#blue curtains

[collageofnudes]

Taya Vais

[annapolisrose]

Blue

[facelessghouldmine]

And I’ll say this much about media literacy and metaphorical drapery:

The curtains may be blue, but that does NOT negate the fact that they’re also velvet. Or that they’re trimmed with fringe. Or that the sash to tie them back is embroidered with golden thread and white glass beads.

Multiple things can be true at once!

[prim-slimm]

I used to think “The Curtains are Blue” was a valid take but as I’ve gotten older and more interested in media analysis, I’ve changed my mind. Now that I’ve seen someone say that Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird as just a story about some kids having a “wild summer,” I’ve fully changed my mind. Some of you very much need to be strapped into a chair and taught media literacy

[digital-meat]

Media literacy is simple if you care about whether the plot makes sense or follows any sort of logic you're a doodoo head, if you count the numbers to see if they add up you're a doodoo head, and if you don't interpret all of the secret signs and symbols and themes in the perfectly right way to arrive at my predefined political analysis you're also a doodoo head. Hard magic systems are for morons but if you let the gnostic symbolism go over your head you should just die right now.

[justplainsimon]

I knew from the minute of "why didn't steven kill the diamonds" that media literacy was plummeting

[tranquil-slaughterhouse]

OOOOOoooooOOoooOOOoooOOooo I'm a ghost! But not just any ghost, a ghost made of floating blue curtains!

[ruthimages]

[cowardstiel]

lament with me

[tower-of-hana]

"The curtains are just blue" is a bad ideology but it is extremely funny to apply it to Octavia Butler books.

Your English Teacher: Bloodchild is about the line between a relationship with a power imbalance and r*pe

Octavia Butler: mmm fucked-up mpreg porn

[paigewrites]

Ok I’ve been thinking about death of the author and symbolism and media literacy.

It’s such a trashed that people are losing the ability to think critically about books, art, and films. The curtains are just a boring shade of blue now, and the author cries because they wrote the curtains to be blue for a reason. Not one they could put into words though. Often symbolism is not put into words or defined by the author themselves in a way they can understand or make others understand. The idea just comes out. It is sprung from the skull like Athena from Zeus. The curtains are blue. They’re a backdrop for some scene and they were important enough to write about and the author wrote them down and there was no color they could be but blue.

Now the author can’t explain why, it’s just a truth that has lodged itself in their heart. There’s no other color they could be. Absolutely none. The readers will create the meaning. As the readers pick apart the words and put their interpretations forth, suddenly it becomes clear why the curtains are blue.

I hope to die as an author while I’m still alive. I want the meanings of my characters names explained to me. I want the sails of the pirate ships to be a specific color and I want the importance of their enemy’s colors to be understood by my readers.

I want to see that happen. A readers purpose is to tease out the author’s meaning and put into words what the author cannot.

TLDR media literacy is a dying art and I am a reader/writer who mastered it as a child and I’m sad about it.

[camping-with-monsters]

The more I work on character design, world building, storytelling, story plots, character plots, anything, you name it, the more I come to realize that maybe… maybe the curtains actually weren’t just blue. Maybe those curtains actually did have deeper meaning. Maybe subtlety really does emphasize tone. Maybe we were the ones thinking too much into it. Or maybe we weren’t thinking hard enough.

The curtains were blue, but we were all colorblind.

[mostly-dead]

I was thinking about blue curtains discourse and I think the just blue crowd has a point but it's so annoying to see them become the very thing they swore to destroy because the just blue crowd started as a response to pretentious assholes reading into everything but they've become just as pretentious assholes who refuse to read into anything because sometime the curtains are just blue but sometimes blue is symbolism

[jingles-miserably]

the blue curtains as a metaphor for the futility of further analysis. you can find whatever answers that satisfy you but they're all a façade. there is no real answer. the work you put into connecting the dots was all for naught. there were no dots and there is no conclusion. you were wrong because there was no way to be right. you looked too far into this. the curtains were just blue.

[robtopus]

"Maybe the author just meant that the curtains were blue hurr durr"

"Okay, but what does that tell us?"

"That ... the curtains were blue?"

"Yeah, but what does that tell us? Why does the narration mention these blue curtains at this particular time? Are they unexpected or not? Do we have a narrator who is heterodiegetic or homodiegetic or autodiegetic? Are blue curtains the norm or are they surprising to have for whoever owns the window the curtains are hung? Are the curtains drawn or open, what does that tell us of the curtains' owner? What is associated with the color blue in the context of the current narrative; in the culture/discourse surrounding the novel? Do these blue curtains give us a deeper understanding of the characters, fictional world, plot, narrative entity or themes? Of course they do, in some way, because otherwise, they would not be mentioned. It's honestly insulting to think the author would just randomly throw words on there that mean only one singular thing which is the most surface-level one and not put some thoughts into it -- it could be set dressing/scene setting, or a highly complex metaphor, or anything in-between and you don't need to do 'The blue curtains symbolize the war in Eastasia' (even if they maybe do) to engage with literature, and maybe you even did and then some asshole beat it out of you with IT JUST MEANS THEY'RE BLUE LOL and killed your media literacy and your ability to enjoy literature".

[digital-meat]

real life curtains of a specific color likely don't signify your specific mood at a specific moment.

however. fictional curtains could change color at any moment and fictional people could have a tendency to change their curtains up to three times a day despite real life people not doing that. or perhaps our fictional characters travel and, weirdly, most places they visit have curtains in a color matching their mood. or maybe the curtains had the same color throughout the story but the author didn't really mention it earlier, likely because it would be kinda bad writing to describe every single irrelevant detail of the characters' environment, but when the color became relevant, the author mentioned it.

and, "the curtains are just blue" does not only apply to literal curtains that happen to appear in a book. it also applies to any other metaphor that people insist is actually literal and actually bad writing. it's not a phrase exclusive to curtains.

I can accept that nobody's actually talking about curtains, because that seems like a stupid hill to die on anyway.

But you're saying I'm supposed to do a psychological deep dive on every detail of a book, and not care about inconsistency and coincidences? You can't have it both ways.