#gothic turn liveblogging

[daisyachain]

Having caught up to the translated chapters I could find on The Three Manga Websites. Why does everyone talk about Yuri Espoir as if it’s a romance anthology and not a thriller /horror

[momthesearemydinnerguests]

TVL Liveblog:

So I'm currently a little over halfway through TVL, and I realize I haven't kept up with liveblogging my read through. So here are a couple of things that have been on my mind a lot as I'm reading. (I am currently a little over halfway through the book!)

Narrative Parallels and the Persistence of Hope

Currently I am obsessed with the Lestat/Daneil and Lestat/Armand parallels when it comes to Lestat's final goodbye to Armand in the tower. There are a LOT of Gothic doubles/dialectic parallels when it comes to this book - especially in relation to IWTV - but these are the two I'm going to focus on for now because I want to talk about the tower scene and Lestat's farewell to Armand.

Let's start with the Daniel/Lestat parallel. There's a scene right after Armand reveals his whole backstory when Lestat asks Armand, "Why is it you don't hearken to your own story?" (It's on page 310 in my copy). And obviously it's really reminiscent to the way Daniel accuses Louis of not understanding the meaning of his own story, of what it means to someone like Daniel. And in both cases, it reads very much like a child yelling at an elder. Kind of like a teenager screaming that their parent just doesn't understand and slamming the door. Except, you know, the age gap here is centuries. Armand is about 300 years older than Lestat, Louis is about 200 years older than Daniel. So in a way, the younger characters represent modernity, the changing age, and their inability to understand the elder is the struggle of every historian ever.

But I think that the parallel between Lestat and Armand is super heartbreaking. Because when Armand is speaking to Lestat, he's speaking from experience. Lestat and Armand are a lot more alike than Lestat is willing to believe. They both have incredibly traumatic, loveless childhoods. Both are stolen from their homes and taken against their will by the master vampire who ultimately turns them. Both lose their master to the fire (supposedly) only shortly after being turned. There's even the similarities between their experiences with the monastery and the way it is snatched away from them, regardless of their different motivations for pursuing it. Most importantly, though, both Armand and Lestat are defined by their defiance and inability to accept the world at face value. They both desperately want the world to have some deeper meaning, to be better and more beautiful than it is.

So I think when Armand is describing the great laws of the Children of Darkness - when he tells Lestat that an old vampire should never give the dark blessing to a mortal and when he says that "those with great passion and indomitable will should be avoided as well as those who have none" - he truly believes it. And it's not because of any belief in God or Satan. I can't shake the feeling that it's because he is talking about himself. He is his own cautionary tale. Even his attempts to destroy Lestat a little earlier in the chapter can kind of be read as an attack on himself. But I think it is as much an act of mercy as it is one of hatred. Because Armand was so much like Lestat, and it has left him with nothing but ever-increasing despair.

And yet.

Even when Armand believes himself to have lost all hope and all desire, he still finds ways to persevere. His refusal to take an active part in the kill on the one hand reads kind of like a vampire ED, but it's also in a way a rejection of the Children of Satan's views. Even as he swears he is evil, he is still clinging to the traditions of the saints that he loved so dearly as a mortal. He is asserting his own identity and rebelling against the trauma he's suffered. And then in his goodbyes to Lestat, he says, "I will take the gold you have to offer me, and I will seek refuge in this tower. And I will learn from your passionate fledgling whatever he has to teach me. But I reach for these things only because they float on the surface of the darkness in which I am drowning. And I would not descend without some finer understanding. I would not leave eternity to you without... without some final battle." (315) Armand at this point doesn't really believe that he can actually live again. He has lost all hope in his own recovery, and it very much reads like someone who is suicidal and doesn't really believe in the point of trying. And yet there is still the faintest shimmer of hope. He doesn't recognize it as such, of course, and to him it probably looks more like pride and willfulness. But even his hopelessness, there is still the ghost of hope. And there is always a chance that the revenant of that hope will rise again and give life some new meaning.

[favoritefightingfrenchgoth]

What the fuck is Simcoe a zombie

[elevensbian]

liveblogging the movie bc i have almost 0 knowledge of it and i think it might be fun. i don't even know if it's good or not but i guess i am about to find out

this is by far the superior theme song version i don't care

oh i LOVE this tardis interior... the little chair and all the trinkets..... i think they should go for this angle again tbh

7's old man outfit too :]

i think instantly getting shot on arrival followed by 'i hope he's rich' is pretty americacore so 10/10 for realism

also some fun 'medical system not accepting that ppl probably know more about their own health than them' realism

as regenerations go that one was pretty rough 😭

also slightly disturbing vfx. nice

why are there so many mirrors and also a baby doll in this morgue

WHAT IS WITH THE DOC AND STEALING CLOTHES FROM HOSPITALS BABE U HAVE DONE THIS THREE SEPARATE TIMES

why tf was the master a snake is this gonna be explained or is it just doctor who being doctor who

8 i want ur gender hand it over

omg tardis doorway is so cool??? why have i never seen ppl talk ab this interior it might be my fav

aw they're talking about gallifrey :( cute

oo master has a companion this is fun

i can't actually tell if he's bullshitting or there's some essential master lore i haven't seen yet lmao

oh ok yeah he's bullshitting. probably

i love him being like 'i can prove the eye of harmony is open' like that means Anything to anyone else

how are they not suspicious of these paramedics that are extremely shady and also grace's ex boyfriend and clearly not medically trained

JELLY BABY!!! he's sooo.....

why r there so many spyfall parallels in this

grace being entirely unphased by the whole bigger on the inside thing is so funny

SILLY TIME LORD CLOTHES MY BELOVED

seriously why has no one else made a gothic architecture tardis i love it

can't tell if the religious imagery is purposeful or not but either way i'm a fan

why has autopsy guy turned up to a party in his Morgue Clothes. get changed bro

I'M ALIIIIIVE

'you are my life' kinda romantic idk

how tf did the master get un absorbed then. probably answered somewhere but ????

ok well that was fun. kind of annoying that there's very little of 8 in like visual form bc the aesthetic of everything was the best part but i'm sure there's comics that will suffice

[tealmoth]

Dark academia gothic

A mutual posts pictures from their trip to a museum in London. You know them personally. They've never been to London. In fact, they've never even left Arizona.

"I'm studying at the library today!" someone posts. "I'm studying at the library today!" they post again, the next day, but in a different library. They've kept this up for years, a different library each time. You don't question it, you just hit follow.

Someone makes a post gushing about a certain type of tea. You search it's name, intending to buy some, only to find the website of a pharmaceutical testing company.

You see pictures of someone's study notes. Curious, you zoom in, only to find that they've been written in an unidentifiable code.

All of your mutuals have read The Secret History. Every single one. They liveblog their 15th rereading, and act as though they've never read it before.

Someone mentions that they're starting their second semester of college. Last week, they mentioned that they were in their third semester.

"The Secret History is a satire." Someone tells you. You're in the check-out line in Walmart. You turn around to face them, but no one is there.

You see a picture of the same man in every moodboard or aesthetic post. You begin to see him in non-DA tags. You see him walk down the street outside your house one day. He starts sending you cryptic messages via your dreams. Who is he?

"I'm so tired of all the dark academia discourse in the notes of my posts!" Someone bemoans. You check their posts. There are no notes.

You see a post where someone jokes about having tuberculosis. That was years ago. They haven't posted since. You wonder if they were joking.

You see a picture of someone's desk in the midst of study, autumn leaves scattered about. You see another post, this time with a potted plant and a twig. You see a post where someone's desk is completely covered by a pile of soil and compost. You see a vaguely human shape beneath the surface. You hit reblog.

[coelenterata]

So. I spontaneously decided to read The Picture of Dorian Gray because a friend has been talking about it?? I have not started it yet because I went, instead, on a Journey of figuring out how and where and which version to read, because as with apparently every book: oh no there’s multiple versions.

Wikipedia says it’s gothic horror could anyone maybe have told me and it has a preface about the meaning of art, oh my god, anyway if we want the preface, gotta read the 1891 novel, so that’s that decision made, thought I, foolishly, but it turns out Wikisource does not have the preface???????????????????????

And obviously I still cannot access Project Gutenberg because I’m in Germany, and archive.org has the novel but scanned pages are, bad, and then I finally remembered that Overdrive has classic literature.

Thank God For Overdrive And Libby.

Anyway, tl;dr: I’m gonna liveblog The Picture of Dorian Gray,

[buffyisms]

okay let’s commence the ‘alie liveblogs her btvs speed watch while she has the attention span’ 

of course starting with WELCOME TO THE HELLMOUTH.  i totally forgot how gothic edgy btvs tried to be in the beginning before finding it’s niche in the slightly campy, slightly comedic, monster drama vibe. also the original logo font was horrible. the iconic buffy font is so much better. i feel like these prophetic dreams were really a big thing in the first two seasons then kinda died off. the only ones i can remember after season two were the one at the end of season three that forshadowed Dawn coming, and the one at the end of season seven that told her about the army of monsters. note to self: do more plotting with buffy’s weird dreams. 

omg the lighting in season one is so fuckin’ bad. i remember when i iconed season one and wanting to tear my eyelashes out. so freakin’ yellow. or super dark and super blue. Also i kinda wanna do an AU where Buffy stays friends with Cordy after ep 1 and tries to be who she use to be and balance being a slayer. PSA, frapps are still trendy but tasty. 

also giles was so weird and pushy in the start. and buffy’s outfit is on freakin’ point. gee can you Vague that up for me is one of the five million icon lines. also The Master the original goth af villain. damn what was his childhood trauma? like c’mon the sleeper will awake and the wold will bleed, is that a freakin’ evanescence song or something? and like I know buffy has like, inherent ninja skills, but really, hanging upside down ish ( right side up ??? inverted ??? idfk ) on a random alley way pole is a little over kill. Angel is dramatic af ‘to kill them, to kill them all’ like everything he just said to her was so dramatic and cryptic, and tbh if you wanted buffy to save the town, maybe you shoulda just told everything straight up. instead of ‘be ready for the harvest’ he coulda said ‘hey so you’re like the slayer and all, and this old scary vampire is trapped in the sewer. his minion is gonna try to massacre everyone to escape the soul and release hell. so here’s where he is, let’s kill him.’ Some of my favorite icons are of Buffy in the bronze scene talking willow and sipping on that drink. she just looks so pretty there. but hello early 90s frosted eyeshadow. also i kinda envy that simple makeup because i spent 25 minutes blending like eight different shades and doing cut creases and halos and shit. also no way teens would be let in a night club like the bronze. 18+ is a thing, 15/16+ not really when they sell alcohol. 

okay can we just talk about the master rising up from a pool of blood. hella cliche. and like, a waste of blood when it’s their food source. we’re talking violence, adult language, strong content another one of my fave iconic buffy lines. the earth will belong to the old ones. okay i can’t tell whose more dramatic, angel or luke.  scary cliffhanger ending but you know our herione isn’t gonna die in the first episode ( although that’d be a really cool twist. at the end of episode one, buffy gets turned but because she’s a slayer she retains her soul. and the whole series is her fighting evil and adjusting to being a vampire while trying to be a normal highschool girl. okay someone give me this au now please. ) aaaaannnnddd onto The Harvest aka episode two.

[cbk1000]

Jenn Recommends: Sensation Fiction

Welcome back to another round of recommendations by yours truly! Be sure to read everything I suggest because I have impeccable taste, as those of you who have followed my Chuck Tingle liveblogs are well aware.

I’m going to spend just a bit describing today’s genre, since it’s a subset of 19th century literature you may not have heard of before.

Sensation fiction was immensely popular with the Victorians because they were all freaks but wanted to pretend to propriety in a world where BDSM brothels became a thing thanks to a proliferation of corporal punishment in childhood that contributed to a deep and abiding obsession with spanking. (Go ahead, read their porn; I’ll wait.) Sensation fiction gave them a chance to pearl clutch over tea with Muffy so Muffy would think that if they’re shocked at a little bigamy, surely they didn’t carry around an inflatable sex toy under their hat to avoid the temptations of ‘the solitary vice’, a.k.a. masturbation, which, as we all know, results in insanity and death. 

Sensation fiction has its foundation in the melodramatic and the Gothic, and revolves around some sort of secret. These are not whodunits; there’s no opening crime from which a detective has to work backward, picking up clues along the way. But there is something massive and sinister lurking just underneath the surface; expect lots of foreshadowing and shiftiness as the secret unravels over the course of like 700 pages, because Victorians be fucking prolific. 

If You Like: Eerie mansions, evil Italians, and a little social commentary with your Mysterious Happenings

Read: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.   

Wilkie Collins was a friend of Dickens’ and a name you will hear a lot in association with sensation fiction: he was one of its most popular contributors, and for good reason: this shit is hard to put down. 

Collins was an early experimenter with mixed media and usually follows multiple perspectives in his books, so that all these little related threads can be teased out and teased out till you finally learn how they all connect. The Woman in White takes its name from a freaky encounter of one Walter Hartright, protagonist numero uno, in the very first few pages, so you understand that Shit Is About To Get a Purplish Hue of Real Very Quickly. It is an ‘epistolary novel that tells the tale of Walter Hartright, who encounters a woman all dressed in white on a moonlit road in Hampstead. Hartright helps the woman to find her way back to London. The woman warns him against an unnamed baronet and after they part he discovers that she may have escaped from an insane asylum. Hartright travels to Cumberland where he takes up a position as the art tutor of Laura Fairlie and her devoted half-sister, Marian Halcombe, who are somehow entangled with this mysterious “woman in white”.’

While the quintessential Victorian heroine in all her swoony delicacies is presented here, Collins, for his gender and specific social era, actually writes his female characters with a much defter hand than many of his contemporaries. Laura is your typical 19th century heroine, pale, delicate, and dependent upon her man. Her sister Marian, however, is ballsy, witty, and not about to let the men have all the eavesdropping fun. She’s exactly the kinda’ bitch I’d want at my side if an evil Italian were conspiring against me. 

The prose is dense, of course; this is Victorian literature, after all. But Collins constantly inserts little details that deepen the mystery, that hint after the subtle clockwork of the narrative ticking away underneath. Even during the mundanities of art lessons or tea, you never forget that something is at work, that every action and bit of dialogue has in it an allusion to the fact that this is some puzzle piece that fits somewhere, somehow, into the larger picture. Mr. Jenn listened to this on audiobook during slow periods at work, then came home and put it on again to give me a taste of what it’s like to live with someone who really couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what you’re doing while they’re reading. And he is not much of a reader. 

If You Like: Shifty bitches and the men who ignore all their obvious red flags

Read: Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Meet Lady Audley. Lady Audley is kind of a psychopath, but she’s hot, so you know the peen will come marching in two by two regardless. Lady Audley, as you may have guessed from the title, has a secret. Or, as Amazon puts it ‘When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley's past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael's nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems. When his good friend George Talboys suddenly disappears, Robert is determined to find him, and to unearth the truth. His quest reveals a tangled story of lies and deception, crime and intrigue, whose sensational twists turn the conventional picture of Victorian womanhood on its head. Can Robert's darkest suspicions really be true?’   (Btw, I’m pretty sure one of ‘Robert’s darkest suspicions’ is that he’s secretly gay because it’s Victorian England and he can’t just be like, “Yo, I want a boy on my dick” and I know you guys are reading this like, “But Jenn, you’re like that kid from the Sixth Sense except with gay people: you see them everywhere, in all your media,” but you tell me: how straight is it for a guy to admire a girl’s beauty by marveling over how much she looks like her brother? And to fall in love with her specifically because she reminds him so much of her brother? Case closed.)

I picked up this book in a Dublin bookstore on my honeymoon the night before our flight out, and I remember dealing with severe anxiety about the coming flight and then cracking this book in a little cafe where we stopped to wait out a rainstorm and proceeding to ignore Mr. Jenn completely. I’m a ho for pretty metaphors, so the writing sucked me in immediately, but beyond the lyrical quality of Braddon’s prose, I wanted to know: yeah, wtf IS this bitch’s deal? Lucy Graham is tiny, doll-like, retiring...or is she? No one with eyes THAT large and fluttery isn’t a murderer, dammit. 

If you like your trash reads with a side of Vocabulary and poetic prose, read this and find out what the hell Lady Audley is hiding. It does not pretend to great literature; sensation novels were the beach reads of the Victorian era. But it has some beautiful descriptions and if you’re a trashy ho like me, then you’re definitely going to appreciate Victorians being shady as fuck.

[the-ghost-of-jason-todd]

my two cents on the name of keith’s space-wolf: jonah

keith came from a heavily religious area and undoubtedly knows the story of jonah and the whale, thought it was funny that they were traveling on a giant space whale in the abyss, mentioned it one (1) time to krolia, and the name IMMEDIATELY stuck because krolia is still in that every-piece-of-culture-from-earth-is-precious-and-meaningful phase of being an alien who went to earth and fell in love with an earthling.

no, you don’t get it.  jonah was a man.  if anyone here is jonah, it’s me, keith says.  it’s too late.  the doggo already responds to it.  keith now has to live with the fact that there is now a walking, teleporting bible reference out in space with him.  he can’t escape.

krolia is delighted.

[favoritefightingfrenchgoth]

Withh a comma aftar dearest,,

[favoritefightingfrenchgoth]

Turn: from what i understand,

Gays Caleb Brewster Benjamin Tall Mage Robert Townsend Mr. Baker Lafayette Billy Robert Rogers Bis Edmund Hewlett George Washington Charles Lee Abigail Robert Townsend's dad Pans Peggy Shippen Anna Strong Benedict Arnold John Andre Akinbode Heteros Abe Woodhull Richard Woodhull Simcoe King George III

[favoritefightingfrenchgoth]

Me And This Frogman 300 Years In Holy Macaroni Til England's Immortal Queen's Death Do We Part

[favoritefightingfrenchgoth]

OK SO I FINISHED THE FIRST EPISODE AND

- The preps all look really similar and they should color code the characters because it's Hard to tell who's who -Simcone is tall CREEP and Hewlett is small frogman cryptid -Abe is stupid af, that prep!!!1 -Ben Tall Mage is pretty compared to all the gremlins -Protect Anna

[favoritefightingfrenchgoth]

Does this prep not know how to act like he was attacked or

[favoritefightingfrenchgoth]

@simc-hoe NO PREPZZZ ALLOUD!!!!1!!1

[favoritefightingfrenchgoth]

Me: 🎶 i want to see my little boy :') 🎶 (George Washington cradling Lafayette in his arms): here he comes,