#but just saying the way it was narrated is weird

[slay-the-heroine]

How should we get down there? This is in the way.

The Narrator:

Through the gap in the vines. What is in the way?

Voice of the Prince:

The mirror, again.

The Narrator:

Mirror? What mirror?

Voice of the Cheated:

It came back...! That's kind of a nice surprise. A little weird, though?

Voice of the Opportunist:

And it matters even less now. Move it aside, get it out of the way.

The Narrator:

You step forward and approach the gap in the vines I had indicated. Through them is a stairway down, but you are hesitating.

Voice of the Cheated:

Will it stick around this time? I'm not too bothered by it, it's just a mirror. As long as we can get past it.

The Narrator:

You reach forward and wave your hand around through the entrance to the stairwell. You truly saw a mirror? That... is rather worrying. This is already as wrong as it is.

Voice of the Cheated:

Aw, man. Well...

Voice of the Opportunist:

Okay. Who cares. On we go. Let's pull ourselves together.

The Narrator:

You step through the frame of hanging vines and make your way into the damp darkness below.

The Narrator:

The stairs to the basement are sinking, grassy mud. Considering everything seems to be made of plants, the air is uncomfortably warm. Waving vines that make up the walls direct you downward, their sappy secretion giving the impression of melting.

Voice of the Cheated:

It's kind of gross down here.

Voice of the Prince:

Did you say "seems to be made of plants"? Why aren't you saying they're just... plants?

Voice of the Opportunist:

I, for one, have never seen vines like these. It's hard to say, isn't it?

The Narrator:

Her voice, wracked with frustrated worry, warns from the basement.

"Stop. Don't come any closer. I don't care if you left the blade."

>>>

[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

[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

[adamshallperish]

listen. i love bruce springsteen. i love ethel cain. american teenager is not the new born to run. it is not born to run if it was written by a bi trans woman instead of a cis man. they are two very different songs in terms of sound and tone, and even theme-wise they run parallel to each other rather than down the same road.

a lot of ethel's music draws from/can be compared to a lot of bruce's songs, especially on his nebraska album, but i'm not seeing where people are getting the born to run comparisons from. if anything, american teenager reminds me of born in the usa if it was sung by the narrator's next-door-neighbor, a secondhand account of the suffering springsteen explores in first person in born in the usa.

also like. both of these songs can stand on their own just fine. a thing can be good on it's own without being compared to another thing.

[gothamcityneedsme]

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

[loplainlointhemorning]

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

[mummer]

me when i lie

[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?

[j-esbian]

thinking about the time i was criticizing a male fantasy author for not including many female characters (and all but one were incredibly generic) and people were really like "be nice to the author, he's said he doesn't know many women in real life :/" like. yeah i can tell

[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.

[autism-corner]

cant believe that the delusions i had at 16-18 y/o were just autism again.

[katakaluptastrophy]

The thing about having read our way through two previous books full of necromancers and weird eldritch shenanigans is that the absolute horror of what happens to John as a person doesn't quite register.

John's own glib, matter of fact narration tells the story as an apotheosis. He was doing great. He'd have fixed everything if only people had listened.

But reading between the lines in the John chapters, you glimpse something rather different.

John basically spends the first half of the Jod chapters sitting in the dark with his creepy yellow eyes, not eating or sleeping, literally stroking his favourite corpses and coming out with chill and fun statements about how he can feel their skin when he's away from them and he's 'waking up'. Cool, cool.

Passing swiftly over the cow dome, Presidential Puppet Pals, and the suitcase nuke, day to day life in the cow dome must have been fun... You're all on the Interpol watchlist, the Vatican is asking a lot of questions, the police are outside and John - who hasn't slept in a week and doesn't eat anymore and is probably wearing some kind of weird novelty tshirt - comes wandering past while you're eating breakfast, followed by a dozen silent, dead-eyed corpses like some kind of mother hen. He makes a cow joke, and then zones out because he got distracted by listening to the bacteria in your gut.

And then some guys die accidentally and it turns out he can eat death energy. So now he's got creepy Twilight eyes, an entourage of corpses, a cape, some very dodgy eyeliner, and he's barely breaking a sweat as he instantly kills over 100 people, says it was an accident, and then, dead serious, tells his followers to drag dead UN peacekeepers inside to add to his 'skeleton army'.

By the end, he's not slept or eaten in weeks, is tweaking his own bodily processes on the fly, is puppeting the dead US president and possibly an army of over a hundred corpses, monitoring G- in Melbourne, carrying on at least two conference calls, and helping to build barricades out of chairs.

And I just keep thinking how weird it must have been for his friends. How sometimes he would have seemed like the man they'd known and loved for so long, and sometimes he would seem different. Did they ever find themselves mourning the man he was? Did they ever stand there as he tuned into something they couldn't fathom, staring at them with those yellow eyes, and feel some awful, uncanny valley terror? Did he ever feel like he was losing himself? At what point did the cow jokes stop feeling like oh, classic John and start to be a reminder that his desire for vengeance and the scope of his powers were outstripping his remaining...perspective?...restraint?...humanity?