#but just saying the way it was narrated is weird

[alittlebitofloveliness]

Darry Curtis was always gay- the musical just makes it more obvious.

I know it was never Hinton’s INTENTION for any of her characters to be perceived as queer, she claims she didn’t write them that way, and that’s fine. In fact, I think reading The Outsiders as a group of straight men who have the bonds they do is actually a really great critique of toxic masculinity, in that we would see the contrast between their interactions one on one or alone with the group, compared to their macho, hyper masculine personas they showcase in public. HOWEVER, I think it’s incredibly hard to read it that way because Hinton accidentally and completely unintentionally made Darry Curtis one of the gayest characters in modern literature. It’s not far fetched. It’s not a stretch. I’m saying that if you have even a surface level understanding of subtext that it is obvious. Darry’s queerness is as open  in the novel as he is in his life- that is, it’s never said explicitly, but it’s VERY easy to see the signs. In fact, the way it’s threaded into the narrative but very talked around leads me to believe that even though Darry wasn’t out, it might have been an open secret within the gang- or at the very least they probably had some suspicions. 

For one, in the book Darry is never mentioned even once to have had a girlfriend, or even to have gone on dates, but we know he was popular and well liked. You can’t convince me that a handsome, popular football player, whose peers liked him enough to vote him Boy of The Year, didn’t have more than a few girls interested in him, but Pony’s narration never even alludes to Darry having been interested in one. For all he talks up Darry’s achievements, the scholarship he won, the future he could have had and everything he gave up, women/a girlfriend were never a part of it- which, given the time period and Darry’s reliance on hyper masculine social scripts, seems highly uncharacteristic unless there was a plausible explanation for his complete disinterest (ie. being gay). Now, examine this hyper masculinity a little further, and you can see it for what it is, a) a defence mechanism (because it separates him from stereotypes of what a gay men are like, so if he’s ‘manly’ enough no one will ever suspect or discover what he is) and b) the unfortunate complete opposite of that. Just like how hyper femininity characteristic to femme lesbians is off putting to men, the same is true to some degree about hyper masculine men being somewhat off putting to women. Not to the same degree, and probably not as obviously, but Darry’s  over the top masculinity might be the one thing effective in keeping (some) women away for reasons they can’t quite put their finger on. Point is, Darry was never a ladies man, to a degree that is very not heterosexual, especially for the time period.

So, now that we’ve established Darry’s complete disinterest in dating women,  his hypermasculine personality and it’s possible implications, let’s turn to other textual support for his queerness: his relationships with other male characters. I’m not talking about the gang- his interactions with all of them are very friendly/familial-  but he has a bond with Tim Shepard that is clear on the page but left largely unexplained (their weird eye contact and high mutual respect, the fact Tim was at their house once with no explanation), and his homoerotic run in/fight with Paul at the rumble. Both these relationships have plausible deniability- they’re not explicitly gay, but they’re also not NOT gay. Again, Hinton didn’t intentionally make Darry gay, but he very much is, and as far as closeted gay characters go, he’s a fairly well written one, because the subtext is very much THERE if you know what you’re looking for, but the queerness of his interactions is shrouded in this very real this COULD mean nothing characteristic of a lot of closeted queer interactions. 

Having said all this, I think the musical making Darry and Paul’s fight (somehow) even more charged and homoerotic than it is in the book was a wise choice, because a lot of the rest of the subtext was changed/missing from the musical adaptation. I’ve seen the ritfr analysis looking at the lyrics as they relate to Darry’s queerness, and I do think they follow the veiled/subtextual theme, but I don’t think they’re as explicitly gay as they’re touted to be. However, I do think the musical does a good job of highlighting Darry’s queerness given the medium they’re working with, and the actors do an amazing job portraying it without saying it outright, making it more obvious than it is on the page- but Darry was canonically gay in the book too, and let’s not pretend otherwise.

(Lmk if you want to see my analysis of the other Curtis’ queerness as it related to the book + musical).

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

reading update: january 2025

I'm a bit behind on getting this posted, so I'm gonna do it quick and dirty. this is not the most elaborate reading round-up I'm ever going to do, and that's okay!!! january has gotten off to a weird, uneven start in terms of reading, and that is what it is!

The Extinction of Irena Rey (Jennifer Croft, 2024) - this book is great for anyone who likes dark academia but wants to see what those students will be like when they’re adults who have to get by outside of college. in this case, they become translators for an enigmatic woman who makes them gather in a remote Polish forest and then disappears. pure vibes all the way down; truly things just happen in this book. the gimmick of the novel itself being a work by one of the characters, told from her perspective, and then translated by another character that the narrator despises, is soooo rich and interesting, and I deeply wish it had been used much more extensively.

Darknesses (Lachelle Seville, 2022) - is this book good? I couldn’t possibly say. it was very fun to read on vacation with like 12% of my brain operating. the best way I can possible explain it is that by the time the book is over it feels like Seville is running one of those old ask blogs where artists would have their blorbos and their OCs answer questions and hang out and stuff. do you know the kind I’m talking about? it’s like that, it’s dissociative identity disorder Dracula and the descendants of the human Dracula characters and Norse mythology werewolves and a vampire bunny and a dragon and Satan who’s a teenage girl with pink hair and they’re all hanging out in New York City. don’t think too hard about it. 

Become Your Own Matchmaker: 8 Easy Steps to Attracting Your Perfect Mate (Patti Stanger with Lisa Johnson Mandell, 2009) - I’m not proud of this and I can’t really justify it except that my housemates and I have gotten really into watching old episodes of Patti Stanger’s terrible TV show, Millionaire Matchmaker. the show is atrocious and so is the book but in my defense it’s extremely funny.

Queen Takes Rose (Katee Robert, 2020) - guys I can’t stand Katee Robert. I really can’t. I thought it was going to be fun but god this just sucked.

Adam & Evie's Matchmaking Tour (Nora Nguyen, 2024) - after that last one I really needed a good, normal romance novel to get me back on track, and this delivered! I don’t think it’s going to be one of my all-time faves, but the characters are lovably realistic losers and I was really rooting for them—especially Evie, who feels like a messy bitch I would love to hang out with. plus the setting, a romping tour across the sights of Vietnam, was so fun and I’m always willing to award points to a romance novel that supports telling your awful to fuck off right to hell!

Mystery Lights (Lena Valencia, 2024) - here’s the thing. every short story in this collection is a well written, coherent short story. thematically there are really clear throughlines; you’ll get a lot of mileage out of this if you like middle aged women who have complicated relationships with their daughters between the ages of 13 and 23. I really wanted to like this! and yet, I feel like this collection just isn’t going to stick with me very well. there are some cool concepts and ideas (there’s a creepy story involving a little girl who disappears into some underground caves and comes back Weird that actually spooked me pretty good) but overall I feel like it’s just not going to stick with me :/

Is Love the Answer? (Uta Isaki, 2021; trans. Sawa Matsueda Savage, 2023) - huge thanks to the person who sent me an ask to recommend this manga! it’s a very quick, sweet read about a university student coming into her aroace identity with the help of a circle of newfound friends supporting her along the way. I really liked the way it delves into the way anxiety can have you second-guessing and overthinking your sense of self even after embracing an identity. this was my Heartstopper (I say, without having ever read Heartstopper).

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (Louise Erdrich, 2001) - I picked this up at Erdrich’s bookstore, Birchbark Books & Native Arts, last summer while I was briefly in Minneapolis, on recommendation by an employee at the store. I was initially hesitant about the novel’s focus on spirituality and religion, given that it follows a Catholic priest working on an Ojibwe reservation throughout the 20th century, but man, this was an incredible introduction to Erdrich’s work. Father Damian Modeste is an incredible character and one of my favorite depictions I’ve ever seen of a woman living long-term in disguise as a man, and how the line between those identities blurred. there’s a scene I don’t think I’ll ever forget, in which Modeste is asked, essentially, “Are you a man or a woman?” and answers firmly “I’m a priest.” and all the while, despite the fact that he’s supposed to be an agent of colonization and the destruction of indigenous culture, more than anything he is changed by the Ojibwe people he works with. it’s a surprising, elegant book, and I was shaken to find myself crying at the end. 

A Magical Girl Retires (Park Seolyeon, 2022; trans. Anton Hur 2024) - this book is a short, rapid-fire read that’s a dry, funny take on the magical girl genre. our protagonist starts the book so mired in credit card debt that she’s considering jumping off a bridge when she’s summoned to be a magical girl, and things will only get weirder for her from there as Korea’s magical girl union recruits her to help them combat climate change. a fun read, easy to polish off in a single sitting at less than 200 pages.

salt slow (Julia Armfield, 2019) -now THIS was the short story collection I was waiting for! it reminded me so much of why I loved Armfield’s novel Our Wives Under the Sea. she has another new novel out this year and I’m really looking forward to reading that as well! she has an incredible way with love and melancholy.

[badscientist]

Starstruck [Teaser]

Believe it or not, you wake up.

You have trouble believing this because the last thing you remember is hurtling helplessly through deep space with not a breath of oxygen left. But you especially have trouble believing this because you're currently staring directly up into a beautiful blue sky filled with cottony white clouds.

Thing is, it's been years since you were last on Earth.

You sit up and try to orient yourself.

When you realize you're still in your spacesuit, it follows that nearly dying out there was not at all a dream.

But, where exactly are you now?

The world around you is vibrant. The grass is long and emerald green, swaying gently in an unfelt breeze. Butterflies in a rainbow of colors flit among the flowers lining the road you find yourself on. And it is a curious road, composed entirely of shades of yellow brick gradating perfectly into one another, creating stripes that shimmer in the warm sun above.

"Whoever did this has way too much time on their hands," you mutter aloud. "Kinda weird, actually."

...You still find it pleasant to look at nonetheless. You start down the road -

Annnd double over in pain. You weren't supposed to do that. Oh - but you straighten out with a grunt, and march onward! You're not going to let nearly dying phase you for long, are you? Of course not! You have to figure out where you are!

Every tree in your line of sight bears several kinds of fruit at once, ripe and ready for the plucking. After a seemingly endless supply of the Foundation's dried rations specially tailored for astronauts, the sight makes you salivate, and you're sure the rolling farmlands in the distance have an equally appetizing assortment of crops.

Overcome with hunger, you examine the fruit trees more closely. There was a little bit of everything you could possibly want, and they all looked mouth-wateringly appetizing! Apples, pears, pineapples, dragon fruit, bananas-

"I'm actually allergic to bananas," you say.

The bananas vanish before your eyes.

You jump away from the tree in shock. "No way this place is real," you say. "It's too weird!" Hmph. You're a little rude, aren't you? "How's that rude?! Who wouldn't be weirded out in this situation?" you ask. You think you should be a little less rude to the one trying to tell your story.

"What?! Wait a minute," you mutter. "I don't think that! What the hell's happening?! HEY! IS SOMEONE THERE?!" You look around for whoever it is that is narrating your story, but you really weren't supposed to realize I was here.

"You better show yourself!" you cry out.

You swing your arms wildly, and - hey! You can't do that! Stop that! You're going to knock it all out of place and

need you to just calm down

g o n r u the story play along, won't you?! hey this isn't funny a

aaaa aaa h a listen e c a n h l I NEED YOU TO STOP s y l o . u s h e o a r ? l m p e c i n

Cinnamon Xochitl Maeweather finished rearranging the letters falling from above to their liking, and nodded. Nobody was gonna tell them what they were thinking and feeling, especially about this bizarre world they'd found themself in. What kind of tree grew every imaginable fruit, anyway?!

They started down the road on shaking feet. This place was unreal, but the pain they were in sure as hell wasn't. They stopped, bowing over and putting their gloved hands on padded knees. Their vision distorted briefly. When it was over, the crack in the visor of their helmet was in focus.

A flash of something came back to them, then; the reason that crack ended up there in the first place. Someone had struck-

And the flash was lost amidst an angry twittering above. A bird with shining pink and purple feathers divebombed their head. Cinnamon ducked with a gasp.

“Whoa! Shoo, shoo!” they yelled.

The bird squawked noisily as it came to rest atop their helmet. Cinnamon listened more closely; that lilting voice again, the one narrating them not moments ago among the bird’s irritated tweeting.

“- and I was TRYING to tell a, WONDERFUL STORY, and you had to go ahead and-”

Gently, Cinnamon pinched the birds beak shut. The voice stopped, and remained quiet even once they pulled their fingers away. As the time it spent not speaking increased, Cinnamon got the impression that the continued silence was a result of the speaker now feeling quite stunned.

“Okay, bird brain. I’m gonna ask you some questions. First. Where am I?” Cinnamon asked.

The bird fluttered away. It alighted on a nearby fencepost. It draped a wing across its breast in a gesture that was unmistakably a bow.

“You’re in the Land of Oz!” it chirped.

“Oz? Like that old movie?” Cinnamon asked. “I don’t remember there being a weird talking bird in it, though.”

“No, no movie! This is simply the Land of Oz! And I am not a, weird bird!” it exclaimed, hopping madly. “I am Zo!”

“So, Oz backwards?” Cinnamon asked with a grin.

The bird fell silent again. There was an unamused air about it.

“I’ve never been, good at coming up with names,” the bird admitted. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Cinnamon,” they replied guardedly. “Next question: how’d I get here?” "You fell from the sky!" Zo said. "Am I dead?” "Certainly not!” "Then how am I here?!" "It's as I said! You fell from the sky!"

Cinnamon groaned. This conversation was going nowhere. With an indignant peep, Zo perched on their shoulder.

“What does it matter how you got here? You’re, here!” Zo said. “But if you keep moving forward, maybe you’ll find the, answer to your questions!”

“And what’s forward?” Cinnamon asked tiredly.

“Why, the Great Wizard of Oz!”

Cinnamon rolled their eyes. “And I’ll bet I’m meant to follow this here yellow brick road to get to the ‘Wizard’, right?”

Zo fluttered excitedly.

“Now you’re getting it, sunshine!” it peeped. “The Great Oz knows everything about the Land. I would say the, journey to see them is well worth it!”

Cinnamon gagged at the nickname, and looked skyward. Nothing but endless, perfectly blue sky. They looked back on their starting point, where they’d supposedly fallen. There wasn’t so much as a scuff on the road, scattered foliage or pieces of ship debris, nor any signs of witches caught beneath houses. No, there was nothing at all there to indicate an impact, as if they’d simply spawned into the Land out of thin air.

Somehow, that unnerved them more.

“All right,” Cinnamon said. “We’re off to see this Oz, or whatever.”

-

You travel along the yellow brick -

-

“Don’t you start that again!” Cinnamon said, flicking Zo’s tiny head. “I don’t need a narrator!”

The bird peeped sadly.

“But it’s been so, long since anyone’s come to the Land! Can’t I do it a little bit?! I can tell you about things you can’t see on your own!” Zo said. Inexplicably, it winked. “You could say I have a bird’s eye view of the Land, after all!”

Cinnamon thought on it. Corny pun aside, that could be useful.

“Fine. But I tell you what I do, and how I feel,” they said.

“Deal!” Zo chirped.

-

“I’m about to follow the yellow brick road,” you said.

So you do! What do you see!

“That’s your job!” you called up.

Oh, right! AHEM. Wide swaths of picturesque land stretch on before you. The road continues straightforwardly toward the horizon, but you take note of a divergent path to your left, leading to a quaint little town with houses in a rainbow of colors.

Do you continue onward, or do you visit the town?

“I’m visiting the town. There’s bound to be someone I can ask for help, or get real answers from,” you said.

Well, I already told you that the Great Oz can help – oh, you’re already making a run for it to the town. I can work with that! After all, it’s not the destination that’s most important.

I’ll spin you a tale so good, and so masterful, you’ll never want to leave. ::)

[violettierre]

I just watched oshinoko and im really confused about the concept

[fisheito]

Me: Everything i make is garbage i shouldn't even bother

The eiden in my head:

Me: Sorry eiden you're right my efforts have value

[suddencolds]

.(personal)

[girlatrocity]

MAN.

[uzukali]

Yknow, pvp civ is actually pretty damn good when evbo isn't making meta/fourth wall breaking jokes every minute and pissing me off

[riftsmagic]

I want to enjoy this game so bad bc I paid money for it and I’ve invested 70 hours of my life into it already. but I’ve gotten to a point where it’s SO hard not to get critical every time anything happens. im losing it

[eyepatchdate]

hopefully smtv vengeance like. adds some stuff to clarify on things left by the wayside in the original game. im looking at some forums and such on some of my remaining questions and they're like. nobody knows lol. smtv has suffered a bit too clearly from the cutting room floor i think

[twodlover]

the more i think about it the more interesting it seems

[lowplainlowinthemorning]

I literally told a hot goth girl I wanted to be the narrator to her tyler last night & she rejected me what do I have to fucking do around here

[metanarrates]

hi! I know you said you probably won't answer (and honestly that's ok I'm just curious!) but what's the main problem with the high school/college au trope? I'm asking because like. while the rest have some clear red flags that's the only one to me that seems decent enough

I don't think it's problematic or anything i just find it really boring lol. especially if you're transposing characters from a fantasy or sci fi setting into a regular american high school or college! you get rid of a lot of the cool shit about their world, and most critically, the context in which those characters exist.

I guess that's the main reason I find it boring. almost all the characters I find extremely compelling, especially when it comes to their dynamics with other characters, are so informed by their extremely specific circumstances that it just strips the appeal to remove those circumstances! character dynamics especially are NOTHING without the really weird context in which they were formed. it's tough to replace the context with something else and still get similarly compelling characters or relationships. and since the context for high school aus are always "these characters are normal american high schoolers," it invariably ends up lacking any appeal those characters/relationships may have had for me. where's the genuinely weird shit!

idc if people enjoy it, to be clear. i think it's a boring way to interact with media but that doesn't mean it's totally bad. I just don't like the trope because it's everywhere in certain fancontent and I'm really tired of seeing it yknow?

[vinceaddams]

People who try to copy historical writing styles don't say enough weird stuff in them. I'm listening to a 1909 story about a ghost car right now, and the narrator just said he honked the car horn a bunch of times, but the way he phrased it was "I wrought a wild concerto on the hooter".

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[scienceismygirlfriend]

Reading asks:

2. Flops! Or 9. Compels me tho

2. flops! i consider this one a flop because i really wanted to like it BUT. i did not enjoy Things In Jars. it had a great premise, and i love a ghost sidekick as much as the next guy, but it just did not come together for me. and the most frustrating this is that the things i didn't enjoy about it don't seem to be the things that bothered anyone else who didn't like the book so i didn't even get the cathartic release of reading the two star reviews of the book!!

9. compels me tho: this is maybe a goofy answer but i read the first dinotopia children's novel (Windchaser) while on a road trip and it's pretty simple and predictable but DINOSAURS THOUGH. i don't know why i never read this as a child (i devoured A Land Apart from Time) but i know i would have been soooo annoying about it if i had. it's cute!