#example world b

[coquelicoq]

i love how everyone close to "jiang li" at some point or another has their moment of "girl i KNOW you're cooking up some shit and you are not going to tell me anything about what it is but that's okay. do what you gotta do, i gotchu." like everyone goes dang this girl is up to something...no idea what it is but it doesn't matter. this 18yo who spent the last 10 years in a convent knows what she's doing and i am just gonna follow her lead on this. i am yours to command, recently former teen nun. no questions asked. you got this.

[smoke-glass]

Basically what I'm getting from qsmpblr today is that y'all what a magic mod on the qsmp and honestly.....Same.

[hourlyeternaldiva]

[smile-files]

this might be a hot take... but if you care about disavowing media made by bad people out of fear of looking like a bad person yourself more than you care about actually doing good things... you might have your priorities (and your morals) screwed up a bit :/

(see my tags for more of my thoughts on this topic! please try to avoid making make bad-faith assumptions about what i mean!)

[dreamedfyre-a]

au where she gets to save jaehaerys bc of her dreams though. dae.nys saved their whole ass house let her save one (1) precious little boy

[the-busy-ghost]

Warning- this is a very petty post, but I think I'm entitled to at least one petty, pissed-off reaction every time I finish a classic novel that hit harder than I expected so take this as my quota for the year.

Also spoiler warning for a book that came out over a century ago but still, I didn't know the plot going in so don't want to ruin it for anyone else, if you haven't read it shut your eyes. (Also Local Tumblr User Going Wild Over Book Published a Hundred Years Ago That Everybody Else Already Read should probably be categorised as akey part of indigenous tumblr culture at this point).

Anyway I just finished the War of the Worlds and in between studying I've thinking about Themes and Motifs as you do, and idly looking for further analysis. I then accidentally ran into an article called 'A Quiet Place II Succeeds Where the War of the Worlds Failed' and:

Now I haven't seen any of the Quiet Place films, this is not a rant against them and of course everyone is entitled to their own opinions. But re: the ending of The War of the Worlds, I have to ask, did this guy somehow miss, uh, the entire point of the book or am I just utterly insane?

[oldtvandcomics]

Happy Queer Media Monday!

Today: The Lights of Prague by Nicole Jarvis

Another highly personal one.

(My copy of The Lights of Prague, flanked by two of my bat plushies. Picture taken in Old Town Square, after dark.)

Prague, not long after the introduction of gaslights on the street. The guild of lamplighters doubles as elite monsterfighter squad, whose job is to keep the normal population safe from the numerous beings active at nighttime. Meanwhile, said monsters have their own hidden society. Both worlds get thrown in disarray by a series of experiments, that, if successful, would let the pijavice, vampire-like creatures, go out during the sunlight hours. Lamplighter Domek and pijavice Ora get sucked in the middle of the conflict, struggling to keep up with the conspiracies as well as their feelings for one another.

The reasons why this book is so special to me are personal more than anything else, but I still feel that it would serve as a good example for changes in the fantasy genre.

This was the first thing I bought when I arrived to Prague for my one year in film school. Then it took me almost two years to read it, because I was reading everything but this book. The thing is, this is the EXACT kind of story I would have LOVED as a teenager, but apparently, I grew out of it and kind of lost interest. The book itself is good, and I really regret not getting to it ten - fifteen years sooner. It is also, all in all, not really that special or different from the ones that I did read back then.

What did stand out for me was the casual queerness. I bought it because of the Prague connection, and was fully expecting it to be completely straight, like the books I used to read as a teenager. It wasn’t. Ora is bisexual, having had two major relationships with women, as well as multiple with men, and Domek’s friend Cord (as well as his mystery boyfriend) is gay. It is all treated very casually, but it is very visibly there.

As I said before, I know this exact kind of book. I used to devour them around 2009 - 2012 (ish). Back then, this kind of casual queerness just didn’t happen. It did not.

Following the progress of queer representation is often frustrating because of how slow it is. It feels like it should be so normalized by now, and yet we are still stagnating and waiting for crumbs to drop. However, the progress becomes very visible the moment you look at the bigger picture in history, and compare media we have today with the way things were even ten years ago. Once upon a time something comes along that hits you over the head with this progress, and I feel like it’s a good thing to stop for a second and appreciate it.

So yeah, that is what The Lights of Prague symbolises to me.

Here is Nicole Jarvis’ personal webpage. About the pijavice, I only found this entry on the Monster Wiki.

Queer Media Monday is an action I started to talk about some important and/or interesting parts of our queer heritage, that people, especially young people who are only just beginning to discover the wealth of stories out there, should be aware of. Please feel free to join in on the fun and make your own posts about things you personally find important!

[phoenixcatch7]

The concept of good and evil as a cosmic balance of the universe as a world building thing has always wigged me out since before I could even put my finger on what.

So much of it, when improperly done (ie, good vastly outweighing the bad, evil must be eradicated entirely) is just... The thinnest veneer of a plot device that makes it so hard to develop any good sense of nuance or even real understanding. It reeks of propaganda, and self righteous at that, even when in universe it's a hard proven fact. And it's always the bad/evil being unnatural, inherently wrong, the mere existence irredeemable.

Even when there's a bit more thought put into it, something like 'there is evil in every heart, but we must learn to understand it, and accept it, so we are not overcome' still has, like, that black and white binary to it, like sure there's shades of grey, but it's still... Based around the morals of the creator? It's an entirely objective concept, this good and evil.

Even today, cultures and religions around the world can have wildly varying ideas on what are virtues and what are cardinal sins that'll get you punished forever (even the words there are from one religion that famously cannot agree within itself). In the past global values were even more extreme as people learned more about the world over thousands of years (ye olde sexism is a big example).

Yes, it might not be true of reality, but even in fiction I still find works that explore the concept of a world order that incorporates good and evil physically or spiritually just... Off. Like that one terry pratchet quite from death I am going to quote very loosely - 'grind this universe down to its very building blocks, and show me one speck of justice. One atom of mercy'. The response is 'but people - we have to believe in these things! We need to believe in something!'.

Of course people need to believe in it. We do. We need justice and mercy and love and kindness. But to make those human concepts integral to the universe itself - magic forces of good and light and purity, and evil and darkness and corruption... It always sort of falls through.

But I'd also love to play with that. I'd love to explore other ways a fantasy world could work that could be misinterpreted by its denizens and good and evil. Something that has atoms or motes or fairy dust to make up its being. Decay and repair, perhaps. Warmth and cold. Light and dark as more than the presence or absence of radiation. The dark as a radiation of its own.

To say something is evil for its mere physical existence, I find that very hard to believe.

[a-birdhouse-in-your-soul]

the fact that chock/bates have a world title but hubbell/donohue don’t is the greatest crime against ice dance since *checks notes* everything else that’s happened to ice dance in the past five years

[whitehartlane]

something i’ve seen frequently in football circles especially with the rise of social media (where ppl engage with the sport in absolutely bizarre ways but that’s another topic for another day) is this longstanding obsession with ‘(winning) mentality.’ how is it quantified? how do you prove its existence? how consistent must it be for a club to acquire this ‘mentality?’ it’s just bonkers to me because you’d assume that every club and every fanbase would want to win, just some a) have better resources to do so or b) some overperform/underperform as is the case with any sport which leads to drawing some kind of conclusions about this ‘mentality’ or c) some fanbases just have a better time rationalising a potential loss within the external factors which of course also leads to drawing conclusions about this ‘mentality.’ i guess my problem with it is just that it’s become such a buzzword where teams get either praised or insulted for their mentality when it’s so subjective and influenced by other factors too (doing well, doing badly, general trajectory of the club, personal satisfaction with individual achievements, media opinion, etc).

[daniclaytcn]

I agree with you on all those buddie moments. Especially eddie touching bucks shoulder in 5x01. Like... thats such a normal common platonic thing to do. If you're manouvreing around someone and getting up from a crouch in a tight spot of course youre gonna touch their shoulder. Sometimes the way people read certain buddie interactions im like... have your ever interacted with people in real life? Its just perfectly normal friendly interactions. I understand the instinct to look into every frame for a deeper meaning but sometimes people act like it couldn't possible be explained in a non-romantic way

Sorry rant over. Love buddie analysis generally but sometimes I'm like "come on guys"

yeah...i mean, to be fair, we all have a very specific type of blinders on when it comes to the ships we like and it's no use pretending otherwise, so we're all likely to have done this at some point, whether we realize it or not. and it IS fun to freak out and obsess over the little things! but it is a little weird when people start insisting that [insert very normal and platonic thing] is definitely romantic and can't be anything else. i mean, it all depends on the kind of boundaries each individual draws between romance and friendship—what might be romantic for some wouldn't be romantic for others. lol.

[nullcoast]

The world is fucking disgusting

[rrover]

if they do make another game with botw/totk link and zelda (or just in the same art style as botw/totk) then i hope it takes place entirely outside of hyrule that poor continent has been wrecked enough

[gibbearish]

also is the thing with the box ever. explained?

[unproduciblesmackdown]

that moment when: everyone's lives are restricted and constricted and these imposed consequences are attributed to anyone's continual individual failures to seek, find, and follow the Correct Path through Life, and so everyone is left on their own to only be seeking & finding these failures as well as the only answer to how their lives can be better....versus Not seeing the world as the free marketplace meritocracy of everyone's personal failures/successes, nor everything in your own life, and thus not forever having to scrutinize Where You Must Be Bringing It Upon Yourself by fucking up or at least failing to do the correct thing, and exist only in perpetual punishment for your ongoing failure and occasional temporary reprieves from it. recognizing everything that wasn't & isn't & wouldn't be [this is because you're bringing it upon yourself] and thus having more capacity & capability to look at the realm of your personal individual self, reality, experiences, life through the perpetual instances of seeking, finding, and following your own needs/wants through one's inherent personhood and exercises of autonomy and recognition of where & when & how one recognizes moments of their existing freely & in more resonant genuine alignment with themself, you know? endless examples to be found in endless fractals of [where & how are people's lives made smaller]. and that of course this doesn't preclude the ability/option at any time to question one's choices, since you'll be able to find more Actual choices available to you (and, also crucially, find more actual choices made by others that are in the pursuit of limiting Yours) to look at, and people getting to exercise their autonomy isn't the same as "everyone doing anything they want regardless of how it affects others" since that [how does it affect others?] element instead being Regarded would be able to lead to recognizing that, in fact, an effect might be the infringement on others' autonomy, hence: There's A Problem....like the ability to just go ham with [questioning???] anything in existence, certainly including oneself, b/c the "norm" is such that rather you're only supposed to be able to question yourself for your failings (or those positioned as less than, thus, beneath you) and not even have the language to express a questioning of aspects of life beyond that b/c stop calling anyone "cis" they're just Normal, Just Be Normal and it would all be fine

[sammydem0n64]

Constantly thinking about a conversation me and a buddy had about how people in the modern era always end up making or Headcanoning villains as homophobic or just general bigots...