#i love this essay so much

[fluffypotatey]

i Need to know about narrative vs Narrative(tm)

omfg baby that is my beloved magnum opus. my essay to end all essays. my pride and joy <3

made her after writing a silly shitpost about how Lego monkie kid has 2 narratives (the narrative written by the writers and the narrative™️ being forced upon the characters) because Lego Monkie Kid is a very meta show and plays with storytelling mechanics. so then i went, “wait a minute….what if i did expand on this” and now there’s a posted part 1 with the rest still in the works

i have been writing this essay for fun since fall 2023 finals (because what am i if not beginning a new project for funsies when i am supposed to be focused on writing academic papers ✌️) so like…. end of November(?) i think [nvm it was Nov. 9th i just checked lmao]

anyway,

this baby can fit sO much infodumping :D

i am 3704 words in now and only gotten as far as part 3 (but only three paragraphs in. so like….29% complete). this is essay is not at all formal, nor do i intend for it to be anything else other than a tumblr post. it is (said affectionately) a hot mess of an essay full of screaming and incoherent rambles that give you a pretty good idea on how my brain works

but yeah lemme give you a snippet of what i’ve got so far

The Hero’s Journey is a style of storytelling that moves in steps (acts) with your establishment of the status quo, the inciting incident that breaks the status quo, the rising actions, the climax, falling action, and resolution. “BUT FLUFFY!!!” you may be shouting at me, “is this not the steps we have for every story????”  Again: yes but also no. It’s hard for me to explain (without going further off tangent) but stories have different stakes and conflict resolution and sometimes there’s never a resolution, just catharsis— but this isn’t what I am here to talk about. Just know that Hero’s Journey follows this structure pretty strictly. But back to Percy Jackson. 

oh yeah, i uh, i use other pieces of fiction as examples of narrative mechanics and modern storytelling. that is also there

[waywardsunlight]

How do I tell my professor that there are Owl House spoilers in my essay

[rustbeltjessie]

We’re operating inside the religion of Capitalism, whose gospel is that there is not enough.6 Capitalism preaches the gospel of scarcity and, as such, demands we see scarcity everywhere. And if scarcity is nowhere to be found, it will be imposed. Among those imposed scarcities—of health, of food, of clean water, of adequate shelter, of comfort, of community, of meaning, of a future—is that of time. And to believe otherwise—in enough, say; in abundance, say; in gratitude, say; in the unmitigated, unbounded hang, say!—makes you blasphemous. Or a heathen. Or a criminal. Or out of your goddamned mind.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard conversations about W. H. Auden’s famous line from his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “poetry makes nothing happen.” I have been to panels titled such, where people have hand-wringing conversations about the political utility of poetry. You know, Can poetry be an agent of change? Can poetry interrupt a regime? Can poetry bring the masses into the streets to shut this thing down? Always invoked in these conversations are Neruda, whose poems, even the long ones, coal miners in Chile could recite. Or some Russian poets who filled stadiums because the people needed it, it was under the brutal repression of communism, etc. Seems to me those poets and attendees would’ve been sent to Siberia, or the gulag, but I guess that’s not the point. The point everyone insists on, desperately, is Wrong, W. H., poetry makes something happen!

At some point, probably I heard someone else say it,7 it occurred to me that all these poets, and all these conversations, were misreading Auden’s line, and that he was really talking about (inasmuch as a poem is him talking about something) what poetry makes, the sometimes product or effect or wake or artifact of poetry, of a poem. Granted the line feels emphatic, grand, provocative even—seriously, I can’t tell you how many tweed-jacketed refutations to Auden’s line I have endured; no one has ever explained to me the elbow patch—but what the line makes made is not nothing, but nothing happening. Or rather, nothing happening. The happening it makes is nothing. In other words, a poem, or poetry, can stop time, or so-called time at least. First of all, what a good reminder it is that a poem is an action, and as Auden has it, a powerful one, too. Secondly, and not for nothing, this is one of the suite of poems Auden wrote in the late thirties and early forties, a period when one might have wanted so-called time—the clock, the airplanes, the trains, the perfectly diabolical synchronous goosestep rhythm of time itself—to stop.

Unless of course you were the regime or IBM or Bayer or the arms manufacturers or the munitions makers or the other companies profiting from the slaughter—more sales more slaughter more sales more slaughter more sales 8 —unless you were among the prophets and profiteers of progress, which so often is another word for murder (albeit sometimes murder outsourced), you, too, might’ve been praying for a way to stop the march of so-called time, and poems, sometimes, might do that. Poems are made of lines, which are actually breaths, and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace and tempo of the body, the tempo of our bodies lit with our dying. And poems are communicated, ultimately, body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart.9 Even if those hearts are not next to one another, in space or time. It makes them so. All of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily, its earthly proportions. Poetry might make nothing happen. Inside of which anything can happen, maybe most dangerously, our actual fealties, our actual devotions and obligations, which is to the most rambunctious, mongrel, inconceivable assemblage of each other we could imagine.

You ever been on a dance floor like that? Ever on a basketball court like that? Ever in the long sweaty collaborative dream of an orchard like that? Ever in a study group like that? A potluck? Ever a forest? Ever a garden? Ever a conversation? A classroom? Ever an impromptu rendition of Shai’s “If I Ever Fall in Love”? Ever a Hula Hoop gang? Ever when making applesauce from the apples from your beloved neighbor’s tree? Ever when trying to get the steps from the video of New Edition’s “If It Isn’t Love”? Ever on your roller skates? Your skateboard? Ever making love? Ever at a laying on of hands? Ever in a dream?

[corpsentry]

pick your battles

[st-hedge]

I can’t believe they’d managed to animate kusuriuri’s insane character design and then decided to make it even more insane. The most character ever

[sabertoothwalrus]

my chilshi marriage comic is not only about to become my most popular dungeon meshi comic, but one of my most successful art posts ever??? which first of all I'm very grateful! I'm just really shocked cause 1. gen stuff tends to do better than ship, at least for this fandom 2. I didn't think that many people liked chilshi????

[greghatecrimes]

We always want to give our children what we never got for ourselves.

[woopsieswithnoh]

Sometimes, when I’m late on work for Uni, I hang up this picture of Gabriel to motivate me to do my work

He yelled at me enough when I tried to P-rank his fights, what difference does it make if he yells at me to do my work?

[dykedvonte]

Jimmy tries so hard to not let Anya haunt his narrative but she is his narrative and he hates that.

Everything loops back to what he did to her and every hallucination, action and choice he makes or does directly goes back to her and he deserves that strife. She persisted and spoke up and he hates her for it. He can erase her but not her presence over them and that’s the best type of ghost.

[linkedin-offficial]

hymnheart birds, better known as "hymns", or "travel mount" birds, are a genus of bird derivative from todays common flocking birds of sky (doves), and the less common nightbirds.

during the days of prosperity, these birds were bred to be large and capable of carrying many passengers, as skypeople flight was not a common form of travel. similarly, it wasnt uncommon to find a smaller version of these birds (usually bred by hand, and not by known breeders), meant for single person travel, that was also often used in racing. these lesser travel mounts are known to have sparked the use of mantas for racing and speedy travel, as mantas were faster and smaller, and functionally better for the same uses.

in modern day, these birds are considered to be extinct. after great technological advantages like flying boats becoming mainstream, and soon after the modernization of 'caped' flight, hymns numbers had begun to dwindle due to simply no longer needing them for their main purpose. unlike hymn travel however, manta riding remained persistent as a practice, as the species was abundant, and did not need skypeople aid to continue to breed.

few individuals, like those of the nester families, continued to breed these birds, but eventually discontinued the practice as it became laborious and took too much time.

[a-bisexual-panicking]

no words can describe how much i love Kaos.

it's the most accurate adaptation of greek myths i've ever seen (and yes, i believe it's better than percy jackson even if it has my whole heart).

as an autistic person with a greek mythology special interest, i am obsessing over the care for the details they put

SPOILERS FOR EVERYONE WHO HASN'T SEEN IT

example: Pasiphae, Ariadne's mother, was in the myths the mother of the Minotaur because, to say it very poorly, she fucked a sacred cow. So Ariadne's brother was the Minotaur. And she also had a brother named Glaucus (i have to research if they're twins or not)

another example? i have plenty of those

Caeneus being trans, the whole Troy thing (which i adored because i think it's both heartbreaking and a smart as fuck way to tell the myth), the Seven Trojans in the maze, Orpheus being a singer and convincing Persephone to let Eurydice go because "she likes his songs", the scene in the last episode where outside the underworld Eurydice begs Orpheus to look at her, Hades and his wife being the only ones with fucking logical thinking in their whole family, even the fact that everyone is gay it's somehow myth accurate

the only thing that i really don't like is the fact that they made Hera cheat on Zeus, she's the goddess of marriage and because of that she has never and would never cheat on her husband, even if she clearly doesn't like Zeus (still, i loved the way she behaved, "you're the king but i am the queen" was PERFECT to me)

so yeah basically go watch Kaos because it's neat and i love it and greek mythology and yeah

[turtleblogatlast]

I think a lot about Leo standing up for his brothers in the things that really matter to them.

Like- Leo is the one who immediately pushes Mikey and Donnie into finding Raph the second it’s clear that their oldest brother is missing because he knows Raph can’t handle being separated like that.

Leo is the one who stands up for Mikey when Mikey wants to go on a solo mission, actively vouching for him and being the one to convince Raph into letting Mikey go, because being independent and proving himself just as capable of standing on his own two feet as everyone else means so much to Mikey.

And Leo defends Donnie’s honor in particular when his brothers’ intelligence is insulted because Leo is well aware of how important Donnie’s smarts are to him - and how important having those smarts valued and acknowledged is as well.

All this goes right into just how well Leo knows his brothers. For as much as he’ll tease or fight with them, he knows them, and he loves them.

[k1tty5]

mezalean smalletho won’t leave my brain

closeups

and also extra doodles because i’m going to goinsane

[lazylittledragon]

hi i'm unw el l

[gummi-ships]

[daphnalia]

and they were galpals