#anyway gothic horror is a genre for women etc.

[ravenkings]

the degree to which differing opinions on nosferatu 2024 seem to be falling along gender lines is utterly fascinating to me

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

Anyway Monty is a Gothic heroine send tweet: Aka, Monty the Crow and The Devouring House

Gothic literature/horror is about pushing societal taboos/exploring the implications of what isolation/the literal house(family) as a haunting can do to the human psyche. What happens when you fuck with the human condition and turn it in on itself and trap it in a cage where the child has no idea of what usual societal expectations are? What if they have no access to socialization and only what is provided by the parent/the house? What can be normalized? What taboo is not seen as taboo? What can they do with all these human feelings but no healthy outlet?

It's Wuthering Heights. It's the Haunting of Hill House. It's Frankenstein. It's the house as a ghost. It's the family as an inversion of itself. It's the blurring of lines between what is healthy and unhealthy and what is love and what is obsession and what is temptation and sin and what is expected.

Gothic literature comes from the castle. From the imprisonment of ladies within a context that they cannot escape from and what the pressures on their shoulders trap them in and the unhealthy ways that feminine sexuality (historically speaking) might express itself when it has only ever known suppression due to societal expectations and history. It takes its name from Gothic architecture, these dark, sweeping buildings of stone and arches and where you cannot step inside without feeling the literal weight of history and Catholicism (one of the leading causes of female sexual suppression/guilt/etc. During these time periods) bearing down on you. As a result, sexuality can only be expressed in unhealthy ways (women falling for their uncles/guardians/and even step/half-siblings) both because of a) if you feel sexual feelings you direct them somewhere but you only have the outlet of the people you're surrounded by b) economic circumstances often dictate you gotta marry someone wealthier/older/has more power to than you and then these stories often end with tragic consequences (discovering your spouse is keeping his ex-wife in the attic (Jane Eyre)/killed his ex-wife (Rebecca)/murder by spouse(so many I can't count)/murder by parents/murder by self) due to the fact that as a result of you being unable to live 1) in the castle because the pressures are so unhealthy or 2) out of the castle because you do not know how to live in the real world you can exist nowhere. 

It's for these reasons why you can't extricate Monty and Esther from their Gothic origins. The house is haunted. The house is a ghost. The house consumes its young. The house is the vampire, the house is the all-consuming stomach, the house is an extension of Esther and her power and Monty is a bird being eaten by a snake and the snake is Esther and Esther is the house and the cage door is unlocked but Monty can never leave.

Gothic literature which is a subgenre that is literally built around the cycle of abuse/the inability to escape the House (both the literal house and metaphorical House- i.e., the family and the generational trauma/ghosts haunting it) and how the only way the heroine gets to escape its influence is through Death, and how Monty is the one character in the show who never gets to escape the cycle/dies both tragically and is folded back into the House itself (literally being stripped of his humanity/choice) at the end of the episode.

The house as a cycle of abuse. The house as generational trauma. The house as a prison. The house as a stomach. The house as the devourer of youth. Hannah, Hope, Charles, Monty- all with their adulthood stolen from them by the family/house that trapped them. Getting stuck in the loop. Getting stuck as a ghost. Edwin and Crystal pulling Charles/the Devlin girls out and breaking them out of the Gothic genre. No one being there to break Monty out and so him, being more than any other character, the embodiment of the Gothic heroine.

[sumeria]

who in riverdale would be the most compelling main character, other than archie- and why?

imo cheryl blossom but it would cease to be riverdale as a universal pastiche and almost exclusively a gothic horror x sabrina the teenage witch x buffy vibe. like the problem is when you make anyone but archie andrews, all-american boy, every boy ever in fact, the main character, you lose access to the fact that american comics contain every genre within them and lose yourself to a specific niche. detective/crime, old hollywood/mafia, gothic horror/teen supernatural, gang thriller/writer about writing, etc.

archie andrews = archie comics and under archie comics all of these genres exist. therefore we cant have anyone but archie as the protag unless you want to completely change the genre and tone. this is a question that is purely subjective based on someones preferred genre fiction

anyway yeah cheryl blossom bc i love gothic horror and i love hysterical women and a series focused on gothic horror and witchcraft sounds wonderful. i loved penny dreadful so im approaching it with that mentality

[talesfromthecrypts]

w-what is cozy horror???

From what I can tell it’s like “spoopy” stuff. Addams Family, Over the Garden Wall, What We Do in the Shadows. Things that are specifically made to have a gothic or Halloween or fall aesthetic but aren’t really horror. Comedies and thing made for children (not children’s horror that is a different thing).

Horror is inherently uncomfortable. That’s it’s purpose as a genre to make you feel feelings of fear or stress or disgust. Making things “cozy” goes against that. I have comfort horror for sure (The Witch, Alien, TVC, etc) but I wouldn’t call it cozy at all. And they do make children’s horror that’s purpose is to invoke fear or uncomfortable feelings in children, like Goosebumps or Coraline or even Gremlins and The ‘burbs.

“Cozy Horror” seems to be just a rebrand of a thing that already exists. Spooky themed media that isn’t meant to invoke horror feelings. The weird gender essentialism in the article about women liking “cozy horror” and men liking “endurance horror” was really gross to me. As was the the rude way the article dismissed female, POC, and trans horror creators who were arguing against it. Anyway now everyone is caught up.

[devilsskettle]

can i ask u to elaborate on ur feelings/notes about swallow? i rly liked it and i would love to hear another person’s thoughts!!

yes! i’m so glad you asked, i was just writing about it actually! 

the main two things i think this movie has going for it are the visual appeal and the strength of the acting. every shot in this movie seemed intentional and considered thoroughly, none of them seemed unnecessary or even boring to look at. everything from the set and costume design to the camera work was well done. i think that’s really impressive! most films don’t have that kind of intentionality. it felt kind of like “wes anderson does a psychological thriller” lol but not in a way that felt distracting to me. also the actress who plays hunter, haley bennett, did such a good job of conveying her as a character, and with so much nuance to her emotions. i also think it’s thematically interesting, the way it explores ideas about health, bodily autonomy, financial inequality (this is another “rich people suck” movie), gender, i could go on but you get the idea. it’s very gothic in a lot of ways, discussing the confinement of and violence towards women in the domestic sphere, especially the entitlement to their bodies and ideas about motherhood. i’ve also rarely seen stories about pika but i think here it’s framed in a sympathetic and respectful light that points out its seriousness but doesn’t place the blame on the person who struggles with it, which is a good way to handle any mental health issue in stories imo. i also think it’s rare to have abortion portrayed as a neutral choice that is right in certain circumstances so i think it did that well enough (there have been several movies/tv series in recent years that also discuss abortion without bias so it’s hardly revolutionary but i still like the way they went about it). however, i didn’t love the direction the movie went, i was hoping for more horror than that, in fact the only reason i think it’s labeled a psychological thriller is because people aren’t used to seeing pika portrayed and while it’s a scary problem to have, i don’t think the movie as a whole feels like a thriller. it feels more like a drama about marriage and mental health, if maybe a little bit more intense for that genre. like you can tell it’s intended to be a thriller based on the tone and everything, but the story itself doesn’t back that up. also it only really gets at surface level issues, and gives you a clear reason and solution for her problem (reason: guilt about the method of her conception + problems with her home life + pregnancy. result: pika. solution: confront father + leave husband + abortion. i wish it hadn’t been that simple)

which brings me to: the things i would’ve changed about it or liked to see more:

1. they opened the movie with several close up shots of food and i thought that would be a motif that they carried through the movie, which it was with the items that hunter ate, but not with actual food. like i thought in the birthday party scene, they would have a close up shot of the tray of sandwiches she was carrying, for example. i would’ve liked to see that and how by treating both the food and the objects the same way visually it would blur the line between the two, also i just think it would be visually appealing 

2. i’m uncomfortable with the way they portrayed getting mental health help, with the therapist breaking confidentiality and the family of her husband coercing her into checking into an inpatient facility, even though imo that’s exactly where she needed to be (she almost died! she should’ve been in more intensive treatment). i don’t mind the therapist thing as much because it shows how money can open any door and how alone hunter was, but there’s nothing wrong with having to go to a psych ward even if it feels like an extreme step so it kind of felt bad to me but maybe i’m just hypersensitive about that kind of thing 

3. again, i wanted it to go darker. i wanted for her to snap at the end and do something fucked up to her husband or his family. honestly i didn’t mind the ending, i thought the bathroom scene under the credits was a very strong final shot, but the narrative after she leaves the hotel feels like it diverts into soap opera melodrama territory. in some ways i like the ending but i wished it had something else to it

4. i wish we got to see more of hunter’s real personality but i think that’s difficult when she’s so isolated. maybe in some of the therapy scenes she could open up more and we’d see more past the facade (besides when she’s having a breakdown, which is also not indicative of her “real” personality) 

5. the fact that we get to hear from her father and very little from her mother - none of which is positive - is a little bit questionable to me given that he raped her and we see him humanized and her - maybe not dehumanized, but she’s framed as not being a very good mother, at least to hunter, despite what she says about it. but it’s also surprising and moving in unexpected ways to see her confront the real person face to face instead of literally carrying around the image that she has of him and never really dealing with it, and it also shows that what he did and who he was when he did it was truly pathetic and entitled and massively harmful to both hunter and her mother and potentially to the family he has now, and also there’s not some magical line that separates “normal” people from people who do terrible things to other people, they’re also just people, which isn’t to say “we should forgive them and give them another chance! they’re only human,” more like “you are a person who is capable of hurting others so think about your actions and hold yourself accountable for them.” so i don’t know if it works or if it doesn’t work for me, i maybe have to sit with that one a little longer

6. while i think this movie is better, it does feel like it’s potentially getting into promising young women territory with the pastel aesthetic, focus on women, and shallowness of the storytelling (everything in either of these movies stays very surface level imo). i think it’s a much better movie but still there were parts that felt pretty meh in the same ways

that having been said, it’s a movie i think is going to stick with me and i definitely think it’s worth a watch for anyone curious, but if you’re not already curious, i don’t think you’re missing out so terribly much if you skip it

if you enjoyed this movie (or even were just interested in its themes) here’s some things i would recommend checking out: the yellow wallpaper by charlotte perkins gilman (a woman experiences a mental breakdown after being shut away in her room to recover from “hysteria” while suffering from postpartum depression), white is for witching by helen oyeyemi (also deals with pika as well as horror in domestic spaces), the invisible man 2020 (i feel like these movies have a lot of overlap - isolated glass houses on a cliffside, abusive/possessive men that they have to escape both of whom threaten to - or actually do - hunt them down, a woman experiencing a serious problem that no one takes seriously and is threatened with - or actually experience - institutionalization, commentary on wealth and autonomy), wide sargasso sea by jean rhys (after reading jane eyre of course! follows the character of bertha from jane eyre during her childhood, the early days of her relationship with rochester, and the breakdown of that relationship - similar in relationship with her husband, etc)

anyway yeah that’s all i have to say about it for now but i’d love to hear what you think about it!

[battlestar-royco]

here is part 2 of my sci fi recs masterlist! again, i could’ve gone on with even more recs but i decided to draw the line here. this set for the most part errs on the darker side, thematically, visually, conceptually etc. i personally find it super thought-provoking and intriguing but that’s just me. i highly recommend reading the tw under the cut if you’re thinking of watching, especially the matrix and space gothic slides. please view at your discretion <3

part 1/2

If you like WLW (um idk why I only made this slide based on identity; it just kinda happened lmao but I think it works):

Siren: (tw: parent loss, grief, thalassophobia) a mermaid surfaces in a cove town looking for her lost sister. Polyamorous relationship between a man, a black/indigenous woman, and the mermaid!!!! Environmentalism! As a person who has thalassophobia, I didn’t find this too hard to watch. There aren’t that many underwater scenes, thankfully.

Black Mirror: San Junipero: (tw: grief, but otherwise none that I recall; it’s pretty lighthearted) two women meet in a beach resort in the 80s and fall in love. Interracial wlw!

Orphan Black: (tw: suicide, infertility, rape implication, VB, language, drug use) a woman realizes she is one of several clones and uncovers an elaborate corporate conspiracy. This is one of my personal favorites with great rep of complex women of all ages and bodily autonomy. Several central queer characters and a black male secondary character!

Starfish: (tw: grief, a few jump scares and brief monstrous imagery, blood) after the death of her best friend, a young woman breaks into the deceased’s apartment and discovers a chain of music tapes that could save the world. Weird, subtle, and experimental. Not to sound like a surfer but you kinda have to allow yourself to be in the vibe. The main character and her friend were definitely a thing imo.

Annihilation: (tw: body horror, VB, disturbing imagery) a team of women scientists explore an anomaly that rapidly mutates genes. There are canonical and coded wlw and multiple (light-skinned) POC in this but the rep is short-lived. I put it on because although it should’ve been more ambitious with the casting, I think it breaks *some* ground for Hollywood sci fi with the all-woman team and more than one WOC. Wack ending though.

Mad Max: Fury Road: (tw: rape implication, violence) I think everyone knows about this one but: in the apocalypse, a woman breaks 4 younger women out of a harem. A badass car chase across the desert ensues. A bit light on plot/worldbuilding, but sooooo cool-looking and very thematic!!!!

If you liked STRANGER THINGS:

It: (tw: VB) don’t actually watch this lmao I’m serious. It’s really stupid, and not in a funny way. But I do think Stranger Things was inspired by this story overall. The modern It films are better but they’re also really kjslsklskls stupid? Stephen King in general is obsolete imo.

The Thing: (tw: VB) an alien that can take the form of others wreaks havoc on a scientific facility in Antarctica. It’s dark and vibey, but I feel like it’s just Alien in Antarctica with truly terrible special effects tbh?? Others feel differently. It’s also classified as sci fi/horror, so stay away if you’re easily scared! Not too good on representation.

Super 8: (tw: some language) a group of preteens witnesses an alien-caused train crash as they’re filming a home movie. Not diverse but I definitely think it inspired a lot of sci fi for the 2010s, ESPECIALLY Stranger Things. Not too scary either!

ET: (tw: it’s been a really long time since I watched so I don’t remember but it’s rated PG) I think everyone knows what this is about!

Alien: (tw: VB) truckers in space discover a deadly evolving alien. One of my favorite movies of all time! I love the aesthetic and the mood and worldbuilding so much. Ellen Ripley is one of the first Final Girls in the horror genre. I personally found this more of a sci fi than a horror movie but I’d say stay away if you’re nervous!!

Terminator: (tw: VB) a deadly android is sent to kill a woman who’s destined to birth the man who saves the world. Terminator 2 is way better imo because it centers on Sarah rather than the dudes saving her and trying to kill her. But it’s still worth a watch, you know, for the culture.

If you liked CONTAGION:

War of the Worlds: (tw: blood) pretty straightforward aliens come to Earth to take over. Sorry to rec another T*m Cruise movie but I really like the alien design and the apocalypsey feel of this one. Baby Dakota Fanning is in it too!

Falling Skies: (tw: VB, body horror, rape) alien invasion yada yada but the alien lore gets more interesting as it goes on. It’s kind of cheesy and yeah maybe I did discover it by looking up the iCarly boyfriend (and what about it??) but it’s nice to have on in the downtime. An Asian woman co-stars.

Knowing: (tw: blood) school students unearth a time capsule that contains a sheet from a girl who predicted all the tragic world events between 1959-2009. This is NOT a good movie but it’s SO hilarious to me because of the acting and contrivances. Fun to group-watch!!!!

10 Cloverfield Lane: (tw: VB, emotional abuse) a woman wakes up in a bunker to a captor who tells her that the world has fallen to alien apocalypse. I think this movie elevates the original Cloverfield in pretty much every way. Again, super tense and moody. The conflict revolves around whether or not the captor is being truthful.

Train to Busan: (tw: extreme VB and disturbing imagery) a man and his daughter are on a train when a zombie hops on at the last minute. It’s Korean with an all-Asian cast; Choi Woo-shik co-stars. I definitely wouldn’t watch if you’re scared of blood and gore. It’s very gross and violent.

12 Monkeys: (tw: ableism, violence) a man from the 2030s is sent back to the 1990s to prevent the plague that will end the world. I think the aesthetics of this are really cool but otherwise it’s not a favorite. But I think it appeals to people who like apocalypse and time travel stuff!

If you liked THE MATRIX:

Strange Days: (tw: rape, sex, nudity, VB, racism, police brutality) memories can be saved to hard-drives and sold on the black market for exorbitant prices. Very problematic and triggering presentation of rape, but young Angela Basset stars and there’s a condemnation of police brutality that’s still relevant 20+ years after its release.

Upgrade: (tw: ableism, VB, fridging) a disabled man installs an AI in his spine to help him move and investigate the murder of his wife. The premise is glaringly ableist and I feel weird even recommending it tbh but it’s got great visuals and a few good twists.

Altered Carbon: (tw: VB, weird interracial body switching, uhhh I haven’t finished this one IDK) in a society where human bodies are interchangeable, a man wakes up in a new body after 300 years of his mind being dormant. A Latina woman co-stars, two Asian characters in a subplot, a few other POC here and there as well. I think season 2 stars a black man.

eXistenZ: (tw: VB, anti-Asian racism, general weirdness? IDK it’s hard to describe. There are guns made out of bones and weirdly sexual visuals.) after someone tries to assassinate her, a video game designer and her bodyguard must play through her virtual reality game in order to save the only copy of the game.

Minority Report: (tw: VB, eye removal/insertion) all crimes are predicted and criminals reported before they are committed. The main character is preemptively accused of murder. This one is really white but it was one of the first movies that got me into sci fi. Early 2000s Colin Farrell <3.

If you liked WESTWORLD:

Humans: (tw: uncanny valley, objectification) androids are household helpers and public assistants throughout Britain until one day they start developing consciences. It hits a lot of the themes of Westworld without all the unnecessary pretentiousness, “edginess,” and “grittiness,” and it stars Gemma Chan and Colin Morgan!!

Blade Runner 2049: (^) an android is ordered to find and kill a human/android hybrid. It’s not without its issues but it’s one of my favorite movies of all time, right up there with Alien. So beautiful, so thematic, so thought-provoking (to me, anyway. I know a lot of people thought it was way too slow).

Ex Machina: (^) a man is invited to a private estate to help test the intelligence of an android. It’s kind of predictable imo but you know Oscar Isaac and Sonoya Mizuno are in it so we have to stan, and so is Domhnall Gleeson, for the SW fans! I like how isolated and quiet it feels.

I Am Mother: (tw: blood, gaslighting) after an extinction event, a young woman is raised by a lone android in a human repopulation facility until one day a woman knocks. It starts off slow and a bit generic, but I’m obsessed with the 2nd and 3rd acts of this movie---good acting, dialogue, and fantastic visuals. It has that same isolated feel as Ex Machina with only three characters, all of which are women/woman-coded!!!

If you liked ALIEN (space gothic):

Battlestar Galactica (2004-2008 reboot): (tw: genocide, war, colonization, VB, uncanny valley, rape, infidelity) space opera that follows humanity as it fights the ever-evolving and powerful enemy of their own creation: androids named Cylons. Um? I  L O V E  THIS SHOW SO MUCH and I truly do think it’s everything sci fi should be. There is a really unfortunate Miss Saigon-esque romance plot in season 1 and a lazily-written love triangle involving a black woman in season 3, but otherwise it’s one of my all-time favorites and I highly recommend. It’ll spin your mind and tug your heartstrings for years.

Black Mirror: Men Against Fire: (tw: genocide, war, nudity) soldiers in the near future protect citizens from mutant zombies, but one soldier starts experiencing strange hallucinations in the field. This is such an underrated Black Mirror episode starring a black man. There’s brief objectification of a black woman but it’s very anti-military and it has an interesting sterile aesthetic that reminds me of Alien.

High Life: (tw: rape, black holes/space anxiety, very disturbing) prisoners are given the option to join a space expedition and serve as experimental subjects en route to a black hole. Please please stay away if you are triggered by sexual violence of any kind. There’s almost no physical violence in this movie but it’s psychologically haunting imo.

The Faculty: (tw; VB, drug use) high schoolers discover their teachers are being possessed by an invading alien race. I LOVE THIS MOVIE LMFAOOOO. The cast is SO wild---Elijah Wood, John Oliver, Usher, Salma Hayek, Josh Hartnett??? And I’m probably forgetting more. The combination of the cast, the terrible dialogue, and shitty special effects is PEAK comedy imo. But bear in mind it’s bloody!!

Prometheus: (tw: body horror, VB, uncanny valley) a crew of scientists heads on a deep space mission to find the aliens who created the human race. A prequel to Alien, but I kind of view it as its own thing. Despite the plot holes, I love this movie too! It was one of my sci fi gateways and the visuals are stunning. It’s pretty gory though so if that’s not your thing stay away.

Life: (tw: extreme VB) a lesser Alien, but it provides all the space gothic tropes (jokey crew, shots of space, really pretty spaceship, everyone dies, creepy alien) with a well-known cast---Gyllenhaal, Reynolds, etc.

The X Files: (tw: a few episodes contain 90s racism, sexism, queerphobia etc but you can skip them) a lot of people have watched this so I barely have to explain, but it’s one of my favorites. Two FBI agents investigate multiple aliens and get involved in government conspiracies along the way. A good gateway!

A Quiet Place: (tw: child loss, VB, tension) I think most people know what this is about too. Alien apocalypse with aliens that hunt by sound. The daughter in the family is deaf, and so is the actress who portrays her. The representation of deafness was critically acclaimed.

[an-incurable-affection-blog]

Wieland, or The Transformation. An American Tale.

Charles Brockden Brown. 1798. “Romanticism and Gothic” list.

Pro forma for early novels, Wieland opens with the obligatory justification for its existence on the grounds of its salutary moral lesson. The next thing we learn from the first-person narrator, à la its predecessor Caleb Williams, is that the story will have an unhappy ending. But many pages will have to be turned before we learn the specifics.

Wieland creates suspense, not with immediate action that makes us want to know what happens next, but by stating an outcome up front (total devastation of the narrator’s life) and making us read not for the what but the how. It triggers the same impulse as not being able to look away from a car crash. The narrator’s long interjections bemoaning events further delay the gratification of learning what happens next.

It features countless themes and tropes of (especially the early) gothic, and early novels more broadly, but I’ll start counting them anyway⁠—terror and horror; the hypnotic, irresistible power of the horrifying; curiosity; madness; the somatic roots of emotion; melancholy and imagination; Burkean principles of sublimity; closets; corpses; perfect heroines; interplay of interior emotions and the external environment; naturalistic explanations of seemingly supernatural events; dreams. Characters place themselves at windows to ruminate. They understand the paradoxical pleasures of pain and the solace of weeping. Their emotional traumas lead, inevitably, to physical illness. Women understand “the remediless and unpardonable outrage on the dignity of the sex” involved in being the first to disclose one’s romantic feelings; they preserve their chastity at all costs. (This invariably involves sequestering oneself in one’s room against the external threat of rape.) 

Each of the above, in its own way, testifies to the Gothic preoccupation with human psychology. Wieland is particularly invested in phenomenology, and thus, its literary project is what Dorrit Cohn calls “narrative modes for presenting consciousness.” (As the 1822 preface to Brown’s unfinished sequel Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist, perceptively notes, “[u]nlike most other writers, [Brown’s] modes of thinking, the systems of ratiocination with which he invests his characters…” are “more the objects of our admiration or attention than the incidents or themes of his fictions.”) To this end, Wieland is far from alone among 18th-century novels in its appropriation of the language and concerns of Enlightenment philosophy (association of ideas, errors of the senses, reason vs. emotion, etc.).

The vehicle of the book’s detailed rendering of consciousness is a main character as first-person narrator⁠—not quite typical, as only one-third of the 18 novels on my Gothic list use this. It is, then, our narrator Clara Wieland’s—and not just the implied author’s—tacit foregrounding of her thoughts and feelings over events. In one example among many of Clara’s long internal monologues, it takes two pages between one concrete action (sitting down) and the next (going to her closet). In between, she wonders why her love interest failed to show up at a prearranged social engagement; invents two different possible reasons, one that causes her delight and the other, despair; accounts for why she seized upon those reasons; acknowledges her obsessive thinking as an unfortunate recent development in her character; meditates on the human condition, generally, and then her father’s fate, in particular; resolves to peruse a manuscript written by her father; and plans how to execute the resolution: which should come first, fetching the manuscript or preparing the lamp? (She goes for the book first, in the dark—spoiler alert, bad decision!).

Supplying these details draws out the scenes, serving a purpose of suspense. More importantly, it goes beyond merely narrating consciousness (achievable through third-person narration) in demonstrating how many people habitually narrativize our own lives and selves, often without realizing it. Clara recalls and retells events by retracing her thoughts and feelings about them, just as she filtered them through her thoughts and feelings when they were happening. She can’t escape this reflexive self-narrativization: “at such a crisis my thoughts might be supposed at no liberty to range; yet vague images rushed into my mind…” 

Wieland advances psychological theories both through Clara’s stated beliefs and narrative demonstration. It seems to come down on the side of Hume, that reason serves the passions, as Clara repeatedly suffers unwise impulses and supplies the bad reasoning to talk herself into following them. At one point she expresses the belief that we can never understand the motives of others; yet, she seems almost as ignorant of her own motivations, listing various alternatives as she tries to assign them post hoc. She walks straight into closets containing probable murderers. She cannot even acknowledge that she is drawn to darkness and danger, much less explain why.

A gothic novel is not complete without a villain, but Wieland’s Carwin is more rounded than most. He confesses to bad things, but is not responsible—or at least, not fully nor intentionally responsible—for the dark climax, the hero Wieland’s murder of his own wife and children. Mischievous rather than evil, Carwin uses his talents for ventriloquism and mimicry to perplex people with unembodied, often seemingly supernatural voices. On almost every occasion when someone hears a voice of warning or command, or when the overheard voice of a friend sows misunderstanding and anger, it’s Carwin. But he did not, it seems, order Wieland to kill his family in order to prove his devotion to God (the story of Abraham and Isaac should come to mind). The voice of God was all in Wieland’s head. No one was ever in actual danger until Wieland’s descent into madness. The real villain is the human mind and its vulnerabilities.

Carwin’s role is more complex than villain, as he seems to embody the gothic tale writ large. Albeit minimally involved in its defining tragic event, he is the inadvertent engine of most of the plot. His gift is the easy solution to all mysteries. He confesses to “a rooted passion for scattering around me amazement and fear”; it is “for the sake of creating a mysterious dread,” he says, that “I have made myself a villain.” What could be more fundamental to the Gothic project than the scattering of amazement, fear, and a mysterious dread? Like Clara’s, Carwin’s motives are perplexing. He seems to enjoy arousing gothic emotions just to see how it affects people, and so, it seems, does the novel. We could see it was the ventriloquist, just because he felt like it as a lazy, anticlimactic, and improbable explanation of events, or as an insight into the genre and the human psychology. 

In a shorter piece written three years after the close of these events, Clara reveals that she did not, as she predicted, die with the completion of her written account, but lived to find happiness again. She traveled for a change of scene and became curious about the world again (a central motivating force of the novel). She married the object of her affections, who, in a reversal of the traditional gender dynamic, has moved from admiration to reciprocating her love. Surprise, it’s actually a happy ending after all. Clara transcends generic expectations on two levels, existing outside the Gothic story and changing the ending.

[peppermint-studign]

Hey Andrew, it’s your secret Santa again! 🎅🏻🎄 Thank you so much for asking, I am doing okay 💖 My semester ends in 3 weeks and I am sure that you know how hectic end of the semesters can be! And congrats to your brother!!! Let’s talk about you now 🎄 What kind of music do you like? And what are your interests other than school, what is your favorite book, tv series, movie, food, etc? Are you an extrovert or an introvert? I’d love to get to know you better! ☃️

First of all??? Your emoji’s are so Cute??? But yes, I hope you can power through the rest of your semester, you got this!!

To start off, I’m a big ol’ introvert. I like to Stay home and Recharge after school mostly, and I love to write. I’m pretty much writing like 24/7? And anything too, fiction, fanfiction, any genre I don’t really care, my mind is just always kinda going with ideas. I’m not too particular about my music, I like all kinds of stuff, am I partial to indie bands and 80s music? Yes. I also like Southern Gothic kind of songs. Y’know the songs that are all about women beating up cheating boyfriends, or getting guitar lessons from the devil at midnight. My music selection is a mess tho. One second it’ll be Radio Ga Ga by Queen, the next it’s The Devil Wears a Suit and Tie by Colter Wall, then its Lemon Boy by Cavetown. I’m A Mess when it comes to music.

My favorite book is boring bc it’s a non-fiction book that took me like,,,,three months to get through bc it’s depressing and full of medical terms, but it’s How To Survive a Plague by David France. My favorite TV series right now I would have to say is,,,,uh,,,,,man there are so many. I recently got into American Horror Story, and since I’m on break, and I’m on a binge watch of Law and Order SVU. I made it through the first season in under a week, I’m not even kidding. My favorite video game (bc that’s what I do to relax during school times :x) would have to be Far Cry 5. Or Detroit Become Human. Or Assassins Creed Odyssey. I have a lot of Thoughts on all of those games. 

I hate deciding on my favorite food tho bc I feel like I’m betraying all the other good foods out there y’know? Like if I say, I love mashed potatoes, then what about spaghetti. Or what about shawarma. Or what about Portillo’s hot dogs?? WHO IS GOING TO DEFEND OMELETS AND TOAST!?!?

I’m passionate about food if you can’t tell.

Anyway, thanks secret santa!! I hope you are having a wonderful day! Tell me about about yourself too! Well, without giving yourself away I guess :p

[onewomancitadel]

The term people are probably looking for is 'hate-to-love' in the context of general enemies to lovers misuse. That's not Darcy and Elizabeth, but it was something I was thinking about. (It's a simplification of Darcy and Elizabeth).

Even then I don't think the real key to 'hate-to-love' has been identified, which is that it's an easy reason for why they can't be together yet (the question you need to keep asking when you're writing a romance) and is easy to deliver upon dramatically.

This is where sometimes a real issue in media criticism is attributing something like hate to love to social issues, social commentary, expectations of women and men etc. etc. when at the heart of it what makes it so successful and easy to replicate in the worst romcom (and I'll expand on romcoms in a bit) is because it's just dramatically more interesting than friends-to-lovers and easier to deliver upon. The conflict is set. The character is set. The stage is set. Friends-to-lovers as a trope needs more work. It's not because women should set the bar low for men, or because women are conditioned to accept bad behaviour from men (when a story involves character reform anyway that's the fantasy, not the mean behaviour as such).

Romcoms are really a misrepresentation of what makes romance novels appealing though, and are kind of themselves somewhat of a different entity - I'm not as well-versed on this issue though, but I do know romcoms are somewhat of an artificial genre designed to cater to an invented demographic, but they are the usual suspect for the hate-to-love trope problems.

In fact, the way I sort of mentally think of most romcoms is just imitation of what the perceived romance genre is versus what it actually offers. I'm not wholly 'with' the romance genre, but I definitely understand it, and appreciate its conventions and expectations, and a critical issue in a lot of storytelling is just not understanding how to write romance... so the craft of it really interests me. But it says a lot about me that my favourite romance novel is also sort of a Gothic horror romance, and self-published at that.

Romcoms hit the familiar milestones of romance but often lack the soul. There are certainly exceptions, because I'm talking about a very wide genre which continued to evolve. 10 Things I Hate About You is very good; Bridget Jones' Diary misses everything good about Pride & Prejudice, and I wish Bridget ended up with the Mr. Wickham instead, because they would've been terrible and wonderful together.

Although my issue with the romance genre is often that the development of the relationship just happens too quickly for my tastes, and so that's why I tend to lean towards the hate-to-love spectrum of things, just because you get that protracted development and discovery. On the other hand, sometimes you get the hate-to-instantaneous love, which is something I equally dislike. I love romance, I'm just very picky.

The broader point I was working towards is that sometimes identifying why something is compelling doesn't need a social approach but a technical approach. This is why people are so mistaken about enemies to lovers. It's fun. It's ironic. It's dramatic. It's fantastic; I'm not sure why romance is so scrutinised compared to other consistently ridiculous things which happen in fiction, but compassion is boring and women are stupid, I guess.

Actually, I was remarking to Best Mate about the idea of characters 'deserving' redemption arcs (which I have gone on record of mocking and finding extremely stupid, because redemption is an active act, not passive) and she said that on the topic of what they deserve, the idea that everybody is deserving of something like compassion is ideal but it's also extremely difficult in practice to the point of being emotionally impossible to extend to everybody as well as uncomfortable for most people to contemplate. I said that's exactly why it feels like a superpower in the context of enemies to lovers, because it's that enormous philosophical demand.

I think I may have figured out one of the major reasons Elizabeth and Darcy's dynamic gets compared to or conflated with the enemies-to-lovers trope: because it involves the (poor) preconceptions of the other -> expectation reversal, in addition to intertwined character and moral development.

Beat for beat, that's what a lot of 'true' (bear with me here) ETL fans enjoy about the trope. The structural enmity is there to keep two fundamentally similar people apart but also they are two people who grow in response to the other. In the Elizabeth and Darcy dynamic, the barriers to their interactions are not enemy- or allegiance-based.

But you can see how that crosses over. Obviously I do think there's the element of people wanting the watered down ETL trope and just generally a misunderstanding of tropes contributing to things but I think this is the most interesting part, because I don't think the ETL trope is often articulated the way I'm describing it here (and where it mirrors Darcy/Elizabeth). The hatred is really accessory.

[greyelven]

Fandom 5k Letter

Dear Writer,

To begin with, thank you for writing for me! I really appreciate the time and effort, especially for this exchange, and I want to emphasise that I’m going to love whatever you come up with, so write what you want to write and don’t stress about it. All I ever really want from exchanges is more fic about my favourite characters so I’m very easy to please. The genre tags I’ve picked are probably bordering on the excessive but that’s just me liking a lot of different things. As always, prompts are just there if you need a little inspiration, if you already have your own idea then go for it. My previous letters can be found here; I’ve recycled a lot of old prompts in this letter but you’re welcome to draw on any I haven’t as well.

Likes – AU settings (modern, steampunk, sci-fi etc, go wild!), canon divergence AUs, grey morality, gothic vibes, fantasy elements (creepy fairies, enchantments etc), character studies, backstory, banter, road trips, found family, femslash, ladies working together, ladies kicking ass (literally or figuratively)

Dislikes – torture, depictions of rape/dubcon/sexual assault (implied/discussed is fine), pregnancy, homophobia

Ghostbusters

Erin/Holtzmann, Abby & Erin & Holtzmann & Patty

This movie was such an unexpected delight and I just want more of these ladies, kicking spectral ass and being friends and not giving a damn about what anyone else thinks of them. I loved the light tone of the movie but I also love creepy ghost stories so feel free to take these prompts in any direction.

-what’s one of their most memorable busts? Are there any particularly scary or irritating ghosts? Do they ever go beyond New York? Perhaps to investigate a ghost town, or abandoned buildings in the middle of nowhere…

-how does their ghost research progress after the events of the movie? Any big scientific breakthroughs? Do they find out more about the world through the portal? Any big mishaps that lead to more ghosts rather than less? I wouldn’t be surprised if Holtz’s unstable equipment malfunctioned somehow

-the team hanging out in their downtime (movie nights, celebrating each other’s birthdays, Patty taking them to interesting historical sites around the city…)

-there are a lot of genre AUs I’d love to see for this fandom but the first ones that spring to mind are Victorian gothic (ghost hunting would fit so perfectly) and cosmic horror (what creatures live on the other side of the portal?)

All of those could have an Erin/Holtz bent but for some more specifically shippy prompts:

-everyday moments between the two of them, slowly getting closer the longer they work together - cleaning off slime after a tough bust, late nights at the lab, long uneventful stakeouts of ghosts that may or may not be there

-established relationship moments - lazy mornings, date nights (bound to be some odd ones with Holtzmann around), culinary adventures, trips away together

-I’m dying for a San Junipero au of these two, if you’ve seen it (if you haven’t, it’s a standalone piece and a really lovely story - Black Mirror season 3, episode 4)

HTGAWM

Annalise/Bonnie

I’m not caught up on the second half of season 3 but I will be soon, though tbh I’m here for character dynamics - there are so many freaking plot twists I’ve forgotten much of what happened earlier in the show anyway. What I love about this pairing is how complicated and co-dependent it is; their personal relationship and working relationship bleed into one another, it’s messy as hell and it’s never not going to be like that.

In the meantime, shameless copying and pasting of prompts from the last exchange I did, with a few new ideas:

- they finally kissed and then the freaking house burned down, so maybe a quiet moment between those things happening when Annalise is wide awake and sober (seriously that whole situation was so ficcy, with Bonnie taking care of her – might as well mine it to its full potential)

- I like how effective a team they are as lawyers and the contrast with their complex messy personal relationship, so like, maybe casefic with a side of dysfunction

- backstory! all the backstory! good moments, bad moments, just anything exploring how their relationship came to be as it is

-assuming Bonnie gets Annalise out of jail, how does their relationship change going forward?

-in terms of genre shift, I would love a political au - Annalise runs for office, or maybe she’s a career politician, with Bonnie as her right-hand woman (of course), and they take a similar approach as they do to law - occasional good intentions, regularly dirty methods, a string of bodies in their wake

Rogue One

Jyn/Leia, Jyn & Leia

All I want from Star Wars is a proper relationship between two women and it has yet to materialise. So give me Jyn and Leia as friends, girlfriends, reluctant allies, whatever, as long as they’re interacting. They’re from very different backgrounds - polished princess and petty criminal - but they’ve both been trained for rebellion from a young age, and if they met around the time of A New Hope, they’d both be grappling with loss; there’s a lot of potential to mine.

-they’re sent on a mission together at some point during the war - how well do they function as a team? Who’s in charge? How does the other deal with that?

-Jyn surviving Scarif and standing beside Leia when the Death Star gets destroyed - what does it mean for each of them? What would Jyn’s involvement in the rebellion be like going forward?

-building on that, what would Jyn do if she were still alive during the Force Awakens? Would Leia turn to an old friend/old flame for support after losing Han?

-college au, where they’re both involved in student activism but have very different methods of getting shit done (Leia working from within the institution, getting elected to various student offices and delivering impassioned speeches at committee meetings, while Jyn goes for more subversive tactics)

Wolf 359

Lovelace, Minkowski, Lovelace/Minkowski, Eiffel & Minkowski

My new favourite thing! I started listening about a month ago and was immediately hooked. I love the show’s effortless switching between humour and much darker material, the insular character dynamics set against the big empty galaxy, and the bleak underlying scenario of being stuck on a spaceship that’s falling apart while nobody on Earth really seems to care.

I requested my favourite characters and combinations of characters but I like Hera and Hilbert too and most of the prompts could apply to the Hephaestus crew as a whole, so if you want to take more of a group approach that’s totally cool. What I’m really interested in is how the characters function and develop meaningful relationships under the circumstances.

(I’m less a fan of the SI-5 team; the angle I’m interested in there is the disruption they present for the original crew , so if you want to include them in that capacity, go ahead. Also, feel free to ignore the whole Lovelace = alien thing cos that’s mostly what I’ve been doing.)

Prompts!

-if the crew do make it back to Earth, what then? Do they stay in touch or drift apart? Is it difficult to re-adjust to ‘normal’ life? Or for a lighter approach, the crew indulging in all the things they’ve missed most about Earth

-wacky space shenanigans! The first time Minkowski brought out the jetpack and Eiffel got excited, an experiment of Hilbert’s going wrong and everyone helping with damage control, ways Eiffel has attempted to alleviate his boredom...

-exploring pre-canon - the characters’ first weeks of life in space and how it was the same/different from what they thought it would be, moments where characters realised their first impressions of each other weren’t quite accurate, etc

The X-Files

-what I’m really after here is casefic, weird happenings with a side of Mulder & Scully banter. One of my favourite things about the show is how many genres it managed to incorporate so effortlessly, sci-fi/horror/thriller etc, and I love the monster of the week episodes that their own distinctive feel - the claustrophobia of Ice or the melancholy of the Field Where I Died. Some of my favourite X-Files tropes are small creepy towns, isolated mountain forests and strange lights in the sky, if that helps :)

-I’m not a huge fan of the revival - I think it was a missed opportunity, because it was a) a mess and b) didn’t really use aspects of the 2010s that make the show still relevant today - government spying, distrust of authority, etc. So a modern au done right would be really nice.

-the show’s pretty noir-ish already but I would love a full-blown noir au, Scully as the straight-laced detective who gets reluctantly entangled in her partner’s wild goose chase

-or complete opposite direction, take out the aliens and have Mulder & Scully as office co-workers