#convent thoughts

[mysterious-secret-garden]

Charles Allston Collins - Convent thoughts, 1851.

[fangirl-nadir]

Is no one gonna talk about how only close friend and family are supposed to refer to half-foots by their first name, and how by the end of the manga most of the party call Chilchuck "Chil?"

[timethehobo]

Sketchy thingy. It’s literally releasing this week ahhh.

[dimity-lawn]

So I have some potentially big news, at least in my world: After over a year of desperately longing for something I thought impossible, I am now on the waiting list for a ticket to the Discworld Convention!!!!!*

This happened about this time yesterday, and I still haven’t fully absorbed this information. I have yet to think one complete coherent thought, because my thoughts keep being interrupted by new ones. Last night I was too excited to sleep, and, as you might expect, the lack of sleep isn’t helping matters. And while I’m thrilled by this, I’m also kind of in a state of “oh no, there’s so much to figure out and do and so little time!”, including several sewing projects, especially my scaled up to adult size reproduction of an 18th century pocket in the collections of the V&A, because if I’m going to Birmingham for the convention, I’ll have to go to the V&A.** I’m afraid of getting my hopes up, but 🤞.

Rattle your drawers for me!

*Yes, five exclamation points is a sure sign of an insane mind, but in my defense, reread the part before the five exclamation points. **This project has reached a surprising and ungodly extent of procrastination.

[heartorbit]

revstar emu save me

[hypnogogyc]

Oliver doodle

[tomahachi12]

✨️THE BOI IS HERE✨️

He gets a spot on the shelf next to Cyn!

I need more figures lol

[thenameisgul]

I love Misha’s solo panels so much.

He’s so fucking funny that it could easily be a standup comedy show but then he’d take a question and go into a deep philosophical discussion about the world and then seamlessly shift into talking about Castiel’s character analysis, throw in a bunch of f-bombs and end with a hilarious story from his past or about his children.

Especially when he has full conversations with the fans with 100% attention. It’s wonderful to watch.

[bellshazes]

i don't think the life series is "about" anything at all. it's not about survival or winning or player dynamics, or any theme. however i do think that the entire series - third life to present - is unified by a game design philosophy where all mechanics are engineered to disrupt the game as it has been played.

third life was initially pitched as "a[n ...] experiment" and its opening question was fundamentally how long can this last, which scar quickly proved was not long at all. it's easy to forget that it was not always a given that seasons would last approximately eight weeks and how the breakpoints of red/yellow violence would fall.

last life attempted to disrupt the established social norms by a) attempting to ban acting based on prior season's events and more importantly b) introducing social deduction mechanics which destabilized all alliances by default. similarly, although the ban on continuity never returned, double life's gimmick at its core is just another disruption of social dynamics. limited life iterates on last life's boogeyman dynamic while applying a different kind of time-limited pressure; secret and wild life are carousels of disruption to social play and "regular" or survival gameplay.

nevertheless players have defined the real rules of the game - the game-as-played which gives the series continuity - through their playing of it. both in spite of and because of the mechanical disruptions, conventions around sportsmanship and acceptable behavior are deeply entrenched. kills that are "illegal" by the written rules matter less than the player perception of them; the desire to invent social punishments for explicit infractions died with etho in the third life firing squad. players judge kill attempts as acceptable/impermissible by their relative status of reds vs. yellows, as the rudeness of ending someone's series early far outweighs the obvious strategic benefit of eliminating reds first. history persists, only as much as a given set of players negotiates it should. everyone should be along for the ride for as long as possible, but it will end.

ultimately life seasons are designed to make it difficult to play as you always have, and the players derive fun and drama from balancing their leaning into the gimmicks or into their habits. unfortunately this tension is deeply compelling and leads to wildly divergent opinions on what is "good" or "authentic" about a season or gimmick or episode because where the "good" tension is depends on the viewer, the point of view, the episode, etc.

[oifaaa]

Realising that my idea of what it means to be in a fandom might be a little skewed so help me out here what is your baseline qualification for being part of a fandom

[saintbleeding]

it’s a horror tragedy. people are mean and uncharitable and impatient with him and don’t give him the benefit of the doubt because he is the protagonist of a horror tragedy. u are supposed to think it is tragic. dare i say u are supposed to be horrified.

[084392]

decided to put the pmd-ified bw1 requests altogether!(cheren and bianca for @citrongarde, n for a few anons, and no one requested hilda but i thought she should be here too)

[necrotic-nephilim]

what's fun about shipping Tim with Dick, Jason, or Damian is he has, at some point, hallucinated all of them to comfort himself. even when he doesn't like them or particularly get along with them, he has to imagine/hallucinate them just so he has the power to go on. Tim's concepts of the Robin mantle and what it should be is so fun, because he respects the others through the Robin mantle. Tim worships Dick because he was the first Robin. he wouldn't be Robin if Jason hadn't died in the mantle. and a lot of his frustration with Damian is he feels Damian isn't honoring the mantle correctly. when you ship Tim with the other Robins you can't divorce their identities as Robin from it because Tim will always see them as a Robin first and that's so fun and fucked up. like.

batman (1940) #456

Tim perceiving Dick as *Robin* cheering him on, not Nightwing, which is the version of Dick that Tim actually knows? that's just. wild of him. he will always view Dick as Robin first, his personal hero but also the original of the legacy. his love for Dick is shaped by that.

and then of course, even when he's hallucinating/imagining Jason cheering him on, it's *still* through the lense of being reminded how Jason failed? subconsciously believing that Jason got himself killed because of his actions, and that being a lesson for Tim to learn from? Jason isn't a person to Tim, he's a moral lesson about how to be Robin. any potential idolization he could have of Jason isn't because he loves Jason, it's because of the lessons Jason's death taught him.

and then, even though him hallucinating TIm is from the New-52, which makes characterization all kinds of questionable, i do think it makes sense for TIm to hallucinate/imagine Damian after Damian's death in an attempt to cope with it.

teen titans (2011) #18

to an extend, he sees Damian's death as in part his own fault. and even hating Damian, Tim needs the comfort from this to cope with Damian being gone. he's angry that Damian even was Robin, and has to learn something from Damian's death and how it impacts the Robin mantle, and teenage heroes as a whole. like, Tim can pretend he hates Damian all he wants, even getting taunted by the image of Damian, but there's still an underlying love to their relationship.

i think that's just the fun of shipping Tim with any of them. you will never divorce Tim's views of them from the Robin mantle and how fucking Unwell he is about anyone else who's been Robin before or after him, to the point he has to hallucinate them comforting him when he's at his lowest. it's always going to be a little unhealthy, a little toxic, and driven by Tim's relationship with being Robin as well. i need more Tim being weird about Robin in these ships.

[playgroundeyes]

ok but I will never understand y'all who don't like Gun.

It's literally so perfect and ajsjahshshshxhs and-

Do the lyrics "And if I'm old enough to die for your mistakes then let's go / can I bleed enough to fill up what the engine takes I don't know" not elicit some kind of perfect rough angry rebellious emotion deep inside of you???

[goatsandgangsters]

succession has always been genre-defying and convention breaking, but killing the main character 15 minutes into only the 3rd episode of the season throws all television convention out the window

which is not only a bold choice, but it’s what makes the episode so effective. almost everyone watching has said they experienced a prolonged disbelief. there’s no way. no way. and it’s not just the denial that comes with loss and death, but denial because this isn’t when you kill a character, this isn’t how you kill a character. it flies in the face of everything we know about storytelling convention. we don’t believe it. is tom joking. is logan manipulating them. where’s the body, we need to see the body. is he going to make a miraculous recovery at the end of the episode? 

and like the denial and the slow-dawning horror of realization that the kids are experiencing, we the audience experience it too. not as spectators, but as participants. because we had the rug pulled out from our Audience Expectations, just as the kids had the rug pulled out from them by The Random Suddenness of Tragedy. 

if this had been the cliffhanger at the end of an episode or a season finale—the times when you’re Allowed to kill a main character—we would have only been spectators. but by tipping storytelling convention on its head and breaking all the rules, they brought us along on that same journey of denial and disbelief. the same impossibility of it. the same confused “wait, like this?” 

it took logan’s death outside the bounds of storytelling and the safety of well-known plot beats. instead, it made us sit with the uncertainty and denial and confusion and raw grief of the random mundanity of death. 

[elftwink]

going to say something about writing that is not a complaint and i know it sounds exactly like someone complaining but the conclusion i have drawn is that this rules. preface over am currently "working on" (in the most generous, nebulous sense possible) an original fantasy story & i just keep finding more stuff about the world i need to decide because it feels extremely formative to me even though it will barely appear on the page, if at all

but like... just the sheer volume of communication irl that happens symbolically that you never question becomes so apparent when you try to create a world that doesn't have those things or doesn't have the conditions for such a thing to be created. writing a character wearing a wedding ring and then going wait a minute— would these people communicate marital status via ring placement? why do we do that irl? when did we start? surely thats not the only way people ever communicate marriage— what does everyone else do? and really, come to think of it, what does it mean to be 'married' in this fictional world i'm creating? is there a legal component or just a social one? should it have all the same connotations/obligations as the real world (e.g. monogamy, having children, romantic love, impact on finances, etc)?

you can do this with literally Everything In The World. what language is everyone speaking? is it the same one? how many languages are there in the region i'm writing about? is the language we're speaking anyone's second language? when did they learn? is bilingualism common? and where does everyone here live? speaking of living, is that a permanent dwelling situation or are people nomadic? what's the climate like? are all the characters here used to the climate or is someone used to ten degrees cooler and kind of short tempered because of it? the clothes are probably impacted by the weather, what's everyone wearing? what's it made out of? what would be around here that could be used for dye? help me i have a case of worldbuilders disease and its incurable. these motherfuckers are never going to finish this journey because i cant even get them on the page long enough to pack a cart. also would they use carts? when did we start having cart and carriages pulled on roads irl? if there's roads, who's maintaining them— or is it just the path from years of people travelling that way? does the terrain allow for wheeled vehicles or would some other way be better?

anyway. you may call all this a waste of time and "not technically writing" since i "havent written any prose". i think im just slow cooking this novel. oooooh im thinking about it so much. you just wait when im like 56 im going to knock your socks right off with my intricate detailed world where i thought about everything except whatever element of society you understand most deeply. that part i fucked up and clearly didn't know anything about. sorry