#i hate that book with PASSION

[salisburyliam]

no achievement in the world will make me replay sophie's ten wishes.

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[derangedthoughtssideblog]

thought about enjolras for 2 minutes. now i'm deeply unwell

[haridraws]

behold: the (american) COVER REVEAL FOR MY NEW BOOK ✨

WHAT

queer regency rom-com graphic novel, out later this year

repressed period drama LONGING

vaguely chaotic Austen-ish mashup plot

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

n-b transmasc love interest, let's go

the inherent absurd comedy (tragicomedy?) of people assuming you're cis or straight despite literally all the evidence

🎩☕

inspired by pre-victorian queer history!!!! & real histories of marginalised people that rarely get taught in schools!!!!!

decolonial undertones... come for the lovely fun queer romance, stay for the gateway ideas deconstructing the regency genre

---

Now available to pre-order, or

Hear when it comes out here

[orangechickenpillow]

Howl Pendragon as a character prepared me for Astarion Ancunin and I feel like I can't really explain that to anyone who doesn't just get it like you have to have been there when Howl turned himself into literal goop because his hair was dyed one (1) shade redder than usual

[anxiouspotatorants]

Actually you know what I need to rant about this: while literati is technically a good girl x bad boy dynamic it is written so incredibly well and avoids so many pitfalls and stereotypes that it makes a good girl x bad boy hater like myself (I’m only half joking — I don’t think any trope is inherently good or bad but I tend to dislike most pairings with this dynamic) fall head over heels for their story and relationship.

So much of what makes the two of them work is the contrast between how others perceive them and how they truly are. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people who understand who Rory is as a person (Lorelai, Lane, Paris, Richard and Emily to a certain degree for starters), but she's constantly met with the expectation that she just does good and is supposed to make everyone proud 24/7. Stars Hollow as a group especially are big on this, as seen f. ex. through how Taylor takes Rory's one comment about an inappropriate DVD and twists the whole thing into a censorship crusade and makes Rory its poster-child even though she wants nothing to do with it and tells him so repeatedly. But instead of hearing Rory disagree with him (like he would Lorelai and Luke) he assumes that she actually agrees with him - and why shouldn't she when she's the perfect sunshine paragon of good who would never disagree with her elders? Also her grandparents treat her as incredibly fragile and childlike, like she must be too innocent to ever do anything wrong and so whenever she does something it has to be somebody else's fault (usually Lorelai, but occasionally Jess or whoever else was present). Time and time again Rory is treated like something innocent and naive and weak — but not by Jess. He sees her as a person.

And it obviously goes the other way too. Jess is treated like shit by pretty much everyone else. Either people hate him unprovoked or very much provoked (he did do a lot of pranks in his first few weeks and while I'm a Dean-hater I'm not blind to how much Jess picked fights with him), or they’ve simply given up on him. He tells Rory himself that every authority figure he had back in New York gave up on him too, from teachers to principals to his very own mother. But Rory doesn’t treat him like a lost cause, she treats him like the smart, brilliant and asshole-ish teen that he is. By having faith in him she also often holds him more accountable than others. Where f. ex. Lorelai or the other adults just roll their eyes, Rory physically drags Jess into doing his shifts at the diner. While others write him off, Rory chews Jess’ ear out for not helping Luke more and for willfully making enemies out of the Stars Hollow adults.

They don't put each other on pedestals or below each other. Jess doesn’t try to make a sinner out of Rory and she doesn’t try to make a saint out of him. There’s genuine respect between them. They expect each other to have integrity and treat others with kindness and honesty, and the rest is good old chemistry and common interests.

I particularly love how in so many of their scenes (especially pre-relationship) when they spend time alone they just get to be these goofy nerdy kids. They argue about controversial authors and dig through records shops and eat hot dogs and make fun of each other and try to make each other laugh. It’s not just sexual chemistry as it too often is in a dynamic like this (and often uncomfortably sexual when writing teenagers - looking at you Gossip Girl), and not just well written intellectual chemistry — they have platonic chemistry too. A hell of a lot of it actually.

While I don’t think ASP wrote them through a purely deconstructionist lens on the good girl x bad boy dynamic (if she did plan on writing the dynamic at all), there is something to be said about how where many around them treat them like stereotypes they treat each other like people. To so many people, Rory is a perfect small town princess, a little miss sunshine with booksmarts for days but too delicate and sweet for anything with grit and weight. To a lot of the same people and many more Jess is a pathetic brutish and maniacal lost cause, hell personified in a chainsmoking leather-wearing teenager. But to each other they are actual human beings. Kind and mean and flirtatious and scared and reckless and smart. Rory really thinks that with the right motivation and mindset Jess can be the kind who does (and at the end wrote) incredible things. Jess really believes that with a little more practice and support to step out of her comfort zone she can be the amazing journalist she wishes to be.

They don’t have this stupid «we’re so bad for each other but we can’t stay away» thing that too many trope users rely on and don’t even justify in the plot. Everyone else might think they’re not fit for each other, but they knew they were each other’s person from the very first day.

[ofmermaidstories]

a little concerned about the number of adults im seeing on twitter who think YA should be for them, and not like… the young adults aka teens it’s intended for??? get the fuck out of their space!!! “oh i don’t want to read about smut all the time” ok there’s like a million other genres for you to choose from…. go pick one!!!!

[sapphiresenthiss]

So I found this several years old gem of a sketch in my old scraps folder... and finally decided to post it because why not. Nostalgia.

RIP Harry. Also Voldemort is secretly 2% cat and only 98% snake 😂

[helen-cooper-fan-account]

I believe that people are allowed to like bad movies but every time someone says they like the miss peregrines movie I feel such intense physical pain it’s unreal

[trailerparkdad]

welcome to the life of a quiet lab technician

[foreststarflaime]

I did my part today in The Bad Class, it was me in the trenches with one other guy defending stories told in mediums other than books against the world (the entire rest of the class) 🫡 (things I used below the cut)

It saddens me that the academic community is so biased towards anything other than published books. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a writer myself and I adore books, but they’re missing out on so many good stories that hit so much harder in mediums other than words on a page!!! ✨Stories of all kinds are equally precious✨ pass it on

Defending movies: Inception!!! If you’ve not seen it, it deals a lot with dreams and layers of dreaming, and thinking about reality. In it, there’s a gimmick where you have a certain ‘totem’ (item) that you can use to determine if you’re in a dream or awake, and the main character’s is a top—if he’s in a dream, it will never stop spinning, but if it’s reality, the top will eventually be stopped by gravity. (Spoiler alert) At the end of the movie, the mc finally gets home to his kids like he’s been trying to the whole movie, and as he embraces them in the background a little out of focus, you see his top on the table, spinning—and right before you could expect it to start to wobble, the soundtrack peaks (thank you Hans Zimmer you master) and cuts off and the screen goes black, leaving you to your own conclusions. It’s such an effective moment and it really would not be the same in a book!

Defending video games: Crisis Core lmao. I love how it uses game mechanics to characterize Zack in such a unique and creative way!!! The DMW is the main thing that comes to mind here, in particular in the final battle, but over the whole game and how it gets you used to it as well. You get a new thing every time Zack gets a new friend, and that’s the source of your strongest attacks throughout the game, a thing you’re constantly thinking about and relying on—which is such a cool way to characterize Zack, because then you realize your thought process has basically been turned into his! He loves his friends, they’re everything to him, and they’re the source of his strength! Which makes the final battle so so devastating when they’re fading away and you get to see, nay experience, his last thoughts as they’re happening. It’s so devastating in a way I’ve rarely been devastated before, and it would not be the same in words. Also there’s the funny haha that this adhd puppy’s brain runs on gambling because he has to get extremely lucky to be able to focus on anything lmaooo

Defending comic books: Loki Agent of Asgard!!!! My beloved! So this is the comic book run where Loki becomes the god of stories, and everything about how it was done here is just. SO so genius. When I say these comic books were a formative experience for me I mean it. But I’ll focus on the things that were great specifically because of the medium here, otherwise I’d be gushing for hours. Yknow how comic books generally have little narrator text bubbles telling you what you need words to describe? And then maybe have a different one for the thoughts of the character? Well this had that, and the narrator bubbles were styled like little scrolls. When you get towards the end of the run, after Loki has realized his power as the god of stories, you get to a part where he’s facing the gods of the gods, telling them a story—and then the little narrator scrolls have the speech bubble thing drawn off from them, to Loki. It’s been him as the god of stories narrating his own story the entire time, writing his own destiny. Such a powerful moment, blew my mind—you could do something similar in a normal book I guess, but it was just so impactful here that I think it wouldn’t be exactly the same. And also, earlier (I think in the second volume), a different future version of Loki is time travelling using his story god powers to write the past to his own ends (you don’t know his connection to story yet, so this is an example of such good foreshadowing), and to do this he reaches out of the panel and jumps into the margins to travel around the story!!! Mind-blowing stunning 1000/10

The strength of books: I just realized why I like my specific imagery-laden style of writing so much in the middle of class while I was explaining this. So in On Fairy Stories (the book the discussion was about for the day), Tolkien talks about how the invention of the adjective was the most important thing for the invention of fantasy, because it helps you change things—for example you can say things like the red sky or the green sun, and people can imagine that. There’s a linguistic concept called mental models which explores how we think in metaphors to understand more abstract concepts—for example, a lot of people tend to view how electricity works in terms of the flow of water. In fantasy, we can take our words and especially our adjectives and metaphors, and we can craft new mental models that wouldn’t work in the real world, and create our own worlds doing that to great effect. I find myself doing this SO much now that I think about it! And that’s something you can do really really well with words that doesn’t lend itself as well to adaptations in other mediums.

And that’s the thing, really—you can do things to amazing effect if you write them using the strengths of the medium you choose! That’s why adaptations rarely work I think, people just don’t play to the strengths.

[varpusvaras]

My wife and I just spent over three hours hatewatching a movie that is less than two hours long...we had to pause every two minutes at the start and multiple times later on because we kept losing our fucking minds over and over again

[mixelation]

Is there anyone in ANBU who likes Tori? aNYBODY???

no :)

(realistically probably there are people who don't mind her as a person but are like "OH GOD NO" at the prospect of working with her. like shisui doesn't dislike her THAT much; he just recognizes she'd be a nightmare to work with)

[lizzyaka]

I honestly feel kind of uncomfortable posting about the secret history and it makes me so sad bc its my favorite book and i mainly made this blog to talk about it

[bonefall]

And not all DC fans are mad! I was happy when Leafpool beat Starfire, and I was pleased with Bumble winning too. (Epilepsy dad here, who is a comics fan, and has 4 kids who love reading the warrior cat books and have the Minifig warriors become superheroes In the Gotham city I hot as a kid) im digressing here: What keeps the warrior cats fandom strong is how you all form up around the cats that were mistreated by the writers, how you bring them into your homes and hearts and make better features for them. My Amuma always used to say if enough people believed in something, then maybe their will can change the world.

Always good to see you around!

This vitriol has been super disappointing, y'know? I feel like I have to keep stressing that DC fans are valid, their frustrations with the comics are well-founded, and Bumble's opponents should also be acknowledged as victims of misogyny

And then we don't get that grace back! Doesn't matter that Warriors is a best-selling kids' series with REALLY harmful messages in it read by millions across the globe. Bumble's "just a cat" and we're "reading too much into it." As if that's not the same shit that gets said about misogyny in media broadly; "They're not real, comics are just for fun, you're reading too much into it"

Now people are like "Oh it was a mistake for WARRIOR CATS to be in this poll" because they're mad our "just a cat" is winning. Like it's not a tournament and that's the whole point. We've got people trying to say that Bumble can't even have misogyny happen to her because the human writers superficially made her a cat, as if she's not a fantasy character like every other fantasy character she's been up against.

But, ugh. I won't let it stop me, y'know? StarClan gives its hardest battles to its strongest warriors ✨✨I will never shut up about the "justa cats," this fandom rocks exactly because of the fact we're so passionate about these issues and how to address and fix them, Bumblesweep FOREVER!

[justiceforplutoo]

the thing about reading classics is that people have really high standards of what makes a classic and expecting to understand everything really ruins the whole experience. I started with 1984 and, yes, that impacted me, but I put too much pressure on myself to like and understand it the first go round.

a classic book is just a book.

you don't have to understand it. you don't have to like it.

sure, you can read Frankenstein and be like, "Wow, I sure loved analyzing this text. I feel so smart." OR you can let yourself underline the part that says, "I was encompassed by a cloud which no beneficial influence could penetrate." and write 'no beneficial influence could WHAT NOW?!'

be silly. yeah, it's really rewarding and cool to read a classic and devote your whole life to understanding every sentence and making all the connections, but also... just let yourself read it? have fun with it? you're allowed to hate a classic book (Catcher in the Rye) even if it's a classic. you're allowed to be traumatized by a classic book (Of Mice and Men) even if it's a classic.

I think that a lot of this is common knowledge, but we also need to give ourselves the reminder! it is just a book! how it impacts you as a book should not change just because it's a classic!