#its more thematically funnier

[pchjun]

guys did you know a Korean hairpin can basically be a proposal gift?

[ascendandt]

i make a post about trans dankovsky but its just the screenshot in prev post. 'do you have any nuts' 'that isnt funny'.

[gayleviticus]

assorted empire of death general thoughts:

one of the sloppiest rtd deus ex machina endings in a long while - 'bring death to death' is a cool concept (and rather christpilled) but the mechanics just dont make any sense. and im not one to complain that it doesnt adhere to rigid rules but the logic just is inconsistent. sutekh becomes a god by entering the time vortex and then proceeds to be killed by same time vortex. blowing dust on people kills them but sutekh seeing all of time and space again revives them.

even as much as i hate the journey's end meta crisis deus ex machina, the mechanics of it do make sense.

normally rtd deus ex machinas are justifiable by the character work going on, but this honestly felt rather hollow. like. nothing is going on in this episode outside of beating sutekh until the ending which tacks on Ruby's arc at the end.

lassoo-ing sutekh into the vortex felt a bit like an asspull and inconsistent w the prior vibe. like. it felt like they set it up as if sutekh was possessing the TARDIS; treating it so grossly physically feels like an exorcist story where the priest gets the victim to sneeze the demon out.

the meta-angle of playing on the mystery of Ruby's mother being overblown is a bit interesting and does inject some genuine emotion back into a story that would otherwise have been engulfed by dramatic god confrontations etc. but it's also like. a total retread of clara and the leaf, hell bent etc. we've seen this trope in DW before, and I think this usage lacked both the novelty and emotional/thematic depth it had before. 'bait and switch mystery box' is starting to be actually more formulaic than a straightforward reveal.

it's also a shame given how many interesting theories fans had developed about tv show theory, ruby as the perfect companion etc that we did basically get Clara and the Leaf 2.0.

Mel continues to honestly have no point in even being here. 3 episodes that wouldn't change in the slightest if she wasn't around.

it is getting a bit comical how quick Kate is to recruit every single person in the universe to UNIT

overall s14 thoughts:

for me i think this season, while not bad, sits above only the chibnall era, and a bit above series 7. the inidividual episodes are much better, and 15 and ruby have better chemistry, but it cribs a lot of its overall arc from being largely a retread of s7s. Ruby is more charming than s7 clara, who has a tendency to get written by everyone other than moffat as Generic Companion #47, but this series feels like it's significantly lacking the emotional depth every other rtd and moffat series has had.

i think it's also a bit similar to series 10, which didn't really have a strong emotional arc for Bill in favour of just a fun dynamic, but the s10 finale knocks anything in s14 out of the park. s10 was also just a lot funnier.

[kaibutsushidousha]

Any piece of media you’ve changed your mind on significantly? Bonus points if the only thing that caused the change was passing of time and not other material.

I really rewatch, so I judge things mostly according to what my mindset was back when I experienced them. The closest I have to a proper answer here is how Katekyo Hitman Reborn and Fairy Tail were my least favorite manga around high school and years later I had a sudden "Oh, I understand this part now" realization about a few things a decade later.

Reborn's example is, unsurprisingly, about the final chapter. It made the extremely controversial decision of ending on Reborn musing about how Tsuna learned nothing and is still the same person he was in chapter 1, except with friends now. Everyone hated that because the overarching narrative provided plenty of evidence to the contrary and because if the statement was true, the manga would be calling itself a waste of the reader's time. That was a sentiment I shared immensely.

My random epiphany on this one was that the "Tsuna learned nothing" quote comes from the perspective of Reborn, the character who wanted to teach him to be a mob boss and a killer, so it's celebrating that Tsuna remained a good boy through and through. It's thematically consistent despite the poor communication. In hindsight, Reborn couldn't have ended any other way.

And Fairy Tail's case came from looking back at the series through the lens of its core theme of mourning. Zeref was the one character I always considered good despite the rest of the series, and his deal was ultimately that he got cursed because he failed to cope with his brother's death and the curse causes him to autokill everything around him until he learns to get over it. Throughout his long life, Zeref created many tools that were exploited by half of the villains that came before him, and looking in hindsight, all of those were tools meant to cheat and control death.

And these ideas delivered in one of the main villains are obviously reflected in the main characters as well. Gray kills and mourns his dad 3 times in addition to carrying the guilt of indirectly killing Ur because he had mourned his dad properly the first time. There's a timeskip that sorta only exists kill off Lucy's dad and make her deal with that. And most importantly to make FT feel thematically consistent, Natsu's initial goal to find his dragon dad is ultimately revealed to be a quest to finally accept he died.

Grief is a constant theme in the series, but its importance only becomes evident in the final arc. Which is not something I can complain about because the only reason I stuck with Fairy Tail until the end is because I liked Rave that much to trust it to have at least a great ending, and Rave is another manga whose main theme is prevalent but only gets super evident with the final arc. Maybe the great difference in enjoyment came down to simply reading Rave as a finished story and reading Fairy Tail as an ongoing story. Who knows?

Does that mean I like those two now? No. I never reread them, so my first experience is still what counts. But at least now I believe I have a more fair and good-faith perspective of their flaws. And maybe an interest in checking Eden's Zero after it finishes (I'm not checking if it already finished because I think this post is funnier if it already finished 3 years ago and I don't know about it).

[homestuckreplay]

pied in the face by my clown father

(Pages 91-96)

John and Dad's Strife continues, even while we can no longer click the buttons. What I love about this scene is how well matched they seem to be - the narrator says 'Looks like DAD will enjoy the prankster's gambit on that exchange, as is usually the case.' (p.92) but honestly, I think that's unfair to John. He's holding his own, equipping his disguise again just in time, stealing the pie tin from Dad so he can't magically fill it with another cream pie - and, well, the finishing move with ejecting Sassacre's was a lucky break, but maybe it's luck John can learn from for future encounters.

Speaking of Sassacre's, this is the third time where the weight of the tome and its ability to crush something has been relevant. On page 32, 'Good grief this thing is huge. It could kill a cat if you dropped it.' When we learn about John's nanna on page 52, 'A tall bookshelf. A ladder. An unabridged COLONEL SASSACRE'S.' And now its far more harmless, yet thematically linked, activation of the smoke pellets. It's a shame John already allocated hammerkind to his strife specibus, because Sassacrekind would probably be really effective, and very appropriate for his character. I have a lot of questions about the limitations of the strife specibus, and this raises a new one - is John capable of using any item as a weapon if it isn't a hammer? Could he hit someone over the head with Sassacre's still, or eject it from his sylladex to crush them? Or is he completely unable to damage someone with it, and can only use it as defense or utility?

Items being ejected is also a new use of the sylladex - I kind of assumed that the inventory just wouldn't accept any more items once it was full, [thanks to @tenaciouschronicler for the correction - we did actually see this already! silly me forgetting the tutorial so soon] but high speed blasting away the item on the last card is much funnier. It's also more helpful, as John can access the items on both the first and the last card, so long as what's on the last card isn't especially fragile. I wonder if John will be less angry at his sylladex now that it's actually helped him out. Probably not - his hatred seems to be more irrational than that, and he's not going to be in a good mood now that he's stuck with this giant cake - but we'll see.

Are we finally going to get Sburb tomorrow? Is John's path to the game and back to his computer undisturbed? Or is some other nefarious obstacle going to get in John's way once again?

[thistle-and-thorn]

Dying to know what you thought of the goldfinch. I never read it and am very 👀

thank god you sent this because i was about to make an incredibly long, rambling post about this but now you have prompted this, it feels less unhinged to put it into the form of a solicited answer. @.@

I....have mixed feelings about GF. Like, really mixed feelings. When I was in college, I took a seminar on opera history and we studied the opera, Wozzeck, and my professor described watching it as "an act of endurance." I felt sort of similarly about The Goldfinch. Like I'm glad I read it, and I can't wait to never read it again lmao.

It's a really well-written book--God, I want to write like her--and it is a compelling story with a lot of really great moments, but I found it to be overall less thematically incisive than TSH and, though TSH had some pacing issues, especially towards the end, The Goldfinch felt much, much more uneven. There's a lot of crossover between the two novels--unreliable narrators that are closeted queer men, so much drinking, so much drugs, etc--to the point where I thought a twist would be that they were set in the same universe and that Theo's father was somehow Richard Papen. But TSH felt bolder in a way, more satirically cutting, funnier, wilder, and younger. The Goldfinch is a sadder book, unrelentingly anxious and grief-stricken. And I do think this is sort of the point and I don't criticize it for that. It did make the melodrama of the novel's conclusion feel a little...i don't know...less justified and a little more gimmicky? And anxiety is a monotonous state so I think the GF lacked the emotional texture that made TSH much less....exhausting?

The Goldfinch is DT's ode to Dickens and there a lot of nods to Dickens in both direct references and style (the book is basically like what if uriah heep from david copperfield was psychosexually obsessed with pip from great expectations). There are certainly class dynamics here, episodic adventures, varied characters, and a lot of ruminations on providence but I did keep wondering what about Dickens drew her to tell this particular story which on a surface-level seems to ruminate on the impact of beauty, as opposed to the impact of wealth. In a lot of ways, TSH, with its commentary on class and wealth, even more over-the-top characters, feels like a better fit for Victorian literary structures.

In my wild and quite honestly unfounded speculation, I think the conclusion that I have come to is that it is a really, really personal book. Dickens was an intensely personal writer who used his own experiences, including those with his difficult father and poor upbringing and young infatuations as material, even in sort of unrealistic scenarios. I made a half-joking post about Brett Easton Ellis serving as DT's muse but I think....like...that may be true? I spent a lot of time, while reading this book, googling and reading about BEE and his erratic personality, contradictory and sometimes controversial and nihilistic media statements, and drug addiction. (Something that stood out to me was that BEE said that Patrick Bateman was based on his father, which he later retracted, to say that he felt like he was more like Patrick Bateman and wrote that book from a place of intense depression and isolation and consumption. This third-eying of oneself through the lens of the father is so Theo to me.) It's an examination of a self-destructive person but feels so clearly written from the point of view of someone who loves them--there is a real tenderness in how Theo is rendered that makes me think that it is not directly autobiographical about DT's own life but is the record of someone else who is loved and who is grieved. I have no evidence of this, truly, but this is what I keep thinking.

Some random other thoughts: one thing that @attonitos-gloria and I have talked a lot about is how DT always writes from the point of view of men who desire other men but whose desire is so hidden and buried that it becomes warped and we think that this is fascinating. @.@ The women in both TSH cannot be held as whole people in the eye of the narrator, their wholeness exists but beyond the borders of the male narrators' understanding of them. I also love how DT loves places and loves things. She creates fantasias of real places that feel like they influence the narrative and I think that's really cool.

TL;DR: I thought TSH was better, but GF was more personal and thus more messy. But it won a Pulitzer so literally what do i know.

[spearheadrampancy]

i think more people should do something with the fact that we only see felix kill like 2 people tops with knives. in machinima he never assassinates anyone with one*, but because felix is often seen holding one, and inflicted a few non-lethal knife wounds, the fanbase went nuts about it. sure he nails that one guy with a knife but its like the only time we actually see him using one with any real level of skill.

i propose the "felix likes knives because he thinks they make him look more dangerous or cool but has only the absolute bare minimum proficiency with them" headcanon. not saying he's bad or doesnt know how to use them. just that he passed CQC training when he was in the UNSC and thats it.

*felix doesnt, to my knowledge, assassinate anybody in machinima. but locus does, in season 11. that adds something to it i think. some kind of commentary on locus using it as a skill but felix doing it for style points, or something.

[ spoilers for season 12 and 13. no i dont care that i spoiler warning nearly 10 year old content. yes i feel weird about the chorus trilogy being 10 years old. ]

besides, this makes the knife scene with wash in s13 infinitely funnier. felix gets caught out by someone being As Good As Him, if not better, with knives and his brain short circuits instantly. up to that point he got by in a knife fight simply through sheer luck and intimidation (the latter by virtue of his stupid showmanship), but wash has experience and felix is starting to piss him off. would explain why all felix says is a quiet little "huh" instead of getting bitchy about being bested like he did when fighting carolina in s12. it's a different kind of comeuppance. and also it's thematically appropriate for the ways in which felix is starting to fail by season 13.

[nohara-rin-dot-mp3]

Maaan, people making Danzo the devil's Even Worse Step-Brother is very 🤨. Masashi Kishimoto may've leaned into it a bit too much, what with him having a hand in so many morally terrible acts in the village, but he's not evil just for the sake of it. His reasoning and biases had more nuance that he refused to acknowledge until it was too late! Adds to the tragedy of his nationalism!

It's also not just me who thinks Danzo and Tobirama face similar one-dimensional character interpretations either, right? Like, some people treat them as either totally in the right or totally in the wrong, with NO nuance for why they act the way they do. Very boring!

Also, why the f are people forgetting that all the ninja villages are messed up? Kirigakure LICHERALLY make their kids kill their own classmates to become chunin like, HEWWO?????? Just because Konoha makes people sign a waiver before they die doesn't make it any BETTER. Danzo might've upheld it but he didn't make that thang so SOMEBODY, or multiple somebodies, in the village aren't morally pure either!!!! So Konoha being "the only good village" isn't totally truuuue...

right right see the thing is. naruto the story believes danzo is EVIL and the "ROOT" heh... so to speak... of all of konoha's problems. because naruto the story is kindof bad and does not like to think about the implications of its world building. but. we all know this. and people like. people actively ignore the set dressing of morality naruto the story tries to pin up around konoha. so why are we taking its word when it comes to danzo????? mind boggling like. i know he like doing evil politics things and training child soldiers but when everyone around him is kind of doing the same stuff it just. doesnt make sense to point to him as uniquely horrible. you gott examine his actions in CONTEXT...

ok well my personal tastes aside its probably because people like having EVIL guys to point at and defeat. so that even if they cant dismantle the system they still have a small victory and thats like. fine. its ok to have one dimensional characters. even if its boring. sighs dramatically. at the end of the day pure evil characters are a useful storytelling device. and people can do whatever they want. its just. idk. hes just some guy. i think its 1- funnier and 2- more thematically compelling to treat him as such. preference in the end i suppose.

ninja villages are funny because they're terrible. but also. compared to like. the quality of life before they were around. they are technically an improvement. send your kids off to fight to the death at age 12 instead of 5! usually! its actually really interesting to me how the founders sort of took the first step towards something better and then got lost and floundered away. sad! what could have been. also yeah konoha is NOT the nice village they are a normal ninja village. they are just like everyone else. and most people living there are juiced up on nationalist propaganda <3 wow

[darkpurpledawn]

scattered GO s2 thoughts

spoilers under the cut, but mostly I adored it with a few significant Quibbles

this was so much better and funnier than s1 on a scene by scene level although I think s1 was much more cohesive as a season

angel Crowley and angel Aziraphale my beloveds

I saw the prescreening and it ended with "I'm a demon, I lied" and that was SUCH a fantastic gut punch. I was suspicious of having more historical flashbacks but that one was fantastic and brought something new to that part of their relationship development

I think the major fault with this season was not setting up Aziraphale's conflict at the end enough, but I don't think it would have taken too much to make it feel like a better fit--the show sort of gestured at Aziraphale's missing being an angel (calling Crowley up to tell him about good deeds since he can't report to Heaven) and wanting to keep them both safer than they are (Shax in the car) and being just, endlessly endlessly forgiving even when it isn't completely justified (everything with Gabriel), but I don't think there was quite enough of a thematic through-line, which is irksome

loved my boy Eric getting repeatedly vaporized and also being the demon speaking up for occupational health and safety. a real one

I am cheering and cheering for Ineffable Bureaucracy becoming canon but I would have traded all the minisodes for a cold open of them meeting post-apoc in ep5

loved all of it individually but gosh the minisodes, the present day, and then the second half of ep 6 all feel like completely different shows. what even is tone

Nina and Maggie was underdeveloped. I would have liked to see them trying to investigate what the heck is up with Mr. Fell and digging through old records. I DID like them confronting Crowley about meddling in their relationship and not giving them enough of a choice in their own destiny and Crowley being hypocritical about that

fire in the water cooler in hell...wacky office worldbuilding WIN

at first I thought it was so weird that Gabriel and Beelzebub got their happy ending before Aziraphale and Crowley but I think it works quite well--they had all the power and none of the psychological trauma they each inflicted on A and C. Of course they can go off together, there's no Prince of Hell or Supreme Archangel to tell them otherwise!

I think my overall thoughts are s1 was a lot more than the sum of its parts, s2 is less, but I liked the all parts of s2 way, way more than s1

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

maybe the funniest way to resolve the Three Frat Houses AU timeline issues of having characters from Shadows of Valentia (takes place right at the same time as Shadow Dragon) and Awakening (takes place like 2000 years after Shadow Dragon) existing at the same time is to say fuck it and have two suspiciously geographically similar continents, one called Ylisse and one called Archanea. How are the coastline of two separate continents nearly the same. That's weird.

Actually wait would there be two sets of suspiciously similar continents? Do Valentia and Valm exist in tandem, as well? Or is it all just Valentia and Say'ri and Virion have to deal with the Duma Faithful as their neighbors. I think Valm and Valentia have to be separate continents because Valm has a volcano smack in the middle of what would be Zofia, which does not have a volcano next door to its castle.

That's even funnier, honestly. Science in this world knows about plate tectonics but no one has an explanation for Valm-Valentia or Ylisse-Archanea. Naga hit the copy-paste buttons and then tweaked a few things and said "good enough."

Also I know I said that I wasn't canonizing time travel in this AU, but I think actually one person has time-traveled, and that's Tiki. Tiki blurred between parts of the timeline and there is a tiny Tiki in Archanea and an adult Tiki in Valm. Little Tiki has vague awareness of the presence of her future self here in this timeline, but she's not all that worried about it. She has told Bantu and Marth about this, but Bantu is just relieved that Tiki managed to survive to grow up without any more weird cult stuff happening to her, and Marth thinks it's some childish flight of fancy that Tiki dreamed up and doesn't put any stock into it. Big Tiki is not about to enlighten him because Big Tiki is still thematically about the grief of outliving everyone you love and much as she wants to go see Marth and Caeda and the gang, she's still trying to decide whether she wants to burden them with the knowledge of her own future grief. Will her friends be happy to see her grow up so proud and strong, or will they be hurt when they see how she hurts to have outlived them by 2000 years.

Also she figures she's gotta take her time to steel herself for the inevitable point when everyone starts asking her what life is like in the future. There's gonna be so many questions about flying cars. She can feel it in her heart.

So Big Tiki's got some weird existential stuff going on and she's got a bit of a gay thing with Say'ri going on and she still lives in a tree. An icon, really.

"Hey Roddy so if Mila is the goddess of Zofia in Valentia, which is a totally separate continent, why's there a place called the Mila Tree in Valm--" Don't Think About It. Actually do think about it. Make it funny. Valmese legend states that the goddess Mila died and the Mila Tree grew up over her corpse, and they think that Zofia's Mila is an imposter. Papal schism but make it about the church of dragon milf. No, the other dragon milf. No, the other other--

[apphiarothowrites]

I don’t know what’s funnier

(1)Marco being the accidental love child of rocks and whitebeard through some trans magic and phoenix fuckery

(2)Or Marco’s mother being alive, known as “auntie” to all the white beards and coming aboard the moby to visit her son

(1)Because on the one hand you have Ace going “my dad was a monster” and Marco just being silent like… yeah that’s rough buddy (and goes along with my personal headcanon that rocks was the last user of the tori tori no mi, and ended up going insane because of the phoenix) Marco looks like Wb except for the eyes (rocks had the prettiest eyes)

(2)On the other hand you have this random lady who boards the moby every once in a while who is a carbon copy of Marco except bigger tiddies and longer hair who is absolutely adored by all the crew. Who will in all of her 5.9 glory cuss out whitebeard for hours while brandishing a chancla (thatch will be lovingly kicked out of the kitchen post hast during her visit)

In both of these scenarios Ace is permanently flabbergasted and I can’t decide which to choose

(Sorry if I’m spamming, I just really wanted to share this)

1 is interesting because it would actually make Marco a couple years younger than in Canon to the same age as Shanks or he'd have to have been at most 6 years old on the Rocks Pirates ship (current speculation is that right after the final battle of Rocks D. Xebec, the God Valley Incident, Roger found newborn/infant Shanks in the aftermath and adopted him right there then found buggy not long after).

The "my dad was a monster" relatability but it'd make for a *fascinating* case of nature vs nurture. Same "nature" for them both but whereas Ace was raised believing his blood is cursed and his dad at least was a horrible person, Marco was raised believing his blood doesn't matter its what you do with your life that does (and that his dad wasnt evil, just hugely ambitious which led him down a hard path) (also makes marco's lack of ambition thematically similar to Ace's lack odlf desire to be pirate king). Phoenix notwithstanding of course (bonus for marco if eating the fruit was a complete accident that nobody planned for him and WB had to remove himself from the situation at first because he was laughing hysterically).

2 is just plain funny. Amazingly embarrassing mom who mothers the whole crew and actually guilts Pops into being more conscious of his health because look what that stress is doing to her precious boy!!! Thatch evicted from the kitchen so Auntie/Mama Bird can feed her boy and all his friends? I'm crying that's so fucking good.

Ace gets his cheek pinched, his ear grabbed so he can be dragged around, and a lecture on wearing shirts because he'll catch his death of cold if he doesn't before getting drowned in soup. Meanwhile Marco is just "yes mama"ing his way through her visit (yes mama I'll write more, yes mama I'll make an honest man out of ace, yes mama I'll make sure my cousins are invited to the wedding). 🤣🤣🤣

[szintaart]

void accerealator!!!!!

it took 6 whopping years for blizz to make a character that is There To Trap Me Specifically but eventually they managed to figure it out. the moment i laid eyes on him for the first time, i knew i will be instalocking him for at least the next 100 hours, no matter what he plays like, but actually i genuinely like playing him. it's a little weird like he feels both a little under-and overpowered at the same time somehow but in the bigger scheme of the disastrous state of balance he gets by. Love it when he says its shambalin time and then he shambals all over the enemy team.

idk what the callout for his abilities is becoming but on the day the character came out, i started a joke that the vortex is the bowl for the cereal of the primary fire (which makes it funnier, or at least thematically fitting when the kiriko main i almost always duo with is bringing the "milk") and it kind of caught on in my circle in the form of yelling CEREAL!!!!!!!!!! when you are unwittingly standing in a danger zone. and by you i mean mostly me who is the most prone to Death By Cereal. Why is there always cereal on the ground?! Who put that there

this is probably the proudest i have ever been of drawing something, because it worked out so well - and just exactly as i hoped! - in spite of the great amount of moving parts and me not knowing pretty much anything about animation in general. secretly i always wanted to become an animator but was intimidated by the complexity of it and how much work it would be. Maybe it's not that complex after all. i mean, it is. but i think there are only so many times that you can tell yourself "well i don't know how to animate, but this was way more complex than the previous thing that i tried and yet i still worked it out" before you are just.... an animator.

[sendmyresignation]

Rlly curious if you’re willing to elaborate on your tags in that senseless post!

omg of course. perfacing by saying im not. a huge movie buff so this is more of a theoretical thesis that could easily change if i watch any film made past like 1987. but. in my experience metalheads aren't protagonists in the same way punks are. rarely are they main characters at all- the exception being rocksplotation horror movies which, the ones i have watched are very tongue and cheek and are made mostly with the audience of metalheads in mind. imo. or there's fakeumentaries like spinal tap which also are unserious but still like. metalheads love that shit the jokes are funnier when you are In On It. and then ig bill and tedd are metalheads?? ive never seen it. and waynes world. but that's the thing they aren't All Dressed Up in The Outfit it's a secondary part of their loserdom or stonerisms, it's not representative of anything on particular its just a detail which allows for headbanging car scenes and dialogue name drops.

punks, on the other hand. are a very visually arresting subculture at the same time they have lot of thematic possibility so you see punks as significant characters more, dressed up a lot more, in my experience. the whole nine yards with piercings and the vests and shit. and that archetype is filled with potential- they're a vehicle for disillusionment by older counterculture writers to discuss the disingenuous nature of suburban punks and their fake, childish radicalism, they're a tool for bitter old directors to hold up a deterioration of society, they're truth tellers, they're wastoids, they're hot, they're dangerous- they can represent a lot and you don't have to be invested in punk to utilize that archetype ripe for exploring. metalheads just don't have the same potency, unless you factor in the devil

in the end this is mostly negative, you don't see a lot of incredibly human portrayals of punks. and for as cheesy as metalhead horror fests are, they are attempting a kind of realism for being a outcast loser the average nonrockstar was i can respect. idk it's an interesting dichotomy! and makes me think i need to watch more shit short films.

[brotherhoodoftheblade]

Is there anything funnier than me discussing the enduring appeal of Star Wars just now only to think how DG could never write such a thematically profound story because she simply doesn't possess the VISION for it??? Not at the moment. 🤣

Sorry, but hers is not a philosophically profound mind.

Sometimes I have to seriously stop and remind myself that OL is romantic historical fiction and that I'm expecting too much of it for that very reason. [Insert me telling myself to relax for millionth time in my life because it's not actually that serious.]

As a romance it's objectively better than most even if the tone of it isn't always my cup of tea. (I just struggle with romance as a genre to begin with, not because I'm unromantic but because I'm so deeply so that most popular romance is liable to feel trite to me. Not to mention that OL's brand of it tends to boil down to "I lust, therefore I love" which will never not have me rolling my eyes. *points back to the word 'trite'* So therefore the vast majority of romance novels should never exceed the length of a single book (or one or two more if it's pretty good), because that's generally as long as I can stand the reading of it. So no wonder the super long OL series has me rattling the bars begging to be set free by now. LOL)

I think it's OL simultaneously trying to be a serious work of historical fiction that often falls flat to me bc it so often feels like depiction without a greater sense of purpose. Too much sound and fury signifying not nearly enough.

So again I have to remind myself that, as much as DG herself denies it, OL is primarily a romance. That is its purpose. So of course I keep looking for the fire amidst all this surrounding smoke without ever finding much of anything. It's an exercise in futility. *sigh*

[moe-core]

OKAY I used to be way more meticulous about the types of posts/potential immersion of this blog but now it really is just vibes LMFAO

Important reoccurring things that are thematic to Moe though are:

> Hooves (you bitch), specifically goats but horses are acceptable as well (this also adjacently includes just the stupidest to god awful shoes you've ever seen) 

> God stance is whatever is most beneficial or whatever is funniest at the moment. Amalgamation of faith and blasphemy. 

> Cleric. Ties into above. Doctor/medical posts are cleric-adjacent 

> Weird ghost experiences (either a metaphor or monsterfuckery). Also includes The Creatureful 

> Time Loops (metaphor that was present before Book 7 LMFAO Book 7 just makes it funnier)

> All kinds of magic. Aspiring wizard and posts as such.

> Shut-in recluse forcefully made to experience the outside world and reintergrate into A Society due to The Circumstances (so various posts that fit this are like. Either along the lines of being trapped in the tower or experiencing the wonders of nature with whimsey in its heart and knowing jack about shit) 

> Related to above: Chronically online

> Disappearing. 

One thing I DESPERATELY wanna capture and try to whenever I can is the mishmash clash of worlds, coming from a world like our's to a world that's ye olde fantasy. Posts like that are a bit oddly specific though LMFAO I take what I can get 👍

Also some posts I'm def picturing from another character's POV or are with another chara in mind, I just. Haven't specified which ones/when it happens 😭 

May edit this later if needed!

[the-hype-dragon]

Books I read in July

Kind of a rough month so I didn't get around to reading a couple of the books I'd planned to, but (as I usually do) I picked up two on a whim. The Widow's War was recommended to me by Goodreads and I was sure I would hate it because their recommendations usually suck - but I ended up really loving it, I zipped right through it. I had started Tehanu back in early April but only got around to finishing it now. Zipped through this one and really loved it, as well.

I had never read any O'Connor before now but I ended up liking A Good Man is Hard to Find, though I'd say it's very much a product of its time and O'Connor's upbringing as a white woman in the Jim Crow South. From what I've read about her she was sort of a soft bigot, i.e. she wanted Black Americans to have civil rights but also wouldn't want to share a neighborhood with them. As I was reading this I was struck by how similar her style is to Stephen King's, and I was not surprised to learn he has in fact read O'Connor. That said, she was a lot funnier and a lot less vulgar than King, and she was much better at character writing, especially of female characters. If viewed as a product of its time I'd give this a solid 4/5, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it due to some of the offensive language O'Connor used.

The Dispossessed took me a month to read and part of that was simply because of the writing style and subject matter. I've stated before that Le Guin was great at saying a lot while writing very little. That's no different here, though The Dispossessed goes off on a lot of philosophical tangents that I wasn't a huge huge fan of, even if they were thematically appropriate. This is definitely philosophical speculative fiction rather than out-and-out science fiction. It presents two parallel worlds (one is the moon of the other) that are utopian on the surface but utterly miserable in actuality: the communist society is egalitarian in all ways yet suffers from frequent famines and individuality is stifled, creativity is encouraged to an extent but artistry is seen as abnormal and amoral; the capitalist society meanwhile is rich but that wealth is built on the exploitation of the lower classes, and women are just unambiguously considered property. Some Goodreads reviews were a little disappointed (lol) that Le Guin didn't show that the protagonist saw the flaws in his communist paradise but he did: he left the communist world partly because they stifled his ideas as a physicist, because his commitment to his work was seen as too individualistic. I don't know, seems to be one of those books you'll either Get or Not Get. I liked it overall, another 4/5.

The Widow's War is a historical legal drama about a woman who is very abruptly widowed and subsequently cast adrift socially, in part thanks to a law in the 1700s that denied widows ownership of their husband's property, but entitlement to use of one-third of it. This leads to a lot of drama with her son-in-law, who becomes her legal guardian (of sorts) after her husband's death, and who wants to sell the house as soon as possible. Of late I've become impatient with a lot of historical fiction that doesn't question the misogyny of the chosen time period; The Widow's War manages to juggle characters acting historically appropriate while doubting on the status quo. I think people take for granted things like women having restricted (or no) civil rights historically and assume that this means nobody was ever questioning it, but that's simply not the case, especially not during the American Revolutionary period. Anyway this is the only book I read this month that I would really really really recommend, 5/5.

Last but not least was Tehanu, a book I started reading in early April but ended up putting down because I had other things I wanted to read. Over the past year I've come to really appreciate low-stakes fantasy fiction, i.e. stories with a more personal, character-driven focus. Part of this has to do with the fact that most authors are terrible at writing a wide variety of character types but a lot of it is also that I'm tired of reading things where every conflict has world-ending consequences. Out of all of Le Guin's works that I've read this one is the most heavy-handed, but I can forgive that because the writing is (for the most part) just so excellent. I wish more fantasy stories were told from an ordinary person's perspective, and from a normal woman's perspective, like this. My favorite Le Guin book so far. 5/5.