#i love a metanarrative

[visenyaism]

*watching the play within the play that clearly highlights the themes of my narrative and foreshadows the circumstances and tone of my epic and tragic downfall while recontextualizing myself as an performer in a tragedy without any agency of my own* luckily all this stuff is random and fake

[a-treatise-on-velociraptors]

The Dracula Daily experience is so interesting on a third re-read. The first time reading was interesting for a similar reason--the small pieces of the story unfolding in real time allowing the horror of it to sink in, allowing for analysis and prediction and discussion to build on itself. But the third? We've been here before. We feel like we should have been here before. Jonathan has been here before--how could he not? We're sending him on his business trip again, watching him stumble into every choice because he can't change a bit of it, he's a book character he's not a person with agency but it feels like he should be because we've been on this ride twice now, both times over the same stretch of time as the characters. The reason the Daily experience is so interesting is it isn't like re-reading a book for the third time normally, where as much as you read with a new lens each time your pace will be different, you'll end up skimming over some things and focusing in on others. We're stuck on this train along with our good friend Jonathan Harker and it will move along the tracks as fast as Bram Stoker intended, goddammit. So we sit here yelling at this character written over a hundred years ago to just stop, turn around, don't start the story you're stuck in again. But he does.

[leletha-jann]

Favorite Footnotes of Girl Genius: An Appreciation (3/?)

The Professors Have Entered the Chat, Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg, page 141

Authorial voice of the self-insert characters who are writing the book you are reading, who can't resist commenting on their own presence in this story. We're several layers deep into the conceit and dropping. Love it.

[ilions-end]

i’m obsessed with how quintus’ need to make posthomerica so morally edifying accidentally makes him portray the most intriguing odysseus i’ve come across outside of homer

quintus is notoriously uncomfortable with heroes not acting upstanding all the time, or having conflicts with each other, so achilles and ajax and diomedes and neoptolemus and everyone else aren't really allowed to have complicated feelings about anything, and if they disagree with anyone, the Correct and Moral opinion always convinces everyone within a couple lines and then they're all friends again.

but quintus has to collect (mostly) all the events that take place between the iliad and the odyssey in one straightforward narrative, including several shady and self-serving things odysseus does, so quintus' solution is... he writes them but just doesn't comment on them. none of the characters seem to notice whenever odysseus lies or omits part of the truth or follows his own agenda; the text itself lets those moments slide past without acknowledgement. and all the while of course odysseus is also brave, and strong, and passionate and tactically brilliant. he IS undoubtedly a hero.

it makes for such a crazy metanarrative because on the surface odysseus is following the same kindergarten morals everyone else is, but secretly he's playing his own game! it feels like i'm a character in the story because i'm listening to odysseus describe something that happened in an earlier chapter, and i'm the ONLY ONE who goes "wait, that wasn't what happened. ...was it?" it makes me diegetically think "oh okay i need to keep an eye on this guy, he's got everyone else convinced". he's not evil, he's not a villain, he has a ton of positive attributes! but he's the only one in the story who knows how to lie (he even seems to lie TO the story), and that makes odysseus hold so much potential power and danger.

[the-shifting-long]

really weird to see a meme i made reposted to reddit and then reposted by the devs on the very social media i first made the meme and also that they blocked me on.

it's not my Main so i'm still able to check their blog and see insights and such that i'd honestly love to share but. c'est la vie i guess.

[nenoname]

the experience of reading stan twins fics and being constantly haunted by a name

[bagelarts]

i'm late for rock day, but in rock's mind every day is rock day

[eleiyaumei]

My brain after reading about Mystic Messenger's secret metanarrative:

(I already don't like the Mint Eye metanarrative but this... is churning up my insides >.< Can't MM be just about character development and relationships? ^^')

Person on deviantart who saw the parallels back when DDLC came out

[waitingforsecretsouls]

Zahard x Arlene is SO "strangles you with the red thread tying us together" core... Zahard remaining haunted by Arlene's prophecy for the rest of his life and Arlene devoting the rest of HER life to her all consuming hatred for Zahard and setting said prophecy of his downfall into motion.

Forget about her so far pretty generic romance with V, (often further distilled down into the blandest possible core of m/f ('he was a boy, she was a girl', 'wholesome') without even acknowledging the edges canon gives them (going to war together - the whole "battle couple" thing you could make out of that alone - , what about their underlying ideals? Edahn doesn't mention Arlene as particularly taken with Tower residents and even acting as frequent intermediary between Zahard and V, so how did they mesh in that regard? Having to watching it all crumble, slipping away as literal fugitives, the breakdown of their relationship potentially even prior but definitely following their sons murder, etc.)), Zahard and Arlene is where it's at. It's literally the dynamic that created the plot of Tower of God.

[unionizedwizard]

man. i just had the single most emotionally scarring dream ever. and this is coming from someone who only ever has nightmares and awful stress dreams. what the fuck

[scribefindegil]

Ever since I first listened to the Wintersmith album (periodic reminder that if you like Discworld you should absolutely listen to the Wintersmith album) I've been haunted by visions of a stage musical. You'd have a Narrator character to do exposition and voiceovers, like in The Good Witch song on the album. And they'd wear a very particular hat. And for the whole play no one would acknowledge them. Maybe they'd even get to a closing monologue, tell the audience that it's the end. And only then would Tiffany turn around and look at them for the first time, as the opening notes of We Shall Wear Midnight start playing.

[craftlands]

i need everyone to know that while the chance of Horropedia having read House of Leaves is incredibly low, it is not zero if he's from Los Angeles specifically -- while the book was first published in March of 2000, there were print copies of the rough draft circulating around tattoo parlors and similar in the late 1990s, and also allegedly a website hosting PDF versions of at least part of those rough drafts

[phosphoresccent]

storyteller xephos headcanons (honeyphos)

consider, if you will, a storyteller!xephos who became a god after the grief of feeling honeydew's soul unravel grew so great he forced the very narrative to give him the power to change it.

but there are some things beyond even him - even now - he can't fix the unraveling, only halt it in place like an insect in amber. he keeps him close but carefully doesn't think about what he's keeping close, lest the weight of it tear him apart

forcing his friends to play through a 100 lives and deaths, combing through memory and interaction to build back up something of honeydew's soul, but unable to admit to himself what hes looking for - still trying to see the edge of honeydew's dry humour in one of lalna's jokes

honeydew there, unable to really communicate, halfway into not being anything anymore, having to watch his friend tear himself to shreds looking for scraps of him, who gets pieced together into being again, having to be more and more present as xephos forgets himself in his grief, but still really only worried about how guilty xephos might feel, and feeling guilty himself because of it but "only xeph remembers, the poor sod. it's like it didn't even happen, to the others."

the insane bias towards eachother that doesn't need to be romantic but is very "you are the only other real person in the world, to me" -

[carlyraejepsans]

bad character take on the tl, 13 dead 300+ messages in #bad-opinion-zone

[canary-song]

Noir's universe is a 21st-century telling of a Noir-genre-alike but still visibly full of era inaccuracies and 21st Century stylistic flairs to me. Incongruous with any true time period and more stage-drama than grit with lots of monologuing.

Pete's universe would be either rotoscoped or filmed if we'd permit such a sharp divergence in style - and perhaps hand-colored. Realistic and weighty and just a bit less forgiving.

[overcaststargazing]

today at work (for a state agency) a kid told me that she noticed we all have pronoun pins on our lanyards. and then they shared their own pronouns with me!!! which wouldn't have happened if i wasn't being brave with my own pronouns on my lanyard in this horrible horrible world!!! i made a little queer kid feel safe in a government building despite despite despite. we are important. being yourself is IMPORTANT. but god is it hard.