

Controversial in the extreme, and indeed heir to several of Brian Bendis’s longstanding weaknesses as a writer, his work on The Man of Steel, Superman, and Action Comics has nevertheless been defined at least as much by its ambition and intuitive grasp of its lead, as well as fistfuls of some of the best artistic accompaniment in the industry. At turns bombastic space action, disaster flick, spy-fi, oddball crime serial, and family drama, its assorted diversions and legitimate attempts at shaking up the formula - or driving it into new territory altogether, as in the latest, apparently more longterm-minded unmasking of Clark Kent in Truth - have remained anchored and made palatable by an understanding of Superman’s voice, insecurities, and convictions that go virtually unmatched.

5. Strange Visitor

The boldest, most out-of-left-field Superman comic of the past 10 years, Joe Keatinge took the logline of Adventures of Superman to do whatever creators wanted with the character and, rather than getting back to a classic take absent from the mainline titles at the time as most others did, used the opportunity for a wildly expansive exploration of the hero from his second year in action to his far-distant final adventure. Alongside a murderer’s row of artists, Keatinge pulled off one of the few comics purely about how great Superman is that rather than falling prey to hollow self-indulgence actually managed to capture the wonder of its subject.

4. Superman: Up In The Sky

And here’s the other big “Superman’s just the best” comic the decade had to offer that actually pulled it off. Sadly if reasonably best-known for its one true misfire of a chapter, with the increasing antipathy towards Tom King among fans in general likely not helping, what ended up overlooked is that this is a stone-cold classic on moment of arrival. Andy Kubert turns in work that stands alongside the best of his career, Tom King’s style is honed to its cleanest edge by the 12-pager format and subject matter, and the quest they set their lead out on ends up a perfect vehicle to explore Superman’s drive to save others from a multitude of angles. I don’t know what its reputation will end up being in the long-term - I was struck how prosaic and subdued the back cover description was when I got this in hardcover, without any of the fanfare or critic quotes you’d expect from the writer of Mister Miracle and Vision tackling Superman - but while its one big problem prevents me from ranking it higher, this is going to remain an all-timer for me.

3. Jeff Loveness’s stories Help and Glasses

Cheating shamelessly here, but Jeff Loveness’s Help with David Williams and Glasses with Tom Grummett are absolutely two halves of the same coin, a pair of theses on Superman’s enduring relevance as a figure of hope and the core of Lois and Clark’s relationship that end up covering both sides of Superman the icon and Superman the guy. While basically illustrated essays, any sense of detached lecturing is utterly forbidden by the raw emotion on display here that instantly made them some of the most acclaimed Superman stories of the last several years; they’re basically guaranteed to remain in ‘best-of’ collections from now until the end of time.

2. Superman Smashes The Klan

A bitter race for the top spot, but #2 is no shame here; while not quite my favorite Superman story of the past ten years, it’s probably the most perfectly executed. While I don’t think anyone could have quite expected just *how* relevant this would be at the top of the decade, Gene Yang and Gurihiru put together an adventure in the best tradition of the Fleischer shorts and the occasional bystander-centered episodes of Batman: The Animated Series to explore racism’s both overt and subtle infections of society’s norms and institutions, the immigrant experience, and both of its leads’ senses of alienation and justice. Exciting, stirring, and insightful, it’s debuted to largely universal acknowledgement as being the best Superman story in years, and hopefully it’ll be continued to be marketed as such long-term.

1. Grant Morrison’s Action Comics

When it came time to make the hard choice, it came in no small part down to that I don’t think we would have ever seen a major Golden Age Superman revival project like Smashes The Klan in the first place if not for this. Even hampering by that godawful Jim Lee armor, inconsistent (if still generally very good) art, and a fandom that largely misunderstood it on arrival can’t detract from that this is Grant Morrison’s run on a Superman ongoing, a journey through Superman’s development as a character reframed as a coherent arc that takes him from Metropolis’s most beaten-down neighborhoods to the edge of the fifth dimension and the monstrous outermost limits of ‘Superman’ as a concept. It launched discussions of Superman as a corporate icon and his place relative to authority structures that have never entirely vanished, introduced multiple all-time great new villains, and made ‘t-shirt Superman’ a distinct era and mode of operation for the character that I’m skeptical will ever entirely go away. No other work on the character this decade had the bombast, scope, complexity, or ambition of this run, with few able to match its charm or heart. And once again, it was, cannot stress this enough, Grant Morrison on an ongoing Superman book.

[gryfon-spanish-werewolf]

7. What story/headcanons do you feel the proudest of?

15. What is the fanfic you’ve written that you’re most proud of? 

16. What fanfic tropes do you avoid writing for?

17. What fanfic tropes do you gravitate to writing for? 

20. What feedback makes you the happiest to hear?

21. Is there an idea you’ve always wanted to write, but haven’t yet? 

36. What fanfic of yours has the symbolism you’re proudest of? 

39. What area of writing do you feel strongest in?

Fanfic Writer Asks

7) In terms of headcanons (which I wouldn’t say I make often) I think I’m most proud of how I unabashedly use magic in a lot of my stories. Elsa’s magic, Troll magic, Other-magic - if I think something is neat then I kind of just roll with it!

Elsa’s ice magic, in canon has a LOT of uses, but I like pushing the boundaries. Ice-GPS? Check. Icepack for that burn? Check (though who hasn’t xD). Troll magic used for time travel? Check. Troll magic used for Dream-traversal?? Check. Physical embodiment of a strong emotion via magic? Check. Physical, evil appearance of an emotion incarnate via ice magic and troll magic and the POWER OF LOVE? Where’s my BINGO sheet? Cuz check that too.

15) OOF wow, that’s a hard one. I hate to say it but it MIGHT be one that’s not published and is currently sitting on my GDrive >_>;; I’m really proud of my Frozen!StarWars crossover

But of the ones that are published? Either A Banisher’s Dilemma or Great Knight Annatorias, The Abysswalker. I got to be super nerdy and meta on the second one^^

16) I avoid writing smut, I’ve never really been game for it. I’m always amazed that other people can write it, but I never really want to. I also tend to avoid angst, especially if it’s for no other reason than JUST angst. It has it’s place, but I don’t like using it just to get a reaction. (Some of you are already pointing fingers at Spirit - I know I KNOW xD It was a one off, I swear!)

17) I immediately gravitate towards anything SOFT. I love slice of life, I love characters bonding with each other, I love when they have CONVERSATIONS, especially about hard things that they can work through together! I also love “Firsts’”! First meeting, first hug, first confession, first kiss, first hand-hold, first date, first anniversary, etc etc. I love confessions and conversations. On the flip side I really love established relationships? Whatever they are: familial, friends, romantic or marital. There’s something really nice about a a pair or a group already being together. I have no idea where that all fits under your standard trope lists, but those are mine!

20) I absolutely scream if anyone ever quotes my stuff back to me saying stuff like “I really liked this line/paragraph/part because...” and then says why. I lose my mind. I also love when people say “This made me feel X” because I’m just ever so curious about how writing affects people!

Edit bc I forgot: I’ve had one (1) person make me fan art once as “feedback” for a story and I was on cloud 9 for like, shit, a month?? I still think about that person. I legit hope they are living their best life.

21) I wouldn’t say I “always” wanted to write this since I’m WAY too impatient to wait on ideas most of the time BUT I have had this au sitting in my WIPs folder for nearly 6 YEARS and it’s about how the King and Queen of Arendelle are secretly part of a vampire hunting guild. They kill a vampire that snuck into the castle one night but not before it infects their daughter and heir to the throne, Elsa (who’s like, 6 or 8). Even though they’re oathbound to kill vampires, they can’t kill their daughter. The castle is closed similar to post-Accident Frozen 1.

Jumping to modern times, Anna is a history student exploring the mountains of Norway with her classmate, Hans, and a guide, Kristoff, and they are heading for the ruins of Arendelle castle for a research project. Rumors say that despite wars, invasions, thrill seekers, and treasure hunters, a lot of people that go into that foggy area of the fjord waters and forest end up lost and never found. The few that make it out tell tales of strange chills and the feeling of eyes at their backs. Locals know that the headstones of the last living Royals (who died at sea) are still tended to, though no one knows by whom. Anna gets separated from the group and encounters a sleeping Elsa in the castle before sundown. Afraid for the stranger’s safety (it’s winter, it’s cold, and it’s going to be night soon), Anna attempts to wake Elsa, to no avail. Realizing she’s sort of stuck herself, Anna builds a fire and awaits morning (and her own rescue), unknowing that in the last rays of sunlight her “companion” is about to wake. For the worse.

Unrelated to fanfic, I HAVE always wanted to write a story about a girl named Rain (as such for her birth during a terrible storm) that misfortune is heaped upon by the bucketful, so much so that everyone believes she’s cursed, except for her tutor. I want her name have a double meaning that she both slumps and shines under, since rain may bring destruction, but also growth and healing.

36) A Banisher’s Dilemma, hands down. I did SO MUCH RESEARCH for that fic AND I was in a Bible New Testament class at the same time, so I just SHOVED a whole bunch of Christian history, themes, imagery, and references in there. It’s not the only symbolism however, as I mixed plenty of other global and cultural references in there as well. Hard not to, since Anna is literally jet-setting to a new location nearly every chapter.

39) Surprising maybe no one: light humor! My writing is often funny, mostly because I like to make myself laugh :D If I’m not having fun, than what’s the point!? Most often it’s shown off in my one shots or short fiction, but even re-reading some of my longer chapter fics still has me laughing at the same jokes I wrote many years ago.

If not humor than portraying strong emotions. I’ve received too many (generous and loving <3) comments about how pinpoint accurate or visceral my portrayal of joy or sorrow, grief or fear, or love and happiness are to deny it. And that’s much less of a boast and more a humble acknowledgement of people who have written very thoughtful responses to my work, and it would be irresponsible to imply that their words over the years were false in any way.

Thanks for the ask! These are a lot of really good questions!

[buzzdixonwriter]

My Five Most Influential

Someone asked:   Who are the most influential writers in your life?

Good question.

The broad answer is that one gets influenced many different ways by many different sources.  I enjoy poetry and song lyrics because they find ways of conveying the strongest emotional content in the most concise manner, music brings a sense of dramatic rhythm and fulfillment, the visual arts suggest ways of subtly adding many insights to a single strong idea, etc., etc., and of course, etc. (and that is also an example of a creative influence in my work).

But…to boil it down to those whom I most consciously made an effort to emulate, we find ourselves facing five creators that primed the pump.

This is not to say others whom I began following after them didn’t wield a lot of influence (thanx, Ernie, Bert, Jack, Bob, and Hank!) but these are the foundation of everything I’ve done in my career.

(And to those who notice a lack of diversity, I know, I know…but to be honest I have to acknowledge the truth, and the truth is for whatever reason, by chance or by choice, by fate or by fortune, these five dominated my sensibilities.  I trust that I’ve grown and expanded my horizons since then, but they’re the hand I got dealt.)

. . . 

Carl Barks

I loved ducks as a kid and my grandmother and aunt would always bring me a passel of duck-related comics when they came to visit.

There were some Daffy Duck comics mixed in there but while I know I looked at and enjoyed them, none of them stick in my mind like the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories of Carl Barks.

Typically my grandmother would read these comics to me and I’d imprint the dialog and captions in my brain, replaying them as I looked at the pictures over and over again.

Barks never wrote down to his audience, and his stories covered a vast array of genres, everything from straight domestic comedy to oddball adventures to screwy crime stories.

Donald and his nephews encountered dinosaurs more than once (another big favorite of mine), and Uncle Scrooge setting out to explore the asteroid belt in order to find a new home for his fabulous money bin was another tale I loved literally to pieces, but A Christmas For Shacktown remains my all time favorite graphic novel.

I’ll concede there are better graphic novels, but none of them warm my heart the way that Christmas story does.

Barks showed it’s possible to combine heart (not to be confused with sentimentality or =yuch!= schmaltz), vivid characters, and strong, intricate narrative.  His plots where typically filled with unexpected twists and turns but his characters were always deeply involved in them, not just along for the ride.

He’s one of the greatest storytellers in the 20th century, and his work remains timeless enough to last for several centuries to come.

. . . 

Ray Bradbury

The first Ray Bradbury story I remember encountering was “Switch On The Night” in its 1955 edition, read to my kindergarten class towards the end of the school year.

This would place the event sometime in the spring of 1959.

“Switch On The Night” captivated me because it was the first story I’d ever heard that showed what could be seen in the dark that couldn’t be seen in the day.

Even as a child, it made me realize the night wasn’t scary, but contained wonders and insights we miss in the harsh glare of day.

I don’t recall if the kindergarten teacher told us the name of the author, and if she did it didn’t stick, but boy howdy, the story sure did!  Did it open the doors of the night for me, or was I already inclined to be a night person and it simply confirmed that as a valid identity?

I dunno, but I’m typing this right now at 12:24am.

And the thoughts Bradbury planted in little Buzzy boy’s brain stayed and grew and flowered, as you can read in my poem, “The Magic Hours Of The Night”.

The next time I encountered Ray Bradbury’s writing was in grammar school, certainly no later than junior high.  I was already interested in science fiction by that point, and had read “The Pedestrian” in one of my school English books (we weren’t taught the story in class; the teacher skipped over it for whatever reason but I read it anyway then re-read it and read it again and again).

Anthony Boucher’s ubiquitous 2-volume A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction was in my grammar school library and in it was Bradbury’s “Pillar Of Fire” (which I would later learn was one of his alternate Martian Chronicles and a crossover with Fahrenheit 451) and in that story he offered up a veritable laundry list of outré and outlandish fiction to be tracked down and read, authors to dig up and devour.

Oh, man, I was hooked.

So of course I began looking for all the stories and writers Bradbury listed in his short story but I also began looking for Bradbury’s own work and before you could say, “Mom, can I get a subscription to the Science Fiction Book Club?” I’d read The Golden Apples Of The Sun and A Medicine For Melancholy and R is For Rocket never once dreaming that at some point in the future the roadmap Ray plopped down in my lap would eventually lead to us being co-workers (separate projects, but the same studio at the same time) and friends.

There is a beautiful yet deceptive simplicity to Ray’s work, and even though he wrote his own book on writing (The Zen Of Writing) that has lots of good insights and professional tricks & tips, he himself wasn’t able to explain how he did it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good Ray Bradbury parody.

I’ve seen parodies that clearly are intended to evoke Ray Bradbury, but only in the same way a clumsy older relative might evoke Michael Jackson with a spasmodic movement one vaguely recognizes as a failed attempt at a moonwalk.

But, lordie, don’t think we didn’t try to emulate him, and while none of us fanboys ever came close, I think a lot of us did learn that less is more, that the right word carries more impact than a dozen paragraphs, and that there’s magic in even the most ordinary of things.

And of course I discovered the film and TV adaptations of his work, and in discovering them I also discovered that there are some things that just can’t be translated from one media to another, and that the light, effortless appeal of Ray’s work on the page (paper or pixel) can at best be recaptured with a good audio book reader but even the best dramatic adaptions -- even those by Ray himself -- are cold dead iron butterflies compared to the light and lively creatures flying about.

So eventually I stopped trying to write like him, and instead picked up the valuable lessons of mood and emotion making an impact on a story even if the plot didn’t make much logical sense.

Decades later I would become a fan of opera, and would learn the philosophy of all opera lovers:  Opera doesn’t have to make logical sense, it just has to make emotional sense.

Ray Bradbury, opera meister.

. . . 

H.P. Lovecraft

As noted above, Bradbury’s “Pillar Of Fire” tipped me to numerous other writers, first and foremost of which turned out to be Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Okay, before we get any further into this, let’s acknowledge the woolly mammoth in the room:  H.P. Lovecraft was a colossal asshat racist.

He was a lot of other terrible things, too, but racist is far and ahead of the rest of the pack.

It’s a disillusioning thing to find people one admired as a youngster or a teen later prove to have not just quirks and eccentricities and personal flaws, but genuinely destructive, harmful, and offensive characters.

I’ve posted on that before, too.

How I wish it were possible to retroactively scale back that hurtfulness, to make them more empathetic, less egregiously offensive (in the military sense of the word), but that ain’t so.

We have to acknowledge evil when we see it, and we have to call it out, and we have to shun it.

Which is hard when one of its practitioners provides a major influence in our creative lives.

Here’s what I liked about Lovecraft as a kid:  He was the complete opposite of Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury’s instinctive genius was in finding the right word, the simple word that conveyed great impact on the story, drawing the reader into the most fantastic situations by making them seem more familiar on a visceral level.

Lovecraft achieved the exact opposite effect by finding the most arcane, bedizened, baroque, florid, grandiloquent, overwrought, rococo verbiage possible and slapping the reader repeatedly in the face with it.

If Bradbury made the unreal real, Lovecraft made the weird even more weirder.

And let’s give this devil his due:  The Strange Case Of Charles Dexter Ward and The Dunwich Horror are two masterpieces of horror and serve as the bridge between Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King, not to mention his creation of Cthulhu and other ancient entities existing beyond the ken of human knowledge…

…oh, wait, that’s where the story simultaneously gets messy yet provides a convenient escape hatch for fans.

While Lovecraft created Cthulhu, he did not create the Cthulhu Mythos.

That was primarily the invention August Derleth, a writer / editor / agent and H.P. Lovecraft’s #1 fanboy.

Lovecraft had some loosely related ideas in his stories and several themes he revisited repeatedly (in addition to racism).

He also had a circle of fellow writers -- including such heavy hitters as Robert “Psycho” Bloch and Robert E. “Conan” Howard -- who picked up on his ideas and, as way of a tribute, incorporated them in some of their stories.

Derleth took all this and Lovecraft’s unfinished manuscripts and short ideas he jotted down and turned it into a whole post-mortem industry, linking all of Lovecraft and other writers’ tales.

And he did a damn fine job of it, too.

So much so that the Cthulhu Mythos has taken on a life of its own, and pretty much anybody can play in that cosmic sandbox now (including Big Steve King and a ton of Japanese anime) and so Lovecraft’s works have an enormous influence on pop culture…

,,,but Howard hizzowndamsef can be -- and is -- cancelled.

Derleth and various biographers downplayed Lovecraft’s virulent racism for decades, and I don’t think Ray Bradbury was ever aware of the scope and tenor of Lovecraft’s bigotry when he name checked him in “Pillar Of Fire” and other stories.

In a similar vein Bradbury didn’t know -- because thanks again to overly protective literary executors, nobody knew -- just how big a racist asshat Walt Whitman was, either.  It is one thing to call shenanigans on a Bill Cosby or a Harvey Weinstein or a Donald Trump because their egregious behaviors were noted long before they were held accountable, but quite another to do so on a creator who died while hiding their most awful behavior from thousands if not millions of fans who felt inspired and uplifted by their work.

It’s one thing to call out a contemporary bigot and not support them by not buying their work, it’s quite another when their bigotry has been shielded from view and fair minded, decent people have used their work to draw inspiration into their own creativity.

Of course, I had no way of knowing all this when I was in junior high and seriously began tracking down Lovecraft’s work.  

He possessed a flair of the horrific and unearthly that to this day is hard to match (but easier to parody).  He was a tremendous influence on my early writing (truth be told, I zigzagged between Bradbury’s stark simplicity and Lovecraft’s overarching verbosity, giving my early oeuvre a rather schizophrenic style) and the ideas he sparked still reverberate to this day.

If only he hadn’t been such a giant %#@&ing asshat racist …

. . . 

Harlan Ellison

In a way, I’m glad neither Harlan nor his widow Susan are alive to read this.

I cherished Harlan as a friend and greatly admired his qualities as a writer.

But damn, by his own admission he should have been thrown in prison for aggravated assault on numerous occasions (he was courts martialed three times while in the Army).

We’re not talking about arguments that spiraled out of control until a few wild punches were thrown, we’re talking about Harlan by his own admission stalking and ambushing people, knocking them unconscious or causing grievous bodily harm.

We’re talking about sexual abuse and humiliation.

We’re talking about incidents he admitted to which if true put people in life threatening situations.

And yet ironically, in a certain sense Harlan (a bona fide Army Ranger, BTW) was like the U.S. Marine Corps:  You’d never have a greater friend or a worse enemy.

I became dimly aware of Harlan in the late 1960s as I started diving deeper into literary sci-fi, transitioning from monster kid fandom to digests and paperbacks.  Harlan first caught my attention with his macho prose (years later a similar style also drew me to Charles Bukowski) in stories like “Along the Scenic Route” (a.k.a. “Dogfight on 101”) in which Los Angelinos engaged in Mad Max motor mayhem but soon it became apparent the macho posturing was just a patina, that the heart and soul of much of the work reflected great sensitivity and often profound melancholy (ditto Bukowski).

Harlan was a fighter, and again by his own admission, he acknowledged in his later years that he was not a fighter because his cause was just, but rather sought out just causes because he knew he would be fighting regardless of his position, yet possessed a strong enough moral compass to point himself in the direction of a worthy enemy…

…most of the time.

He hurt and offended a large number of innocent and some not-so-innocent-but-certainly-not-evil people.

He also helped and encouraged a large number of others, people who had no idea who he was, people who had no way of adequately reciprocating his kindness and generosity.

He defended a lot of defenseless people.

He also mistakenly defended a lot of terrible people.

If someone tells me Harlan was a monster, I’ll agree:  Monstre sacré.

What made his writing sacred was that no matter how outlandish the situation, Harlan dredged up from the depths emotions so strong as to be frightening in their depiction.

Skilled enough not to lose sight of humanity, outlandish enough to conjure up ideas and emotions most people would shy away from, Harlan hit adolescent Buzzy boy like an incendiary grenade.

Unlike my first three literary influences, Harlan was and remained active in the fannish circles where I was circulating at the time.  He regularly wrote letters and columns for various fanzines, including a few I subscribed to.

In a literary sense he stood, naked and unashamed, in full view of the world, and that willingness to go beyond mundane sensibilities is what made his work so compelling.

He certainly fired me up as an adolescent writer, and proved an amalgam of Bradbury and Lovecraft that got my creative juices flowing in a coherent direction.

I don’t think I ever consciously tried to imitate him in my writing, but I sure learned from him, both in how to charge a story with emotion and how to fight for what’s right regardless of the blow back.

I loved him as a friend.

But, damn, Harlan…you could act so ugly...

. . .

H. Allen Smith

Who?

Most of you have never heard of H. Allen Smith, and that’s a damn shame.

I’d never heard of him either until I stumbled across a coverless remaindered copy of Poor H. Allen Smith’s Almanac in a Dollar General Store bin in Tennessee in the late 1960s (it was a memorable shopping expedition:  I also purchased Thomas Heggen’s Mister Roberts and Let’s Kill Uncle by Rohan O'Grady [pen name of June Margaret O'Grady Skinner]).

Reading Smith’s editorial comments (in addition to his own essays and fiction he edited numerous humor anthologies) I realized I’d found a kindred soul.

Smith had a very conversational tone as a writer; his prose seemed off the cuff and unstructured, but he slyly used that style to hide the very peculiar (and often perverse) path he led readers down.

He sounded / read like a garrulous guy at the bar, one with a huge number of charming, witty (and delightfully inebriated) friends in addition to his own bottomless well of tall tales, pointed observations, and rude jokes.

Of all the writers mentioned above, that style is the one I most consciously tried to emulate, and one I seem to have been able to find my own voice in (several people have told me I write the same way I talk, a rarity among writers).

Smith was hilarious whether wearing an editor’s visor or a freelancer’s fool’s cap.  If you know who H. L. Mencken was, think of Smith as a benign, better tempered version of that infamous curmudgeon (and if you don’t know, hie thee hence to Google and find out).

Compared to my other four influences, Smith didn’t need to add the fantastic to his fiction:  The real world was weird and wacky and whimsical enough.

A newspaper man turned best selling author, Smith became among the most popular humorists of the 1940s-50s-60s…

…and then he died and everybody forgot him.

Part of the reason they forgot is that he wrote about things that no longer seem relevant (TV cowboys of the early television era, f’r instance, in Mr. Zip) or are today looked upon askance (and with justifiable reason; the ethnic humor in many of his anthologies may not have been intended as mean spirited, but it sure doesn’t read as a celebration of other cultures, viz his succinct account of an argument following a traffic accident between two native Honolulu cabbies rendered in pidgin:  “Wassamatta you?”  “’Wassmatta me’?!?!?  Wassamatta you ‘Wassamatta me’?  You wassamatta!”).

I’m sure I picked up a great many faults from Smith, but Smith also had the virtue of being willing and able to learn and to make an effort to be a better person today than he was yesterday, and better still tomorrow.

I’ve certainly tried applying that to my life.

Smith’s style was also invoked -- consciously or not -- by other writers and editors, notably Richard E. Geis, the editor of the legendary sci-fi semi-prozone, Science Fiction Review (among other titles).  Smith died before I could meet him, but while I never met Dick Geis face to face we were pen pals for over 40 years.

Geis certainly sharpened specific aspects of my writing style, but the real underlying structure came from H. Allen Smith.

Smith’s work is hard to find today (in no small part because whenever I encounter one in the wild I snap it up) but I urge you to give him a try.

Just brace yourself for things we might consider incorrect today.

. . . 

So there’s my top five. 

With the exception of Carl Barks and Ray Bradbury, none of them are without serious flaw or blemish (though Smith seems like a decent enough sort despite his fondness for X-rated and ethnic humor).

In my defense as an impressionable child / teen, I was not aware of these flaws and blemishes when I first encountered their writing (primarily because in many cases efforts were made to hide or downplay those aspects).

The positive things I gleaned from them are not negated by the negative personal information that came out later.

I can, for the most part re the more problematic of them, appreciate their work while not endorsing their behavior.

Ellison can only be described in extremes, but his fire and passion -- when directed in a positive direction -- served as a torch to light new paths (his two original anthologies, Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, pretty much blew the doors off old school sci-fi and belatedly dragged the genre kicking and screaming into the 20th century).

Lovecraft I can effectively ignore while finding entertainment value in the Cthulhu Mythos.

But I must acknowledge this isn’t the same for everyone.

For example, as innocuous as I find H. Allen Smith, if a woman or a member of a minority group said, “I found this in particular to be offensive” I’d probably have to say, yeah, you’re right.

But I can still admire the way he did it, even if I can no longer fully support what he did.

. . . 

By the time I reached high school, I’d acquired enough savvy to regard to literary finds a bit more dispassionately, appreciating what they did without trying to literally absorb it into my own writing.

I discovered for myself the Beat generation of writers and poets, the underground cartoonists of the late 60s and 70s, Ken Kesey, Joseph Heller, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, and a host of others, some already alluded to.

Some, such as the Beats and Bukowski, I could enjoy for their warts and all honest self-reflection.

Yes, they were terrible people, but they knew they were terrible people, and they also knew there had to be something better, and while they may never have found the nirvana they sought, they at least sent back accurate reports of where they were in their journeys of exploration.

By my late teens, I’d become aware enough of human foibles and weaknesses -- every human’s foibles and weaknesses, including my own -- to be very, very cautious in regarding an individual as admirable.

While I will never accept creativity as an excuse for bad behavior, if a creator is honest enough and self-introspective enough to recognize and acknowledge their own failings, it goes a long way towards my being willing to enjoy their work without feeling I’m endorsing them as individuals.

It’s not my place to pass judgment or exoneration on others bad behavior.

It is my place to see that I don’t emulate others’ bad behavior.

Every creator is connected to their art, even if it’s by-the-numbers for-hire hack work.

Every creator puts something of themselves into the final product.

And every member of the audience must decide for themselves if that renders the final product too toxic to be enjoyed. 

    © Buzz Dixon

[cafedisco3]

BOY’S CRY

Before sharing his story with the world and becoming one of the most important artists of our time, Frank Ocean was a high school graduate in New Orleans scouring for jobs to pay for studio time to record his potential projects. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc across the region, provoking Ocean’s move from New Orleans to Los Angeles, California. It was in California that Frank eventually found his opening into the music industry. Landing a songwriting deal, he began ghostwriting for many of the biggest artists we know today: Justin Bieber (“Bigger”, 2008) and Beyoncé (“I Miss You”, 2009). In 2009, he started working with Odd Future, specifically Tyler, the Creator - one of his best friends, who played a pivotal role in encouraging him to continue writing songs, but for himself. Through Odd Future, Frank was able to meet Producer, Tricky Stewart who eventually introduced him to an American Record Label: Def Jam Recordings. Though this deal was meant to serve as his platform for releasing music, out of frustration he released his first mixtape, nostalgia, ULTRA, for free download on Tumblr. Frank explained that he was frustrated with the label for not being supportive of his efforts after signing. Regardless of the heightened tension in Frank’s relationship with the label, this mixtape ignited the spark of his fame to follow. Frank’s pilot success with this mixtape allowed his standing to grow tremendously, eliciting feature requests from A-listers such as Jay-Z and Kanye West, but for the most part, Frank remained highly selective with his craft and unwaveringly loyal to Tyler and Odd Future. 

This origin story is only the tip of the elusive iceberg that is Frank Ocean. Since before the days of nostalgia, ULTRA, Frank has been selective with his public interactions. Once a ghostwriter for pop stars and then a secret weapon among Odd Future’s large roster, playing the background seemed to come naturally to him. However, the star within him proved too bright to contain. Still, since his rise in stature, rather than outwardly embracing the fame that was guaranteed, he chose instead to remain guarded with his art and protective of his image. Over time, this has allowed him to meticulously reveal himself on his own terms, using his art as a way to give insight into his identity. It was only when speculations about his sexuality began to circle through the hip-hop and pop community prior to the release of his debut studio album, channel ORANGE, that the once-guarded artist decided to become candid in a way he never previously attempted; on his Tumblr, through an open letter to his fans titled Thank You, Frank went on to reveal his bisexaulity:  

Credit: http://frankocean.tumblr.com/post/26473798723

I don’t think I’m exaggerating in the slightest when I say that this letter was a beautiful, poetic exemplification of love. In typical Frank fashion, it wasn’t an overt admission of anything, because there isn’t anything to admit. We are who we are, and according to Frank, that is “human beings spinning on blackness”. According to Frank we are a lot more alike than we are different, regardless of our race, cultures or sexual identity. He chose to focus on what makes us all similar as humans, and if he revealed or confirmed something about himself that wasn’t clear to you in the process, then so be it. His sexuality wasn’t the point of the letter. The letter was about empathy and love. The letter was about being human. In an era were child-suicide rates were increasingly linked to homophobia and transphobia, especially in black and latino communities, Frank used his story to humanize those who had been historically demonized. 

This letter birthed a chapter for Frank’s influence. When channel ORANGE arrived that following summer, these feelings of self-discovery through heartache and unrequited love reverberated all throughout the tracklist. The album itself was named after the summer detailed in his letter, the summer during which he first fell in love with another man. Frank dropping this album and his Thank You letter was powerful, valiant move. He cut through the lingering homophobia of the time and crafted a tale of perseverance and acceptance. This album allowed me, someone with completely different experiences, to appreciate his journey. He successfully detached himself from the increasingly materialistic world of the music industry and turned his art into statements that effectively captured the current state of the human condition.

There are two songs off of channel ORANGE that I believe are worth highlighting. The first is “Bad Religion”: 

Taxi driver Be my shrink for the hour Leave the meter running It's rush hour So take the streets if you wanna Just outrun the demons, could you He said "Allahu akbar", I told him don't curse me “Bo Bo, you need prayer,” I guess it couldn't hurt me If it brings me to my knees It's a bad religion This unrequited love To me it's nothing but a one-man cult And cyanide in my Styrofoam cup I can never make him love me Never make him love me Love It's a bad religion To be in love with someone Who could never love you I know Only bad religion Could have me feeling the way I do

This is a story of longing, of internal conflict and crippling self-doubt. With no one to turn to, Frank resigns to confessing his deepest, most closely guarded truths in the backseat of a taxi, and his thoughts betray the confidence that many of his fans may have prematurely branded him with. These confessional thoughts instead show him in his most fragile state, one in which he seems internalize years of homophobic rhetoric. The stigma that homosexaulity or sexual fluidity is a sin, is amoral, and requires prayer and absolution is so deeply ingrained in society that Frank doesn’t even flinch when the taxi driver basically tells him to pray away his desires. Instead, he chooses grasp onto the suggestion, wondering if maybe he should find a way to detach himself from the unrequited love that has brought him so much pain - whether through religion or drugs. This song is a heart-wrenching discussion of the internal struggle felt by Frank throughout the journey detailed in his letter. Frank’s lyrics expertly navigate self-hate and heartbreak, and his execution features a stunning vocal performance that evokes a deep, soulful pain that feels universally applicable to all humans. 

The second song of importance would be “Forrest Gump”: 

I wanna see your pom poms from the stands Come on, come on My fingertips, and my lips, they burn From the cigarettes Forrest Gump you run my mind boy Running on my mind boy Forrest Gump I know you Forrest I know you wouldn't hurt a beetle But you're so buff, and so strong I'm nervous Forrest Forrest Gump My fingertips, and my lips, they burn From the cigarettes Forrest Gump you run my mind boy Running on my mind boy Forrest Gump I saw ya game, Forrest I was screamin' run 44 But you kept runnin' past the end zone Oh where'd you go Forrest Forrest Gump

If “Bad Religion” - and “Thinkin’ Bout You” before it - were subtle allusions to his bisexuality, “Forrest Gump”, the penultimate track on channel ORANGE, would be the unabashed coming out party. In this song, Frank beautifully covers the timeless love story from the film, Forrest Gump, but through Jenny’s perspective - one that he clearly relates to on a visceral level. In the movie, Jenny and Forrest don’t end up together - but neither did Frank and his love at 19 years of age. In a very literal sense, Forrest Gump is used as a metaphor for a man running away from Frank - referring to the different paths taken by him and the man he fell in love - and this story is another example of unrequited love. But it’s uptempo nature and Frank’s equally light singing paints it in a much different light than “Bad Religion”. Here, there is no self-doubt and he seems to believe the experience of the fling was worth it. It’s the bright result of having grappeld with his emotions throughout the album’s more dark spots. This is essentially Frank fully submerging into his new lifestyle that he explains in his letter as being “a free man”. Similar to his letter, Frank is grateful for the man he fell in love with, regardless of the outcome. 

Despite this album being such a bold statement on his part, highlighting him as an artist that will stand the test of time, I’ve always felt as if its slow and melancholic vibes represent a shyer, younger Frank Ocean. Since releasing his letter and reinventing himself as a free man, the outward projection of his confidence has considerably escalated. Four years after channel ORANGE the fans were finally given a second and third album, simultaneously: Endless and Blonde. I personally cherished these albums, not expecting any new music for yet another few years, but just as I was getting used to the idea of no new Frank music, he released a single on his Beats 1 radio show, Blonded Radio: Chanel. Chanel was released in March 2017, and I can’t think of any way to describe the start of the song, besides epic:

My guy pretty like a girl And he got fight stories to tell I see both sides like Chanel

See on both sides like Chanel

 The Undefeated’s online music review of this song describes these first few lyrics in the following manner: “The boastful first few bars of Ocean’s new song might be the coldest, gayest, and most securely masculine flex in the history of rap. Elegant and mellow, the song’s lyrics read as a deliberate ode to duality and non-heteronormative binaries - an ambition, that since the death of Prince Rogers Nelson, is sorely missed in black music”. Whether I’ve convinced you or not, I truly believe Frank Ocean is an icon. He has made tremendous strides through his music and personal life and his consistently made choices that have positively influenced millions. As a visionary and genius, he’s stood out not only as a singer, but as a writer, a visual artist, and an activist. 

Credit: https://www.gq.com/story/frank-ocean-is-peerless

[strawberryamanita]

alright, y'all, i'm gonna tell a story regarding racism and ignorance. it's gonna sound preachy and self-centered at first, but please hear me out until the end. CW: Mental Illness, Medication, Hate Crime, Death, Violence, Murder, Brief mention of Murder Victims.

so, a little over seven years ago now, i was in an AP US History class. ***anyone i went to highschool with knows where this is going, and i *beg* you to please not say the name of the victim or show his face in the comments. i know that sounds backwards and goes against the movement, but i am so damn triggered by that name and that image that it'll send me into an extreme fit of panic. if someone in the comments asks who it was, i give you permission to DM them about it; otherwise *please* show my nerves some mercy.*** anyway. i was in this History class, and i had already seen some horrid stuff, and it made me cry and i had to ask my Art teacher in the next class period for a moment or a cooldown hug. as you can see, my psyche is already fragile, and i don't respond as "maturely" as my classmates did to these things. and then came the day of reckoning. all i had to do was keep my head down and keep taking notes and drawing like i already was for ten more seconds -- but i guess fate told me to look at the screen, because i was transfixed by the image. paralyzed, almost. it needed to be seen, and it made me look and i did. no sort of frightening imagery had ever *hurt* me the way this one did. i react to my emotions very physically, and i remember being in pain while i was stuck in the image's tractor beam. my veins ached. my arms locked at the joints. this image NEEDED my attention. i am not exaggerating when i say that this image left me a different person than i was going into that classroom that morning. the image followed me everywhere i went. i became a mad prophet, tears streaming down my face as i relayed to every one of my friends the events of the story and how broken my mind felt. i remember breaking down in front of my brother, screaming about how heartless someone had to be to "drown a teenager"(yes, it's THAT event, PLEASE DON'T SAY HIS NAME OR POST HIS FACE IN THE COMMENTS, I *BEG* OF THEE); the victim was fourteen, and so was my brother. and, like, this physical reaction was so bad that my organs were starting to shut down: my body was growing cold, i couldn't digest food, i felt like i was dying. i remember my mom and her then-boyfriend sitting me down to calm me down with "Blazing Saddles", and while watching the movie quelled the horrors in the back of my mind, it was only for so long. i called my former therapist, who lived all the way in Wyoming at the time. i prayed to God, honestly and genuinely, not the way i do in church to humor my older relatives. my then-psychiatrist diagnosed me with OCD-induced PTSD -- a label i still don't feel like i deserve from something as benign as a photograph -- and prescribed me with Klonopin, which i still take for emergencies. i had to walk around my school high to the point where i couldn't control my legs just to get some relief from my now-scarred brain. i still sleep with a light on. i still see his face sometimes. i hate my History teacher for not giving me a proper warning beforehand and not giving me a proper apology afterwards. nobody should have to suffer the way i was, i wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. and then, thank goodness, it hit me. listen, i am white. i'm Irish, German, Polish and Slavic, and while back in the day none of those would've made me a proper white person, in 2020 i am white. i grew up very sheltered, my family did what they could to protect me from harm, and i don't even watch horror movies or go on rollercoasters because i know my heart can't take it. this sudden, extremely jarring exposure to something so viscerally human, so depressingly, saddeningly disturbing, so carnally horrific threw me into the deep end in a way that none of my other classmates had to worry about because they were probably exposed to it already -- especially my classmates of color. this was, without exaggeration, the first time i was hit with the reality of what it is to be black in America. i am completely serious -- feel free to laugh, i know it sounds absurd compared to the world we live in now. the harshest instance of violence towards a black person i had heard of then was MLK's murder. i was 17! it took that long for it to be spelled-out for me! the point of sharing my story is not to draw pity -- i did my grieving, i don't need a new shoulder to cry on, and i don't want to be seen as a hero because i had to spiral into complete hysteria just to understand that black Americans, as young as fourteen and even younger, live in a warzone. they have to think about being hurt at every fleeting moment of living in this country, and that the authorities will literally fight life and limb to justify their murder. that is *extremely* sobering. that History lesson ripped the rose-colored glasses right off my face, sat me down in a "Clockwork Orange" chair and made me understand. and honestly, it couldn't have happened at a more necessary time. this lesson was in 2013 -- right after Trayvon Martin, right before Michael Brown. i was thrown into reality right in the midst of all those police-issued atrocities, and while it didn't arm me or give me time to heal, at least it helped me understand what was now too loud to be ignored, at least for me. now, listen -- i still am enraged at my teacher for not warning me, and i still wish i was strong enough to hear about these tragedies to lend my black friends an ear. i had to be *mentally* hurt to understand how necessary it was to care about people who *physically* have it worse than i do. but compared to what they go through, i do still believe it's necessary that i was in class that day. i was going to say, "if it wasn't this event, it would've been some other murder that would've brought it to my attention"; but honestly, the imagery i was shown was worse than anything they'd probably show in a newspaper today -- and that's saying something. i want my experience to be a lesson to white people: educate yourselves, and use that knowledge for good. the world is not irredeemable, and it is not without hope; but it is in *bad* shape, and it has been for hundreds of years. unless you believe in reincarnation, as far as you know this is the only life you get (and if you DO believe in reincarnation, you already know that you have to be your best self to move into the next caste, so you don't have to listen to a white ex-gentile explain your faith to you); if you aren't doing everything you can to leave the world better than it was when you came into it, what has your life been for?