#its gonna be fine. because I'm a fucking coward so I'll never do it anyway. but I fucking wish I could

[luxpenumbra]

ugh ohmygod so I saw this post and it made me so mad that I simultaneously wanted to reblog it just to rant in the tags and to not reblog it so that I could avoid sharing it with /more/ people

listen. music is universal. when a singer, songwriter, producer, lyricist, musician, team puts something out into the world, there may be emotions that they are trying to put into it. They will draw on these emotions as they perform and edit and refine this thing they are making. There may be a story they are trying to tell, an experience they are trying to communicate, and this may not be straightforward; there is a level of abstraction between conceptualization and realization that I am convinced exists to some level in all pieces of art like this. This is not a flaw; this is marvellous. When I the listener interact with a song, or an album, or an artist's entire body of work - the emotions that I feel and the story that is conveyed to me may be just. absolutely different from the artist's intentions and their own experience. It may resonate with me in an entirely different way than intended; it may resonate with someone else in a separate, distinct, discrete way. My and others' awareness of the artist and any context they have made clear may play a part in this or it may not; it depends on how I interact with music and how readily available this information is.

All this is to say: the only fucked up thing with this whole gaylor shit is the part where people are convinced that their interpretation of her music and the way it resonates with them indicates some fundamental truth about her identity. The only person who knows that is her and frankly it's none of anyone else's business and it's probably not that interesting anyway. But!!! this does not mean that her music cannot resonate with someone's experience of queerness!!!! It is story and song and a vehicle for emotion, and the details that make something sing true to someone's life and values are not pinned to the artist's "true identity" like a fuckin. butterfly to a corkboard. there is VALUE and DELIGHT in being aware of some additional dimension of queerness by virtue of the singers intentions or identity or whatever but that's a fucking BONUS you NIMRODS the only thing you need is a heart to feel things and a song to feel them about it's about YOU and how you interpret things. you change things just by existing!!! the only person to experience a song the way you do is YOU!!! "if I wanna listen to gay music I'll listen to gay ppl singing about gay sex" good for you!! but what a sad and limited life you must lead to need the significance and meaning of art spoonfed to you by author bios.

AND THEN. fucking condescending ass AAAAAAAH listen. christian rock can slap. i say this as someone who is markedly not christian. and even if you don't think it slaps that's fine. but the fact that someone's out here going "oh poor limited babies who've never listened to real proper good music before projecting sasanaru onto christian rock because they've never known anything else" grow uppppp!!! first of all!!! nobody. NOBODY. is out here saying 10,000 reasons by matt whatever is about sasuke and naruto kissing. you know this in your heart of hearts, just like you know deep down that there is VALUE in eking out meaning in places where you don't expect to find it, and in places that have some connection to the earliest parts of you. (and even if you aren't doing this, aren't interacting with the context of the music and its genre, see above re:universal fucking language). you've probably done it before. it's tumblr, land of transformative works and webweaving of course you have. how limited in scope must you be to think that people who listen to a genre you don't value but who are also queer or something must be just poor deprived children, limited in resource, waiting for that next evolution i'm gonna weep. anyway listen to relient k cowards

[multi-lefaiye]

hi feel free to talk about how you'd rewrite other episodes of the lost tapes

hi hello thank you for the opportunity!!!

okay so. there's a lot of episodes of lost tapes. there's a good chunk of them i'm not touching with a ten-foot pole and think should be scrapped (such as the episodes that appropriate and misrepresent Indigenous cultures b/c Ooooh Scary or w/e the fuck). but there are several that i think have the potential to be interesting and good stories.

anyway, i'm not gonna go as in-depth about the others as i did for the dover demon episode, but i'll list some episodes and like. one or two changes i'd make to make them better. wahoo! i'll mainly do the ones i listed earlier, but maybe i'll list a couple additional ones.

general change: honestly i think all of these stories would benefit from ditching the documentary aspect and just telling their stories. please don't spend half the episode trying to convince me that it's all real and every scientist who disagrees is lying to you, just tell the story you want to tell.

chupacabra - i'm gonna be honest that i think the border patrol agents in this episode should not be portrayed NEARLY as positively as they are if they're going to make an appearance, and maybe if this episode really wanted to use that plotline it'd be good to examine how THEY come into play when people die trying to cross the border into the U.S. (actually now that i think about it, maybe a storyline that focuses more on that with the monster as more of a backdrop could be interesting.)

bigfoot - no notes, this one's fine.

monster of monterey - aside from some logistical things (like how this girl has such a good skype connection in the middle of the ocean), no real notes, this one's alright.

swamp creature - i actually like this one a lot too but i think it'd benefit also from making the characters into... y'know... characters. not just monster fodder.

oklahoma octopus - set it somewhere besides oklahoma (a notoriously landlocked state which has no direct ties to any kind of ocean) and maybe i'll suspend my disbelief enough to accept literally any of the events in this story. i actually don't mind how unlikable some of the characters are here, but if they were more well-rounded i'd probably care more about what happens to them.

death raptor - i actually like this one? it's cheesy and kinda weird but it's not bad. but i think the parents letting a fucking ghost hunting crew take their traumatized young daughter back to the place she was traumatized so she can relive her trauma for their little show is uh. unrealistic at best. so the story should rely on something else.

megaconda - make them gay. lost tapes isn't the kind of show i'd really go to for good queer rep but i think it'd be nice to have something, i guess. i do like that the capitalist dies at the end, though, that's good, no notes on that one. (though i do think maybe the implications of a gigantic fucking snake that can and will attack people being loose in a city should be addressed a little more!)

mothman - this is the perfect episode actually, at least in terms of its story. in execution it's a little clumsy but there's not much in the way of Glaring Issues i want to fix.

death worm - i mean as per usual i just wish these were characters and not monster fodder. i don't even feel bad that the one guy's wife will never know what happened to him because he's barely a character. (also i think it might actually be interesting if you had some kind of queer elements here as well, but again lost tapes isn't the place i'd go to for queer rep in general. i'm just saying if you're gonna reference brokeback mountain, don't be a fucking coward and do something with it.)

hellhound - honestly i think if this just had some room to breathe this episode would be just fine. also if the characters had more Character.

okay i'll do the other seasons under the cut

vampire - genuinely no notes, this episode is actually really interesting, and i think if it had room to breathe this story would be really good.

lizard man - story-wise this is fine, but logistics-wise the suspension of disbelief is a bit hard to secure here. i don't expect a full backstory on the monster, but you expect me to believe this tiny neighborhood has a full grown lizard human in the sewers and he kills everyone he encounters and no one's noticed until literally now? okay. also the cat survives and is unharmed.

southern sasquatch - this one's actually fine i think? it's a decent horror story, and if it had room to breathe i think it'd be alright. my only question is why we need this episode AND a regular bigfoot episode.

werewolf - this might be nitpicky but the werewolf element is really minimized and i think there's a lot of missed potential in just having her be like. a girl with sharp teeth, rather than a fucking Beast And A Monster. like i love the concept of werewolf attacks being viewed by local authorities as a run-of-the-mill serial killer, but nothing is really done with the werewolf part.

death crawler - i only mention this episode to say that i'm scrapping it purely because i hate it on a conceptual level. is the story bad? not necessarily, but i dislike it.

white river monster - i mean it's kinda just a generic Scary Monster In The Water story, but at least it has good stakes for the most part and feels more believable than the octopus one. though i think earl sticking around is a bit unrealistic, if he was SO fucking certain there was a monster there. (once again though actually maybe it'd be more interesting if there was no monster and the characters died from accidents that they mistook as being caused by a monster.)

jersey devil - this would be so much better if the story did literally anything with the attempts at cult references and implications rather than just using them as OOOOOO SCARY SET PIECES.

alien - i do actually kinda hate this episode but the effects are pretty good and the story isn't BAD. i just think it's visceral and disgusting to look at. i guess maybe if there was some more internal logic about the alien, that'd be cool.

bear lake monster - the characters in the episode are all indistinguishable to me and i have no interest in any of them. make them real characters and the story would be better.

dover demon - i already talked about this one at length <3 tl;dr: make them real characters and the demon is fake.

--

season three overall complaint: either ditch the enigma corporation or put continuity between their episodes, oh my fucking god, if you're going to reuse the same characters why are there no lasting effects from their episodes? you don't get to say "overarching storyline time :)" and then not do it.

zombie - i get what they're going for but the way they handled the vodou elements of it come off as tone-deaf at best and actively racist at worst so i'd probably throw it out and do a different explanation for the zombies. also address the implications of the fact that the zombies are essentially released at the end without the public being informed of anything. this could be a cool story element

kraken - i'm just not really that interested in this one tbh but it's not Bad. it just could use some more characterization for the characters. i don't see why i'm supposed to care about the divers when i don't know anything about them.

strigoi vampire - i actually kinda like this one conceptually, but don't be a fucking coward. kill off the enigma agents at the end. let them die. don't pull a deus ex machina and have them survive unharmed every time.

poltergeist - i actually like this one but i don't think they know what a poltergeist is. this one scared me a lot as a kid but i think maybe they should do a different kind of ghost. also maybe do something with your ghost hunter characters to begin with.

devil monkey - again, suspension of disbelief comes into play for me, but i guess it's. fine? idk.

yeti - just put some more characterization here, and again i want to know what's gonna happen now that the yeti has apparently escaped.

beast of bray road - i just think this episode would be significantly more interesting if it actually addressed the politics around what's going on. just having it be about a far-right/alt-right militia in the woods and then not going into any of that.... there's a story here and you're deliberately avoiding it. though i will say the militia's politics makes me very unsympathetic about their deaths, so i don't feel bad for any of them.

okay this got long whoops

(edit: decided to take out the reptilian episode and just throw that in the pile of Episodes To Scrap, b/c even though i think the concept isn’t bad and changing the monster would go a long way towards making it better, uhhhhh thinking about it more. i’m not so sure about that. idk, maybe i’ll try and tackle that another time.)

[reanimationstation]

Maybe I am maybe I'm not I'll never tell. But anyways he has done nothing wrong okay he just abandoned his 8 ft tall son and didn't defend Justine. He's perfect.

ok it's definitely you

i do want to touch upon not defending justine tho— the tags of a reblog of my earlier ask brought her up. so uh sjfbsjd gonna use your ask to ramble about that

yes, victor didnt defend justine, and that was shitty, it really was. BUT—who on earth would actually believe him??? bro he built a MAN in COLLEGE and then a few years later it MURDERED HIS BROTHER??? that shits impossible to believe. imagine your sibling coming up to you and telling you that. LIKE WHAT???? no one would believe them. i mean—i dont know everyone specifically but especially back then it probably wouldnt have been believed, and Victor wouldve been thought crazy.

so victor weighed the pros and cons of admitting to his actions in the hopes of proving justine free, going through all the possible scenarios. i will now go through all the possible scenarios,,

scenario 1: he tells the truth. she might be proven not guilty!! his conscience would be clean, and thered probably be a hunt for the real murderer, Adam.

scenario 2: he tells the truth. she is proven not guilty, and the blame is now on him. adam also gets blame, but victor is still fucked.

scenario 3: tells the truth, shes not guilty, he is, adam isnt.

scenario 4: he tells the truth, he isnt believed, justine is still hanged, but people brush off what he said as grief.

scenario 5: he tells the truth, isnt believed, justine is hanged and he gets regarded as insane.

scenario 6: he doesnt tell the truth, justine gets hanged, he lives without consequence.

scenario 7: he stays quiet, justine doesnt get hanged, theyre all alive (minus william [for now]), but they never get justice on adam.

so. in 3 of them hes fucked, in 3 of them justine lives, in 3 she dies, and in 4 he's fine. the odds arent really in anyones favor.

we know victor is a coward and a little bitch, so he picks the "safest" option for himself, taking into consideration the unlikeliness of anyone believing him: scenario 6

its logical, i'd say. i dont think its right, but i see where hes coming from. so uh,, i cant hate him for this. because who knows what i'd or anyone else would choose if we were in the same situation