#i need to go to the bog

[strawberryamanita]

@Besties looking for inspiration for art, be it drawn or written:

Create about the cranberry bog.

Put your favorite characters or OCs or 'sonas in the cranberry bog. Put yourself in the cranberry bog, even.

Let them experience the cranberry bog. Let them wade in it. Let them take in the Summer Sun above them. Let them feel joy and sorrow and fear and peace and catharsis in the cranberry bog.

Let them harvest some berries from the cranberry bog. Maybe they'll eat them later, maybe they won't, idk if they like cranberries.

But they will experience the bog.

[egginfroggin]

Shooting Star

(Frantically telling myself that I'm not going to do this with every member of the zodiac, I'm not gonna do a monochrome portrait of each of them with their symbol in gold haloing their head, I'm not gonna do that I'm not I'm not gonna - *thinks about how to pose Dipper and the grunkles* frickign dang it)

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

phillies i really get it. he’s so perfect. like i understand and if i had better taste and more self respect i’d be right there with you because look at him. he’s so silly and dumb. exquisite.

[wishing-well-art]

The one thing about Arcane season 2 that I'm still a little bit mad about is that Vi and Jinx never really talked. They had a total of 2 conversations in season 1, one where they got interrupted and Jinx was never able to tell Vi what happened in the 7 years Vi was in prison, and the second where Vi still had no clue what was going on. But that's fine, miscommunication that befalls tragedy, it's intentional, and character-wise Jinx wasn't in that kind of headspace for that to happen. But then season 2 rolls around and at no point in season 2 did they sit down and talk about what went wrong, why they made the decisions they did, and try to understand each other. We never even got a loud fight where they unloaded all the negative feelings they had towards each other, or a quiet painful confession that they felt like failures towards each other. They had so much down time that we should've seen all that, the fight in the mines and the talk in the commune should've been that, but they only barely skimmed the surface. Did Vi even find out about Jinx being injected with shimmer? Did Jinx ever find out why Vi left her that night? No, they didn't, and that's just such a shame.

[captainrufflebanger]

Every day I inch closer to changing my DNI rule from 18 to 21 istg

I realize the 2nd Twitter exodus is happening but I do not have time to block every account promoting re8, a MATURE RATED GAME, to minors.

This is also just my blog for everything and I'm a 30-year old woman who likes hitting reblog on posts about sex AND filing taxes. Easy enough not to hit the follow button if that's not for you.

[whaliiwatching]

CRINGE BUT FREE ERA

[incomingalbatross]

Sooo... I just watched Labyrinth, and I remember seeing some posts of yours talking about how it's good and similar to other stories (like OTGW). And in some ways, I see that? But also like.... I need a little help making any sense of it, lol

Sorry, I know this is super random, but I was just curious to find out why you like it and what you see in it, so I thought I'd ask!

Of course, I'm happy to talk about Labyrinth! :) Thank you for the ask!

(Disclaimer that I haven't watched it in a year or two, but I still remember it fairly well.)

In terms of similarity to OTGW: both stories center on a teenage protagonist who is a dreamer, but too caught up in themselves, and to some extent running away from their life. This manifests PARTICULARLY in their neglected and/or rejected responsibility to their younger half-brother. They end up in a liminal, otherworldly space that operates on much more narrative logic than they're used to, and can only save their lives/souls and make it home again by saving said younger brothers first.

Sarah rejects her brother at the beginning of her story, while Wirt abandons his care for Greg near the end, but you can see the similar beats there, right? They're both dealing with normal teenage stress + the stress of parental divorce (probably) and remarriage, and seeing their younger brothers as an emblem of Everything Wrong In Their Lives. In reality, their younger brothers are forcing them to live in reality, where they have duties and connections to other people, and can only find maturity/fulfillment through embracing that.

Jareth and the Beast are also very similar figures, I think; Jareth is a more seductive tempter figure, playing to Sarah's ego and to romance tropes, while the Beast plays with hope and despair. But they are both trickster figures who use bargains -- seeming windows of hope -- to entrap vulnerable mortals (Wirt and Greg, in the Beast's case).

AND. Both Jareth and the Beast are defeated by someone calling them out as empty and powerless! Wirt says, "this is dumb," and demolishes the Beast's entire facade -- he's not keeping souls in the lantern, he's the one dependent on the lantern, and he can't keep Wirt or Greg if they're ready to go home. Sarah's "You have no power over me" has the exact same weight -- it's wrapped up in theatrics of these being Specific Magic Words, but it's the meaning of them that shatters Jareth's power and sends her and Toby home.

In both stories, evil tries very, very hard to convince these kids that they need it. Jareth wraps it up in a lot more complicated temptations -- I'll make you happy, I'll make you powerful, I'll give you glamorous parties and material comfort and everything you ever wanted if you fall down and worship me -- while the Beast sticks to a brute-force message of despair, with the crumbs he offers as all that there is -- "There is only my way." But in both cases, the message is: you need me.

And in both stories the protagonists go: No. I don't need you. I don't need anything from you. In fact, you have nothing to give.

At which point it's revealed that evil needed them. Needed them to buy into its strength, its ability, its substance -- or it doesn't have any. It crumbles away, and they go home.

...So! Those are the big similarities between them, I think, for me? I like Labyrinth, as its own movie, because I like the classic fairy-tale structure of "the fairies/goblins/elves took my loved one because I messed up, and now I gotta get them back the hard way." I love the atmosphere of the Labyrinth and Sarah's friends (though your mileage may definitely vary on this movie, depending on your tolerance for Henson Creations ;P). I love Sarah, who messes up, but who is still plucky and brave and kind through most of her trials! The friendship between her and Hoggle (...a Woodsman parallel?) is my favorite. And while I'm very much in the minority of this fandom in not really feeling Jareth's appeal, as a villain I think David Bowie does an excellent, glittery job. And we get music.

[bogunicorn]

I honestly think I would be more willing to engage with harsher critiques of Veilguard if so many of them didn't seem to include projecting malice or cowardice onto the developers and/or frankly really insulting blanket statements about how people who don't agree with said harsh critique are only disagreeing because they have a child's sense of fantasy and don't like feeling complicated emotions with consequences in their fiction.

Both of them annoy me but the idea of someone looking at me, of all people, and saying "well you don't agree with me because you want a story that puts you in a safe bubble that's never sad or conflicted or realistic" is absurd. Like, no, I just think some of the basis of your analysis is kind of bothersome and flawed because you keep assigning motivations to strangers and then arguing with a guy you personally made up, and my willingness to suspend disbelief and engage with a piece of fiction on its own terms isn't proof that I'm a baby or a coward just because it would make you feel smarter if that was the case.

And there is a world of difference between "the story's perspective softballs X or pulls punches with Y", and "the writers are cowards who don't want you to deal with consequences because there's something wrong with them artistically and morally". That's fucked up, projecting malice onto someone you don't know and whom all evidence suggests (both by their own words the last few months and by past storylines they've written for Dragon Age) would actually probably agree with your critiques and agree that they'd either done things different or had been ALLOWED to do things different. It ALSO makes for less coherent critiques because some of your analysis is based off of, frankly, an underlying motivation that is literally just made up of your own personal projection of what other real humans were thinking (which conveniently fits the narrative you already want to spin), rather than interrogating the perspective of the narrative itself on its own terms, where all of the pieces are fully available to you.

Works of fiction carry unintended perspectives all the time, it's a whole thing, and you can engage with that without assigning cruelty or cowardice or malicious stupidity to a small group of real human beings that you do not know and did their job in circumstances that we as fans will never know the extent of. You have no idea if "the devs" as you conceptualize them are actually at fault for the things you have such harsh feelings about, or why that thing happened or whatever, because big media projects like video games have hundreds of hands on them and many people making decisions whose names we will never know because they're just not pulling PR duty or whatever.

And when it comes to other fans, unless someone outright states their feelings on something, you actually don't know if any individual person agrees or disagrees with you for a good or bad reason about something as subjective and low stakes as a video game. Imagining that anyone who enjoys something that you don't as a dumb idiot baby too stupid to see what you see is pretty gross.

I am, as ever, not saying that anyone must like or dislike something, or that liking or disliking something means you're smarter or stupider than anyone else. It bothers me when analysis in these spaces seems to reserve all of its empathy for fictional characters and leaves little of it left for the actual people that are in these spaces or made the work that's being analyzed.

[seaglassdinosaur]

Eternally grateful that Cressida Cowell didn’t involve a romantic subplot in the How To Train Your Dragon series.

[scentedluminarysoul]

As an older person who's been active in fandom and shipping for literally over 20 years now, this current trend I see in fandom spaces is frightening

People are trying to defend and explain away every problematic in the media they like, because they feel like they're morally bad for liking things with problematic topics

They're obsessed with only liking morally good and perfect things. They cannot allow themselves to like anything less than morally pure

So what they're doing is they're looking at something that they know is bad, and then try and explain it away, using pop-psy to "explain" why it's actually NOT problematic and it's good actually, you just don't get it

When in reality, what you should do, and what's helpful to do, is recognizing these problematic things, acknowledge them as problematic, become aware that in reality, these would be really bad and understand WHY. And then move on and still enjoy the thing because it's fiction

You are allowed to like fiction with bad topics and bad implications. It doesn't make you a bad person

When someone tells you they're an abuse survivor and they recognize a lot of what happened to them in that media you like, you shouldn't then go: "No, actually, you're wrong for seeing it that way and you're just uninformed and don't know what you're talking about and it's not even really abuse because (xyz) and (random invented caveats) and you're stupid for even thinking that."

Because here's thing: different people will view the same thing from different angles. And that's okay. Normal even. Expected and good. You cannot hurt a fictional character by calling them an abuser.

You can, however, hurt a real person by telling them that the abuse they suffered wasn't *really* abuse and that they're just too stupid to know what they're talking about. (This is especially egregious in gaslighting survivors imho, but I'm biased here)

Excusing abuse and making up rules as to why it's not ~technically~ abuse in the first place? That's what abusers do, sorry to say.

All this to say:

You are allowed to like things that have bad topics. It doesn't make you a bad person.

You are allowed to recognize "oh man, this main character is really sexist" and then go on watching the show and have fun with it

You are allowed to recognize "oof, that main couple is pretty abusive" and then go on to root for them

It's GOOD to recognize issues in the stuff you like, to critically engage with it

And still liking it doesn't make you a bad person, far from it

I keep coming back to that point because that's the crux of the current fandom purity culture going on:

People seem to have collectively decided that thought crimes exist

They don't. What you consume in fiction says NOTHING about who YOU ARE as a person, about your morals and convictions

But how you engage with media, and other people with differing opinions does

[youngpettyqueen]

sometimes you need to have life-altering realizations, cry about them, and then move on be fine and figure something else out

[thekimspoblog]

Is the video game really subverting its genre? Are you sure it's not just doing clever things within its genre, because otherwise the game would be boring and unchallenging and say nothing interesting? I'm just saying, it's cool and all that the internet allows horror game fandoms to overflow into eachother, but not EVERY 2 hour video essay needs to be spent breathlessly sucking off the devs. Sometimes a game is just REGULAR difficult and REGULAR high-quality.

Besides RPGs made over a decade ago, what is the thing supposedly subverting? Clearly not other contemporary indie horror games, because there is clearly a convergent ethos forming of cosmic horror and beginners' traps; that's just what the genre looks like nowadays.

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

rewatching dead poets society for the first time in 4 years and i had to pause to make this it came to me in a Vision:

[samipekoe]

I have to say, I don't fully understand the ship since I haven't finished DM yet, but you certainly make it look appealing at the very least. Thank you for sharing your passions, and please continue to do so!

🥲 THANK YOU... I'll continue to publicly mutter to myself about larcille...!!!!

[dramas-vs-novels]

Prapai is celibate-ish for 3 months after having sex with Sky at the race Rain fled from.

The portion of Love Storm AFTER the race takes place over... two months. One month to bed Payu, and he takes Rain to the race where they meet Stop which, monthly races, means it was a month later.

So by this logic... The entire courting of Sky would have to take place over a month...

But we've seen now three races in the Love Sky portion itself, which would make this 9 months from the first race Sky went to, not half a year. It has, however, been half a year since he fucked Prapai stupid.

TIMELINES, SKY, TIMELINES.

[incandescentflower]

Me just sitting here going UGGGHH I have feeelllings what do I dooo with them???

a sign of a good drama