#I’ve been seeing this sentiment for the past few days on Reddit and tumblr and it���s like 🤨

[atelierlili]

Sorry not sorry, anytime I see someone say Peeta's childhood crush as obessive/creepy, I can tell they're reaching so hard or projecting. Because Peeta's crush on Katniss is literally so normal. He never acts on it until they're placed in a life or death situation and he only weaponizes it as a tool to keep HER alive. Peeta's affection for Katniss, is and has always been unconditional and innocent. It's so ick when people twist it into something it's not to perpetuate their narrative.

When he realizes that Katniss doesn't reciprocate his affections and may feel burdened by his affections, he put so much distance between him and Katniss that she admits to missing him and HE gets criticized by most of the fandom for freezing her out.

He has always been respectful to Katniss’s autonomy and respects her boundaries. Is he overly self-sacrificing and have little self worth? Yes, but in comparison to red flags in a partner, this is barely one at all. He’s not abusive at his own volition. Doesn’t guilt her for not liking him back or continuing their lover’s facade to keep their families safe. His flaw is workable and it’s never something that can harm Katniss physically or mentally (at least for the most part). And this is not to mention that Katniss shares these flaws as well.

At the same time, these examples of his self-sacrificing nature are placed within contexts where once again, Katniss and Peeta are planning to die for each other again. Where Peeta is doing the ruthless calculus of war and knowing in the grand scheme of things, his death will have less repercussions than Katniss’. He doesn’t have people relying on him to live. He’s not the one the rebellion is using as a symbol.

“Oh, but he used to watch her go home everyday-“ no. That’s what the movie said in that abysmal cave scene. Even if that were the case, it’s not like he’s stalking her- they go to the same school?? Some people act and cling to this instance as if he’s following her home and stealing her panties. All he’s ever done is watch her (and saved her life) and guess what??? Katniss was watching him too? She’s been taking sneak peeks at him too (oh, he can lift heavy bags of flour so easy, he came in second in the wrestling tournament. 🤨 Giirrrrrl) so I guess their both creepy and obsessive for each other. Match made in heaven 🤷‍♀️

[somediyprojects]

The Tapestree Project is a memory cloth/tapestry stitched and designed by Rachel Samek (née Piso). This is an ongoing project in which she documents her life in cross-stitch. She stitches memories, current events, and anything that especially interests her. She keeps an online journal to recount why she chose certain motifs. The tapestree is stitched on 45ct. ivory Graziano linen with a range cotton embroidery thread. The cloth measures about three feet wide by two feet high.

[Reddit | Blog | Instagram | Facebook | Tumblr | Twitter]

Descriptions under the cut.

pics 1 & 2— I stitched these little gold scissors this week to remember the foggy, intense few months immediately following the birth of my boys. If you knew me around that time, you know that when I was just about 7 months pregnant, I was diagnosed with preeclampsia and received an emergency C-section at 31 weeks. All three guys were incredibly tiny (Charlie was 2 lb 12 oz) and as expected, they would go on to spend long (long, long) stretches in the NICU. Also expectedly, I was a wild mess. I was spending long days at the hospital in the middle of winter, feeling powerless, and as a result, I was killing myself trying to pump enough to keep up with three infants. During those delirious nights of waking up every few hours, I would collapse in front of Hulu (probably rewatching The Handmaid's Tale) and Hulu would do what Hulu did best: repeat the exact same commercial every 20 minutes. During those first weeks, that commercial was a trailer for the upcoming horror movie "Us." The score of the two-minute trailer is so unsettling that even though I would sometimes scramble to switch it off, it was also weirdly comforting to be shocked out of my weepy, helpless state of zombiehood. This came with the price of scaring myself shitless when I had to walk back to bed at 3 AM with the slowed-down, beefed up version of "I Got 5 On It" on repeat in my head. These scissors, a symbol from the movie, represent those weird, difficult postpartum nights. Whenever I hear the first few chords from the trailer, I'm immediately back in 2019, freezing cold on our old couch, fully panicked at life.

pics 3 & 4— I added more hairwork to my tapestree! Last fall, I cross stitched a tiny design using my boys’ hair. I tried again this weekend, using my own hair to make this equally tiny bird. One of the questions I get a lot with this project is whether I get burned out working on the same thing for so long. Yes, I get sick of it, mostly due to the pressure I put on myself to include things (like current events) out of obligation. This bird was one way to bring “me” back into it. If you know anything about the Victorians, you know that they loved crafting with hair. One way was braiding a lock and placing it in a book with a poem underneath—creating an ode to a person’s essence. Since it was fashionable to be sentimental, they made similar keepsakes as jewelry and other textile art. I’ve talked in the past about how much of a nightmare it is working with hair, but if you’re interested in seeing my process, you can find a highlight on my page that covers my last attempt. I also included a picture of the back of my stitching (first time ever!) so you can see the ridiculous knot it creates.

pics 5-7— I have a new tapestree addition! It's the weird little quilt at the very bottom! I have a bin in our basement with a bunch of the boys' preemie onesies. I have plans to make a quilt with them, but since that probably won't happen for another 20 years, I wanted to add something small to my tapestree. Half of the quilt blocks are snipped from the clothes with patterns that have the strongest memories of the boys being in the hospital (the white parts are fabric, for example). The rest is filled in with solid cross stitch. It's been a crazy few weeks! I recently started working full time again (from home, fortunately!) and we're starting to plan the boys' third birthday on December 14th. I can't believe it.🤍

[digitised-celluloid]

what is online space? what is content? i update this blog that now somehow has 900+ posts semi-regularly but with nowhere near the fervour of the salad days of my tumblr posting. i consider this to be a ‘new’ blog yet it’s been here since i think 2014. it has thousands of followers yet that’s still a drop in the ocean compared to what other blogs of mine had. it gets a lot of notes yet i don’t know a single follower, have not a single mutual. i consider this a ‘space’ yet as spaces go the theme is 7 years out of date and tumblr has long broken the few pages i made. what sort of ‘space’ is that. yet if you go elsewhere the online platform is almost irredeemable and whatever enjoyment can be had is, imo, fleeting. i’ve moved to twitter got some bluecheck follows and yet they are less ‘prestigious’ or ‘interesting’ or whatever than sending asks to big users here and ending up respectful mutuals, and jesus christ if you haven’t been able to tell by now i can’t be doing with the tweet limit. i’ve modded a popular ‘in group’ subreddit and been popular on there myself yet there’s something so deeply impersonal and fleeting about that ‘space’ and so grubby about its dramas. as someone who had a main blog and then several sideblogs, i have ended up with my ‘main’ being one of those sides, with an actual main left comatose, on life support, so that this side doesn’t ‘die’. the content posted here is stills of an artist’s work. there is some sentiment that there’s an art to this art. the art of curation. curating for others. 100gb+ of stills on my hard drive, like a scrapbook - curation. no, more like a filing cabinet, more impersonal, and no romance. despite 95% of my mutuals leaving the site, and me myself not posting outside of this stills side, i check my dash every morning like i would in 2013. i can’t put my finger on why that habit hasn’t been broken. the content is gone, the space is empty. so again what is online space? what is content? why am i still here in an online space that as social media is now empty? why do i continue to screencap and post stills as if there’s any meaning to this curation? why am i writing this, my first text post in four years? why have i romanticised the process to the degree where i have milestoned stopping posting? why do i remember the theme, font choice, and palette of my ‘personal’ sideblog that i privated every post on and left in 2017? why does it feel submerged rather than absent? why am i seeing some mutuals slip back in and start posting again, looking for their old mutuals - some gone for good, some returned themselves, some never left and post with the same frequency they did in 2012. why am i both of those people, having ‘slipped back’ mentally to make this post as well as having never left in my own way. if i check the dash every morning and post here, on what level did i consider myself to have left? emotionally? i emotionally left tumblr? i met the ‘great love’ of my 20s on tumblr and as the relationship fell apart i ‘emotionally left’ the site - how hilarious, like this is a physical space someone was met in, like i vowed to never return to the cafe where our eyes by some miracle met. i remember when i broke up with my ‘first love’ as she had cheated on me, crying walking past the burger king where she’d first agreed to stay over at mine. so i have tumblr and paddington burger king as my spaces emitting a deep absence. i wonder whether if i went to the burger king, i’d do so having lost something, with a formality unfitting for fast food. madness have lyrics that go ‘although I've never been there I wish I was there stillI - stare out of this window - see the world go past - i've read and looked at everything - i know it off by heart‘ and i think that epitomises online spaces, specifically tumblr. there’s nothing new you could show me here, i’ve seen it all and seen nothing. i’ve been here so intensely yet not been here at all. yet when i’ve not been here at all i’ve also been here intensely. even though i’ve never been here i wish i was here still. there’s something so liberating about knowing 2,348 followers will see this yet none of them will read it, it’s like being naked at a nudist beach, you’ve stripped yourself bare yet nobody will pay any notice at all, because everyone is stripping themselves practically to the bone on this site. nudity is either deeply erotic or totally sexless and maybe that’s the same with content, something is either deeply contentful or totally contentless - and it’s often the same object through different eyes or in different spaces. like the warehouse that becomes the art gallery. this space, tumblr, is both gutted warehouse and social space, at the same time. what is posted is both dull plain almost vapid objects, and yet something enjoyable, sometimes even profound. i can only come to the conclusion that what divides tumblr in that sense from reddit twitter facebook and many more is that this is a deeply human space. perhaps it’s at least the pretense of all of this being blogging. or because it’s a deeply unprofitable busted attempt at social media that not only lingers but thrives even as others - me - say it is ‘gone’. this is the one space where there feels like there’s someone behind the account, even more so than first name last name facebooks and twitters. this is a totally worthless wall of text but it’s enjoable to stream of consciousness over 20 minutes isn’t it, in this space... is this content? i guess it is because you’ll see it, and not because you’ll not read it.

[sunriseinorbit]

KazeTsuyo’s One... Questionable Soundtrack Decision: Lazy or Brilliant?

SPOILERS UP TO EPISODE 19

The fact that KazeTsuyo has a good soundtrack should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, since Yuki Hayashi has been making straight bops for like 10 years now, but it’s really good. I’ve listened to We Must Go at least 15 times in the past two days alone, and the rest of the soundtrack is just as good. (It’s on Spotify, go listen to it)

But when I was actually watching the show, I noticed one sound direction decision that was really fucking weird. And I’m not trying to nitpick, nor do I think that this decision was necessarily bad, but it’s something I’ve never seen (or heard, I guess) before in anime and it’s baffled me to no end since I found out about it. 

So let’s unpack:

At the beginning of episode 14, Haiji shows the team a documentary about the Hakone Ekiden. An old, wise narrator talks about the determination of the athletes and other sentimental bullshit over an inspirational backing track complete with Yuki Hayashi French Horns. But there’s something about said inspirational backing track that doesn’t sit quite right with me for some reason.

And at the beginning of episode 19, right before Prince starts the first leg of the marathon, the same thing happens. For some reason, there’s something really weird about the music.

(sorry about the play symbols, i used the screen recorder on my computer to grab these)

During the scene in episode 14, I had a hunch about what could be going on, and I paused the episode and went to Spotify to find the track and listen to it to see what’s so weird about it. But after I listened through the whole soundtrack, song by song, I found something even weirder: The song that plays during this scene isn’t on the soundtrack at all. 

At that point, my hunch seemed more correct, but I was still very confused because I kept telling myself “No, they can’t do that, they would never do that”, so I went to Reddit. I looked up the episode discussion page for episode 14 and scrolled through, and I realized that the soundtrack discrepancy wasn’t just a figment of my imagination. Other people were talking about it, too, and even more strangely, I was right. 

So what’s up with the music during these two scenes? Where does it come from? Why aren’t these on the soundtrack? 

Here’s the track that plays during episode 14, and here’s the track that plays during episode 19. Weird, huh? 

Now, onto my main point. Was this decision lazy and unimaginative, or was it inventive and thematically resonant? Well, that’s up to you to decide, but my answer, as it often is, is that it’s a lot deeper than you’d expect.

At first, I definitely thought it was lazy. After all, you have a beautiful original soundtrack created just for this series, why would you give that up just to use music that’s 3-5 years old? 

Well, first off, you wouldn’t be hard pressed to find similarities between Haikyuu!! and Run with the Wind. Besides having a plot structure and character tropes typical to their genre, both series are produced by Production I.G., have similar art styles, and have soundtracks by Yuki Hayashi (yes, I know Asami Tachibana did half the Haikyuu!! score, who do you think I am?) with similar moods, textures, and orchestration. Not to mention the Kakeru-Kageyama jokes. I’d definitely call the two sister series, and I think a lot of people would agree with me.

But that still doesn’t answer the question: Why would you use music from an entirely different anime?

When I first watched episode 14, my answer to that was that it represented that the Hakone Ekiden was something out of reach. The track itself is called “Longing”, and having it play in a documentary within the show makes it seem distinct and separate from the plot and characters outside of it. The Hakone Ekiden is meant for the best of the best, and at this point, the Kansei team isn’t there yet. There are so many good teams out there, there’s no way they could even qualify.

But at the same time, they’re so close. There’s still the qualifier to worry about, of course, but the vast majority of their members have official records. The Hakone Ekiden is definitely within reach. So there’s a bit of a discrepancy with this reading. 

Except... there isn’t. Because let’s step back. This scene happens at the beginning of episode 14. What happens at the end?

At the beginning of the episode, Prince is the only member of the Kansei team who doesn’t have an official record. At the end of the episode, he achieves one, and the whole team is eligible for the qualifier as a result. This episode is Prince pushing himself and catching up to the others, going from seeing the Hakone Ekiden as something impossible to being just one step away from participating in it himself. 

And what happens at the beginning of episode 19? Prince is preparing to run the first leg. 

The thing that connects these two scenes is Prince. And somehow, it makes perfect sense. Why? Because Prince is a huge fucking nerd. 

Prince loves manga. He reads it all the time including before and after races, his room is filled with stacks upon stacks of volumes, at one point Kakeru tells him to just think “After this, I’ll be able to go home and read more manga” when he’s running to get him to run faster, and while he doesn’t actually say the line, he’s the one who points out the MOTHER FUCKING JOJO REFERENCE. And in episode 19, it’s clear that he reads a fair amount of sports manga, too. 

Because the episode is filled to the brim with references and homages:

This shot is the most obvious example, but he also quotes Slam Dunk, Hajime no Ippo, and Yowamushi Pedal, and the fact that Production I.G. was able to directly reference all these series is astounding. But I think the overload of references is necessary, just to show how much Prince values the genre. These characters are his heroes, and their stories are ones he looks up to and is inspired by. Now that he’s living one of those stories himself, sampling music from another series just makes sense, because that’s the mindset he’s in and the background he’s coming from. That’s probably the music playing in his head right now.

I think the reason they chose to use Haikyuu!! specifically was just the similarity between the two scores, since a complete switch in musical style would have been jarring and ruined our sense of immersion in the series. But even with the similarity, if you’re listening hard enough and know the Haikyuu!! score well enough, you’ll recognize it.

But that sense of recognition and familiarity goes a lot deeper than the music, and Prince’s love of sports anime and manga in itself ties into it, too. Because what I’ve found over the past twenty episodes is that KazeTsuyo is a sports anime for sports anime fans, but specifically sports anime fans who have grown up. The character tropes and simple plot structure are still there, but gone are the absurd, over-the-top superpowers of series of old, now replaced by a nuanced take on the genre itself. Not only are the characters in college and thus dealing with issues and goals specific to an adult audience, but the themes are more mature as well.

Over the course of the series, one of the most important lessons to be learned is that winning isn’t everything, and that running is what you make of it. Whether you’re running because you love it or because it’ll make you healthier or stronger or because you want to push yourself to do something you’ve never done before, it’s going to enrich your life somehow, even if you don’t win the race in the end. And other sports anime have played with that theme, too, but KazeTsuyo makes it a main point. Every sports anime can be inspirational, but the message KazeTsuyo sends - that everyone has a different reason for wanting to run, and every one of those reasons is right - really pushes it above the rest in that regard, at least for me.  

Remember when Haikyuu!! got big on tumblr in 2015-2016? I was 15-16 then, and now I’m a few months shy of being 19. A large chunk of the fandom has done a fair bit of growing up since then, whether that’s going from middle school to high school like my sister, high school to college like me, or college to beyond like some of my friends. But for me, Haikyuu!! was the first anime I really loved, and it holds a very special place in my heart to this day. So when I hear its score in KazeTsuyo, there’s something distinctly nostalgic about it. 

But was that decision lazy or brilliant? I don’t know, but it feels like coming home, and that feeling is really, really cool.