#but if it’s a deliberate narrative choice…

[spectrum-color]

Reblogging because these tags are so good

Fitz on Molly: I love her so much!!

Fitz on the Fool: “He flowed to his feet, every nuance of his grace as familiar to me as the drawing of breath”

[epiphainie]

i've just finished my s7 rewatch and it's kinda so funny to me how much discourse people created over every bucktommy interaction when their whole arc boils down to tommy being patient and vulnerable with buck and showing up for him. like when you are not wearing shipper goggles under the name of "analysis" and don't try to reverse-engineer every word and look and shot with utmost bad faith, that's what it is. a simple and sweet story of a new exciting relationship with a guy who's understanding and willing to show up. literally the two things buck needs from a relationship but never had with his previous love interests. they are kinda sickeningly sweet and well-communicating actually lol

[rinbylin]

"what is the image of the ideal person..."

[coyoxxtl]

yknow the posts that ive read so far that go along the lines of “falin doesnt have a personality” isn’t actually about her being a flat or boring character. like she absolutely does have a personality, and i don’t think many people believe otherwise. but the point i believe theyre trying to make is that most of the time we experience falin’s character it’s through the perspective of someone else. we don’t actually see Her as Herself Through Herself until much later in the main story (and some side content) and the anime definitely isn’t there yet.

falin haunts the narrative most of the story. we perceive her through the memories of the people close to her. it’s inherently biased and only paints half the picture of who Falin is. thats what i think people mean when they say we don’t see much of her personality, because we actually don’t

[waywardsalt]

man just about every new little bit of that new totk book i see just makes me feel more and more rabid

[bbygirl-aemond]

I've seen a lot of discourse about whether people's bloodlines dying out is meant to be seen as GRRM condemning them within the narrative or punishing them for prior indiscretions. And I'm not saying I don't think that's true at- I'm not GRRM, after all, and I don't know what he was thinking when he wrote Fire and Blood. I'm just curious what this interpretation would mean for Fire and Blood as a whole. I'm also pretty sure that in this case, the only person who is venerated is Daemon, not Rhaenyra or Aegon II or anyone else.

The "bloodline ending" thing can be applied to the Greens most obviously, but it also applies to all three of Rhaenyra's eldest children. Is this meant to be the narrative "condemning" their existence for being bastards, or for only being half-Targaryen? GRRM didn't have to kill them off, after all. He had complete control over which of Rhaenyra's children he would write as rumored bastards with a non-Targaryen parent. So why did he choose to make the children who died rumored bastards, rather than the children who went on to sit the Iron Throne?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure I believe that GRRM chose for Aegon III and Viserys II live because they were Rhaenyra's children. I'm not sure Rhaenyra had anything to do with it. During the Dance, there was like a 100% mortality rate for all Targaryens who weren't Daemon's children, and a 100% survival rate for all Targaryens who were Daemon's children. I've been chalking this up to GRRM being a self-proclaimed Daemon fanboy. But if we're taking bloodline fates to indicate GRRM's personal endorsement of a character's worthiness to be King or Queen, again, I'm not sure that means we can say he's endorsing anyone other than Daemon.

[autisticrosewilson]

Last post made me realize that cathyWillis and SladeAddie are complimentary opposites in that while the base is the same (married couple that ends up falling apart when the husband is experimented on leaving the mother to care for the children on her own) they both have what the other lacks. Catherine and Willis loved each other and Jason so much that Jason never doubted it and that love is woven into the core of his character and morality but there were too many corrupt systems and oppressive forces against them and they were torn apart by outside factors. While Slade and Adeline who loved each other clung to the relationship but were fundamentally incompatible and the choices Slade made inevitably came crashing down on the whole family even though they had all the tools at their disposal to make it work the effects of the divorce lead to multiple other unrelated characters lives being significantly worse.

[comradeboyhalo]

my mind is still stuck on that book. do i really want bad to join a resistance that talks about him like that...notice the difference in how they talk about bad vs other islanders? how they'll use everyone's name but call bad "this one" and "it" and "this guy"? never using his name? ill bet anything that the lack of respect stems from his species.

[whalesfall]

wish interactive fiction would become the hip new popular medium rather than being a fairly niche nerd thing, because the kinds of faux-academic mini essays from the most insufferable people in the world about the different implications of the narrative and such and such and restriction / illusion of choice within your own story that you are told you create would slap, I think

[erstwhilesparrow]

friend-ask friday! what is the new smp show you've been enjoying today? it appears that you're having a lot of fun; what's it about?

hee. i will answer your question but first you need to know i'm picturing me screaming bloody murder in a backyard (presumably my backyard) and you peeking over the fence (you also have a backyard, we're neighbours in this scenario) and very calmly going, "oh hey, you having fun over there?" (yes, i'm having a grand time)

anyway! yes! outsiders smp! i mentioned it briefly in a different ask answer a while ago; the base plot premise is a group of people wake up in a clearing in the middle of a massive stony maze with little to no memory of their lives before, and try to figure out what to do from there. as i've said before and will continue to say, it's incredibly good. it's also bad. this is dialectics (tone indicator: lying).

more under the cut, for the curious:

the question of What Outsiders Is About (Thematically) is.... honestly not something i have totally settled in my head yet. i just finished watching the -- as far as i know -- most complete edited pov of one of the major characters, and for the first eighteen and a half hours of that pov, outsiders is an incredible story about how people cannot help but care for and about one another, despite everything about their circumstances incentivizing conflict and distrust. early on, the characters spend a lot of time arguing about whether they should go into the maze (very dangerous, if you're in there overnight the doors back to the safety of the clearing will close behind you) and people keep going, "okay, i don't care anymore! do whatever you want; everyone is allowed to risk their own life if they want to," and then the hours that follow are just dedicated to piling on the evidence that no, actually, they do care. they care immensely, or else they wouldn't keep standing in these circles arguing with each other for hours and days at a time! they build infrastructure to support one another, they offer one another places to sleep, they want so badly to do right by each other. at one point, one character muses to himself that none of them would have survived this long if they weren't all so fearful that they built secret bunkers under their homes, but like. when it really came down to it, when monsters came to the clearing to destroy it, they pulled each other down into the bunkers with them. they looked out for each other, and every single one of them survived that event.

once you hit the eighteen and a half hour mark, however, shit just STARTS HAPPENING AND THEN DOES NOT REALLY STOP HAPPENING UNTIL YOU'RE LOOKING AT A BLACK SCREEN THANKING YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT OF OUTSIDERS SMP. I REALLY DO NOT FEEL I HAVE FULLY PROCESSED IT YET. like. okay. the questions of "whose life are you willing to risk? which lives are worth saving and which ones aren't? what about now? what about now?" those are the sort of things i think are front and center, and it's not that those questions haven't been relevant before this point, arguably they've been relevant the whole time, but it gets fucking dire. and there's stuff about the horror of being in a situation where your suffering is for the entertainment of an audience, there's stuff about who is brought into or pushed out of a community and what that does to a person, there's stuff about what it means to be a good person and to do right by the people around you, but it's all kind of wildly smashed together in way that very much reads as [the people telling this story needed to (1) get as strong a kneejerk emotional reaction out of the audience as possible and (2) have the story be done, have the people who were always going to die dead, have the project come to a close]. like i was telling a friend, it feels like the first eighteen and a half hours are one story, and then the next three hours are BRAND NEW hypercondensed stories that should have had, or would have benefited from, a lot more breathing room than they got. it gets this close to working perfectly for me in a way i don't really know what to do with. i expect i am going to talking about it for A While.

[quetzalpapalotl]

I really think we should do something about this emphasis on experiencing things in chronological order because when I explained that book 2 and 4 of TGCF are backstory, I got asked if those should be read first.

[callixton]

i am trying to figure out how to articulate the grand scheme of this better but the denial of amy’s autonomy is one of the most interesting nuwho arcs. 2 me.

[littlestsnicket]

time of contempt!yenralt is geralt not trusting yennefer and being too scared of upsetting her to say it and sleeping with her anyway and the way netflix!geralt is different, that would never work.

i don't think the writers aren't fighting yennefer's arc in season 2 nearly as much as they are fighting this other version of geralt. and well... i wish some nuances of character interaction had gone a bit differently in season 2, but the thing that irritates me more than anything else in adaptations is when changes are made and the production backs off on them rather than following through. so whatever. i'm more interested to see what they do than anything else.

[queen-mabs-revenge]

starting the day blaring children of the revolution such a fucking vibe thank you trent crimm uwu

literally genuinely obsessed with the whole headcanon spiral that tshirt has taken me on bc trent crimm coming of age just too late for the new romantics and right at the surge of britpop and grunge being a pretentious little gay up in his room with his glam rock lps is such a fucking perfect characterisation i want to throw something out of a window

[kingofmyborrowedheart]

If we don’t get any news on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) today, then what was the reason for this?

[steveyockey]

To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.