#era soapboxes

[gothelsflower]

physically i’m here mentally i’m at candy corn acres

[merrysithmas]

lol i literally couldnt care less about fandom drama but i will i say i saw an entitled cishet say "NO ONE BETTER START SAYING MIZU IS they/them!!" and if you cannot consider Mizu, an outwardly gendernonconforming character who shows a distaste towards 'feminine' dress/makeup/roles and penis-in-vagina sex as potentially nonbinary, trans, or otherwise ... then like who is ok for the trans fans out here to imagine as trans??? like who will you give us permission for, Your CisMajesty?

lmao kiss our collective trans azz tbh

[justworthlessreblogs]

do you have any more pikario or yukari (or both) headcanons maybe

i still have a few!

rio:

he's a very trusting person originally but after yukari lies to him in episode 16 that trait slowly disappears and he becomes a lot less gullible

ghost/cryptid disbeliever despite being a literal fucking fairy and living around magic all his life

this one is incredibly random but i was rewatching the avengers for the millionth time last night and it occurred to me that if he was into superhero movies he'd be a black widow fan. like i don't think he'd be into superhero movies all that much (his interests lie elsewhere) but if he was i think he'd connect with her backstory a lot. overall he tends to like characters that go through redemption arcs gee i wonder why. during his julio era he would've been the most insufferable loki stan

yukari:

is a prankster! nothing too big or anything that would hurt anyone but she does like messing with others. stuff like switching out the water with sprite. aoi catches her setting a prank up one day but instead of ratting her out asks to join her. they become an absolutely terrifying duo

also ghost denier. now i want an akiyuka buzzfeed unsolved au because i can hear them saying so many of those quotes

[johndonneswife]

🌙🌵✨☀️ piñon tree smell after rain. u agree

[heartbeatkaleidoscope-new]

So right now would be a good time to remember that whenever Taylor writes about a relationship, her truth is just that: her truth. She writes about things from her perspective, so that's the only perspective we get. That however does not mean that the person she was with doesn't also feel some kind of way about HER, and her and her contribution to (or lack thereof) the relationship.

Taylor isn't perfect, she's human and humans are messy. This whole turncoating thing the fan community has been doing lately as Taylor has divulged more and more of why and how her relationship with Joe fell apart has to stop. She is a grown woman, she meant it when she said she doesn't need us to defend her against imaginary enemies on the internet. Reminder that we are all flawed human beings and unless actual abuse is involved, chances are both people do things in a broken relationship that aren't the healthiest or most mature, and that ALL OF US have been toxic at some point in our lives.

Taylor is not a fragile doll that needs rescuing, nor is she infallible. Allow her to be messy and to be human because placing someone on a pedestal and holding them to perfection is to do them a disservice and the OPPOSITE of love.

[sick-sad-little-world]

"[Pretty Noose is] an attractively packaged bad idea, something that seems great at first and then comes back to bite you." (x)

(via @lovehate-love)

[petoskeystones]

one day into having a shoulder tattoo and im googling sleeveless shirts

[morgana-pendragon]

it would’ve been SO funny if they started chanting “wooder”

[rubinecorvus]

I feel like ik exactly which blog ur on about… the pipeline of ww2 to kpop must be studied

I totally didn't mean to vagueblog there... I think I clicked on a juicy The Pacific gifset and suddenly was taken to a BTS stan blog wiped of its traces of HBO War. I don't even remember who it was or who it used to be!

But also, is it? A pipeline, I mean. I don't know any other blogs this has happened to.

It seems a little counterintuitive bc WWII media (in my mind) has so much potential for life questions and philosophical thought, as well as just being about the most brutal times in history... and then kpop is like, people saying "poor little meow meow" on twitter

although I'm sure at least one person somewhere in the universe has probably referred to Eugene Sledge as their poor little meow meow so maybe that thought is redundant

[aethersea]

I think it's worth pointing out that there are two things kinda being conflated here, and also kinda overlapping – being perceived & perceiving. I'm saying this as someone who also hasn't watched these movies, so grain of salt lol, but Don't Look Up is basically "if you don't acknowledge the horror then it can't get you (yes it can)" while A Quiet Place is basically "if the horror can't find you then it can't get you."

(idk where Nope falls bc Jordan Peele is too good at his job so I've carefully avoided watching any clips or trailers. too scary. no idea where the nun thing falls either bc I haven't heard of it, though it sounds like a really interesting combo of these two.)

so first is the fear of being perceived, and I mean, we do live in the age of big data. fun little corporate panopticon we're all just marinating in. with that, plus the whole thing where we've known for an open fact the US government is spying on everyone to an egregious degree for, god, a decade now, and all that happened was Snowden had to go on the run for life – I feel it makes sense that we might have a pervasive society-wide anxiety about being noticed by a powerful force not entirely within our comprehension, which will devour us without a second thought.

and then the fear of perceiving, which I feel is more fatalistic/despairing. Don't Look Up is about how we're all fucking doomed and there's nothing we can do about it. feels like an unsubtle metaphor for climate change, though ofc I haven't watched it so I can't say for sure, but it applies really well to the pandemic too – there are all these problems that we're all aware of, but we feel powerless to do the slightest thing about them, and the people who do have power are using it on frivolous excess and/or saving only themselves. the movie's not even a horror story, except in the way that all satire is a form of horror.

(and like. as individuals, we are powerless. the solution™ to problems that affect the whole planet is to band together. but that's not something the american national psyche is really equipped for, conceptually – we're saturated in individualism so thoroughly that it's genuinely hard to apply any other philosophy to our own subjectivity.)

there's definitely an overlap between these two fears. part 1 of the overlap is maybe Bird Box – the fear that if you acknowledge the horror, it'll get you. this feels like the attitude behind all these loosened or absent covid restrictions even while people are still constantly dying – if we just act like there's no pandemic, then it's not real! it's the essence of your point about not facing up to things, like a child hiding under the blankets because if you can't see the monster then it can't see you.

the other part of the overlap might be the nun thing you mentioned – you keep your eyes fixed on something, don't look up, don't acknowledge the horror, and you're still fucking doomed because it's not actually up to you whether you're perceived. you can hold still and avert your eyes, you can run and you can hide, but it's all futile: the horror comes for us indiscriminately, impersonally, and there is no individualism really, we're all equally irrelevant in the face of the horror. we try to tell ourselves otherwise, we try to fool ourselves that we're special, but we all die just as easy no matter how we might struggle.

the one part I saw of Don't Look Up was the very end, as the meteor strikes. the movie cuts between moments of connection, courage, defiance, and love. we all die just as easy, that ending says, but that doesn't make the living any less meaningful. our connections to others transcend the banality of death – not only because we then live on in others, but because the connection itself is worthwhile, no matter how brief or how abrupt its end.

a beautiful ending, so much so that I almost watched the movie for it, and the avenue by which an individualist worldview usually aims for collectivism. and look, it is working. slowly, ponderously, but it is. if the horror is climate change, well, just a hundred years ago you couldn't see the sky in half the cities of the world because the pollution was a permanent cloud, rivers through major cities were too toxic for life, species around the world hurtled toward extinction and barely anyone cared (statistically speaking). but a hundred years of regulation and collective effort have slowly, painstakingly, cleared the skies and the waters, brought species back from the brink of extinction, and taught your average person on the street the importance of ecological preservation. if the horror is the pandemic, a hundred years ago the spanish flu killed more people than world war one, but we had covid vaccines within a year of the virus being identified. if the horror is the panopticon.....no actually that one's just worse. but we are fighting it, in a myriad ways, from all of us installing adblock to the US justice department suing google for monopoly. and I mean, look at all the unionizing that's been happening in the past few years, and the immense boom of them in just the last few months. we're getting better at collectivism. the fight for a better world is long and slow and full of stumbling, but it is ongoing. it spans far longer than a single human life.

I hope our children's children look back on us with sympathy, but I also hope they look back with that same detached uncertainty we feel about Victorian sexual mores or Cold War paranoia. I hope they don't quite get it, even when they understand intellectually. I hope ecological conservation is a foregone conclusion for them, the panopticon a thing of the barbaric past, public health an obvious priority. they'll have new fears, and new battles, but they'll be better at fighting them than we are. we're getting better at this. we just have to keep going.

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

[wingherc]

this is going to be my personality for the next week

[gothelsflower]

blah blah blah hercules on the west end blah blah tiktok inspired musical uhhhhhh whEre the FUCK is my Broadway version of the princess and the frog???

[daylight-13]

i need someone to write a long S.T.A.R.S fic just them being happy and silly as a team PRETTY PLEASE WITH A CHERRY ON TOP🙏🙏

[mortalityplays]

Hi! I really liked and agreed with your post on purple prose, and I was curious what books if any you'd describe as having purple prose. Not even necessarily as shorthand for calling it bad! just examples of it, especially from non-classic literature. Unless the term is entirely subjective lol. Feel free to reply to this ask publicly or privately; I don't mind either way

Have some Conan the Barbarian (sorry about! the racism):

TORCHES flared murkily on the revels in the Maul, where the thieves of the east held carnival by night. In the Maul they could carouse and roar as they liked, for honest people shunned the quarters, and watchmen, well paid with stained coins, did not interfere with their sport. Along the crooked, unpaved streets with their heaps of refuse and sloppy puddles, drunken roisterers staggered, roaring. Steel glinted in the shadows where wolf preyed on wolf, and from the darkness rose the shrill laughter of women, and the sounds of scufflings and strugglings. Torchlight licked luridly from broken windows and wide-thrown doors, and out of those doors, stale smells of wine and rank sweaty bodies, clamor of drinking-jacks and fists hammered on rough tables, snatches of obscene songs, rushed like a blow in the face. In one of these dens merriment thundered to the low smoke- stained roof, where rascals gathered in every stage of rags and tatters—furtive cut-purses, leering kidnappers, quick- fingered thieves, swaggering bravoes with their wenches, strident-voiced women clad in tawdry finery. Native rogues were the dominant element—dark-skinned, dark-eyed Zamorians, with daggers at their girdles and guile in their hearts. But there were wolves of half a dozen outland nations there as well. There was a giant Hyperborean renegade, taciturn, dangerous, with a broadsword strapped to his great gaunt frame—for men wore steel openly in the Maul. There was a Shemitish counterfeiter, with his hook nose and curled blue-black beard. There was a bold- eyed Brythunian wench, sitting on the knee of a tawny-haired Gunderman—a wandering mercenary soldier, a deserter from some defeated army. And the fat gross rogue whose bawdy jests were causing all the shouts of mirth was a professional kidnapper come up from distant Koth to teach woman-stealing to Zamorians who were born with more knowledge of the art than he could ever attain.

Conan is an interesting example imo because it displays a lot of the highs and lows of pulp. Robert E. Howard could also write very punchy, straightforward action, and often did - but part of the selling point for the emerging genre fiction of the era was that it was lurid and lascivious. While the extract above is. Well. Bad. It is worth recognising that within its context it was also kind of experimental.

Howard wrote these drooling, sort of bewildering, sensory passages for the same reason Marvel movies punch you in the face with saturated colours and rapid cuts and a billion VFX. You see it in the work of H.P. Lovecraft too, and I will grudgingly acknowledge that that's something worth recognising about his literary impact. I also think Lovecraft was a pretty bad technical writer, personally, but that's a whole other soapbox.

My point is that a lot of truly purple prose today (in the sense that it is extraneous, distracting, undermines its own function) traces its legacy to this era of pulp where there was a distinct secondary purpose to overwhelming the reader with ornamentation. It was self-consciously indulgent, and strikingly distinct from the more genteel floridity of equally bad literary novelists. For instance, compare the above with the even purpler prose of the famously awful Irene Iddesleigh:

On being introduced to all those outside his present circle of acquaintance on this evening, and viewing the dazzling glow of splendour which shone, through spectacles of wonder, in all its glory, Sir John felt his past life but a dismal dream, brightened here and there with a crystal speck of sunshine that had partly hidden its gladdening rays of bright futurity until compelled to glitter with the daring effect they soon should produce. But there awaited his view another beam of life’s bright rays, who, on entering, last of all, commanded the minute attention of every one present—this was the beautiful Irene Iddesleigh. How the look of jealousy, combined with sarcasm, substituted those of love and bashfulness! How the titter of tainted mockery rang throughout the entire apartment, and could hardly fail to catch the ear of her whose queenly appearance occasioned it! These looks and taunts serving to convince Sir John of Nature’s fragile cloak which covers too often the image of indignation and false show, and seals within the breasts of honour and equality resolutions of an iron mould. On being introduced to Irene, Sir John concluded instantly, without instituting further inquiry, that this must be the original of the portrait so warmly admired by him. There she stood, an image of perfection and divine beauty, attired in a robe of richest snowy tint, relieved here and there by a few tiny sprigs of the most dainty maidenhair fern, without any ornaments whatever, save a diamond necklet of famous sparkling lustre and priceless value.

Christ. Hopefully you can see the depth of the scale here - the Conan extract is muddy and difficult to read, but this is near incomprehensible. Part of the reason this passage is so much worse is that there is even less intent behind the author's use of language. Here, she is working overtime to evoke a kind of dramatic-intellectual style borrowed from writers like the Brontë sisters (imo at least - not an expert, that's just the sense I get as a reader). The further these flourishes get from lending purpose to the meaning of the prose, the harder they are to parse.

BUT my other point is: far fewer writers these days set out to emulate Irene Iddesleigh's arch, roundabout, society conscious voice than they do the hallmarks of classic pulp. We're inured to sex and violence, sin and debauchery in fiction today, so extracts like the Conan example feel even more bloated than they did in their time. And that creates a real pitfall for amateur genre writers: the instinct to pay homage to the stylistic choices of the classics can lead them right into Irene Iddesleigh territory.

Too often, the purpose of these overwrought, leering descriptions isn't calculated to thrill the audience, but to establish a piece in the company of older works the writer admires. And that's what leads to truly purple prose in contemporary genre writing, which makes readers scoff and laugh, which makes authors self-conscious and timid, which leads us here to a point where wordy description is inaccurately identified as the problem. It's not. The problem is excess - and when something has purpose, by definition, it's not excessive.

[wildwren]

hey y'all, since it's spotify wrapped season, can i beg a moment of your time? no, im not about to get on a soapbox about spotify. spotify sucks but that's not what i want to talk about.

did you know that most recording artists in the united states don't have the legal right to organize a union? some musicians are unionized as part of SAG-AFTRA or the American Federation of Musicians (for instrumental musicians), but lyricists and composers are classified as "independent contractors." This decision was handed down by the national labor relations board in 1984 and has not been overturned.

this means that musicians cannot organize or negotiate for better deals from, for instance, spotify, without the threat of being sued due to antitrust laws. musicians who are not represented by a major label or who are not part of a large musical organization such as an orchestra have very little bargaining power. source

fixing this situation will take a lot of work -- there's not a single easy solution. but in an era where we're seeing union growth and historic labor wins, i think now is the time to dream big. musicians need to organize ourselves on the ground to create collective power. we also need wider political interest and momentum around the necessity of musicians' rights.

this isn't time for you to say "yea im never gonna pay full price for music, sorry" or "musicians just have to accept that the market's saturated and devalued." this is time for us to try to envision a music industry where artists can be compensated for their creative labor and music can still remain accessible and easy to discover. changing the labor situation in the united states is just one piece of changing a global music industry, but it could have a big impact on the future.

if you're in the united states, there are two active efforts that you can ask your representatives to support -- one congressional bill introduced by Deborah Ross, and a resolution introduced by Rashida Tlaib.

H.R. 5576 - Protect Working Musicians Act of 2023 - sponsored by Artist Rights Alliance

H.Con.Res. 102 - Resolution for a new Streaming Royalty - sponsored by United Musicians and Allied Workers

i know there is so much to organize around right now. but if you're in the united states and have predominantly used spotify this year, or posted about spotify wrapped, please take a moment to send a message to your representatives about these bills. all you need to do is fill in your info, the letters are already written for you.

and please share this widely. thank you!!

[gothelsflower]

no bc how tf did ricky just randomly know the words to ej’s song he’d never heard before like he just jumped in for a duet to parts that ej wrote??? 😭 he wasn’t even reading lyrics from a notebook or anything like maddox