#It starts to feel like the subtext

[vio1315]

I swear

It's wild but sometimes I'll start feeling ostracized for having a majority opinion

And it's just because I have a tendency to surround myself with all people who agree about very niche things

So people will discuss things like

'Shipping in stories is so uninteresting' and etc

And it's like 'Okay you feel that way, cool cool'

But then that's like the only take you ever see

and people just keep discussing it

And they're discussing it so much because it's countercultural so it's kind of always relevant

But I really don't engage with the wider culture very much, or people who enjoy such just don't feel the need to talk about it

So it's this really weird thing where on Many topics, despite generally holding the more common view, I start to feel like

'Dang maybe I need to say something about how x thing is actually okay in my opinion since nobody is really talking about it?'

Which would make a weird feedback loop I think

[katabay]

my knight-monk agenda strikes again, but this was less of a 'I read something that made me experience several emotions and a strike of inspiration at once,' and more of a 'wouldn't it be fucked up if the bejeweled skeleton saints came to life and and started. eating people. or something. in revenge. medieval catholic horror, or an older horror of not being buried right. zombies, even. a complete bastardization of holy visuals. zombies.'

it's a far away idea, but I still wanted to play around with font layouts. like, if I DID make it into a full comic: these would be visual vibes, perhaps.

it's also a little bit about the kind of intimacy that these kinds of spaces provide, or in the case of this monk: the heavy trauma of war and the death of your brother, the escape to a secluded monastery, spiritual brotherhood to make up for your dead brother, but your role as a physician keeps pulling you back to this violence you want to escape. physician, heal thyself, only you have a holy calling to serve those in need, so instead: physician, open up your wounds again. saint jude, patron saint of lost causes, give us a fucking hand here, man. amen.

Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behavior, Identity, and Artistic Expression, James M. Saslow

and this one is about earlier history than the medieval period that this comic is set in, but the monk character is sort of an exploration of earlier themes. a little bit. I like overlapping eras with each other, I've done it before and I'll do it again. this character is an exploration of some other stuff too, but mostly this book was interesting to read

From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity, Andrew T Crislip

bsky ⭐ pixiv ⭐ pillowfort ⭐ cohost

[marlasbreastlump]

was rereading fight club and yeah yeah gun phallus metaphor but you don't even need to do a 10 step psychosexual analysis to come to this conclusion. the book just says it.

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[frobby]

do yall see my vision?

[sulky-cabbage]

Eve: "Regarding the lyrics, this time its about portraying the conflicts and feelings of the characters in Jujutsu kaisen. This kind of feeling inside me, made me choose the characters one by one and thus write the lyrics. I don't dare to say where or who..."

Also Eve:

Alternative translations: 1 2 3 4

The lyrics hit different after ch 271. I kinda want this to be the op for s4 ngl

[apotelesmaa]

> looking for a tenma siblings relationship study

> ask the op if the study is actually about the tenmas or just treating saki like an accessory to tsukasa

> they don’t understand

> pull out an illustrated diagram explaining the difference

> they laugh and say “it’s a good relationship study sir”

> click the post

> it’s treating saki like an accessory to tsukasa

[therealraewest]

Writer Steven Grant looked at the three Moon Knight boys and was like cool time to bully Marc Spector

[zaddyazula]

wait so is itafushi actually canon or not people are confusing me

[isablooo]

every time i blink theyre doing another terrible adaptation of a gothic novel will i ever be free

[broken-lycan]

question to those who have watched the interview with the vampire film (1994) and are now watching the series:

how is louis and lestats relationship portrayed? is it similarly toxic and rocky? does lestat have rageful outbursts a lot?

louis and claudia trying to kill lestat isn't a dealbreaker(?) for me, if lestat acts like a selfish dick he gets what's coming for him

[daisyachain]

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.

[from-beyond]

Jim and Brandon in Witchboard, 1986

“What happened to us, man?”

[lover-of-mine]

Seeing people watch 911 for the first time and be like "I thought the buddie girlies were overreacting, but I have watched the show and I get it now" will never not be fun.

[soft-serve-soymilk]

Wow I love asshole gay people (things have ALIGNED in the ASTRAL PLANE and Pav is WATCHING SOMETHING?? 🤯)

[ingravinoveritas]

Okay but Michael playing Liberace in a movie when...