#but there's not much audience for it lmao

[malleusmaleficent]

i do theatre shit and it's to perpetuate an extremely niche genre of music because it needs more young people, or else it'll die out

but anyways, regarding writing for attention like. it's definitely a thing yk, like i explicitly started writing witch hammer (and my fic before that) thinking like: "this is a truly wretched combination of things, and it creates a combination so niche that i am pretty much the only person that would want to read it, and that's okay"

like that was exactly what happened when i wrote life's tangled skein, which got nearly zero interaction. but witch hammer turned out wildly differently, witch hammer caught on super hard (by my own standards anyways).

and like, let me tell you, writing these two things has felt VERY differently. like the way in which i engaged with both stories is different, life's tangled skein i had a very clear mission and i was trying to capture a particular feeling, for me specifically. like i wanted to see if i could write something to make myself feel a certain way. and i did, i think. nobody read it, but i succeeded and i was never once troubled by audience reception and i was never checking for new comments or new likes or whatever. i was never thinking how a plot point might affect people.

however, witch hammer is a very different story. i am telling you right now if i wrote the story i had set out to write, there'd be fujos howling at the moon or some shit they would be so upset LMAO and like. i don't really want to write what i had initially set out to write anymore, im just not in the headspace for that. i have enjoyed keeping it light, i like writing cute shit too much.

but also, i'd be lying if "but what will me readers think" weren't a consideration as well. like i don't really participate in fandom culture, so i wasn't really aware entirely, but some people take this shit DEATHLY seriously. and while i think that is extremely silly, right, if someone that takes it deathly seriously got invested in something i've wrote, i don't want to actively make their day worse yk.

and i am checking for new comments every day, and i am watching the like counter go up.

and i'll be honest, it does feel a bit less "pure" to me, whatever that means. i haven't unpacked what that means exactly, but that is how i feel. i want to know people like my writing, and i want people other than me to vindicate me spending so much time and effort on this very niche project of mine.

now part of this is timing, i started writing witch hammer just a few days before i got laid off from my full time job, so that put me in a weird headspace. the tremendous wave of positive feedback i got after the fact was very helpful and i'd fully admit i latched on to it for a few weeks as i tried to clear my head.

but i'm good now, and buddy i am still watching for new comments lol.

i dunno, it's a complicated thing.

i do write for attention, actually, because that's a normal reason to create art

[genericpuff]

new genre of LO comedy unlocked: watch the LO wiki editors fight for their lives to justify entire articles for characters who only showed up once and then disappeared forever

"well, themis is pregnant so that must mean SOMEONE knocked her up, right??? put that in relationships, that counts"

"charon's abilities... ferryman... boat... he ferries a boat! therefore he must be very good at ferrying boats! write that down!"

"now hold on, let's not completely discount the idea of artemis' pet wolf having some kind of relationship with someone later on, i'm sure rachel will answer that soon"

[anthonycrowley]

i don’t mean ‘we had money’ or ‘we struggled.’ did you know (roughly, within ~$10k or local equivalent) how much your parents made?

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[bovineblogger]

WOWEEE !! oh my gosh... i did Not expect this much love at all thank u guys so much I LOVE YOU!!!!! id respond to them all individually but id look insane going hi i love u i love u i love u i love u i l

to be completely honest, i'm tired. im burned out. i love bovines w my whole heart but when u run a blog dedicated to one specific topic tht posts multiple times a day u kinda run out of stuff to say. and it starts feeling like a job yannow? and im so tired. im tired!

i never ever expected to have this many of u guys Ever, this blog started out as a silly little sideblog rating video game cows and just Blew Up out of nowhere which was so cool! but it also started feeling like a lot of pressure. pressure to like. Keep Making Cow Content. Forever

and like. i have a full time job thats already very emotionally demanding and im in the process of moving house and im just tired all the time and . its hard to even clean or cook for myself sometimes ! i cant keep up with My Audience anymore. im not like... an influencer. you know?

to be completely blunt i figured if i just post what i want to post and have a bovine queue running in the background it would stop the incessant urges telling me to delete this blog. LMAO

so.. yea. thank u guys very very much for the love. im so tired. i love u guys. idk what im gonna do w this blog but I LOVE BOVINES! I LOVE YAKS! and i Always Will!

maybe ill get back into the swing of things after i'm all unpacked <3 ya never know

why do you post shit irrelevant to the blog if you have a personal blog. no one is following you for fat people content here.

then unfollow me

[remma-demma]

I’m actually scared of alienating some of my followers and moots with all the trans discourse I’ve been steeping quietly in and contemplating, but… I’m trying to not let being scared shut me up about this. That, in and of itself, is erasure and silencing.

Fuck staying quiet. Trans men and mascs deserve a voice, and we, as a group, are not oppressing or invalidating anyone else by using that voice. (Obviously there are shithead exceptions!! Anyone can be an asshole.)

I really hope that if I ever speak about any of this in the future, that people recognize that it’s not ever, ever trans femininity as a concept I have an issue with. It’s people who

- try to divide the community

- are reinventing gender essentialism from the ground up but make it trans

-police other people’s identities and decide for them what oppression they must face because of a tiny set of superficial traits

- simply. Don’t understand what intersectionality means.

- disregard and invalidate anyone who doesn’t fit a very specific (binary, rich, white, abled, flawlessly passing) idea of what it means to be trans.

None of those things are specific or exclusive to one identity. There just happens to be a community of transfems who are currently espousing many of these ideas as gospel. They are understandably defensive because of real actual transmisogyny they face. But other trans people are not your enemy. Accusing anyone and everyone who tries to point these flaws out as radical transmisogynists is simply not true. Pointing out bigotry is not bigotry in itself.

I don’t want the trans community to constantly be at each other’s throats. We each have to sit down and think if we ever catch ourselves blaming an entire other marginalized group for our issues. That’s just fascism babes.

[epiphainie]

i just realized i have to come up with a spouse candidate for eddie if i want to write this bucktommy-as-his-best-men-slash-wedding-organizers fic

[aerithisms]

i understand what people are saying when they talk about fandom overstating the importance of farcille to the dunmeshi narrative and that their frustrations are related to a larger frustration with fandom in general prioritising shipping over other relationships/narrative themes. HOWEVER i do find it a little suspect and annoying that the one time the Big Tumblr Thing Of The Month has a popular f/f ship that the fandom is over-extrapolating from in the same way that fandom usually over-extrapolates m/m relationships i'm suddenly seeing all these posts complaining about it

[fumifooms]

[b4kuch1n]

siren

[oneshotgremlin]

First impressions on Fake Peppino Friday (aka how Pep and Fep first met in my interp):

(Context: Back in the earlier versions of pizza tower, the tunnel chase was a lot harder, and there’s this one drop that immediately goes into an overhang. When I say that I tried SO many times to grab slide through it but because of how little space there was I just KEPT GRABBING AT THE WALL OH MY GOD

Anyways, I like to keep my failures in my interpretation. Adds a je ne sais quoi to some of the character dynamics [judgement and concern])

No because this is actually so funny if you think about. Imagine being in Fake Peppino's shoes, right?

You're alone in in your restaurant. Waiting. Anticipating. And then you hear it. Footsteps.

You turn around and you see...You. You, but not. The You you've been watching on static riddled TV screens. The You you've heard your pizza-headed creator curse out so much, yet fail to measure up to.

It's the You you should've been.

You scream and you scream with him. "He can't get past you. Don't let him get to staff only." It's the one task your creator drilled into your head, above pizza making.

You attack.

And you can't keep up with him as you fight. Even in person, giving everything you've got, even getting some hits in, you still fail to compare to him.

But when the floor beneath both of you breaks, and he speeds away running for his life, he crashes into an overhang in the tunnel you've fallen in.

As he panickedly scrabbles against the dark stone, you finally catch up to him and. Bite. Down.

The world goes black. Then you're standing back in your restaurant. You aren't entirely surprised, nothing truly stays dead or destroyed in this tower. From the levels to the pillars to even the people, they all come back one way or another.

You hear footsteps. You turn around.

It's You.

...[TWO HOURS LATER]...

Oh Cheesus Crust it's You again.

You don't know how many times he's gone through your boss room, and at this point you're too afraid to keep count.

He doesn't even scream after walking in anymore. Neither do you. You're unspeakably worried for this man's sanity, assuming that it exists in the first place (you're less and less sure it does with every reattempt he makes).

You're not actually sure if he's even trying to get past you at this point. If anything he's decided to have a blood feud with one particular overhang in the tunnel and is somehow sorely losing.

Again.

At this point, you're pretty confident you know every single Italian and American swear in the global lexicon, along with some new ones that were invented within the last two hours alone.

As you once again catch up to him, you don't even bother biting him. Clearly getting repeatedly crushed into pulp is not the deterrent it is for every single other creature in this tower. You scruff his shirt with your teeth and carry him out and he just lets you like he did for the past hour or so. Soon enough he'll be back re-doing the same song and dance you've done for 2 hours straight before racing off to fistfight The Wall.

You don't know what this man's malfunction is but maybe you should be a little grateful that you aren't entirely like him after all.

(Bonus doodle for the peeps that read through it all):

[ghost-bard]

how do i talk about taash being a realistic character while also acknowledging that they absolutely couldve and shouldve been written better in every aspect

[antigonenikk]

not speirs looting all that shit because he had a newborn child back in london and was worried his wife wouldnt be able to survive on his salary alone………

[f0x-meets-w0lf]

hey hi hello my lovely fellow goblins and fiends and friends — this feels kind of weird to do, but y’all have been so relentlessly awesome and supportive of my art and i figure it can’t hurt to ask. lately i’ve been experiencing a massive slump on my professional instagram account — needlef0x — and it is impacting my business.

i have been speaking up consistently about palestine in my stories and have a fundraiser ongoing over there and i think it’s causing the algorithm to further suppress and hide my posts from folks. i have a bigger audience (in numbers) than ever, and yet faaaar less interaction and reach than ever.

so! i’m just posting this to say! if you like my artwork and want to support me in a different way, following along on my tattoo instagram and liking/commenting/sharing/interacting with posts and stories in general would be super helpful. i am a full-time self-employed artist just doing my best to stay afloat while it feels like every social media platform wants artists/small biz folks/creatives to fail.

i know my tattoos aren’t the fanart y’all follow me here for, nor are they (generally) fandom-related, but they *are* what keeps food in my stomach and a roof over my head! so any/all support is so so deeply appreciated. thanks y’all ♡ back to regular programming now

[dustykneed]

post-the search for spock but it's a yuri slice of life comic <333 nothing as good a bonding activity as lovingly combing out your vulcan wife's hair as you fondly bitch about your other wife 🩵💙💛

[strawberrybyers]

okay so after that video was posted of the screams at the radio station, i remembered i wanted to look up info on what these episode titles mean and i think it gives some insight as to what the hell is going on at that radio station. so yeah let’s get into it 👇

first things first: the episode titles of the first 6 episodes has been released via jeff sneider. apparently sneider is an award-winning film critic so idk i imagine this would be legit considering he wouldn’t want to lose his credibility considering his status?? but who knows

episode 1: the crawl ( i wrote about this episode when they first announced the title)

episode 2: the vanishing of ***** wheeler (personally i think it’s karen going missing. it just makes so much sense to me. she had her own poster for s4. she has had contact with the mindflayer when she tried to have an affair with billy when he was a host. there’s interesting parallels between karen and the creel family. like karen is going missing i just know it. and nancy also said in s4 that something happened to her mom in one of the visions vecna showed her!)

episode 3: the turbow trap (ok so apparently a turbo trap is an acoustic tool?? so my assumption after reading up on it, is that a turbo trap basically absorbs the bass through the tube of it because there is a hole on the top of it and depending on the size of hole, dictates the air flow which then puts out a certain frequency. basically, the more air a turbo trap can “trap”, the lower the frequency it can reach. i imagine they are going to be creating a big turbo trap involving music and/or sound since that is a deterrent for vecna and it also attracts the demo bats?? and they’re also filming at the radio station a lot and radio stations are frequencies (think FM and AM radio stations you go to to listen to music or the news or whatever))

episode 4: the sorcerer (i mean my immediate thoughts went to el, but then after reading some D&D lore about the connection a sorcerer has with dragons (imagery/mentions of dragons throughout the seasons and the painting was of the party up against a dragon), a possible touch of a demon (vecna/mindflayer), and the mention of how they’re competitive to the usefulness of wizards (will the wise) in a party… i’m like holy shit is the sorcerer potentially WILL????? like will finally evolves to becoming a sorcerer in s5?? or the sorcerer is el and will remains the wizard and we get the super duo willel???)

episode 5: shock jock (this is the definition of a shock jock. i’m thinking which character would fit this description and i say it’s murray. that would also make sense as to why he’s filmed there at the radio station. remember murray’s character was introduced as someone who was investigating the russians and the lab and all that, so for him to start a radio station being the “humorous, controversial guy” in all this mess makes 100% of sense to me lmao)

episode 6: escape from camazotz (i feel like this title gives some insight as to what the hell was going on in the new footage of screaming at the radio station. a camazotz is basically a death bat. i assume it’s the demo bats making a comeback from s4. but here’s the thing: a camazotz is described in one description from some computer game to have a very specific screech. if this screech, hits an enemy god then the sound wave will echo. just think back to the explanation of the turbo trap and what that does. so yeah, i think camazotz are at the radio station and the screeching was THEM. the screams sounded so chilling thinking it was steve or someone else, but i don’t think it was human screams! i think they were demo bat screeches 😎 also, steve was attacked by one of these things so idk does he have some connection with them now and that’s why they’re after him???)